http://www.thescotsman.co.uk/world.cfm?id=53332&keyword=the
Spy files reveal US lied to beat Soviets in arms race
Robert Tait In Washington
THE UNITED States deliberately exaggerated the advancement of Ronald Reagan’s
"Star Wars" missile defence project to price the Soviet Union out of the cold
war, previously unreleased documents revealed yesterday.
US intelligence experts advised President Reagan that the 1980s Soviet
economy was too weak to enable it to respond with its own system and that
further development would force Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, to the
negotiating table.
Details of the 1980s US strategy on Star Wars - the forerunner to President
George Bush’s proposed national missile defence - are contained in hitherto
classified documents released yesterday by the CIA.
Some 859 documents, containing 19,000 pages of cold war analysis written
between 1947 and 1991 - the year the Soviet Union collapsed - were released.
Despite the display of official openness, the reports have been carefully
censored to hide intelligence sources and sensitive information that could
affect contemporary US security interests.
All the same, they reveal the mixture of speculation, uncertainty, shrewd
analysis and misjudgment that characterised the US assessment of its
superpower adversary during the cold war. They show that the US overestimated
the Soviet military build-up between the mid-70s and 1980s.
Other documents predict that the selection of a Polish Pope, John Paul II, in
1978 would be "extremely worrisome to Moscow" because it would make it more
difficult for the Soviet Union to keep Catholic Poland integrated into a
rigid Communist system.
The released documents also reveal the CIA admitting it had "no eyes and
ears" in the Soviet Union in the early years of the cold war, during the
1940s and early 1950s.
"We have no reliable inside intelligence on thinking in the Kremlin," a
top-secret 1953 report stated, adding that there would be no means of
obtaining information in the event of a surprise attack.
It was only the advent of the U2 spy plane - one of which was later shot down
over Soviet territory - and the Corona spy satellite in the late 50s that the
US was able to best the Soviets in the quality of intelligence.
A 1963 document revealed a split within the upper echelons of the US
intelligence community over just how close the United States and Soviet
Russia had come to nuclear war over the Cuban missile crisis of October the
previous year.
However, the advice given to the Reagan administration by the CIA over Star
Wars proved prescient. The agency predicted in 1987 that the Soviet Union was
likely to pursue arms control measures in return for US concessions on
missile defence - a scenario that ultimately came to pass.
But, in a forerunner to the contemporary debate over national missile
defence, the agency predicted that the Soviets would try to foment European
opposition to star wars by portraying it as a threat to Washington’s
commitment to defending western Europe.
The documents reveal that, after Mr Reagan announced his Star Wars project -
a space-based defence against nuclear attack - in 1983 the US deliberately
deceived the Soviets over the extent to which its development was proceeding.
The released documents include several analysis of Mikhail Gorbachev’s
policies of glasnost and perestroika and reveal how puzzling the then new
Soviet leader was to US analysts. In 1986 ,the CIA analysed Mr Gorbachev’s
anti-alcohol campaign and concluded that success in curtailing alcohol abuse,
at a time when consumption had doubled over the prior 30 years, would
strengthen his political position.
Lloyd Salvetti, director of the CIA’s Centre for the Study of Intelligence -
unveiling the documents yesterday - compared studying the Gorbachev regime to
"trying to keep pace with a rapidly moving train".
