The Value of Cold War Intelligence
Gordon Corera for the BBC takes on the interesting question of how valuable Cold War intelligence activities really were:
One reason it is hard to make a judgement is that much of the intelligence collected was military or tactical in nature, and would only have proven useful if the Cold War had gone hot.
Much effort was expended in stealing secrets like the Soviet order of battle or the design of new Soviet tanks which would have been invaluable in case of war.
This type of intelligence was collected by electronic means and satellite reconnaissance, as well as by human spies. It was used to work out how to best equip and prepare the military.
How invaluable would tactical intelligence on Soviet tanks have really been? It seems to me that the world—and certainly Britain—would be burned to a crisp one way or another. Who cares if our tanks beat their tanks prompting them to launch a nuclear first strike rather than their tanks beating our tanks prompting us to launch a nuclear first strike? There’s actually something rather astounding about the huge quantity of conventional armed forces that both sides built up on the European continent. Dwight Eisenhower, as I recall, was against this and thought that a modest-sized conventional force paired with the strategic nuclear deterrent would be good enough.
He later indicates that some valuable political intelligence was gathering regarding the Kremlin’s thinking that eventually convinced Reagan and Thatcher that the Russians were genuinely concerned that the West’s hawkish new leaders would launch an unprovoked attack. This, in turn, got the U.S. and U.K. to try to be more reassuring and generally calmed things down.
48 Responses to “The Value of Cold War Intelligence”
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August 5th, 2009 at 3:28 pm
The real value of Cold War intelligence was making Le Carre’s novels possible.
August 5th, 2009 at 3:37 pm
The USSR sends its tanks across the W. German border, asserting that it has no territorial ambitions other than the reunification of Germany, and disclaiming any intent to be the first to use nuclear weapons.
Very risky, of course, but if you are the US President, do you choose (1) mutual assured nuclear destruction, or (2) surrender of an ally? US presidents, looking at this possibility, quite sensibly wanted a third option, and so we deployed enough conventional forces to make the outcome of a conventional battle for Germany at least uncertain.
August 5th, 2009 at 3:38 pm
increasing defense budget
proxy wars
August 5th, 2009 at 3:47 pm
“He later indicates that some valuable political intelligence was gathering regarding the Kremlin’s thinking that eventually convinced Reagan and Thatcher that the Russians were genuinely concerned that the West’s hawkish new leaders would launch an unprovoked attack.”
It really is quite amazing that Matt has a job as a writer.
August 5th, 2009 at 3:49 pm
Rea (#2) hit the nail on the head. Ike’s concept was reasonable, given the status of the nuclear forces in his time, but it became obsolete in the ’60’s.
August 5th, 2009 at 3:51 pm
As Rea indicates, the idea was to have an option other than A) surrendering West Germany or more to Soviet armored divisions, or B)mutually assured destruction, especially since a reasonable case could be made that an American President would never elect to see Manhattan incinerated in an effort to preserve American honor vis-a-vis a mutual defense treaty with Bonn. As paranoid as the Soviets could be, they never feared the reverse: that an American President would send armored divisions east in a conventional attack on the Warsaw Pact.
August 5th, 2009 at 4:01 pm
Well, how many times did the Soviets use nuclear weapons? And how many times did they use tanks?
August 5th, 2009 at 4:09 pm
Did everyone here miss the “modest sized forces”? No one was suggesting surrendering West Germany. What was suggested was that the massive buildup was pointless and wasteful (somewhat like the mass murder of Iraqis championed by the moron crowd).
The question comes down to, how much patience would there really have been on either side for a full blown war that didn’t include nuclear weapons? The answer was, most certainly, a lot less than the buildup implied.
Hell, some of the more insane of Will Allen’s compatriots championing the slaughter of innocents in the Middle East wanted to use nuclear weapons against the non-existent threat of Saddam Hussein.
August 5th, 2009 at 4:16 pm
OK, but how do you get both sides to agree on how much force is “modest”? You don’t reach an equilibrium point in this game until the costs start to really hurt someone.
August 5th, 2009 at 4:16 pm
I work in the intelligence community, so I’m getting a kick out of theses replies.
Matt probably thinks that ‘political intelligence’ (POLINT?) simply because thinking about big-picture strategies, etc. is much sexier than knowing about the speed of a Soviet tank. The reason? People like Matt probably think that nitty-gritty details such as the speed of a Soviet tank are far too pedestrian for geniuses like themselves.
August 5th, 2009 at 4:36 pm
As much as i share the forget about that military games in the time of nukes attitude, realisticly seen Germany would have not shared it and asumed it would get sacrificed to avoid a nuclear war when the Sovjet Union would make a conventional attack on Western Europe, which would have lead to a unilteral German nuclear build up, which again would have lead to tensions within western Europe….
August 5th, 2009 at 4:36 pm
10: And I get a kick out of your response. Its irrelevance kind of proves the point. Probably few would dispute the value of a modest budget for intel activities. But as serving a critical role in the survival of the republic? Yeah, probably not so much.
August 5th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
I’m reading Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes at the moment and it’s really terrifying how blind we were throughout the cold war.
I’m not well-read enough on the CIA to know if Weiner provides a balanced picture or not. Can anyone here provide any links / criticisms / further reading material?
August 5th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
All that tactical intelligence would have been essential not just for planning out war-fighting scenarios but also, more critically, calibrating the size and composition of allied forces, which in turn would influence all kinds of sexy policy questions like the scale of the U.S. defense budget and the footprint of the U.S. presence in foreign countries. Pretty important stuff. Knowing everything you can about the adversary is the essential first step to synthesizing a successful strategy.
August 5th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
IIRC, Ike’s doctrine was to threaten escalation to nuclear weapons in order to compensate for the west’s disadvantage in conventional weapons (Soviet tank production didn’t decline after WWII, for instance).
Makes sense.
As for gathering intelligence, it’s silly to think that people know what they’re going to find when they set out to gather it. As with any initial research, you never know what you will find, so you might as well gather as much as possible and refine your search as you go. Looking for info on tanks, you might find something out about refinery capacities. Poking around data on the order of battle, you can easily infer inter- and intra-service politics, etc.
August 5th, 2009 at 4:40 pm
Also Germany largely paid the US troops stationed in Germany. That happend throught direct payments but also through hidden measures such as buying crappy US weapons at a high price and the Dollar overvaluation in Brenton Woods.
August 5th, 2009 at 4:58 pm
Come on, Matt. Read your Herman Kahn (Thinking about the Unthinkable). A nuclear war would have been unlikely to lead to “total annihilation” or anything like that. A nuclear war probably would have been winnable by one side, and that makes every aspect of military intelligence pertinent.
August 5th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
Eisenhower had the advantage of having overwhelming nuclear superiority against the Soviets – during his presidency, we could nuke the Soviet Union into oblivion, and all they could in response is probably lob a handful of nukes at Western Europe.
Part of the reason was fear that one side would build up (particularly from the NATO side towards the Soviets, since the Soviets always outnumbered the NATO conventional forces, and engaged in a massive conventional build-up from the late 1960s to the early 1980s) enough conventional force to be able to invade, then basically say, “Hey America/Soviet Union, are you really willing to go to nuclear war over West Germany/Poland?”
August 5th, 2009 at 5:23 pm
There was a great program awhile back on BBC Radio 4 about the letters that each Prime Minister wrote – handwritten letters placed in a safe in each British nuclear missile sub, and intended to be read only in the case of the very worst happening. IIRC, the letters were basically the personal opinions of the Prime Minister for when, should worst come to worst and Britain suffer a nuclear attack that wiped it out and placed retaliation in the hands of the offshore nuclear subs, the British captain would then read open the safe, read the letter, and decide whether their sub would actually participate in Mutual Assured Destruction, or whether instead they should let Britain suffer nuclear attack without retaliation.
At the end of each P.M.’s term of office, the letters were destroyed, still unopened, so all we know is what the ex-P.M.s have been willing to reveal. Again IIRC, at least one ex-P.M. went on record saying that their letter advised the captain not to launch, that participation in a nuclear exchange would be immoral even in retaliation. You can understand why such letters had to be kept totally secret.
August 5th, 2009 at 5:24 pm
MPC Says:
August 5th, 2009 at 4:16 pm
I work in the intelligence community, so I’m getting a kick out of theses replies.
Matt probably thinks that ‘political intelligence’ (POLINT?) simply because thinking about big-picture strategies, etc. is much sexier than knowing about the speed of a Soviet tank. The reason? People like Matt probably think that nitty-gritty details such as the speed of a Soviet tank are far too pedestrian for geniuses like themselves.
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He he he!
Plus you’d have to deal with hard stuff like math, never MY’s strong suit.
August 5th, 2009 at 5:31 pm
Adam Villani Says:
August 5th, 2009 at 4:01 pm
Well, how many times did the Soviets use nuclear weapons? And how many times did they use tanks?
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Absolutely.
My (imperfect) analogy is poison gas in WWII. Both sides had it and were prepared to use it in retaliation if the other side started it. But nobody ever used it on the battlefield, not even Hitler at the bitter end.
August 5th, 2009 at 5:31 pm
Cold war intelligence activity arguably saved the world from cold war nuclear “deterrents,” as it put a lie to the propaganda of each nation’s hard liners, allowing our leaders to treat each other as rational actors. Also, spy flights and satellites were crucial for enforcing strategic arms limitation treaties.
August 5th, 2009 at 5:40 pm
I read this on a blog just recently…maybe Slashdot?
Cold War intelligence was invaluable in monitoring/verifying:
#1 The number/location of Russian nuclear armaments.
#2 The size and location of nuclear tests.
#3 The readiness of ICMBs to launch.
Without intelligence-sources like gamma detection and high-res photographic satellites there would be no way to know if the Russians were about to fire their nuclear weapons or if there weren’t even thinking about it. If they were attacking, or testing.
To maintain an effective deterrent, we would have needed to be willing to fire with much less provocation if we didn’t have adequate intelligence, because we wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference between a serious threat and idle posturing. In order words, intelligence made our nuclear trigger fingers much less itchy.
There was enough apparently threatening posturing during the Cold War that the value of Cold War Intelligence is almost certainly the value of not having had Nuclear Armageddon.
Seems like quite a bargain to me.
August 5th, 2009 at 5:48 pm
I’m trying hard to understand what the argument against collecting intelligence against an adversary would be. “We have a nuclear deterrent so let’s just make a guess about the Soviet’s conventional force structure” makes little sense to me. What is the drawback to collecting intelligence about conventional forces? That we had to spend a little money on it?
August 5th, 2009 at 6:02 pm
Reconnaissance photos (U2s, SR71s, satellites) of the Soviet Union did much to lessen fears in Washington that the Soviets were gearing up for a new Pearl Harbor.
August 5th, 2009 at 6:04 pm
How invaluable would tactical intelligence on Soviet tanks have really been?
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A total waste. I mean we only fought against Soviet tanks in three wars (Korea, Vietnam, Iraq).
August 5th, 2009 at 6:07 pm
Even ignoring the fact that the overwhelming superiority of American strategic weapons had ended after Eisenhower left office, “modest” is a relative term, unless we are talking about the ability to destroy the planet a few times over, meaning that one can not determine whether one has “modest”, or “dangerously inadequate” conventional forces, unless one has good intelligence about the opponent’s conventional forces.
August 5th, 2009 at 6:07 pm
You are forgetting something very important. The Soviets had a strong superiority in numbers of tanks (we thought and were right). As such, when we (the US) ran simulations, we lost a land-war in Europe. Because of this the US NEVER gave up the right to FIRST STRIKE. The Soviets DID announce a policy of NO FIRST STRIKE. They did so, because they knew they could win due to their tank superiority (or perceived superiority).
If we could have ascertained accurately the number of tanks they had, we could have planned accordingly and even won the PR coup by matching the promise of no first strike.
You see a similar dynamic in India and Pakistan, where Pakistan retains the right to strike first in a nuclear war while India has already said they would not strike first. Obviously this is because of the huge disparity of conventional weapons.
August 5th, 2009 at 6:16 pm
Again IIRC, at least one ex-P.M. went on record saying that their letter advised the captain not to launch, that participation in a nuclear exchange would be immoral even in retaliation.
Interesting; this, it’s always seemed to me, is the mind-bending thing about MAD. Once both parties have built up the capability to utterly destroy themselves – and, in the process, severely injure the rest of the planet’s population – the idea that (e.g.) American nuclear retaliation was going to stop the Russians from a nuclear attack seems dependent on the notion that the Russians would believe us to be immoral and insane (which they very well might have believed), and vice versa (which many of the relevant US gov’t actors almost certainly believed of the Russians). To launch the retaliatory doomsday strike is basically to act like the guy in an action movie who’s mortally wounded but says “I’m gonna take you bastards with me!” except instead of only killing bad guys w/guns, he also wipes out a billion essentially innocent civilians.
August 5th, 2009 at 6:52 pm
And one of the ways the skipper could work out if the UK was gone was if Radio 4 went off the air.
Apparently if the Today program on BBC radio 4 didn’t appear on the air for a certain no of days then the Sub commander could presume that the UK had been destroyed and the missiles were placed at his disposal with the letter from the PM as a suggestion as to his next move.
It was believed that ,at least under John major, the last orders were to sail to Australia and put themselves under Oz control.
August 5th, 2009 at 6:54 pm
See also Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s book Secrecy which touches upon that very question.
August 5th, 2009 at 7:43 pm
I took a history class at the University of Arkansas in 1985 or 86 called War and Money. I can’t remember where, but I heard a story–maybe from the professor–that at a certain very tense cold war point during the Reagan Era, the US Government spent about 40 million dollars trying to find out the caliber of a Soviet tank cannon. The British found out before us, for about 1 million. And the French knew before anyone, after taking a Soviet Diplomat out for lunch, and the Comrade paid.
August 5th, 2009 at 7:45 pm
A nuclear war would have been unlikely to lead to “total annihilation” or anything like that. A nuclear war probably would have been winnable by one side, and that makes every aspect of military intelligence pertinent.
Say what? I have not read Kahn, but it is indeed difficult to imagine how a nuclear war could have been winnable, except in some Strangelovian mineshaft sense. War does not need to lead anywhere close to total annihilation to become politically impossible. Or are you referring to “tactical” strikes, lobbing a few nukes at the tank columns?
In any case, as the other comments are fleshing out, a usable nuclear deterrent would make conventional intelligence less useful, if anything.
August 5th, 2009 at 8:04 pm
OK, I just read all the comments, and, this time, I just can’t keep it to myself, but, we have to remember that all this “threat” of the Soviet Union was greatly exaggerated by none other than Dick Cheney and the rest of his Plan B buddies, like Rummy.
So, yeah. It’s entirely possible that The Soviets were drinking all the de-icing fluid, but that’s no reason to be such a Dick to Matt. If you hate him so much, what the hell are you doing hanging out on his blog?
Geeze.
Odds are that this is all income generating busy work for The Complex. Socialism sucks except when you’re building the bombs.
August 5th, 2009 at 8:51 pm
Once again, as rea and others have established, Yglesias has no clue about military matters, intelligence matters, COIN, or just about anything else involving foreign policy and should STFU about these things.
Not to mention those people who babble about “destroying the planet a few times over” which no nuclear arsenal was or is capable of, even if you dispersed the weapons well outside any rational target list.
And Scott is correct – nuclear weapons were meant to be PAID FOR, not used. Especially since ninety percent of the arsenals on both sides would be wiped out in the first half hour of the war.
August 5th, 2009 at 8:52 pm
It’s about time the real information about the Cold War became common knowledge. Though team B neo-cons ran nuclear forces for most of its history, and ruled the Bush administration and the subsequent escalation of the nuclear arms race, most of what was kept secret from the U.S. and Soviet public during the Cold War was well known to both governments and a lot of military personnel.
Documents from the Soviet Union are being declassified, and there are very informative documents now at the National Security Archives concerning the Cuban Missile Crisis from the Soviet point of view. The real story barely resembles what people saw on television.
Fortunately, more level heads in the Pentagon and Soviet Union have prevented nuclear war, thus far.
Tactical nukes, btw, are up to five times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Nobody “just lobs a nuke”.
August 5th, 2009 at 9:10 pm
Hack, a somewhat dimwitted sort, is unable to grasp that the coloquial use of language does not entail the expectation that the reader will stupidly think that the literal meaning of the phrase is what was meant. Or perhaps he is the sort who doesn’t think that the destruction of very many major population centers would be, well, a bit of a downturn for human civilization.
August 5th, 2009 at 9:26 pm
I understand that this is a blog and all. But you actually have no fucking idea what you are talking about here. And speaking of logic lessons, Corera is using the tank design issue as an illustrative example, to make it clear the kind of thing he’s talking about. He may well have made it up. Refuting the utility of this specific kind of information about tanks — which on top of everything else you didn’t actually do, since you begged the question and simply asserted that a nuclear war would obviously have ensued, when the issue of who would have to escalate to that point and whether they would actually be willing to do so was exactly the point in question — says nothing about the information in this category generally.
August 5th, 2009 at 10:40 pm
#38 is pretty cranky, but at least he knows how to use the phrase “begged the question” correctly. It’s sad how those two things go together.
And #1 is the best post in this thread, for those keeping score.
August 6th, 2009 at 12:12 am
We have been on the brink of nuclear war several times. Fortunately, someone thought to check the raw data on the satellite, and another time the right person was on duty in the Soviet Union (though he was sacked and ostracized for standing down).
When the brass has 12 minutes to decide whether or not to establish that a false alarm is indeed a false alarm and to launch a counter-attack in the case they decide it’s not, then human frailty rules the world.
August 6th, 2009 at 2:57 am
The Soviet battle plan for the invasion of Western Europe, from the late 50’s until 1986, was to pre-emptively strike 130 enemy targets, mostly military, with tactical and strategic nuclear weapons, and then send 134 mobile divisions racing into the breach, or nuclear wasteland, depending on how you look at it.
The Soviets weren’t stupid. They weren’t going to spend weeks softening up Western European targets with an old fashioned awe inspiring artillery barrage, while they themselves were getting blown up by American, French, and British nukes. The super cool warthog vs tank battle everybody was looking forward to was simply never a possibility.
Everything changed in 1986 with Chernobyl. The Soviets learned a valuable lesson from that disaster -destroying Western Europe with nukes meant they could not subsequently occupy it.
Chernobyl took the fun out of the game for Russkies, and they pretty much quit after that, much to the chagrin of amateur and professional tank warfare experts the world over, myself included. Damn you, Chernobyl!
August 6th, 2009 at 4:31 am
The Soviet battle plan for the invasion of Western Europe, from the late 50’s until 1986, was to pre-emptively strike 130 enemy targets, mostly military, with tactical and strategic nuclear weapons,
No, it wasn’t. Don’t be absurd.
MPC Says:
August 5th, 2009 at 4:16 pm
I work in the intelligence community, so I’m getting a kick out of theses replies.
No, you don’t.
August 6th, 2009 at 5:07 am
The Limits of Safety by doctor Scott Sagan gives an excellent run down on the attitudes toward safety and fallibility during the Cold War, and has examples of how what was often done in the name of safety and security—mostly exercises in redundancy—actually added to the dangers, and even caused a couple of close calls.
August 6th, 2009 at 7:18 am
For all the people being dicks to Matt, stop being dicks to Matt. Just because you have anonymity and distance doesn’t mean you have to behave like you do. You can rebut him without being a dick.
Back to topic: There were, of course, proxy wars during the 20th century. We would or could wind up seeing Soviet weapons that way. Also, you might accidentally drive one heavily armored recreational vehicle into Warsaw Pact countries and need to get it back out again.
August 6th, 2009 at 9:09 am
@MPC
How often does the intelligence community actually get details like the speed of Soviet tanks right? It’s much more common for the IC to get it wrong, the way they did with the MiG-25, a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akutan_Zero#Mitsubishi_A6M_Zero_fighter”>the Zero.
Not that they get the political stuff right, either, of course.
That’s without getting into things like the missile gap or the bomber gap, or the consistent overestimation of the size and capabilities of the Soviet forces throughout the Cold War.
August 6th, 2009 at 9:47 am
Professor, Yglesias is making me cranky lately. I apologize to you both for cursing.
Re the logic lesson bit: Yglesias studied philosophy at Harvard for crying out loud. And he just schooled someone else on how arguing against an instance or subset of a class isn’t the same as arguing against all members of the class. Then he goes ahead and does exactly the same thing here — and adds another fallacy on top of that. The reason he makes me cranky is that he clearly has the chops to make coherent arguments. But he doesn’t hesitate to disingenuously use incoherent ones when the outcome suits him. This just isn’t the way to move the ball forward no matter what direction you think forward is.
August 6th, 2009 at 11:09 am
larry birnbaum Says:
August 6th, 2009 at 9:47 am
Professor, Yglesias is making me cranky lately. I apologize to you both for cursing.
Re the logic lesson bit: Yglesias studied philosophy at Harvard for crying out loud. And he just schooled someone else on how arguing against an instance or subset of a class isn’t the same as arguing against all members of the class. Then he goes ahead and does exactly the same thing here — and adds another fallacy on top of that. The reason he makes me cranky is that he clearly has the chops to make coherent arguments. But he doesn’t hesitate to disingenuously use incoherent ones when the outcome suits him. This just isn’t the way to move the ball forward no matter what direction you think forward is.
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Part of it I think, is laziness, but he’s gotten much worse since he went to work for a political organization. He didn’t have Ms Palmieri breathing down his neck at The Atlantic
August 6th, 2009 at 7:09 pm
Dwight Eisenhower, as I recall, was against this and thought that a modest-sized conventional force paired with the strategic nuclear deterrent would be good enough.
It’s strange he believed in this. Truman did the same thing when he rapidly de-mobilized the military; thinking that the fact that we had nukes and the Russians didn’t (yet) would prevent things from escalating in to a conflict. Then Korea came and we were caught with our pants down with an ill-trained and insufficient military.