Spying on the Soviets...
There is a thrill
to be gained from going through old archive files at locations like the
National Archives in Kew, reading formerly deeply sensitive material that was
for many decades classified as ‘TOP SECRET’. The advent of legislation such as
the Freedom Of Information (FOI) act has been a boon in forcing Government to
release material rather than horde it away.
Humphrey has over the
years enjoyed going through many older files in Kew, particularly on the Machinery
of Government in War process and the plans by which the Civil Service thought
the unthinkable and how Government could survive. The files serve as a testament
to the strength of individuals asked to consider how, in the most difficult
circumstances imaginable, something could continue to keep the nation going.
The US Government
has also been busy releasing information for many years over the roles of its
armed forces, their capabilities and how they were to be employed during the Cold
War. Recently during a slightly random google search, Humphrey came across
files relating to the history of the US ‘Office of Special Activities’ (HERE)
that goes into great depth about a variety of interesting CIA activity during
the early Cold War, up until the late 1960s.
Reading through
the hundreds of pages of notes, there is a combination of official history and
primary source material in the form of memos, policy papers and discussions on
some of the most challenging issues facing the CIA and US military during this
period.
The files are an
incredible insight into the challenges facing planners during this period, but
much of what they thought about and considered still runs true to this day. It
is fascinating to consider how much is still relevant, and how challenging some
of the issues they faced were.
This will become a
short series of blog articles to be a quick canter through some of these
issues, partly for highlighting areas of interest, and partly to highlight issues
that continue to affect policy making. They will be written as time permits to
study the papers in more detail and put thoughts together.
Some Worries Never Change
The bulk of the
papers that Humphrey has reviewed to date involved discussions on the A12 and
SR71 programmes and the decisions that had to be made about their role and
continuation. They are particularly interesting as they focus on the role of
manned aviation platforms providing a variety of mission capability (IMINT,
COMINT etc) during this period as the US overhead satellite imagery programme
came on line too.
Reading the
paperwork, it quickly becomes clear that during the 1960s the US had
significant concerns about its understanding of how limited its understanding of
the strategic situation was. Despite the popular perception that overhead
imagery allows near constant real time access to information, in the 1960s
cover was significantly sparser and reliant on the overflights conducted by both
the U2 and SR71 fleets to acquire information on targets.
The process of
even working out where to begin was challenging enough. The files contain a
fascinating account of how in the late 1950s the CIA had to identify where
potential nuclear weapons programme activity could be going on, and work out
the best way to image them. Every mission over Russia was risky, and carried
potentially huge consequences if an aircraft was shot down, so planning had to
maximise the benefit of each mission. This process sounds straightforward
enough in theory – after all, just fly around Russia and take pictures. Now ask
yourself, how do you know where to start?
To do this required
a huge amount of crawling through documentary records and archives from across
US and British Government sources to find the needle in the haystack that might
indicate where the Soviet Union was building a nuclear weapons programme.
The answer came
about not by some magic overhead satellite, but by the slow and laborious process
of interviewing former German Prisoners of War who had spent many years post
WW2 in captivity in the Soviet Union (it is often forgotten that many WW2
veterans were held in Russia for many years after the war).
There is a fascinating
account of how the process of reading the interviews to work out which towns may
have played home to the programme, by the priority assigned to resources and
getting prisoners to work there helped build an understanding of where the Soviet
atomic weapons programme may be based. It took a huge amount of painstaking
joining together of hints from former POWs about their location to work out
where to send overflights to.
The first takeaway
is that it is a minor miracle that the West was able to learn as much as it did
about the Soviet atomic weapons programme. It proves that intelligence is not
about James Bond like characters causing mayhem, but slow methodical and painstaking
analysis of disparate facts and statements to produce a hypothesis which can be
tested.
It is also telling
how little was known about the Soviet Union during this time – one estimate by the
US was that barely 15% of the Soviet landmass had been imaged, meaning they had
no idea what lay within the remaining 85%. Contextually this tells us that many
policy decisions, plans for attacks and ideas about how the Russians were
working were educated guesswork. This is doubly important when it is revealed
in another file that most of the sites that are being imaged by the US were often
done only once every 6 months or so due to capacity issues.
This means that US
understanding of what was going on inside Russia was incredibly limited – their
images were often months out of date, and it was hard to know what was happening.
During a time of tense relationships, spotting whether the Soviets had moved strategic
forces, or were building up their troops near the NATO border was extremely difficult.
It was quite literally an intelligence gap.
The aerial reconnaissance
programme served a vital role in ensuring awareness was built to help provide a
baseline picture of Soviet activity. But its response time was not as fast as people
thought, and throughout this period one of the key pictures that emerges is how
slow it was to get imagery into the intelligence analysis system.
The image above shows
a table highlighting how often US reconnaissance assets were capable of imaging
targets and how long it would take to produce finalised usable intelligence
products. The initial figure (1 day) sounds impressive until you realise the
caveats that it required detachments in place or satellites in orbit (20 days
notice). This is important because it highlights how slow things would be to
get worked up for to be ready for crisis.
Offering advice
and Presidential decision making would have been incredibly difficult during
this period because it was so hard to get timely information into the system
without being taken by surprise. This helps explain the value of reconnaissance
flights in establishing a baseline of understanding to help prepare for when
things change. But it also highlights how difficult it would have been during a
major crisis to get timely information as part of the transition to war stage.
While people sometimes
talk of Cold War intelligence failures, perhaps it is better to reflect that it
is less about a failure of intelligence, more a lack of time to get the assets
in place to collect intelligence that probably accounts for these failures. For
all the global spanning capability of the US and its allies, the time taken to get
assets in place, conduct missions and build an accurate understanding of what was
going on was such that it was easy to be taken by surprise.
The great
challenge which faced American decision makers in the period was breadth or
depth of coverage. There are anguished memos in these files highlighting that
to get the level of cover required for the Cuban missile crisis meant taking
assets off other tasks. Unlike in the movies it was not possible to maintain
near realtime coverage during a crisis across the globe.
This brings us to
the final point of this article – namely that the US had to make strategic
choices then, and now, about where to allocate resources and where to take
risk. The assessment of the US policy making community was that their biggest
risks during the 1960s was in the Far East and Europe – but it notes that trade
offs are required to deliver the necessary coverage.
50 years later and
the challenge is the same – the collection methods may have changed but many of
the same areas remain of interest. US policy makers continue to have to grapple
with the challenge of how to balance their resources against baselining
understanding, routine coverage and crisis coverage and ensuring that too deep
a focus in one area does not diminish cover in another to cause a crisis.
Comments
Post a Comment