The Soviets have done it again. They surprised the U.S. intelligence community. “An intelligence gap,” is the way one top intelligence official described it. “Stunned” is the word used over and over again by red-faced intelligence experts.
So what else is new! We always have an intelligence gap. Our intelligence community is always surprised at the new and modern weapons the Soviets have built. We never seem to find out about them until after they are built.
The latest evidence of our intelligence gap is Oscar, a jumbo attack submarine, almost twice the size of the largest one we have, and which will fire cruise missiles in a range of 200 miles (instead of the 20-mile limit of previous Russian anti-carrier forces).
Oscars will be able to surround a U.S. aircraft carrier, wolfpack-style, and bombard it and its escort vessels with accurate cruise missiles. U.S. experts admit that Oscar makes our aircraft carriers ten times more vulnerable than they are now.
Many Americans have been led to believe that our Polaris-Poseidon ballistic missile submarine fleet is invulnerable because the subs can hide in the ocean depths. Oscar is designed to sneak up on our submarines and destroy them before being detected.
Naval officers have assured reporters that they haven’t pushed the panic button yet. “Concern,” not panic, is the operative word at Navy headquarters.
Why didn’t our spy-in-the-sky satellites or CIA informers discover Oscar before he was built? The reason is so simple it’s almost embarrassing to give it. The Russians built it under a shed and cameras can’t see through a roof.
The intelligence community was surprised when the Soviets broke the first nuclear test ban with a series of massive nuclear tests in September 1961. The tests must have been in preparation for at least six months. The U.S. intelligence community was surprised again in October 1962 when a U-2 plane, belatedly sent up as a result of grassroots pressure, discovered Soviet offensive nuclear missiles in Cuba.
The Russians must have spent at least a year in their daring missile project. The missiles were manufactured behind the Urals, moved by land and sea halfway around the world, unloaded in Cuba only a few miles away from American soil, and then trucked across Cuban highways. But U.S. intelligence didn’t discover them until they were mounted in place, ready for the countdown.
The U.S. intelligence community is just as surprised by massive movements of conventional forces. It didn’t know about the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia until the day the troops crossed the border in August 1968, although the Soviet attack involved more than 400,000 troops from four different countries.
Every estimate about Soviet strategic force levels emanating from the U.S. intelligence community has been wrong by a large margin. Usually, U.S. intelligence experts grievously underestimate Soviet weapons, their power, their numbers, their throw—weight, their megatonnage, and when they will be ready for deployment. The U.S. intelligence community always underestimates the percentage of Gross National Product the Soviets are spending on military weapons.
The failure of the U.S. intelligence community to anticipate the Soviet pop-up cold-Taunch technique for nuclear weapons gave the Soviets the legal opportunity effectively to convert their light missiles into heavy missiles, in violation of the intent and spirit of the SALT I Agreements. The Soviets surprised us with that technique just as soon as the ink was dry on SALT I.
The false and deceptive intelligence estimates made by our U.S. intelligence experts have not always been underestimates of Soviet strategic forces. From 1956 to 1962 the | Soviets were relatively so weak that they needed to create an image of vastly greater power than they actually possessed.
So the U.S. intelligence community helped them out by inventing a fiction called the “bomber gap,” which allegedly stretched from the mid-50s to the late 50s. Another fiction was the great missile-gap-that-never-was which supposedly yawned during the 1960 political campaign of John F. Kennedy, and which he admitted after he was elected never existed at all.
A major challenge facing the Reagan Administration will be to make intelligence estimates realistic and accurate.
