{"id":23489,"date":"2015-11-23T14:30:04","date_gmt":"2015-11-23T03:30:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=23489"},"modified":"2015-11-23T15:05:29","modified_gmt":"2015-11-23T04:05:29","slug":"americas-greatest-intelligence-failure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/americas-greatest-intelligence-failure\/","title":{"rendered":"America\u2019s greatest intelligence failure?"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure><a href=\"http:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/C16825-12.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-23493 size-full\" title=\"9\/5\/1983 President Reagan sitting at his desk in the Oval Office making an address to the Nation on the Soviet attack on a Korean civilian airliner Korean Air Liner KAL 007\" src=\"http:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/C16825-12.jpg\" alt=\"9\/5\/1983 President Reagan sitting at his desk in the Oval Office making an address to the Nation on the Soviet attack on a Korean civilian airliner Korean Air Liner KAL 007\" width=\"750\" height=\"500\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/C16825-12.jpg 750w, https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/C16825-12-205x137.jpg 205w, https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/C16825-12-332x221.jpg 332w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px\" \/><\/a><\/figure>\n<p><u><\/u>The US government has just released one of the most worrying reports about the risk of nuclear war in the Cold War and the dangers of miscalculating Soviet intentions. The <a href=\"http:\/\/nsarchive.gwu.edu\/nukevault\/ebb533-The-Able-Archer-War-Scare-Declassified-PFIAB-Report-Released\/\" target=\"_blank\">top-secret document<\/a> was released in October 2015. It\u2019s a damning report made by the President\u2019s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) in February 1990 about the US intelligence community\u2019s poor knowledge and lack of understanding of the USSR during the 1983 nuclear war scare.<\/p>\n<p><em>Strategist<\/em> readers will recall that in October 2013 I authored an ASPI Special Report <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/publications\/special-report-the-nuclear-war-scare-of-1983-how-serious-was-it\" target=\"_blank\">The nuclear war scare of 1983: how serious was it?<\/a> <\/em>I had access to 57 US intelligence documents\u2014many of them National Intelligence Estimates on the USSR formerly highly classified\u2014that had been obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOI) by the National Security Archive. Using those sources I painted a frightening picture of events in 1983 when the world stood on the edge of the nuclear abyss without our US ally even realising it. But there was one piece of critical evidence missing\u2014the 1990 PFIAB report, which has only recently been released.<\/p>\n<p>There was a series of crises in 1983 concerning the deployment by the US in Europe of Pershing II theatre nuclear weapons with a flight time of 5 to 6 minutes to Moscow; President Reagan\u2019s Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI, or \u2018Star Wars\u2019); his calling of the Soviet Union an \u2018evil empire\u2019; the Soviet Union\u2019s shooting down of a Korean civilian airliner; and above all a major NATO exercise in November 1983 called \u2018Able Archer\u2019, which Moscow saw as a deception operation for the countdown to nuclear war. The Soviet Union&#8217;s intelligence organs mounted an unprecedented collection effort in an urgent attempt to detect warning indicators of NATO\u2019s preparations for war. There was also an unprecedented emphasis on civil defence exercises, increased readiness of Soviet ballistic missile submarines and forward deployed nuclear capable aircraft, and massive military exercises responding to a sudden enemy nuclear strike.<\/p>\n<p>In May and August 1984, two top-secret US intelligence post-mortems reviewed recent Soviet military activities and political statements, but\u2014despite the evidence that the CIA had seen from Oleg Gordievsky the KGB chief in London\u2014they declared that \u2018the Soviet leaders do not perceive a genuine danger of imminent conflict or confrontation with the United States\u2019.<\/p>\n<p>The PFIAB Board\u2019s report states that the evidence didn\u2019t support such categorical conclusions. It says that Soviet actions strongly suggested that the USSR\u2019s military leaders may have been seriously concerned that the US would use Able Archer as a cover for launching a real attack and that the evidence strongly indicated that the war scare was real, not least in the minds of some Soviet leaders and particularly the General Secretary of the Communist Party and former KGB chief, Yuri Andropov.<\/p>\n<p>The PFIAB report says that the situation could have been extremely dangerous if during the NATO exercise\u2014perhaps through a series of ill-timed coincidences or because of faulty intelligence\u2014the Soviets had misperceived US actions as preparations for a real nuclear attack. The report is sharply critical of US intelligence estimates for being overconfident and overly sanguine. The US intelligence community, it says, \u2018did not at the time, and for several years afterwards, attach sufficient weight to the possibility that the war scare was real\u2019. The Board repeatedly criticises US intelligence on Soviet leaders, saying at the time of the 1984 post-mortems that \u2018the US knew very little about Kremlin decision-making\u2019 even though senior intelligence analysts wrote confidently about \u2018Soviet leadership intentions.\u2019 US intelligence judgements \u2018were overconfident, particularly in the judgements pertaining to Soviet leadership intentions\u2014since little intelligence, human or technical, existed to support them\u2019.<\/p>\n<p>The Board\u2019s report concludes that in 1983 the US may have inadvertently placed its relations with the Soviet Union on a hair trigger and that for Soviet leaders the war scare was real, and that US intelligence post-mortems didn\u2019t take it seriously enough. As a result, the President was given assessments of Soviet attitudes and actions that understated the risks to the US.<\/p>\n<p>And where was the Australian intelligence community\u2019s assessments of the Soviet Union in 1983? The Office of National Assessments (ONA) advice to the Defence Committee\u2019s <em>Strategic Basis of<\/em> <em>Australian Defence Policy 1983<\/em> (classified Secret AUSTEO) was that the USSR \u2018has achieved superiority in the critical area of ICBMs and intermediate nuclear forces\u2019 and \u2018The US sees the USSR as able to destroy virtually all US missiles on the ground using only a portion of Soviet forces, while the US cannot inflict similar damage on Soviet forces even using its entire ICBM force\u2019. It asserted that \u2018US strategic planners must calculate that in a full nuclear exchange the USSR could have the final advantage in terms of survival at some level short of national extinction\u2019. ONA was effectively arguing that it was the Soviet Union that had \u2018strategic superiority\u2019, sufficient for its leadership to be sure of fighting and winning a nuclear war and that the overall balance of power had moved to favour the USSR decisively. Thus, ONA\u2014Australia\u2019s paramount intelligence agency\u2014was parroting the US intelligence community\u2019s group-think about Soviet military superiority when, in fact, the PFIAB Board assesses the Soviets at that time perceived that the correlation of forces had turned against the USSR, that the US was seeking military superiority, and that the chances of the US launching a nuclear first strike were growing.<\/p>\n<p>The implications of all this for the Australian intelligence community is that the PFIAB report of 1990 should become a compulsory training manual for all new intelligence recruits as a case study in how <em>not<\/em> to do intelligence analysis about your enemy. When analysts attempt to arrive at a single strong conclusion, as in 2003 with assertions about \u2018evidence\u2019 of Iraq\u2019s nuclear weapons, they run the risk of being dangerously wrong.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The US government has just released one of the most worrying reports about the risk of nuclear war in the Cold War and the dangers of miscalculating Soviet intentions. The top-secret document was released in &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":167,"featured_media":23493,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[599,170,1554,746,31],"class_list":["post-23489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-cold-war","tag-intelligence","tag-ronald-reagan","tag-soviet-union","tag-united-states"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v19.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>America\u2019s greatest intelligence failure? | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/americas-greatest-intelligence-failure\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"America\u2019s greatest intelligence failure? | The Strategist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The US government has just released one of the most worrying reports about the risk of nuclear war in the Cold War and the dangers of miscalculating Soviet intentions. 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