Intelligence in the Cold War: What Difference Did It Make? ed. by Michael Herman and Gwilym Hughes (review)

Although covert actions are the sexier part of the role of intelligence in the Cold War, perhaps more important and certainly less studied is the impact of intelligence gathering and assessment. John Lewis Gaddis and Richard Immerman have argued that the impact was remarkably slight (see Gaddis, “Intelligence, Espionage, and Cold War Origins,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 13, No. 1, January 1980, pp. 1–23, and Immerman, “Intelligence and Strategy: Historicizing Psychology, Policy, and Politics,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 32, No. 1, January 2008, pp. 1–23). Although at first glance this seems counterintuitive, or at a minimum raises the question of why the United States is wasting so much money, most accounts of policymaking indicate that leaders generally have strong views about other states and the way the world works and absent the rare piece of compelling evidence are unlikely to change their minds. But this hardly exhausts the subject, and the essays edited by Gwilym Hughes and Michael Herman, although previously available as the December 2011 special issue of Intelligence and National Security, is to be welcomed. Like many collections, it resembles a good deal of intelligence in being a mosaic from which no clear overall picture emerges but whose individual pieces are worth looking at.

Len Scott starts off by looking at intelligence and the alleged 1983 “Able Archer” war scare. For many analysts, this incident is second only to the Cuban missile crisis in approaching the brink of war and also is seen as having a happy ending because President Ronald Reagan’s exposure to the real and deep Soviet fear of a U.S. attack led him to appreciate the need for reassurances and better relations. But Scott shows that both these assertions are questionable and that crucial evidence is still lacking. Since he wrote, additional material has come out and other scholars have chimed in, but his note of uncertainty and humility still rings true.

John Prados also looks at uncertainties, here dealing with the military balance. Although not tightly organized, his essay is a very useful survey, primarily drawing on secondary accounts but on some documents as well. As he shows, not only did U.S. intelligence get some parts of the picture wrong, but it sometimes ran into considerable resistance and pressure from policymakers, especially Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. Most strikingly, he argues that despite the great increase in intelligence collection capabilities over time, analysis often deteriorated, a conundrum that he admits he cannot unravel. Although I am not entirely persuaded, he is certainly right that the question calls for further research.

Michael Herman discusses the intelligence version of the security dilemma. Originally noted in his Intelligence Power in Peace and War (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1996), this concept points to the fact that although intelligence analysis often was reassuring in giving each side some confidence that the other was not about to take it by surprise in deploying a major weapons system (although the West did miss the Soviet biological weapons program) and in reducing fears of surprise attack, the collection activities themselves often increased tensions, with U-2 flights being the most obvious example. It is almost impossible for a country to tell whether the adversary’s human and technical collection efforts have offensive or defensive intent, a problem that is even greater in the cyber era. On the other hand, Herman also notes that arms control, perhaps the major U.S.-Soviet effort to reduce tensions, was possible only because of excellent technical inspection capabilities.

Pete Davies’s contribution overlaps a bit with Prados and Herman in looking at how the UK estimated Soviet power. But his attention is focused on the organization of the intelligence apparatus, more specifically the amalgamation of the intelligence branches of the three armed serves into a unified Ministry of Defence operation. Although the general outline of the struggles and conflict will be familiar to any student...