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Introduction: Background and Process On 13 December 1981 the Polish regime imposed martial law to crush the civil opposition being led by the Solidarity labor union and diverse groups of dissidents. Many U.S. policy officials declared publicly at the time that they had been surprised by this move and that the U.S. government as a whole had not been prepared for it. Some officials speaking on the record and many others speaking off the record said there clearly had been a failure of intelligence, both the collection of information and the analysis of information that was available. Just two years earlier, at the end of December 1979, U.S. officials had, again by their own testimony at the time, experienced a similar surprise with the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan. This was also attributed to intelligence failure, and was followed by a National Security Council staff request that intelligence agencies examine the implications of the Afghan experience for their ability to warn of other Soviet military moves. These two “warning failures” took place in the first three years following the initiation of measures by the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) intended to improve warning processes for such events. His actions were in response to congressional direction resulting from a review of intelligence performance after what was then the latest surprise—the revolution in Iran that erupted at the end of 1978. The congressional study characterized the lack of intelligence warning of the events in Iran as part of a pattern , citing as other examples the August 1968 Soviet military intervention in Czechoslovakia and the October 1973 “Yom Kippur War” in the Middle East.1 Needless to say, the measures implemented by the DCI clearly did not have their intended effect. Perceptions of the intelligence failure on the Polish military crackdown took on a new dimension in 1986, when it became publicly known that a Polish mil1 1. U.S. Congress, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, “Iran: Evaluation of U.S. Intelligence Performance Prior to November 1978,” Staff Report, Government Printing Office (GPO). 2 Introduction itary officer who had participated in drafting plans for its implementation had been a CIA agent. The press reported in June 1986 that this officer had escaped to the United States a month before the Polish regime carried out the plan. In 1987 the Polish officer gave a detailed description of his role in a publicly reported interview, making clear that he had begun providing information on the planning for the military suppression well over a year before it was carried out. At that point, the charges turned from incompetence in collection and analysis to an exchange of accusations of dysfunctional procedures for handling the information and excuses for not acting on it.2 Probably the most appropriate description, however, was given by Secretary of State Alexander Haig long before the story of the Polish military officer’s reporting became widely known. As is discussed in Chapter 13, he said in a public statement shortly after the Poles initiated martial law that the United States had been well aware of what the Polish regime was preparing to do but had not believed they would do it. Exactly the same statement could be applied to the earlier “warning failures.” In the case of the August 1968 intervention in Czechoslovakia, for example , all of the military preparations for carrying it out had been identified and described by U.S. intelligence nearly a month before operation was launched. The military force mobilization was the largest seen in the region since the end of World War II, and trucks were seen being withdrawn from civilian motor vehicle depots in the western USSR to support the combat forces. Combat aircraft from the Soviet and other East European air forces in the adjacent areas were observed with special “stripes” painted on them in what the CIA’s military analysts described as a device to clearly distinguish them from the same models in the Czech air force. All of this was accompanied by “exercises and maneuvers” that provided a rehearsal for the operation. Prior to the sudden attack on Israel by Egypt and Syria in 1973, the United States had detected both countries preparing forces on their borders with Israel. The activities appeared to be coordinated in a way that seemed to make it implausible that they were merely independent national exercises. In early October the United States learned that Moscow was evacuating most of its civilian personnel from both...

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