In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

20 chapter tWo the MaIn eneMy: the sovIets the operatIons center of the Central Intelligence Agency was on the seventh floor of the original headquarters building, just a short walk from the Office of the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI). In 1979 there was a large round desk in the center of the room with four chairs reserved for three watch officers and a senior duty officer who was in charge of the center. Here the CIA watched the world, monitoring the global press as well as incoming reports from all elements of the intelligence community. Incoming traffic from U.S. intelligence facilities around the world were quickly scanned for reports requiring urgent attention. During a crisis, especially if it was a surprise, the ops center would be a whirl of activity as the watch officers spotted late-breaking news, the senior duty officer called the DCI and the White House Situation Room to alert them to new developments, and CIA officers rushed in and out to get information or comment on events as they unfolded. One floor below was the Task Force Center. If a crisis erupted anywhere in the world, the DCI would set up a task force of experts to monitor and assess developments twenty-four hours a day. Since early November , I had all but lived in the center as part of a small team covering the Iran hostage crisis. It gave us a great bird’s eye view of the crisis brewing next door in Afghanistan and the Soviet preparations for invasion. Late on Christmas Eve in 1979, the pace of activity in the ops center picked up dramatically as the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. In 1979, and for many years before, during, and after the cold war, there was no higher priority for U.S. intelligence than to monitor and assess Soviet military activity to ensure that U.S. policymakers were never 02-2595-4 ch2.indd 20 4/30/14 2:14 PM the MaIn eneMy: the sovIets 21 surprised by a Soviet military move. It was a matter of life and death to know what was going on within the world’s biggest military and to anticipate its every move well in advance. The last major Soviet military operation had been in 1968, with the invasion of Czechoslovakia; before that, it was the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. In 1979 the consensus of analysts in the U.S. intelligence community—including the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and the National Security Agency—was that Moscow did not want to intervene with its own troops in Afghanistan. The argument was laid out in the CIA’s top-secret newspaper, the National Intelligence Daily, on March 23, 1979: The Soviets would be most reluctant to introduce large numbers of ground forces into Afghanistan to keep in power an Afghan government that had lost the support of virtually all segments of its population . Not only would the Soviets find themselves in an awkward morass in Afghanistan, but their actions could seriously damage their relations with India and to a lesser degree with Pakistan.1 Throughout 1978 and 1979, the majority view in the U.S. intelligence community was that Russia would not intervene with large numbers of ground troops in what increasingly appeared to be a Vietnam-like quagmire in Afghanistan. As can now be seen in the Soviet archives, the majority of the Politburo had the same view. When the Soviets did intervene dramatically on Christmas Eve 1979, the intelligence community could argue that it had correctly detected and reported the military preparations for the invasion in the weeks leading up to the invasion. It would later claim in a 1980 postmortem requested by the national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, that it had provided ten days’ warning that Moscow was “prepared” to invade; however, a subsequent study by the CIA’s own Center for the Study of Intelligence was more honest, noting that the warnings were far from explicit and that the “warnees” in the White House did not feel warned at all.2 The subsequent study highlighted that a community assessment issued on September 28,1979, concluded that Moscow would not intervene in force even if it appeared likely that the Khalq government was about to collapse.3 A review of President Carter’s diary, published in 2010, shows dramatically how the president was not warned. In the two months leading 02-2595-4...

Share