Review of "Soviet Leaders and Intelligence"

Raymond L. Garthoff

Soviet Leaders and Intelligence: Assessing the American Adversary During the Cold War

Georgetown University Press

2015

ISBN:978-1-62616-229-7

160 Pages

$26.95

Books on intelligence history often get bogged down in details.  Books on history, and especially on historical leaders, are often ignorant of the details of intelligence that could add depth to their analyses.  Soviet Leaders and Intelligence is a book that avoids both of these problems.  This slim volume eschews pages of details about intelligence minutia and instead focuses on the issue of leader assessment of the US within the context of intelligence collection and analysis. While it is a slim book, it has within it a great deal to offer to scholars of not only intelligence, but of Cold War History, foreign policy, and diplomacy.  It is also a book that will be of interest to general audiences who are interested in the Cold War, Soviet history, and US-Soviet relations.

Garthoff’s study of the way that Soviet leaders view intelligence is situated squarely within the context of the Cold War.  Garthoff does this in two ways. First he outlines the geopolitical causes of the Cold War between the two states.  Second, he outlines the way that ideology on the part of the Soviet leaders both exacerbated tensions and shaded their perceptions of the United States, its intentions, and its actions.  This primary context of the book is the thread that ties together each of the chapter vignettes.  The book itself is arranged so that each Soviet leader – from Stalin through Gorbachev has his own chapter (with the exception of Andropov and Chernenko, whose short tenures were such that they are simply appended to Brezhnev and Gorbachev respectively).

One of the key insights of this book is the individual insights into the worldview of each of the Soviet leaders. Stalin, for instance, relied on personal relationships and his own analysis of the world, eschewing the analysis of intelligence and diplomatic personnel.  In the case of Stalin, his own isolation led to misconceptions and a belligerence toward the west, western media, and western leaders (Garthoff 2015, 3). Like Stalin, Khrushchev’s view of the United States was not affected by the intelligence provided to him (Garthoff 2015, 25), but he was also able to learn from early mistakes and bluffs against Kennedy.  Khrushchev was affected by his own experiences visiting America and his meetings with two presidents.  He credited President Kennedy for bringing more caution to the tone which the United States used in describing the Soviet Union (Garthoff 2015, 34).

The lesson that comes across throughout the book, however, is just how little the leaders of the Soviet Union heeded intelligence estimates.  Garthoff (2015, 75) describes how Gorbachev’s own worldview evolved:

As had occurred with his predecessors, personal contact and communication with a literally personified ‘adversary’ brought about changed perceptions and new policies.

The shifting attitudes of Gorbachev are contrasted with the continued negative view of US actions by the KGB and GRU led to what Garthoff (2015, 84) characterizes as an “intelligence war” between the US and Soviet intelligence services.  This intelligence war did not affect Gorbachev, and in fact his “…early interest in intelligence reports quickly declined” (Garthoff 2015, 85).

The politicization of intelligence, and intelligence skewed by a heavy ideological bias diminished the utility of that intelligence to the state leaders.  In the case of Stalin, the bias came from the top, by the time that Gorbachev had taken power, it had moved to the intelligence services.  The end result was that intelligence lost its consumers, the intelligence services lost their taskings, was cut out of the feedback loop, and ultimately lost its relationships with the Central Committee and its staffs (Garthoff 2015, 87).

These descriptions of the troubled relationship between intelligence services and the leaders that they are meant to represent touch on issues that are relevant to scholars and policy-makers today. The possible lessons from these vignettes are manifold, but I focus on two central themes that are of particular import.  The first is on the importance of leaders and leadership perceptions.

A great deal of scholarship in foreign policy analysis is focused on the assessment of state leaders. This scholarship began in the intelligence analysis community and moved into more general scholarship later.  The work of Leites (1953) was the first to really delve into issues of leader perception.  Later work on the operational code has yielded interesting insights into the worldviews of state leaders (Walker, Schafer, and Young 1999; George 1969; Schafer and Walker 2006).  While Garthoff focuses on historical figures and accounts of their perceptions, other scholars have attempted to ascertain the operational code of current Russian leader, Vladimir Putin (Dyson 2001).

The tie between Putin’s own intelligence career and subsequent rise to the top of Russian politics is even more interesting when considered in tandem with the insights made by Garthoff. Yuri Andropov was also a career KGB officer.  His own use of intelligence and the coloring of his worldview based on his intelligence training was a key component of his views of the United States. Two important points are raised in connection to Andropov’s own intelligence services worldview. The first of these is in connection with the downing of KAL 007 in August 1983. After Reagan strongly condemned the Soviets, Andropov responded by describing the incident as a provocation organized by US intelligence services (Garthoff 2015, 66–67). He connected the US aggressive tactics as a conscientious attempt to provoke the Soviets into shooting down the civilian airliner. This tendency to view the world in terms of information and misinformation, of plots, purpose, and of propaganda makes cooperation very difficult.

The second point that is raised concerning the tenure of Andropov is the increased cooperation between security services during his tenure.  The “Gavrilov channel” was opened to create a telephone hotline to arrange meetings between the intelligence services of both states during periods of tension.  The channel allowed both sides, during a period of intense hostility, to meet secretly “without political posturing” to seek clarifications and dispel misperceptions (Garthoff 2015, 70).