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Round Table on
"Intelligence and National Security
at the Beginning of the 21st Century"

Dubrovnik, Croatia, October 27-28, 2000.

First session:

Intelligence estimates of the changes in Europe
at the end of the 20th Century

Estimates of the changes in the late '80s and '90s in the former socialist countries; the fall of the Berlin Wall; unification of Germany; disintegration of former Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, USSR; dissolution of the Warsaw Pact; enlargement of NATO and PfP; etc.

Moderators: Richard Stolz, General Leonid Shebarshin

Stolz:

I am Dick Stolz and Miro has asked the general and me to moderate this first session. General Shebarshin has a voice problem and I said I would do the honors and accept, and that if I said something particularly stupid, he would intervene, and he promised to do that as well. I would like to make the commen here that we will be talking about Intelligence estimates. We have a distinguished journalist here who has his own views. You'll notice the topics do not include some very important things. What the Intelligence agency thinks will happen, what actually did happen, and what will happen do not necessarily coincide. Some people think that they never coincide. I don't take that dim a view myself, but there is a point to be made in that it should be a part of the discussion today. I'm speaking for myself, I hasten to add, when I say that I think we did more or less call the collapse of the former Soviet Union. The timing may have been off a little, but no one knew that in 1989. The issue now is how do we manage, and what has happened as a result of that collapse. That's the word I use. Others may have a different word. Markus Wolf can speak, of course, as well as anyone and better then most, as to what has happened in former East Germany. My reading tells me that it is not a very happy picture…the reunification is, to put it mildly, not complete economically, socially, or politically. I think that we really need to talk a little bit about the events of former Yugoslavia, and currently, as of today, whether we think Macedonia is a viable country. Is Bosnia and Herzegovina a viable country? What will really happen in Kosovo? Does anyone seriously think that Kosovo can be an independent State? I personally do not. What is NATO's role or lack thereof? I think NATO and the Intelligence Agencies may well have been looking for a new life. What do we do now? But my opinion is that NATO is floundering. So there we are. What role will private entrepreneur, governmental organizations play in the future? I hope a larger and larger role, but who knows. So who would like to start off first? Or do I have to pick somebody? I will pick Mr. Doder.

Doder:

Looking at the work of Intelligence from the outside, let me say that I've covered Intelligence for years for the Washington Post in Washington, and it was going OK when Mr. Casey was director. It is interesting to look back and see how the American Central Intelligence Agency performed in terms of assessment of Russia, and how the Reagan administration, Director Casey in particular, tailored the Intelligence to whatever his personal needs were, or the needs of a particular group. I was in the Soviet Union from '81. to '85, and of course it was quite clear to me that a serious disintegration of the country was taking place. When you have three leaders die in rapid succession, then this disintegration is more rapid. There was practically no contact between the two governments. You remember that the deployment of missiles in Western Europe was traumatic for the Russians. I think they were paranoid, but you know, as Henry Kissinger used to say, "the fact that I'm paranoid doesn't mean I don't have real enemies". The West was really paranoid about what was going on in Eastern Europe, and I thought that in 1983, they were very close to war and real confrontation. I thought that the Administration at that point also realized that things were getting out of hand, and that they kind of backed off a bit. And of course then Chernenko went back to introducing the old style government and so forth. The point is that all these assessments were available to everybody and now I realize that - at the time I didn't know, but I know now - that people in the Agency had views very close to mine. In fact, I was better informed on many issues. You know the key question is one of national estimates. It sounds like it drives everything, because it drives your military procurement, it drives the budget, it taxes the resources, everything. The Reagan administration committed to pushing the rearmament program. So the Agency, the analysts in the Agency, provided them with assessments. Let me read to you what the head of the Soviet and Analytical Division in the Agency testified to ten years later. He was the director from '84 to '89, Douglas MacEachin. He says "the period during which I felt I had the least impact on Policy was during the Reagan administration. They thought of us as the enemies. The implication was that the CIA undercut our ability to rebuild our national forces. The administration thought the CIA was too liberal. It said we underestimated the military strength and the Soviet threat in the Third World." When MacEachin came to the then director of Intelligence, Mr. Kerr, and Mr. Kerr tried to get some of the assessment on Soviet military Intelligence as a foot note, he wasn't successful. Couldn't make a footnote, and I was railing against the CIA all the time because what we see is what the director, or whoever is in charge, presents. And also, what was happening with Gorbachev? What's happening in Russia? It was quite clear to me that this was a major change. When I went to the Party Congress in 1986, Gorbachev told the country that Afganistan was a bleeding wound. I interpreted this as a foretaste of what was to come, since a political leader doesn't say something like this unless he plans to do something about it. In this case, quite clearly withdraw, because they couldn't win. When Gates was Casey's deputy, he was asked in March, 1986 - a month afterwards - by the Senate Intelligence Board about Gorbachev's reform and so forth. His answer was the following: "quite frankly, without any hint that such mental changes are going on, my resources do not permit me the luxury of just idly speculating on what a different Soviet Union might look like." It's March 16, 1986. The thrust of my paper, and this is something that Markus Wolf has in his book, is that all Intelligence agencies are toys in the hands of political masters.

Shebarshin:

The main conflict of the last century was the clash between the two economic and political systems represented by the USA and the USSR. The disintegration of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact put an end to the conflict, which had determined the directions, priorities, and methods of all major and lesser Intelligence services of the world. The change in the international situation was so drastic that some politologists got carried away and began to write about the end of history. But history never ends and never takes a respite. It is time now to think about the kind of conflicts which might determine the destiny of the world in the 21st century. And naturally, Intelligence services are ever present in the real or virtual area of the conflict. For the time being, the global situation seems to be more or less stable, due to the immense military and economic might of the United States and its NATO allies. (It ought to be noted that this kind of stability is not necessarily beneficial to the rest of the world)
But even this imperfect stability will be challenged by tremendous problems which will inevitably arise in the 21st century. The main challenge will be, or already is, the growing incapacity of the world energy resources to support the further development of modern civilization in its present form. Imminent shortages of energy will make oil, gas, and uranium a mighty weapon in the hands of those who control the resources, and a coveted target for those who lack them. The intensification of conflict seems to be inevitable. It would hardly be realistic to expect the development of the conflict to be peaceful. The compulsion to use force is growing. Look at Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan. The world has not become a safer place.
It would be naive to presume that the present-day configuration of world forces will remain stable forever. Look at the technological, economic, and military progress of China and India, for instance. The subject could be elaborated on ad infinitum, but one conclusion is clear: we face not the end of world history, but a new century consisting of old and new conflicts.

Dedijer:

When I began my intelligence courses in 1973 at Lund University in Sweden, I asked myself: What knowledge did the Communist Yugoslav leaders under Tito lack about the world which prevented them from developing their country effectively? I discovered that they lacked global intelligence; that is, knowledge about the trends and dynamics of world changes. I had already realized that the Communist system had lost its battle with capitalism. Mine was the first open course on Intelligence in a European university, and perhaps in the world, and as a result of this, I was invited to lunch at the Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C. by William Colby, former head of CIA, who told me that I was breaking a lot of myths about Intelligence with my courses. During that lunch in l976, I asked him what he thought would happen with the USSR and was surprised to hear him say that "We don't have to worry about the USSR! They will collapse!" This idea was first expressed openly in l947 by George Kennan and President Truman at the start of the Cold War. Two years after this lunch, I read an article in the Moscow "Komunist" by Rumintsev of the KGB Insitute, stating that the Communist regime in the USSR was based on a cult of secrecy and not on a culture of open information. Today, as William Colby, I myself, and a number of students of Intelligence perceived, we live in a new Intelligence and security revolution.
Now we are witnessing the globalization of all aspects of society by the "new deal" based on the enlightened capitalism of the U.S., European Union, and Japan, and this has become the principal proponent of social change in the global society. This is illustrated by the current changes in China, Russia, and other former Communist countries, and in the third world countries, which is how I estimate the world changes in the intelligence and security (I&S) efforts in the 21st century.
However, intelligence estimates can also mean estimates of intelligence and security efforts in the world. During the Cold War, the I&S government budgets were extremely secret, but this was not always the case. As early as April l9l2, the Government of Britain published a white paper which I discovered in the Library of Congress: "Annual expenditure on Secret Services by the governments of Austro-Hungary, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, and Russia". Today, the U.S. spends 30 billion dollars on Federal government I&S entities, and another 50 billion dollars on private, corporate, and state security. IBM published the results of a survey on business intelligence, estimating the market at 70 billion dollars. In l975, in an interview with the "Corriera della Sera", I foresaw that the main investment in intelligence & security would be made by business, which is happening now.

Doder:

I think that the individuals do matter, it does matter who comes to take charge in a given situation. I mean, in the Soviet Union it clearly mattered that Gorbachev took power. In Yugoslavia it clearly mattered that Miloševia came to power. Imagine that Miloševia had been in South Africa instead of Nelson Mandela. There would have been a blood bath.

Lacoste:

I would like to refer to De Gaulle's ideas in the sixties, when the two military blocs were facing off in Europe. The danger of a new, third world war between the West and the East was very high. De Gaulle was convinced that such a situation could not last forever. He did not accept that world politics would be dominated for years and years by such a dangerous bipolar system. He pointed out that our European "brothers" were living on both sides of the Iron Curtain, pushing for a new Europe "from the Atlantic to the Urals."
But such views were not understood or accepted by our American allies, who had the responsibility of preserving the world's security and who had, in 1947, opted for the "containment policy". In those times, the White House and the State Department were very angry with De Gaulle; anger was at its peak when he withdrew the French military forces from the integrated structures of NATO, and when he obliged those allied military forces stationed on French territory - essentially American air forces and NATO headquarters - to leave the country and to build new infrastructures in other European countries; for example, in Belgium. De Gaulle was portrayed as a traitor to the Allied cause. However, in fact, he never betrayed the Atlantic Alliance. When very dangerous crises took place, namely the Berlin Crisis and the Cuban missile crisis, he immediately informed President Kennedy that France was wholeheartedly behind him in opposing Kruschchev's aggressive initiatives, saying: "I am at your side, no problem, you took the right decisions, I agree and I concur." Then a few years later, tensions abated and his prophetic views were gradually shared by all the leaders of the Atlantic Alliance; instead of brutal hostility, we had détente and arms limitation treaties.
However, I have observed that, several years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, there are still difficulties in building positive links with Russia. We escaped the dangers of a nuclear confrontation, but we have not yet suppressed other threats. I am afraid to say that the political revolution in the former Soviet Union was followed by a terrible economic disaster. This can lead to a new, dangerous authoritarian regime, because the Russian people will become increasingly resentful toward the rich, Western democratic powers who were not able to help the country recover and stabilize its economy. Poverty and despair have been the source of many past conflicts. I remember that Hitler's election was one of the consequences of the German defeat in 1918, the Versailles Treaty, and the Great Depression of 1929.

I would like to address another issue directly connected to the economic and political turmoil: the growing power of transnational criminal activities. I wrote a book in 1992 about the dangers of the "Mafia syndrome". I had observed that opening the borders and allowing free circulation of people, goods, and financial assets were highly dangerous in the absence of strict security measures, as this provided new opportunities for clever "godfathers" running the Mafias. In 1992, few people admitted these dangers or thought that our societies could be threatened by them. Today, observing the Bosnian and Kosovo conflicts, I must say that my predictions were accurate; it is clear that criminal gangs and arms smugglers are playing a major role in these horrible wars. Organized crime and mafia systems disregard borders. They shift from country to country, taking advantage of the discrepancies between national legislations in order to escape countermeasures by law enforcement agencies. I believe these new threats should be a major concern for all secret services, not just the police forces.

Tuđman:

Can I put the question another way? What we like to talk about are Intelligence estimates and to see if those estimates exist and were accurate at that time. Actually, at that time, I didn't know anything about the existence of Intelligence estimates. So the question for me is, if there really were estimates from any side that the Warsaw Pact would collapse, then wouldn't this mean the disintegration of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union as well? We know, for example, that in 1989 there was a leak of information from the States, probably the CIA, that Yugoslavia would disintegrate. In spite of that, we saw in 1990 and 1991 that the American foreign policy was focusing on the economy as the main problem of former Yugoslavia, and because of that, Americans supported Ante Markovia as Premier, and invested large amounts money and effort to solve the economic problem and keep Yugoslavia together. All the assessments of the American State Department on the regional crises focused on advocating human rights and a market economy, claiming that if those criteria were met, everything would be hunky dory in former Yugoslavia. Then war broke out in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and, a year ago, in Kosovo. Another example, even when the process for the independence of Croatia was underway, is an American diplomat who told the late Croatian Defense Minister, Gojko Šušak: "Don't even dream about the independence of Croatia. Even your great grandson won't live to see that". The question is, were there real Intelligence estimates on the disintegration of Yugoslavia, or was there just one monolithic view, with all the other sources pointing in the opposite direction? What I do believe is that, in the absence of a proper diagnosis, we cannot talk about the future. If we don't recognize reality, we cannot understand the situation and the processes of the disintegration of Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact, or the unification of Germany. How good were Intelligence products in the late 1980s and 1990s?

Stolz:

Thank you, Miro. First of all, I want to mention Czechoslovakia again. When Tito drew a crowd of 100,000 people in Prague in April, 1968, and when you heard that crowd shouting 'Ti-to, Ti-to, Ti-to', you knew that the Soviets couldn't stand that for much longer.

Leijonhielm:

My name is Jan Leijonhielm and I am the former head of the Swedish equivalent of Economic Intelligence. At present I am in charge of Russian studies at the Swedish Defense Research Agency. In answer to your question concerning the relative or the real knowledge about the crises in Southern Europe and Russia/Soviet Union, I think there are different levels of knowledge needed for the detection of these crises. I believe there are also certain common denominators in the inability of Intelligence services to foresee events, and especially to convey the message to the politicians, something which Mr. Doder brought up, and this is an interesting question. I would argue that systematic errors built into the Intelligence agencies will decrease their capacities and harm their links to the political level. This relationship is crucial. There are human related errors and there are systemic errors, which I believe would be interesting to discuss, and later perhaps we could talk about what this audience thinks in regard to future crises; where they will appear and what shape they will take. Admiral Lacoste said, for example, that the real danger after the collapse of the Soviet Union was an economic one. This danger was also present in disintegrated and segregated countries, which led to a series of wars in the former Soviet Union. I believe there is another topic which should be taken into account. The performance and the relationship between smaller, private Intelligence and security institutions, which I think is perhaps as important a subject as the relationship between developed countries in the future. So these reflections give no answers but rather pose more questions.

Jackovich:

I am Victor Jackovich from the United States. I thought some very interesting comments were made, starting with Duško Doder and Mr. Tuđman, who spoke about the nature of national security and Intelligence, and how they are integrated into governmental decisions. I think for me the real problem occurs after estimates have been made, though we saw that some estimates have not been accurate. But it is a question of the integration of political preferences that tends to override this, and I am sure that during the course of the day and a half that we will be here, we will be discussing this in some detail. In the case of Yugoslavia, the estimate that there would be a collapse and that the collapse would take place with great bloodshed and great violence wasn't, in fact, considered very accurate, because it clashed with the political preference that Yugoslavia continue as a single state. So what we found was that the estimate was there, the prediction was there, but we carried on with the preference for what we thought were good reasons, not only because of Yugoslavia, but because we saw the Soviet Union through Yugoslavia. We continued on with the extra-regional prejudices. I know you want to get into Intelligence estimates. I find some of the comments extremely interesting, especially by Admiral Lacoste, on the challenges of organized crime, not only because of its strength and national nature, but because it has the potential to penetrate the services themselves. What I mean by penetration of the services themselves is that the services sometimes use organized crime elements in order to find, identify, and fight against organized crime, but sometimes the organized crime elements are so organized and wealthy that they turn the situation around. Then you find your tradecraft very much inundated by the criminal elements, and there's penetration of the services. It's an interesting issue for later in the discussion. I just wanted to focus on the discrepancy, and how one integrates national security with political options. Just let me go back to that period for a moment. Probably on the cusp between Bush Senior's administration and the first Clinton administration where the estimates were there, the political preference was indeed stated for the continuation of Yugoslavia as a single state, although as a democratic single state, democratically and economically liberalized, and reorganized. Yet the policy options that would seem to be called for by an estimate that predicted dissolution were not developed, so that we found ourselves in a situation where we were facing the emergence of mini-states, but had not really matured or reconciled our policies towards the realities on the ground.

Dedijer:

The Idea of Yugoslavia, of the union of Southern Slav peoples, was formulated in Croatia in the l9th century by Bishop Strossmayer and Mazuranich, and was implemented by politicians, for example Supilo, in the 20th century. In l9l5, he came to Serbian Prime Minister Pasich, whose government was based in the town of Nish - as the Austrians had occupied Belgrade - and warned that Italy wanted to take over Dalmatia. Pasich asked my father, the geographer Yevt Dedijer: "What is Dalmatia?". Dedijer wrote a brochure published in May l9l5 describing Dalmatia, and ending with a graph representing the growth of "Great Serbia" in square kilometers since the year 1200, and predicted in it that in the future, it would comprise all the area inhabited by Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians, and Albanians. This idea of Great Serbia was Milosevic's guiding concept in the four wars he started in former Yugoslavia. In Croatia, you have advocates of "Great Croatia", and in Kosovo, advocates of "Great Albania". These are the Balkan proponents of the romantic nationalism that prevailed in Europe in the l8th and l9th centuries.

Kerr:

It is very difficult to know where to intervene in this discussion, because there are a number of themes, but let me just make a comment on Ambassador Jackovich's point about Yugoslavia. In 1989, the Intelligence community did produce a rather comprehensive and reasonably accurate estimate on the future of Yugoslavia. It turned out not to have been so bloody, but it was still a dark picture, and it was unusual, in that it was clear. I mean a lot of estimates are fuzzy and ambiguous, but I think this estimate, in fact, was a clear estimate.
There were a number of reasons why I think it was not acted upon. One is that it is easy to describe a problem, as the Ambassador said. The problem was enormous, and the outcome was disagreeable. It meant a fundamental change that we did not want, from our perspective. The other thing is, you have to think about what was going on in the world in 1989 when that estimate came out. What was happening in Eastern Europe? In the Soviet Union? What was going to happen only a year later with the war with Iraq? I would argue that people like Larry Eagleburger, who was then the Secretary of State and was also was very interested in Yugoslavia, were very concerned about it, but were preoccupied with a host of burning issues at that moment, not future problems in Yugoslavia, but issues of importance at that very moment. So you can't pull these problems out and deal with them as if they stand alone, you have to place them in a much larger context.
If I can go back to something that Mr. Doder said earlier, I think when you look at United States Intelligence estimates of what was happening, primarily with the Soviet Union - which was our focus between 1980 - 1988 - during the two Reagan administrations, and then the Intelligence relationship, I would disagree to some degree that we didn't have access to or direct involvement with the policy makers. We did. We saw them everyday. We saw all the senior people everyday. We had great opportunity to see them. They were reading the product. But you have to again think of what was going on from 1980 - 1988. There was a very tense relationship with the Soviet Union all over the world. We had lots of little fires and confrontations. Afganistan was just one of many, but it was a very confrontational world, and we had an administration that considered the Soviet Union the enemy from the dark side, and it was bound and determined to take action to limit and change that. Bill Casey came in as an Intelligence officer, not at all interested, not really interested in what the Intelligence analyst had to say. He was interested in what you could do about it, where you could exert pressure and change the outcome.

Dedijer:

Colonel North is the product of Casey.

Kerr:

But Casey had other interesting things to use. And Intelligence officers during this period also were involved in this military confrontation. Military forces continued to be built up. So nobody would have thought it made any sense if they had heard from an Intelligence officer in the 1980's that the Soviet Union was going to end and break up in 1989. What we did say during that period was that the economic system was in decline, but we had been saying that since 1975. I don't think even in hindsight you could have said in the early or mid 80's that the Soviet Union was going to collapse. In fact, I would have been very interested in Iraq. It seems very clear to me that Gorbachev didn't expect that. I don't think Gorbacov was trying to cause the end of the Soviet Union; he was trying to make changes that would make it capable of dealing in the future with a different kind of world. So he didn't predict the outcome. I used to argue with one of my officers. I said, "you expect me to predict the outcome when not even the principle players know the outcome?" We can talk about the implications of that, perhaps, but prediction is not something that we do particularly well. I would like to say one more thing about Mr. Doder's comment. I was involved in writing the daily product that went to the President. I read it every night, I was the last person to read it. At 8:00 at night we put it to bed and then updated it. Mr. Casey never looked at that product, never came in and said "I want you to change that, I don't like the message that you are conveying." He would call me the next day and tell me that. After he read it, then he would write a note to the President or to the National Security Advisor or to someone else saying "I don't agree at all". He thought himself as a independent person, independent in the CIA, but he never caused me to change a word. I have a lot of strips off my back from him, but he never changed anything before it went out, which I always thought was a interesting commentary.