Reply #24: former CIA analyst Mel Goodman agrees

[RainDog]

from 2001-

... A recent conference at Princeton, where the CIA released 19,160 pages of Cold War intelligence documents, indicated that the intelligence community in the 1980s screwed up bigtime.

Participants revealed that CIA analysts who took Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms seriously were gagged by their superiors. Such views were out of step with the hardline anti-Communism of the Reagan Administration. And the documents show that the CIA was clueless about all the major events of the Gorbachev era. Even as Gorbachev was unilaterally cutting the size of the Soviet army and removing troops from Eastern Europe, the CIA was maintaining that his "broad strategy is in the Leninist tradition" and aimed at "weakening" the United States. And as the Soviet Union was withdrawing its naval forces from Vietnam, the Indian Ocean, and the Mediterranean Sea, and ceasing much of its military activities in the Third World, a CIA analysis claimed Moscow intended "to expand its role as a global actor."

As former CIA analyst Mel Goodman has written, by missing the boat on Gorbachev, the intelligence community cost the United States in higher-than-necessary military spending and delayed arms control agreements. What's sad is that when the CIA did occasionally have a bead on developments in the Soviet Union -- such as when its analysts in the mid-1980s concluded that the Soviet Union, due to its own economic troubles, could not pay for a large arms buildup -- its insights were cut out of National Intelligence Estimates, the key sum-it-all-up documents of the intelligence services. The national security bureaucracy could not handle perspectives that challenged the mythology of the Big, Bad Bear.

He also appears in the 2nd part of The Power of Nightmares to say that this is the worst myth in the U.S. And, funny thing, Curtis, the creator of TPoN says the same thing about Al Qaeda.