Press: Back to the Cold War

...No one would win such a war...

...To do that you have to have the stuffings of which myths are made...

...A day or two might make all the difference then, when my father was a young man...

...Another mythical beast of our own creating, Puff is an appropriate nemesis for Kong...

...It involves the most fundamental issues of war and peace and it is the subject of the fiercest sort of controversy, but most of the evidence on both sides is secret, the participants are mostly keeping mum, and journalists must feel about for truth with little more than instinct to guide them...

...Though brought into existence with only a fraction of the financing and hoopla of Gone with the Wind, King Kong has played to more audiences in more countries than were ever dreamt of in David O. Selznick's philosophy...

...For years one-way bombing was the sole, even faintly plausible Russian threat to the U.S...

...Early NIEs were sometimes the result of so many compromises and qualifications that they were all but indecipherable, but under General Walter Bedell Smith the estimating process was tightened up...

...This is his secret strength...

...The Kingdom of Kong is within...

...In the CIA's view Russia was not trying to achieve military superiority over the United States, was not planning a pre-emptive war against the United States, had a healthy respect for U.S...

...From the wellhead to the consumer, he has been exploited by the same vertical consolidation which, any anti-trust lawyer will tell you, is ripping us all off these days...

...Stalingrad," she said...

...An independent group of pessimists ranging from Saul Bellow to Maxwell Taylor and William Colby, calling themselves the Committee on the Present Danger, says a new balance of power may soon exist in which "we should face, one after another, bitter choices between war and acquiescence under pressure...

...I once asked a friend and colleague of Allen Dulles in Berne during World War II when it was that Dulles began to shift his concern from Germany to Russia...

...There has been a degree of anonymous boast4 February 1977- 84 ing and complaint by the two teams' experts...

...When he climbs atop the World Trade Center to make his last stand, the military send in their Cheyenne helicopters, the ones that were nicknamed "Puff the Magic Dragon" in Southeast Asia because they spew 12,000 machine-gun bullets per minute...

...Instinct tells me that the Russians must have learned the lessons of the 20th century, having suffered from them so much already...

...And it is something like instinct which leads me to believe we are watching a tentative replay of the 1950s, an effort by the pessimists, perhaps only half-deliberate, to reestablish the Cold War consensus which once insulated the defense and intelligence communities so effectively from scrutiny...

...He is the infinite embodied...

...No one could know for certain, after all, what the Russians were actually planning...

...The early "Surveys" were short partly because the CIA did not have much information to go on...

...If they could have heard those Air Force generals, my GOd...

...They never built up Commonweal: 83 their bomber force at all to amount to anything...

...He is that for which there is no other, no opposite...

...A lot of skeptics think the CIA's estimates have been political for years, but I don't think that was the ease, or at least not entirely the case...

...Instinct tells me you have to be slightly crazy to think the Russians would be willing to lose everything above ground for the pleasure of doing even worse to us...

...If General Keegan is right we are obviously in bad trouble, but how are we to determine if he is fight...

...Like Christ, Kong gathers all possibilities into himself...

...and when participants in the debate will give only cryptic or garbled accounts of what it's all about...

...We believe that the Soviets recognize the enormous difficulties of any attempt to achieve strategic superiority of such order as to significantly alter the strategic balance...

...General Keegan has become something of an instant celebrity, after years of quiet labor in the intelligence vineyard...

...It is hard to know if the American conflict with Russia is more like Britain's with France in 1816, or Rome's with Carthage...

...It ought to be clear that the view expressed here is a fundamental one which goes to the heart of the whole question of peace and war...

...By the mid-'50s they were up to 100 pages and now they're as much as 400 pages divided into several volumes filled with charts and graphs, facts and figures, touching on just about every facet of Soviet military might and strategic purpose...

...After the Czech coup in 1948," an early member of the CIA's Board of National Estimates (BNE) told me last spring, "it wasn't a matter of whether they were going to attack, it was just when...

...That leaves the question of Soviet intentions...

...and under Puff's Commonweal: 85...

...That is a long way from the "more somber" view of Russian intentions in the current NIE, if it is really as somber as reports describe it...

...Next to Kong, even Rhett Butler is a pipsqueak...

...The document which came from their sometimes acrimonious deliberations (to judge from the name-calling which has surfaced since) has been described by the CIA as a "more somber" view of Soviet intentions...

...But the controversy also raises a stark question which journalists have been visibly reluctant to state baldly, and which they clearly do not know how to resolve: Either the pessimists are right, and increased Russian military spending is evidence of Russian ambition, or the CIA's estimating process, after decades of independence and rough honesty, has finally been politicized...

...Back in August, 1969, Richard Helms, then Director of Central Intelligence and chairman of USIB, deleted a paragraph on Soviet intentions from an NIE on Russian strategic forces after an indirect but unmistakable order from the Secretary of Defense, Melvin Laird...

...It's odd to go back and read The Guns ol August and think of the time and effort the Great Powers of Europe put into finding ways to speed up mobilization...

...How, then, are journalists to judge its accuracy, much less its honesty, when they are blocked from all the detailed intelligence data which are the basis of the estimate, insofar as it has a basis...

...The expedition which accidentally discovers Kong is in fact looking for oil under the supervision of a petroleum company executive named Fred (Charles Grodin...

...Having existed for over forty years in only one feature and its sequel, not counting Japanese imitations, Kong has nonetheless become as widely known as Mickey Mouse, who had to found an empire to achieve such recognition...

...But even so the process of estimating Soviet intentions demanded a degree of compromise...

...With the exception of Oleg Penkovskiy for a year or so ending in the fall of 1962, the CIA has never had a high-level spy in the Kremlin, which means that Soviet intentions have always been very largely a matter of conjecture...

...and at his public unveiling in New York, the shrouds lifted from his cage are even shaped and painted like a gas pump...

...that Russia has been consistently increasing spending on arms while the United States has been reducing it and that Russia enjoys a clear superiority in many types of weaponry, and is aggressively pursuing superiority in others...

...For one thing the Soviets would almost certainly conclude that the cost of such an undertaking along with all their other military commitments would be prohibitive...

...Our answer," said one BNE chairman at the time, according to the man I talked to, "is to say nothing is going to happen in the foreseeable future, and say it in the most alarming way possible...

...The intelligence battles over Soviet intentions are as fierce now as they were in the early days of the Cold War...

...with assurance that the USSR would not itself receive damage it would regard as unacceptable...

...The point at issue was of central importance, the CIA estimators saw no reason to change their view, and the matter was clearly within CIA's jurisdiction, but Laird had his own ideas on the subject, and Laird won...

...It's worth quoting the paragraph in full to give an idea what the fighting is about...

...Occasionally a news story comes along which reporters can only grope about in like men in a darkened room, and this is one of those stories...

...Russian bombers could not reach U.S...

...THOMAS POWERS MONKEYSHINES 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 THE SCREEN During the button craze of the sixties, one of my favorites was, "King Kong Died for Our Sins...

...It never seems to occur to these military men that what the Russians do is out of apprehension...

...It is not yet clear just what "more somber" means, but it apparently includes a guess that Russia spends 11 to 13 percent of her gross national product on arm~, rather than the 6 percent or so estimated by the CIA a year ago...

...The compromise on that issue was a lot like the compromise on the question of Soviet intentions back in the early 1950s, when the CIA said nothing was going to happen, but said it in the most alarming way possible...

...The first few "S,lrveys" were about 25 pages long...

...The imagination that has gone into the Russians," the former BNE member said...

...Consequently, we consider it highly unlikely that they will attempt within the period of this estimate to achieve a first-strike capability, i.e., a capability to launch a surprise attack against the U.S...

...One of the gloomiest was General Keegan, whose dissent was so fierce in 1974 that he was called to the White House to argue his case...

...My own instincts tell me that the pessimists are wrong, that the Russians are genuinely committed to d&ente, not as a cover while they secretly prepare for war, but as the best way of avoiding war...

...What is foreseen is a possible preponderance of Russian arms of the very sort the United States enjoyed in the Caribbean at the time of the Cuban missile crisis...

...Now that has all changed...

...The American military's solution to this dilemma was ingenious: one-way bombing...

...If one of the USIB members, the Air Force or the Navy say, could not be convinced of the CIA's view, it was forced to put its dissenting view in a footnote...

...As intelligence officers never tire of pointing out, you can't photograph a "forward plan" from the sky...

...Thus Kong has been refined the way any load of crude would be...

...Some people even think it will certainly happen...

...But instinct is not much to go on, is it...

...Since the United States had both nuclear weapons and air bases well within reach of Russia the military had to posit some credible Russian threat to ~he mainland U.S...

...Partly as a result of his repeated warnings the CIA's estimating process was altered last year to include an outside team of seven Soviet and defense experts who operated something in the manner of devil's advocates, challenging the CIA's team of Soviet experts led by Howard Stoertz...

...While Kong is a despoiled natural resource, he is also a despoiled human resource...

...God knows there has been no want of Catos...

...targets and return, but they could make one-way suicide runs...

...But the atmospheric analysis of an oncharted island which Fred takes as evidence of oil turns out instead to be the exhaled breath of a mammal...

...Laird's reason for suppressing this paragraph was not necessarily a belief in the Russian bogey out to conquer the word, but a lot of other pessimists in the intelligence community do believe in the bogey...

...Would it come in 1950 or 19517 Or would they wait until 19557 "For years the military would come in with these inflated estimates of Soviet military capabilities and intentions...

...power, and by implication understood that it could not bully the world, but must reach an accommodation with the U.S...

...No one seems to be saying that Russia is building a first-strike capability or is planning a kind of nuclear Pearl Harbor...

...Gone with the Wind never played in a single African theater for years...

...It's so true...

...At that time, and until the system was changed by William Colby, National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs) were argued over by the BNE and then later by the United States Intelligence Board (USIB) chaired by the Directors of Central Intelligence...

...The introduction of U-2 flights in 1956 and of spy satellites somewhat later, in addition to the enormous volume of electronic intelligence-radio traffic, radar signals and the like--collected by the National Security Agency, has allowed the CIA to establish with great accuracy just what the Russians have by way of planes and tanks, submarine pens and hardened missile sites...

...Most of it came from agents in Europe run by the CIA itself, the British SIS and the German intelligence agency run by Reinhard Gehlen, who had been in charge of German military intelligence on the Eastern Front during the war...

...It's this mania to keep ahead...

...They were all aimed at the budget...

...It is in keeping, then, that Dino de Laurentis's new remake of King Kong should treat its hero as if he were the most precious of natural resourcesmas if he were the very wealth of the earth, the innate power of nature itself...

...Major General George J. Keegan, Jr., who retired as chief of Air Force intelligence the first week in/anuary, thinks the Russians expect such a war, are planning for such a war, and may even think they could win such a war...

...Since we simply don't know what Soviet leaders are saying in the Politburo, we must deduce it from what we do know...

...would detect and match or overmatch their efforts...

...It wouldn't take long to fire off all the rockets, and after that little would be left but the odd plane or two over the Arctic, on its way to deliver a final, vindictive bomb...

...The Air Force would argue they've got the capability of building such-and-such a number of bombers, so they're going to build them, so three or four years from now they will have 800 bombers...

...No one in his fight mind could want such a war, and yet such a war could easily happen...

...This leaves plenty of room for argument, to say the least...

...The change in the CIA's estimating process and the broad outlines of the argument have emerged rapidly since the Boston Globe first broke the story in December...

...The only natural resource which could be a commensurate metaphor for Kong today is oil, of course, so that is the one De Laurentis equates him with...

...More important, they almost certainly would consider it impossible to develop and deploy the combination of offensive and defensive forces necessary to counter successfully the various elements of U.S...

...During the war in Vietnam, for example, there was terrific pressure on the CIA to find some benefit in the bombing program but you can read the Pentagon Papers from beginning to end without ever finding an estimate which said the bombing was going to "work," in the sense that Lyndon Johnson, Walt Rostow and the Air Force wanted it to work...

...They jumped right to the missiles, but the military never stopped making the worst case...

...The question of Soviet intentions, of course, is an old one...

...George Bush and Leo Cherne of the Board of Intelligence Oversight have both deplored leaks about the new Soviet estimate, and President Carter has been placed on constructive notice that he faces a strong arms lobby which is fundamentally out of sympathy with d6tente...

...the military could come up with...

...At the same time, typically, the CIA never said it was not going to work either, while conceding, with a bow to the Air Force, that it was doing a lot of damage, was "hurting" the North, was making Hanoi's supply efforts more "cosily," etc...

...He is unique in the sense that all of creation is unique, and therefore he is at once both unique and ubiquitous...

...There was a good deal of uncertainty about Russian military matters because agents found it hard to operate in the "denied areas" of Eastern Europe and Russia, with their huge and efficient security services...

...Finally, even if such a project were economically and technically feasible the Soviets almost certainly would calculate that the U.S...

...He is everything, and Everyman...

...strategic attack forces...

...Since footnotes had a way of coming back to haunt the dissenters, they were relatively rare...

...Now he's an old man and it's hard to imagine a major war in which mobilization would matter at all...

...Otherwise a war would be brutally one-sided and a poor bet from the Russian point of view, with the implication the Russians would hardly be planning such a war...

...Having been confused with oil deposits from the start, Kong is then shipped back to civilization in the hold of a tanker...

...When the CIA was established in 1947 its major target was Russia, and since the early 1950s its most important piece of paper every year--the document which absorbed the most time and money and aroused the bitterest dissensionmhas been the "Annual Survey of Soviet Intentions and Capabilities...