Cold War Intelligence

THE SOVIET TARGET: THE U.S. INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY VERSUS THE USSR: 1945-1991

By Matthew M. Aid

TABLE OF CONTENTS

SCOPE OF THE COLLECTION

THE SOVIET UNION AS “THE MAIN TARGET"

THE SOVIET TARGET

SPYING ON THE USSR
Human Intelligence
Signals Intelligence
Peripheral Aerial Reconnaissance
Reconnaissance Overflights
Satellite Reconnaissance

INTELLIGENCE ASSESSMENTS OF THE USSR

The purpose of this unique collection is to give the reader the declassified documentary record, such as it exists as of this date, about the successes and failures of the U.S. intelligence community and its foreign partners in monitoring what was going on inside the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The reader should bear in mind that while the Cold War is over and the Soviet Union is no more, the U.S. and its European allies continue to spy on the Russian Federation to this very day because the country still is a nuclear power and a rival to the U.S. in the foreign policy arena.

Only now, twenty-two years after the end of the Cold War, is it possible to begin the arduous task of trying to tell the story in a dispassionate and objective fashion about the U.S. intelligence effort against the USSR during the Cold War. Over the past twenty years, the U.S. government has declassified tens of thousands of pages of formerly classified documents concerning its espionage efforts against the former Soviet Union from the end of World War II in 1945 until the collapse of the USSR in 1991. But the vast majority of the U.S. government’s document holdings on this subject remain classified, which means that what is presented here should be regarded as an important first step, but it should not be viewed as the final word on the subject.

SCOPE OF THE COLLECTION

This document collection contains 2,360 declassified documents (21,700 pages), most of them written at the Top Secret level, concerning U.S. intelligence operations against the Soviet Union during the Cold War (1945-1991) obtained from both archival sources and dozens of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests submitted to more than two dozen U.S. government agencies. 

Many of the documents you see here have only just been declassified, with over 5,000 pages of the documents contained in this collection having been released by the U.S. government since January 2012.

More than half of the declassified documents contained in this collection were obtained from more than twenty-five different records groups currently held at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) research facility at College Park, Maryland, including the following:

RG-38 Records of the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations

RG-59 Records of the Department of State

RG-80 Records of the Secretary of the Navy

RG-84 Records of Foreign Service Posts

RG-107 Records of the Secretary of War

RG-111 Records of the Chief Signal Officer

RG-165 Records of the War Department, General Staff

RG-200 National Archives Gift Collection; Entry 13230A Robert S. McNamara Papers

RG-218 Records of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

RG-226 Records of the Office of Strategic Services

RG-263 Records of the Central Intelligence Agency

RG-273 Records of the National Security Council

RG-313 Records of the Naval Operating Forces

RG-319 Records of the Department of the Army

RG-330 Records of the Secretary of Defense

RG-331 Records of Allied Operational and Occupation Headquarters

RG-335 Records of the Office of the Secretary of the Army

RG-338 Records of U.S. Army Operational, Tactical, and Support Organizations

RG-340 Records of the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force

RG-341 Records of Headquarters, U.S. Air Force

RG-342 Records of U.S. Air Force Commands, Activities, and Organizations

RG-407 Records of the Army Adjutant General's Office

RG-457 Records of the National Security Agency

RG-531 Records of U.S. European Command

RG-549 Records of United States Army, Europe

RG-550 Records of U.S. Army, Pacific

RG-554 Records of Far East Command

Other declassified documents relating to U.S. intelligence and covert action operations against the USSR were obtained from the collections of the following presidential libraries in the U.S.:

* Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, Missouri
* Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas
* John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, Massachusetts
* Lyndon B. Johnson Library, Austin, Texas
* Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library, Yorba Linda, California
* Gerald R. Ford Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan
* Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, Atlanta, Georgia
* Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Simi Valley, California

Smaller in size but no less important were a series of documents concerning joint U.S.-British intelligence operations against the USSR, especially concerning naval reconnaissance and aerial overflights, obtained from the declassified files of the National Archives of the United Kingdom (formerly PRO) in Kew, England, which supplement the documents obtained in the U.S.

Many of the documents destined for inclusion in the Soviet document set came from my decade-long exploitation of the CIA’s CREST digital database of declassified intelligence documents at the National Archive’s research facility in College Park, Maryland, and to a lesser degree from materials on the CIA’s “electronic FOIA reading room” collection of declassified documents at http://www.foia.cia.gov. The CREST database is a much maligned and underappreciated source for information about the activities of the U.S. intelligence community. Since 1999, the CIA and other branches of the U.S. intelligence community have placed over 10.4 million pages of declassified documents on the CREST system covering the period from 1945 until 1984. This document collection contains more than five hundred formerly Secret and Top Secret documents concerning the U.S. intelligence community’s efforts against the Soviet Union during the Cold War. And each year the CIA adds thousands of pages of new declassified documents to the CREST database, making it an invaluable future source of information about all aspects of the work of the U.S. intelligence community, including but not limited to the Soviet Union.

And finally, documents concerning U.S. intelligence and covert action operations against the Soviet Union were obtained from the Hoover Institution Archives in Palo Alto, California, the Library of Congress Manuscript Division in Washington, D.C., the George C. Marshall Research Library in Lexington, Virginia, and the General Douglas MacArthur Memorial Library in Norfolk, Virginia.

THE SOVIET UNION AS “THE MAIN TARGET”

On April 14, 1950, the National Security Council sent to President Harry S. Truman a Top Secret report entitled NSC-68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security, which became the theoretical underpinning for the U.S. government’s Cold War strategy viz the USSR. This study's principal conclusion, which appears grossly simplistic and unrealistic today because it was rooted in a fundamental lack of understanding of what was going on inside the Soviet Union, stated that “The Soviet Union, unlike previous aspirants to hegemony, is animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own, and seeks to impose its own authority over the rest of the world. Any substantial further extension of the area under the domination of the Kremlin would raise the possibility that no coalition adequate to confront the Kremlin with greater strength could be assembled.... Thus unwillingly our free society finds itself mortally challenged by the Soviet system.”¹

From this point onwards, the Soviet Union became the U.S. intelligence community’s single largest and most important target. And the USSR remained the U.S. intelligence community’s “Main Target” for the next forty-one years. A Top Secret December 1951 report by the CIA to the NSC stated that “The USSR is now the center of opposition to American policy, and the one power menace to American security; thus the need for knowledge of the USSR, the orbit of its domination, and its worldwide communist organization transcends all other intelligence requirements.”²

As such, the vast majority of the U.S. intelligence community’s collection resources were devoted to monitoring the Soviet Union and its allies in Eastern Europe. The declassified documents contained in this collection reveal that throughout the Cold War, the U.S. intelligence community committed between 50-60 percent of its vast collection and analytic resources to covering the Soviet Union. If one includes the Warsaw Pact nations of Eastern Europe, these figures rise to approximately 60-75 percent of all resources available to the U.S. intelligence community, which are staggering figures when you take into consideration how large the U.S. intelligence community was at the time.³ To give but one example of how the Soviet Union ate up most of the U.S. intelligence community’s assets during the Cold War, the following declassified data reveals that the National Security Agency (NSA), the U.S. intelligence community’s huge electronic eavesdropping organization, consistently devoted approximately 50 percent of its resources to the Soviet target:

* 1949: 71 percent of all American SIGINT intercept personnel and 60 percent of all COMINT processing personnel were devoted to the “Soviet problem”.⁴

* 1958: 54 percent of NSA’s SIGINT collection and analytic resources were devoted to the Soviet Union.⁵

* 1961: 50 percent of the personnel assigned to NSA’s SIGINT collection and analysis organization worked the Soviet target.⁶

* 1968: 50 percent of all of NSA’s SIGINT collection and analytic resources were devoted to the USSR.⁷

THE SOVIET TARGET

In terms of its breadth and scope, the reader can most easily navigate this document collection by examining it through two prisms. The first is the U.S. intelligence community’s efforts to physically penetrate the former Soviet Union and collect intelligence about what was going on behind the Iron Curtain. And the second prism is what American intelligence analysts were able to deduce about what the Soviets were up to from the oftentimes paltry amount of information that was being collected from inside the USSR.

To understand why the Soviet Union was such a difficult target from an intelligence perspective, one must understand the multitude of obstacles that the U.S. intelligence community and its foreign partners had to face in trying to spy on the USSR.

First, there was the sheer size of the Soviet target. At the time, the Soviet Union was the largest country in the world, covering an area of 6.65 million square miles, which made it almost three times the size of the United States. It occupied 17 percent of the world's land mass, stretching across two continents and eleven time zones, which came to a distance of about six thousand miles running from east to west. Most of the Soviet Union lay north of the 49th Parallel (i.e. north of Vancouver, Canada). The Soviet Union's two largest cities, Moscow and Leningrad, were on the same latitude as Edmonton, Canada and Anchorage, Alaska respectively.⁸

Second, the Soviet Union was a totalitarian police state with a massive, efficient, and omnipresent security and police apparatus that was designed and organized to suppress all forms of internal dissent to the communist regime, as well as prevent foreign espionage on its soil. The U.S. intelligence community quickly learned that the fearsome reputation of the Soviet intelligence and security services was well deserved.⁹ According to a declassified December 1951 CIA intelligence assessment of the Soviet target, “Espionage directed against specific targets in the Soviet Union must elude the vast counter-espionage organization of the MGB. It must avoid spot checks of the most arbitrary and unexpected sort and seemingly irrational – almost whimsical – arrests, detentions, incarcerations, and deportations. It must allay the suspicion of the bureaucracy, the communist party faithful, and even casual citizens. After thirty-four years of dictatorship, they have perforce to associate the unusual or the surprising with the dangerous.”¹⁰

As one can imagine, the obstacles the U.S. intelligence community faced in trying to organize and operate agent networks inside the Soviet Union following World War II were massive. The Soviet regime strictly limited the issuance of travel visas to the Soviet Union to a very small number of foreign diplomats and a few reporters and officially approved visitors. Photography of anything but the most mundane subject inside the Soviet Union was strictly prohibited. Some 220,000 KGB border guards made it extremely difficult to sneak in or out of the Soviet Union. Travel inside the Soviet Union was severely restricted for both Russians and foreigners by an internal passport system. Travel and identity papers were frequently checked by Ministry of the Interior (MVD) internal security forces and KGB counterintelligence officials, which when coupled with the KGB's large and extremely efficient counterintelligence service and a massive network of informers (stukachi) at all levels of Russian society. Foreigners were followed by the KGB whenever they ventured onto the streets of Moscow or other Eastern European cities, their phones were tapped, their mail read, their apartments and cars were bugged, and those “normal” Russians that they spoke to were questioned by the KGB. Because of the extreme difficulty of conducting covert HUMINT operations in this region of the world, the U.S. intelligence community came to refer to the Soviet Union as a “denied area”.¹¹ Third, the Soviets went to extraordinary lengths to keep even the most mundane information about what was transpiring in their country secret. Information resources normally freely available elsewhere around the world, such as newspaper articles and technical journals, were largely unavailable to the Western intelligence community. Those newspapers, such as Pravda and Izvestiya, and the limited number of technical journals that were available contained very little information of intelligence value, although battalions of so-called “Kremlinologists” were still employed by the U.S. intelligence community to try and discern what they could from a close reading Russian newspapers and television/radio broadcasts. Topographical maps and even railroad timetables were treated as classified documents, no telephone directories were distributed because of what they might reveal to hostile intelligence operatives, and even talking with ordinary Russian citizens was an extremely difficult proposition. As a result, the U.S. State Department's political reporting from the U.S. embassy in Moscow was sketchy at best, based largely on what could be learned on the “Moscow cocktail party circuit” from other equally ill-informed foreign diplomats and western journalists.¹²

SPYING ON THE USSR

Human Intelligence

The U.S. intelligence community knew even before the end of World War II in 1945 that conducting traditional espionage inside Russia was an extremely difficult proposition. A 1946 report prepared by a senior American intelligence officer who had worked in Moscow during World War II came to the conclusion that “The available evidence indicates that the surveillance of foreigners within the USSR and the peculiar readiness of the Soviet administrative and police personnel to suspect all foreigners of espionage intentions or activities raises sufficient operational hazards to require postponement of such intra-USSR operations until the time when both our information and our expertise  are on a very much higher level than they will be for the foreseeable future.”¹³Although dozens of books and hundreds of articles have been written on the subject, declassified documents concerning the CIA and U.S. military’s efforts to collect intelligence inside the USSR using human sources (referred to as “Human Intelligence” or HUMINT within the U.S. intelligence community) are few and far between. The CIA has consistently refused to declassify documents concerning its clandestine HUMINT efforts for decades, but has over the past twenty years released a limited number of selected documents concerning a few of its more successful operations inside the Soviet Union and Poland. There have been a few exceptions to this rule. For example, in 2003 the CIA published an unclassified article about Adolf Tolkachev, one its most important agents, who passed classified Soviet weapons secrets to the CIA for seven years until he was caught and executed. But the Agency refused to release any of the classified documents about the Tolkachev case at the time the article was released.¹⁴Nevertheless, this collection includes those documents that the CIA and the U.S. military have declassified to date concerning U.S. HUMINT operations inside the USSR and those directed against Soviet forces stationed in Eastern Europe. Of particular interest are the more than two dozen CIA documents concerning one of the top agents inside the USSR, Colonel Oleg Penkovskiy, who briefly spied for the CIA and the British intelligence service, MI6, from 1961 to 1962. Penkovskiy was arrested on October 22, 1962 and subsequently executed on May 16, 1963.¹⁵ Despite the quality of the information that he provided, CIA analysts refused to include Penkovskiy’s material in their 1961 intelligence estimates on Soviet strategic forces because he was deemed to be unreliable and his information unverifiable.¹⁶This collection includes a series of documents covering the period 1945 to 1950, which show how dependent the U.S. and British intelligence communities were on information obtained from low-level defectors and refugees who somehow managed to cross the border into the allied occupation zones in West Germany and West Berlin. Refugees fleeing to West Berlin remained a key intelligence source right up until the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961.¹⁷ The documents also reveal that in 1948, U.S. intelligence officials in West Germany were being forced to hide these defectors, most of whom were Soviet officers and enlisted men who had left their army units in East Germany to reach the West, because there was an unwritten agreement to return these defectors to Soviet authorities if they were caught.¹⁸Declassified documents also reveal that in the years immediately after the end of World War II, the CIA and the U.S. military were dependant on information provided by foreign government sources for much of what they knew about the Soviet military forces based in Eastern Europe. For example, in the years immediately after World War II the U.S. intelligence community was largely dependent on the British foreign intelligence service, MI6, for most of its high-level information about the Soviet Union, although much of the information the U.S. got from London was deemed to be unreliable.¹⁹The tentative beginnings of the joint Anglo-American intelligence collection effort against the Soviet Union are revealed here for the first time. Included in this collection are a number of declassified cables and memoranda which detail the first planning and coordination efforts between the CIA and the British foreign intelligence service, MI6, as they attempted to synchronize their human intelligence (HUMINT) collection efforts against the USSR.²⁰ Ironically, the declassified documents show that the British intelligence official charged with coordinating the early Anglo-American spying efforts against the USSR was none other than H.A.R. “Kim” Philby, the Soviet’s top spy inside British intelligence. No doubt, the details of each and every meeting that Philby was involved in with his American counterparts found its way to Moscow in short order.²¹Other documents reveal that first the U.S. Army, then the CIA came to depend heavily on General Reinhard Gehlen’s nascent West German intelligence organization, the Gehlen Org, for much of its intelligence information about Soviet military forces in East Germany. A 1947 US European Command (EUCOM) memorandum stated that their intelligence staff (G-2) considered the Gehlen Org “to be its most dependable and prolific source of information on Russian military intentions and strength.”²² The declassified documents reveal also that the Swedish intelligence services were also an extraordinarily important source of information for the US intelligence community about the USSR, particularly during the late 1940s and the 1950s.²³ Sweden even tacitly permitted the CIA to run agent operations into the Soviet-occupied Baltic States during the early 1950s.²⁴

This collection includes 110 newly declassified documents concerning the CIA’s disastrous attempts to infiltrate agents into the USSR from 1949 to 1954. Most of the agents were parachuted into the USSR, but the CIA also attempted to infiltrate agents into the Soviet Union both by overland infiltration routes and by landing them from submarines or torpedo boats on the Soviet coastline.

There were at least six separate CIA operations involved in trying to infiltrate agents into the USSR, each focused on a specific geographical area: Latvia (Project AECOB), Lithuania (Projects AEGEAN/AECHAMP), Estonia (Projects AEROOT/AEBASIN), Belorussia (Project AEQUOR), the Ukraine (Project AERODYNAMIC), and agent insertion operations inside Russia proper (Projects AESAURUS/AENOBLE).

The first CIA agent parachute drop behind the Iron Curtain took place on the night of September 5, 1949, when an unmarked CIA C-47 transport aircraft dropped a two-man team of agents into the Ukraine near the city of L’vov. The team never established radio contact with their CIA handlers in West Germany, and the CIA later concluded that they had been killed shortly after landing by Soviet security forces.²⁵ Over the next five years, over eighty CIA agents, all of them Russians who had fled to the West after the end of World War II, were parachuted into the Soviet Union. The last known CIA parachute drops into the Soviet Union took place on the night of March 5-7, 1954, when three agents were dropped into Estonia. All were quickly caught by Soviet security forces.²⁶ All of these operations were failures from start to finish. The declassified CIA documents show that the loss rates among the agents sent into the USSR was almost 100 percent, and that these operations produced virtually no intelligence information of any value, leading the chief of the CIA’s Soviet Russia Division, John M. Maury, to admit in 1957 that his unit’s “black penetration” operations inside the Soviet Union were “strewn with disaster”.²⁷ Declassified documents contained in this collection reveal that the CIA and the British foreign intelligence service, MI6, which normally worked very closely together, refused to cooperate with one another on certain key operations inside the USSR, such as the effort to penetrate the Ukraine, because of irreconcilable differences between the two countries over which émigré groups to support.²⁸ There is no question that one of the important reasons that these REDSOX “black penetration” operations failed was because the CIA and the British intelligence service, MI6, depended almost completely on unreliable Russian émigré organizations based in West Germany for their supply of agents. All of these organizations were tainted to one degree or another by the fact that prior to World War II many of these groups had engaged in terrorist activities, and during World War II many of the top leaders of these organizations collaborated with the German army or secret police.²⁹ For example, the West German-based Russian émigré organization, the People’s Labor Union organization, or Narodny Trudovy Soyuz (NTS), was widely known within American and British intelligence circles to have openly collaboration with the Germans during World War II.³⁰ To one degree or another, all of these émigré groups were thoroughly penetrated by Soviet intelligence. Some of the Soviet agents were so senior that they were able to compromise many of the parachute drops inside the Soviet Union. For example, one of the top Soviet agents, Myron Matviyeyko, was given command of one of three teams of agents dropped into the western Ukraine and Poland on the night of May 14-15, 1951. Not only did he help Soviet security forces capture or kill all of the members of his team, but the other two agent teams as well. The captured agents were then turned by Soviet intelligence, radioing false information back to their MI6 controllers in West Germany for years before British intelligence finally realized that their agents were under Soviet control.³¹ The CIA and MI6 remained uncertain about who had betrayed their agent teams until November 24, 1960, when Radio Kiev broadcast a statement by Matviyeyko admitting that he had been a KGB spy all along.³² The failures of all of these CIA efforts to penetrate the USSR resulted in some very harsh critiques of the Agency’s performance within the U.S. government. In a Top Secret April 1952 report sent to the NSC (which senior officials in the CIA’s Clandestine Service strenuously objected to), CIA director Walter B. Smith painted a grim picture of the state of the CIA’s clandestine intelligence efforts against the Soviet Union, admitting that “The Council is generally acquainted with the Central Intelligence Agency’s secret operations designed to produce raw intelligence. Although we are making every effort to develop these latter sources, our experience so far has been in general disappointing. They are costly by comparison with other intelligence operations and they present in most cases a gambler’s chance of obtaining really significant critical strategic information, although they consistently produce a significant quantity of useable information. We must and shall devote our best effort to their improvement and to the exploitation of every reasonable chance for penetration. On a few rare occasions there have been really brilliant accomplishments.”³³ Another result of the CIA’s failure to build agent networks inside the Soviet Union was that it forced the U.S. intelligence community to shift its resources away from the CIA and its HUMINT collection programs to a variety of technical means for collecting intelligence inside the USSR, which are described in greater detail below.

Signals Intelligence

This collection contains a number of formerly classified documents concerning the early history of the U.S. signals intelligence (SIGINT) effort against the Soviet Union, which provide new details about the work of America’s codebreakers trying to solve the Soviet codes and ciphers well before the end of World War II.³⁴

During the period 1945 to 1948, NSA’s predecessor organizations were able to solve a number of important Soviet military machine cipher systems. But a traitor inside the U.S. Army’s SIGINT organization named William W. Weisband betrayed these successes to Soviet intelligence. In the fall of 1948, the Soviets changed all of their codes and ciphers, and in the process destroyed the ability of American and British codebreakers to read their high-level communications traffic. It would take NSA almost thirty years before it once again was able to solve high-level Soviet cipher systems.³⁵ In the post-1948 era, Soviet communications security practices and procedures were excellent, making the interception of high-level Soviet communications traffic difficult (but not impossible), and the breaking of Soviet codes and ciphers nigh on impossible.³⁶ Despite these seemingly insurmountable obstacles, the National Security Agency (NSA), America’s electronic eavesdropping organization, found ways of getting around these obstacles and retaining access to key Soviet signals traffic. During the 1950s and 1960s NSA was still able to produce valuable intelligence on Soviet military activities by exploiting low-level radio and cable traffic that the Soviets did not bother to encipher. Included in this collection are a number of examples of declassified intelligence reports derived from the exploitation of this low-level Soviet communications traffic.³⁷ NSA’s ability to intercept and exploit these low-level communications proved to be invaluable during the Korean War (1950-1953), when NSA was able to secretly intercept the tactical radio communications of Soviet fighter pilots engaged in aerial combat with American warplanes over the Yalu River from 1951 to 1953. The U.S. government kept the fact that thanks to SIGINT, it knew that American pilots were engaged in combat with Soviet warplanes secret until June 2010, when the CIA quietly declassified and released many of these records. Included in this collection are over fifty Top Secret Codeword CIA reports detailing Soviet military activities during the Korean War.³⁸ Between 1953 and the time the first successful CORONA reconnaissance satellite went into orbit in 1960, SIGINT from NSA was the principal source of intelligence about what the Soviet military was doing despite the fact that the agency was unable to solve any high-level Soviet cipher systems.³⁹ During this time period, the declassified documents show that SIGINT was virtually the only source for the U.S. intelligence community on Soviet bomber deployments and flight activities, Soviet ballistic missile research and development efforts, Soviet satellite and deep-space probe launch activities, the deployment and activities of the Soviet air defense forces, the movements of Soviet merchant shipping around the world and details about the cargoes they were carrying, Soviet civil defense activities, gold production and international sales by the USSR, Soviet imports of strategic commodities such as copper, and Soviet and Warsaw Pact military and economic aid to China, to name but a few areas where SIGINT made a substantive contribution to the U.S. intelligence effort.⁴⁰ Included in this collection are a number of newly declassified documents concerning the CIA’s enormously successful Berlin Tunnel operation, wherein CIA and British intelligence operatives were able to successfully tap a number of Soviet underground communications active in East Berlin. Among the documents included in this collection is the almost completely declassified CIA history of the operation, as well as the newly released NSA history of its involvement in the Berlin Tunnel operation, known within the agency as Operation REGAL.⁴¹ The 1960s saw the advent of new high-tech SIGINT collection sensor systems, which dramatically improved the quantity and quality of the material that NSA was able to collect from deep inside the USSR.⁴² For example, NSA engineers were able to design and build new sensor and computer systems which led to dramatic improvements in the agency’s SIGINT collection and analytic effort against Soviet missile testing and space launch activities.⁴³ Beginning in 1969, the first SIGINT reconnaissance satellite called CANYON was launched into orbit, which gave NSA first time access to critically-important Soviet military communications traffic carried on microwave links deep inside the USSR. Then in the late 1970s, NSA succeeded in solving the first of a series of high-level Soviet military encryption systems, allowing the agency to successfully predict that the USSR intended to invade Afghanistan on December 25, 1979.⁴⁴ By the mid-1980s, NSA was once again producing some extremely important intelligence on Soviet military activities. For example, a declassified 1984 intelligence study revealed that a combination of satellite imagery, signals intelligence, and electronic intelligence (ELINT) from spy satellites were able to closely track to the movements and activities of Soviet SS-20 mobile intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBM) that were capable of striking targets throughout Western Europe and China.⁴⁵

Peripheral Aerial Reconnaissance

This collection contains what may be the first truly comprehensive compendium of primary source materials on the subject of Soviet attacks on U.S. and allied military and civilian aircraft during the Cold War. Over seventy-five documents, some of them recently declassified for this collection, provide new details on over a hundred of these incidents which claimed the lives of several hundred American airmen during the Cold War. Also included in this collection are a number of formerly classified Soviet documents on these aerial incidents which were turned over to U.S. investigators in the early 1990s.⁴⁶

One of the most fascinating documents in this collection is a 1993 Secret Codeword article by an NSA historian concerning the role that his agency played in thirteen shootdown incidents involving the Soviets between 1950 and 1964, including the shootdown of Francis Gary Powers’ U-2 spy plane over the USSR in May 1960 by a Soviet surface-to-air missile (SAM). NSA accidently placed the complete unredacted version of the article online, then quickly removed it from their website. A few days later NSA released the document after it became clear that a number of individuals had downloaded the article and placed it online on their own websites.⁴⁷

Reconnaissance Overflights

The question of how many U.S. and allied reconnaissance overflights of the USSR were conducted during the Cold War remains one of the most closely-guarded secrets of the U.S. intelligence community.⁴⁸ Declassified documents contained in this collection reveal that between 1947 and 1950, the British Royal Air Force (RAF), and the Swedish and Norwegian air forces flew a small number of shallow overflights of the USSR and the island of Spitsbergen, which was partly controlled by the Soviet Union, using reconnaissance cameras and film provided by the U.S. Air Force (USAF). These countries then forwarded to the USAF copies of the photos taken on these clandestine reconnaissance missions.⁴⁹ The Swedes conducted several dozen shallow overflights of the Soviet Union, principally over the Baltic States and the Kola Peninsula, using American reconnaissance cameras between 1948 and 1950.⁵⁰ The number of the still highly classified overflights of the USSR flown by U.S. Air Force aircraft between 1949 and 1956 remains classified for reasons that remain obscure. But the declassified documents contained in this collection confirm that the USAF and the RAF conducted at least several dozen top secret reconnaissance overflights of the USSR between May 1949 and December 1956. The documents also confirm that the USAF deliberately refused to allow the CIA to participate in these overflight operations and kept the photography taken on these missions away from CIA intelligence analysts.⁵¹These Sensitive Intelligence (SENSINT) overflights of the USSR were conducted under a strict “plausible deniability” protocol. A October 30, 1953 CIA memo revealed that President Dwight D. Eisenhower had personally approved the program of USAF SENSINT overflights shortly after he was inaugurated in January 1953, but that he had told the Joint Chiefs of Staff that he did not want to know any of the details of these missions so that he could deny any knowledge of them if something went wrong. Another CIA report, dated August 1954, stated “Considerations of this highly sensitive subject [overflights] are severely limited by Presidential request. As reported in a memorandum by Admiral Carney [Admiral Robert B. Carney, Chief of Naval Operations, August 1953 - August 1955], the point is made that the President himself does not wish to be informed of overflights.”⁵² The first officially acknowledged USAF SENSINT overflight of the USSR occurred on May 10, 1949, when an RF-80A tactical reconnaissance jet piloted by 1st Lieutenant Bryce Poe II, flew a secret penetration mission over Soviet military airfields on the Kurile Islands north of Japan. Between March and August 1950, RF-80 reconnaissance aircraft based in Japan performed nineteen more overflights of the Soviet Far East, including missions over Sakhalin Island, the Kurile Islands, and the Soviet mainland around the port city of Vladivostok. The purpose of all of these overflight missions was to document the order of battle of the Soviet Air Force in the Far East prior to, and during the early stages of the Korean War. It would appear that none of these missions were approved by President Harry S. Truman, the Secretary of Defense, or the Joint Chiefs of Staff.⁵³ Only two intelligence reports derived from these Top Secret RF-80 reconnaissance overflights in the Soviet Far East has been declassified so far (probably by accident). The first, dated May 10, 1950, and the second, dated August 24, 1950, provided USAF intelligence in Washington with a detailed precis of the location of every Soviet combat aircraft on Sakhalin Island and the Kurile Islands.⁵⁴ Another interesting group of records contained in this collection concern the still highly classified 1952 and 1954 joint U.S. Air Force-British Royal Air Force (RAF) overflights of the western USSR known as Project JIU-JITSU. On the night of April 17-18, 1952, three simultaneous night-time overflight missions were flown by U.S.-made RB-45 reconnaissance aircraft with RAF crews: one across Germany covering the Baltic states; the second flight covering all of Belorussia; and the third covering large portions of the western Ukraine. These missions, which targeted Soviet strategic bomber bases and nearby PVO fighter intercept airfields, all returned safely to base without incident. Two years later on the night of April 28-29, 1954, the original JIU-JITSU mission was repeated. Three RB-45s flown by RAF flight crews conducted another series of overflights of the European portion of the Soviet Union. Like the May 1952 RAF RB-45 overflights, the principal targets of these reconnaissance missions were Soviet bomber bases inside the Soviet Union.⁵⁵ The highly classified photo intelligence derived from these USAF and RAF overflights of the USSR was placed in a restricted access security compartment called “Sensitive Intelligence,” or SENSINT.⁵⁶ Included in this document collect are the first declassified Top Secret SENINT intelligence reports derived from these USAF overflights, including imagery of Soviet naval bases and shipyards at Vladivostok, Soviet industrial and railroad facilities in and around the city of Vladivostok, and a number of Soviet military airfields in the Soviet Far East and Arctic regions.⁵⁷ Perhaps the most interesting SENSINT report contained in this collection is a 1959 Top Secret document detailing the locations of Soviet strategic surface-to-air missile sites deployed around Moscow. The imagery which formed the basis of this report was taken from cameras hidden in the bottoms of foreign commercial airliners as they circled Moscow awaiting permission to land^.58 This collection includes over a hundred formerly classified documents concerning the twent-six overflight missions of the USSR and Eastern Europe performed by CIA U-2 reconnaissance plane between June 1956 and May 1960. Included among the documents are new details concerning which targets inside the USSR were covered by these missions and the CIA’s net evaluations of the intelligence produced by these missions.⁵⁹ A number of CIA intelligence reports are included to provide the reader with a sample of the kinds of intelligence information that were produced by these U-2 overflight missions.⁶⁰ Also included are over a dozen formerly Top Secret memoranda describing President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s personal involvement in planning and approving these missions, as well as his oft stated concerns that these missions could damage the fragile relations between the U.S. and the USSR if one of these planes were shot down, which is exactly what happened on May 1, 1960.⁶¹

Satellite Reconnaissance

On August 18, 1960, just three months after Francis Gary Powers’ U-2 was shot down over Sverdlovsk, the first successful CIA CORONA photo reconnaissance satellite (Mission 9009) was launched into orbit carrying a camera and twenty pounds of film. Recovered in the air over the Pacific the next day, CORONA Mission 9009 returned with 3,000 feet of film showing 1,650,000 square miles of the Soviet Union, including the locations of previously unseen Soviet bomber airfields and ballistic missile launch sites. Over the next twelve years, 145 CORONA satellites were launched into orbit, in the process replacing SIGINT as the U.S. intelligence community’s top producer of intelligence information on the Soviet military.⁶² The advent of photo reconnaissance satellites literally overnight changed the state of what the U.S. intelligence community knew about the Soviet military. The amount of information collected by each spy satellite mission was staggering, covering the entire gamut of Soviet military activities inside the USSR and Eastern Europe.⁶³ Newly declassified documents reveal that as new cameras and film delivery systems were added to each new CORONA and GAMBIT satellite launched into orbit, both the quantity and quality of the information being produced by these satellites on the Soviet military improved geometrically during the 1960s and 1970s.⁶⁴ Most of the early CORONA satellite missions focused on locating Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) launch complexes.⁶⁵ By September 1961, the imagery collected by these reconnaissance satellites allowed the U.S. intelligence community to issue its first comprehensive intelligence estimate on the size and location of the Soviet ICBM force, an extraordinary achievement for the time.⁶⁶ By the mid-1960s, the technology had improved to the point where a single individual reconnaissance satellite could cover the locations of all known or suspected Soviet ICBM silos and intermediate- and medium-range ballistic missile (IRBM/MRBM) launch sites throughout the USSR.⁶⁷ Included in this document collection are more than a hundred intelligence reports based on analysis of satellite reconnaissance imagery, including a 1963 report produced by the National Photographic Interpretation Center which identified all of Soviet submarine bases throughout the USSR and the number and types of submarines stationed at each base.⁶⁸ Another 1965 imagery analysis report identified the locations of all thirty-one Soviet strategic signals intelligence (SIGINT) collection sites.⁶⁹

INTELLIGENCE ASSESSMENTS OF THE USSR

Unclassified publications produced by the CIA’s history staff meant for wide public distribution are replete with glowing testimonials as to the importance and accuracy of the intelligence estimates on the Soviet Union produced by the Agency’s corps of analysts. While it is true that the Agency’s intelligence assessments on the USSR were oftentimes remarkably prescient in terms of predicting Soviet actions, declassified internal CIA documents reveal that, in fact, the CIA’s analysts repeatedly erred on vitally important questions concerning Soviet political and military intentions and capabilities, and that some of these errors of fact and conclusion were costly indeed.⁷⁰The internal CIA evaluations of the intelligence estimative process on the Soviet Union generally agree that on those subjects where the Agency’s assessments left much to be desired, one of the principal causes for the failures was the dearth of accurate and reliable intelligence information available to the analysts, especially during the 1950s when the U.S. had few reliable intelligence sources about what was going on inside the USSR.

This was especially true in the area of the political intentions of the Kremlin throughout the Cold War. CIA internal reports confirm that on political matters, the Agency’s intelligence estimates were consistently wrong, in large part because the CIA was never able to recruit an agent with access to high-level Soviet policymaking secrets, nor was the National Security Agency able to solve any of the high-level codes and ciphers used by the Kremlin to convey policy decisions except on military and economic matters. This meant that the CIA’s analysts were left with the extraordinarily difficult task of trying to discern the Soviet regime’s strategic intentions on the basis of virtually no first-hand information, leaving the CIA analysts to try to “guesstimate” the Kremlin’s intentions based on newspaper reports and other low-level and oftentimes unreliable information.

Reflective of the U.S. intelligence community’s inability to accurately gauge political conditions inside the USSR early on in the Cold War is demonstrated by the fact that the CIA experienced great difficulty trying to accurately determine the nature and extent of armed resistance and political dissent within the Soviet Union. Among the declassified documents contained in this collection are a series of intelligence reports from the 1950s that tried to assess the strength and capabilities of various anti-communist resistance movements inside the USSR and Eastern Europe, which the CIA and the U.S. military wanted to use to both collect intelligence inside the Soviet Union as well as subvert the Kremlin’s authority throughout the country. Most of the early assessments, done in the late 1940s and early 1950s erroneously concluded that there was widespread armed resistance to the Soviet regime in the Ukraine, Caucasus, and the Baltic States waiting to be exploited by the U.S. and its European allies.⁷¹ Included in this collection are the transcripts of high-level meetings between senior U.S. and British government and intelligence officials in London about how the two countries could best use these resistance groups to cause chaos and confusion inside the USSR and Eastern Europe.⁷² It was not until 1957-1958 that CIA analysts finally (and reluctantly) concluded that all of the armed resistance movements it had previously believed to be operating inside the USSR had been destroyed by Soviet security forces or were no longer capable of functioning coherently because they had been thorough penetrated by Soviet intelligence.⁷³ Throughout the 1950s, a host of erroneous conclusions about the strength and capabilities of the Soviet military found their way into a number of key CIA intelligence estimates, principally because of a lack of information available to the intelligence analysts in Washington about what was actually going on inside the USSR. For example, beginning in the mid-1950s the U.S. intelligence community adopted a consensus opinion that the Soviets were ahead of the U.S. in strategic bombers and ICBMs (known to history as the “Bomber Gap” and the “Missile Gap”), despite the fact that there was little raw intelligence information to support these conclusions.⁷⁴ For example, despite the incontrovertible evidence from SIGINT and U-2 overflights of the USSR which showed that production of Soviet strategic bombers was far less than what had previously been believed, in January 1957 the CIA’s Office of National Estimates as a matter of political expediency published a new National Intelligence Estimate, which stated that by mid-1959 the Russians would have about five hundred Bison and three hundred Bear strategic bombers, which ran completely contrary to everything the intelligence collectors were showing at the time.⁷⁵ Nine months later in October 1957, the CIA’s Office of National Estimates once again decided to agree to a consensus intelligence estimate about the size of the Soviet strategic bomber force so as to prevent a fight with the more hawkish views of the U.S. Air Force. Despite a near total lack of hard intelligence to support the position, the CIA’s Office of National Estimates agreed with the USAF position that the Russians still intended to build a massive bomber strike force, with the CIA analysts predicting that by mid-1960 the Russians would have built at least 400-600 heavy bombers. This prediction, as it would turn out, was completely wrong in that it vastly overestimated Russian intentions.⁷⁶ The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis is another example of a failure by the CIA’s intelligence analysts to accurately estimate Soviet intentions. Recently declassified documents reveal that in September 1962, despite the preponderance of evidence from signals intelligence (SIGINT) that Soviet cargo ships were carrying weapons to Cuba, the CIA and the Pentagon’s intelligence arm, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), all refused to accept this information. For example, the analysts in the CIA’s Office of National Estimates (ONE) refused to believe that the Soviets would dare to send nuclear weapons or ballistic missiles to Cuba because it defied what they thought was rational behavior. A September 19, 1962 National Intelligence Estimate prepared by the CIA stated unequivocally that the possibility that the Soviets might deploy offensive missiles to Cuba was “incompatible with Soviet practice to date and with Soviet policy as we presently estimate it.” Less than a month later, the analysts were shocked when a U-2 reconnaissance aircraft brought back the first pictures showing that the Russians were in the process of building launch sites for nuclear-armed ballistic missiles throughout Cuba.⁷⁷ Years later, CIA officials and intelligence analysts were still debating (in secret) how and why the CIA got this estimate so wrong given the growing evidence then available indicating that the Soviets were in the process of deploying offensive weapons to Cuba.⁷⁸ This collection includes a number of previously unpublished declassified documents concerning the intelligence aspects of the Cuban missile crisis, including a series of reports detailing how the U.S. intelligence community was able to track Soviet weapons shipments to Cuba.⁷⁹ Also contained in this collection are a series of detailed post-mortem reports analyzing the performance of the U.S. intelligence community during the Cuban Missile Crisis, some of which are quite critical.⁸⁰ There is also a surprisingly detailed declassified 1994 NSA historical article revealing just how information SIGINT was producing about Soviet military activities in Cuba prior to the situation in Cuba reaching crisis proportions in October 1962.⁸¹ A recurring theme is that on many critical subjects involving the Soviet military, the U.S. intelligence community’s assessments started out poorly because of a near complete lack of information available upon which to form an informed opinion about Soviet intentions and capabilities. But the introduction of new high-tech intelligence collection sensors, coupled with the implementation of improved analytic techniques, over time resulted in dramatically better intelligence assessments of Soviet military capabilities starting in the early 1960s.

One such area was on the subject of Soviet nuclear weapons research, development, testing, and production. Collection activities on Soviet nuclear weapons research activities began shortly after the end of World War II, focusing initially on the activities of the dozens of German nuclear scientists who had been taken to the USSR to work on facets of the Soviet nuclear program.⁸² Because of a dearth of raw material to work with, the early intelligence estimates on the Soviet nuclear program were painfully bare of details and oftentimes woefully wrong about the true state of the Soviet nuclear weapons program.⁸³ But beginning in the mid-1950s and continuing through the end of the Cold War, CIA intelligence estimates on the Soviet nuclear program showed marked and sustained improvement, thanks especially to the information produced by U-2 overflights in the mid- to late-1950s and the CORONA reconnaissance satellite in the early 1960s.⁸⁴ Another important contributor to the U.S. intelligence community’s ability to assess Soviet nuclear weapons developments was the network of nuclear test detection stations that were constructed around the world beginning in the late 1940s, which over time became increasingly sophisticated and capable of detecting even the smallest nuclear weapons test detonations inside the USSR.⁸⁵ Of particular interest to the reader are the detailed declassified articles written in the 1960s and 1970s by the CIA’s top nuclear intelligence specialist, Henry S. Lowenhaupt, who described how the Agency secretly located the Soviet Union’s most important military nuclear reactors and monitored their activities, oftentimes using very inventive collection and analytic techniques.⁸⁶ Another area where the CIA’s intelligence analysts over time came to excel was their effort to document the growth of the Soviet ballistic missile force using imagery obtained from the Agency’s reconnaissance satellites, especially detailed coverage of each successive new generation of Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). Documents contained in this collection show that prior to 1960, U.S. intelligence estimates on the size of the Soviet ICBM force, the locations of the Soviet ICBM silos, and the identities of the factories inside the USSR that were producing the missiles, was practically non-existent.⁸⁷ The declassified documents in this document collection confirm that much of what the U.S. intelligence community knew after World War II about the Soviet ballistic missile program came from interrogating German scientists and engineers who worked on the Soviet missile program until they were allowed to return to Germany in the mid-1950s.⁸⁸ Declassified documents contained in this collection show that beginning in the mid-1950s, a series of new high-tech sensors, such as new telemetry intercept systems and long-range surveillance radars, were brought to bear on the Soviet ballistic missile testing program, giving the U.S. intelligence community its first reliable information about what types of ballistic missiles the Soviets were testing, how often they were being tested, and detailed information about the capabilities of these missiles were.⁸⁹ During the thirty year period from 1960 until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the overall quality of the CIA’s intelligence assessments, particularly on military subjects, steadily improved as new high-tech collection systems and thousands of skilled and highly educated analysts were added to the arsenal of the U.S. intelligence community. Analytic mistakes were made during this time period, but nothing comparable to the “Bomber Gap” and “Missile Gap” intelligence controversies of the 1950s.

For example, the declassified documents contained in this collection demonstrate that the introduction of spy satellites beginning in 1960s dramatically improved what the U.S. intelligence knew about the Soviet strategic nuclear forces, especially their ICBM force. Between 1961 and 1963, the CORONA reconnaissance satellites were able to precisely locate every Soviet ICBM silo and intermediate- and medium-range ballistic missile launch site, find new missile silos then under construction, as well as identify all Soviet factories engaged in designing or building ballistic missiles.⁹⁰ Spy satellites also dramatically improved America’s knowledge of the Soviet air defense system. The vast amounts of data about Soviet radar systems obtained by the first generation of American electronic intelligence (ELINT) spy satellites led to a complete overhaul of the national intelligence estimates on the Soviet air defense system beginning in the mid-1960s.⁹¹ And as successive new generations of ELINT satellites were lofted in orbit during the 1970s and 1980s, the U.S. intelligence community’s knowledge of the strength and weaknesses of the Soviet air defense system grew by leaps and bounds.⁹² Reconnaissance satellites were instrumental in locating all of the nuclear-hardened command bunkers that the Soviet civilian and military senior leadership would retreat to in wartime in order to direct Soviet military operations.⁹³The ability of NSA’s SIGINT network and American spy satellites to peer deep inside the USSR was critically important in allowing the U.S. intelligence community to track the massive deployment of Soviet troops to positions along the border with the People’s Republic of China beginning in 1965, which reflected the increased tension between these two communist superpowers following the Sino-Soviet split in 1960.⁹⁴ Declassified documents reveal that the U.S. intelligence community provided Washington with excellent political and military coverage of events following the 1969 clash at Damanskiy Island on the Ussuri River between Soviet and Chinese troops, which led to the Soviets placing their military forces in the Far East on high alert.⁹⁵ But no matter how good the data coming from the intelligence collectors may have been, there were still instances where the intelligence community’s analysts drew the wrong conclusions from the information they were receiving. In the summer of 1968, despite the numerous indications turning up in SIGINT and other intelligence sources, the CIA’s intelligence analysts at Langley refused to heed the portents and stuck by their judgement that the Soviets would not intervene militarily in Czechoslovakia because it was, in their opinion, not a rational course of action. But shortly after midnight, August 20, 1968, 15 to 16 Soviet combat divisions and supporting Warsaw Pact forces crossed the border and invaded Czechoslovakia.⁹⁶ The late 1970s was a troubled time for the U.S. from a political and economic perspective. But it was a very exciting time for the U.S. intelligence community in its efforts to achieve something akin to a more complete understanding of the Soviet military threat. America’s electronic eavesdropping giant, NSA, finally achieved a significant breakthrough into a number of high-level Soviet encryption systems. The CIA managed to recruit a small number of important agents inside the Soviet military and in Eastern Europe. And the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), which designed and launched spy satellites into space, placed into orbit the first KH-11 KENNAN/CRYSTAL imaging satellite (December 19, 1976) and the first CHALET/VORTEX SIGINT satellite (June 10, 1978), which at the time was the largest and most advanced electronic eavesdropping satellite ever launched into space. And in August 1979, the submarine USS Parche  (SSN-683) installed a large tap on an Russian underwater communications cable just off the coast of the Kola Peninsula that linked the Soviet Northern Fleet headquarters at Murmansk with other naval bases along the Kola Peninsula.⁹⁷ Thanks to these new high-tech intelligence collection sensors, in the late 1970s and early 1980s the U.S. intelligence community scored some notable successes. Declassified documents in this collection show that thanks to satellite reconnaissance and SIGINT data received from NSA, the U.S. intelligence community accurately predicted the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on December 25, 1979, although there was nothing that the U.S. government could do to prevent the Soviets from occupying the entire country.⁹⁸ And in 1980-1981, a CIA agent inside the Polish General Staff, Colonel Ryszard Kuklinski, provided the U.S. intelligence community incredibly valuable intelligence that permitted the U.S. to monitor day-to-day developments inside Poland at a time when the U.S. government and its allies in Western Europe feared that the Soviet Union would intervene militarily crush the Polish “Solidarity” (Solidarnosc) trade union and its supporters inside the country. Contained in this collection are a selection of formerly highly classified CIA reports detailing the information that Colonel Kuklinski was providing the CIA at the height of the Polish Crisis in 1981.⁹⁹ Also contained in this collection are a series of formerly classified intelligence assessments and reports derived from a combination of SIGINT and satellite reconnaissance on Soviet military preparations to invade Poland, which neatly complemented Colonel Kuklinski’s reporting from Warsaw.¹⁰⁰ But as good as the intelligence was, there was (just like Afghanistan) nothing that the U.S. government could do to save Poland. On December 13, 1981, Polish leader General Wojciech Jaruzelski declared martial law and moved to crush the Solidarity trade union and its supporters. Elements of ten Polish combat divisions were deployed to all major Polish cities. HUMINT and SIGINT showed that no Soviet troops took part in the enforcement of the martial law decree, and that Soviet troops in and around Poland remained at peacetime readiness levels conducting routine training activity.¹⁰¹ Some of the CIA intelligence estimates during the administration of President Ronald Reagan (1981-1989) generated more than a fair share of controversy. In July 1981, the CIA issued a report which cast some doubt as to the ability of the U.S. intelligence community to verify a strategic arms limitation agreement (SALT) with the Soviet Union.¹⁰² A January 1982 CIA intelligence assessment presented a somewhat alarmist view about the Soviet work on developing a new generation of nuclear-armed strategic ballistic missiles and anti-ballistic missile (ABM) systems.¹⁰³ A February 1982 intelligence estimate alleged that the Soviets had used chemical and/or biological weapons against anti-communist insurgents in Afghanistan and Laos, although most of the evidence was fragmentary and unreliable.¹⁰⁴ And in 1983, the intelligence community produced an assessment after the U.S. invasion of the Caribbean island of Grenada which argued that the island’s government was controlled by the Soviet Union and Fidel Castro’s Cuba. But again, the evidence, such as it was, was arguably pretty flimsy.¹⁰⁵ And in January 1984, the White House issued a classified directive which found that the Soviets were not complying with a number of requirements pursuant to various arms control agreements. There was considerable dissent within the intelligence community about the veracity of some of the findings contained in this directive, by the intelligence analysts were overruled by the White House.¹⁰⁶ Controversy still swirls in the U.S. over whether the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community accurately foresaw the collapse of the Soviet Union and the break of the former Warsaw Pact states in Eastern Europe from Soviet domination. The declassified documents released to date show that beginning in 1989, the U.S. intelligence community accurately forecasted that the Soviet Union was headed into a period of political and economic crisis brought on by political instability at home and in Eastern Europe coupled with overspending on defense and security matters. The CIA also correctly found that the stability of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s government was being threatened by competing political forces within the Soviet hierarchy, especially the “Old Guard” communist party stalwarts who opposed his policy of greater openness (Glasnost) and wider diplomatic engagement and cooperation with the West (Perestroika). It also accurately forecast that the Soviet’s control of Eastern Europe was weakening. But nowhere in the declassified documents reviewed to date is there any definitive statement showing that the U.S. intelligence community predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the complete break of all Eastern European countries from the USSR, or that by 1991 the USSR would fall apart completely. In other words, the U.S. intelligence community’s track record on this, the penultimate “Big Issue” of the Cold War, is mixed, at best.¹⁰⁷ The end of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the Warsaw Pact alliance happened so fast that probably no one could have accurately forecast it. On the night of November 9-10, 1989, East German demonstrators began tearing down the Berlin Wall. On November 19, 1989, a new Czech political party called the Civic Forum, headed by poet Vaclav Havel, called for dramatic political reforms. Czech Communist Party chairman Milos Jakes resigned the same day. In December 1989, the communist governments in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania collapsed. On March 11, 1990, Lithuania declared its independence, making it the first Soviet republic to secede from the USSR. In June 1990, the Ukraine declared its independence. On October 1, 1990, East and West Germany were reunited. In July 1991 the Warsaw Pact was formally disbanded. On August 18, 1991, communist hardliners launched a coup d’etat against President Mikhail Gorbachev. The revolt collapsed the next day when the Soviet military largely refused to back the hardliners. On December 25, 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as Russian president and the following day the USSR was dissolved. The Cold War was over.

Matthew M. Aid

Washington, D.C., August 2012

Location of originals

- National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), College Park, Maryland
- CIA-CREST database
- Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, Missouri
- Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas
- John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, Massachusetts
- Lyndon B. Johnson Library, Austin, Texas
- Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library, Yorba Linda, California
- Gerald R. Ford Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan
- Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, Atlanta, Georgia
- Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Simi Valley, California
- Hoover Institution Archives, Palo Alto, California
- Library of Congress Manuscript Division, Washington, D.C.
- George C. Marshall Research Library, Lexington, Virginia
- General Douglas MacArthur Memorial Library, Norfolk, Virginia
- National Archives of the United Kingdom, Kew, England

Bibliography

Lennart Andersson and Leif Hellström. Bortom Horisonten (Stockholm: Freddy Stenboms förlag, 2002).

Christopher Andrew, For the President’s Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washington to Bush (New York: HarperCollins, 1995).

Matthew M. Aid and Cees Wiebes (eds.), Secrets of Signals Intelligence during the Cold War and Beyond (London: Frank Cass, 2001).

Matthew M. Aid, The Secret Sentry: The Untold Story of the National Security Agency (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009).

Richard J. Aldrich, The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence (London: John Murray, 2001).

James Bamford, The Puzzle Palace: A Report on America's Most Secret Agency (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982).

Tom Bower, The Red Web: MI6 and the KGB Master Coup (London: Aurum Press, 1989).

Tom Bower, The Perfect English Spy (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995).

Scott D. Breckinridge, CIA and the Cold War: A Memoir (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1993).

Richard Breitman and Norman J.W. Goda, Hitler’s Shadow: Nazi War Criminals, U.S. Intelligence, and the Cold War (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 2010).

Dino A. Brugioni, Eyeball to Eyeball: The Inside Story of the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: Random House, 1990).

Ray S. Cline, The CIA Under Reagan, Bush and Casey (Washington, D.C.: Acropolis Books, 1981).

Angelo Codevilla, Informing Statecraft: Intelligence for a New Century (New York: Free Press, 1992).

Peer de Silva, Sub Rosa: The CIA and the Uses of Intelligence (New York: Times Books, 1978).

Pete Earley, Confessions of a Spy: The Real Story of Aldrich Ames (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1997).

Klaus Eichner and Dr. Andreas Dobbert, Headquarters Germany (Berlin: Edition Ost, 1997).

Harold P. Ford, Estimative Intelligence (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1993).

Robert M. Gates, From the Shadows (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).

Tony Geraghty, BRIXMIS (London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997).

R. Cargill Hall and Clayton D. Laurie, eds., Early Cold War Overflights 1950-1956: Symposium Proceedings (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Historian, National Reconnaissance Office, 2003).

Seymour M. Hersh, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (New York: Summit Books, 1983).

Seymour M. Hersh, The Target is Destroyed (New York: Random House, 1986).

Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (New York: Laurel Books, 1980).

Robert A. McDonald (ed.), Corona: Between the Sun & The Earth: The First NRO Reconnaissance Eye in Space (Bethesda, MD: The American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, 1997).

Patrick J. McGarvey, CIA: The Myth and the Madness (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1972).

David E. Murphy, Sergei A. Kondrashev, and George Bailey, Battleground Berlin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).

Chris Pocock, 50 Years of the U-2: The Complete Illustrated History of the “Dragon Lady” (Atglen, PA: Schiffer Military History, 2005).

 John Prados, The Soviet Estimate (New York: The Dial Press, 1982).

John Ranelagh, The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987).

Jeffrey T. Richelson, American Espionage and the Soviet Target (New York: Morrow, 1987).

Jeffrey T. Richelson, America’s Secret Eyes in Space: The U.S. Keyhole Spy Satellite Program (New York: Harper & Row, 1990).

Jeffrey T. Richelson, A Century of Spies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

Jeffrey T. Richelson, The Wizards of Langley (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2001).

Jeffrey T. Richelson, Spying on the Bomb: American Nuclear Intelligence from Nazi Germany to Iran and North Korea (NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006).

Olav Riste and Arnfinn Moland, Strengt Hemmelig: Norsk Etteretningsteneste, 1945-1970 (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1997).

Harry Rositzke, The CIA's Secret Operations: Espionage, Counterespionage, and Covert Action (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1977).

Christopher Simpson, Blowback (NY: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1988).

Michael Smith, New Cloak, Old Dagger (London: Victor Gollancz, 1996).

Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew, Blind Man's Bluff (NY: Public Affairs, 1998).

Evan Thomas, The Very Best Men: Four Who Dared: The Early Years of the CIA (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995).

Stansfield Turner, Secrecy and Democracy: The CIA in Transition (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1985).

H. Bradford Westerfield (ed.), Inside the CIA's Private World (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1995).

Chronology 

May 8, 1945	Nazi Germany surrenders.
August 6, 1945	First atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan.
August 9, 1945	Second atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan.
August 14, 1945	Victory Over Japan (VJ) Day. Last day of World War II.
August 15, 1945	Joint Anglo-American cryptologic effort to break Soviet codes and ciphers, codenamed “Bourbon,” commenced.
September 5, 1945	Soviet GRU code clerk Igor Gouzenko defects in Ottawa, Canada.
Early May 1947	U.S. Army cryptanalyst Meredith Gardner solved part of a message sent from the KGB's New York Rezidentura to Moscow on December 13, 1944, which showed that during World War II the KGB had an agent working within the U.S. Army General Staff in Washington, who had evidently provided the Soviets with highly classified military information.
February 25, 1948	Soviet-backed bloodless coup d’etat in Czechoslovakia overthrows the democratically elected government.
June 24, 1948	Soviet troops impose a blockade on all road and rail traffic from West Germany to West Berlin. Two days later, on June 26, 1948, the U.S. and Great Britain begin the Berlin Airlift to resupply West Berlin.
June 28, 1948	Tito breaks with Stalin. The COMINFORM expels the Yugoslav Communist Party from membership in the organization.

May 12, 1949	Soviets lift the Berlin Blockade
August 29, 1949	First Soviet atomic bomb is tested at Semipalatinsk.
September 5, 1949	First CIA agents parachuted into the USSR. A CIA C-47 transport aircraft dropped a two-man team of agents into the Ukraine near the city of L’vov. Both agents were captured or killed shortly after landing.
May 30-31, 1950	CIA C-47 dropped into the western Ukraine south of the city of Stryj a four-man agent team. Only one member of the team managed to exfiltrate to West Germany in October 1950, bringing with him a packet of documents which convinced the CIA that the Ukrainian resistance movement was a viable entity.
June 25, 1950	North Korean Army invades South Korea.
October 3, 1950	First CIA agent parachute drop into Lithuania. CIA parachutes three-man agent team into Lithuania to establish contact with the Lithuanian underground.
October 25, 1950	Elements of three Chinese armies launched a concerted surprise attack on U.S. and South Korean forces near the North Korean town of Unsan. Beginning of Chinese military intervention in the Korean War.
November 1, 1950	Soviet MiG-15 jet fighters, flying from the air bases inside Manchuria, engaged American combat aircraft for the first time over North Korea. U.S. intelligence did not know at the time that the MiGs were piloted by Russian fliers. U.S. intelligence community did not learn of Soviet military intervention in the Korean War until April 1951, but kept the discovery a secret.
November 25, 1950	At 8:00 p.m., the Chinese military openly intervened in the Korean War, striking American and South Korean forces deployed along the full length of the Yalu River. U.S. military forces are decimated, and for the next month retreat southwards, in the process abandoning all of North Korea to the Chinese and North Korean forces.
April 2, 1951	Army Chief of Staff General Omar Bradley wrote a memorandum to the JCS, which stated in part: “Soviet capabilities in the Far East, particularly against Japan, have led me to conclude that there is a danger of overt conflict between the United States and the USSR in that area.”

April 19, 1951	CIA parachuted a second two-man agent team into the Kaunas area of Lithuania.
May 25, 1951	Two senior British Foreign Office officials, Donald Duart MacLean and Guy Francis De Moncy Burgess, fled Great Britain and defected to the Soviet Union.
July 1951	A Moscow-based U.S. air attaché photographed one of the first prototypes of the Soviet TU-95 Bear heavy bomber sitting on a parking stand at Ramenskoye Air Base outside Moscow.
September 21-22, 1951	A CIA agent named Ivan Aleksandrovich Filistovich was parachuted into Belorussia to establish contact with partisan groups.
August 26-27, 1952	A four-man CIA agent team designated AEQUOR II was parachute dropped at night into Belorussia
August 26-27, 1952	A three-man CIA agent team called AECOB was parachuted into Latvia.
March 5, 1953	Soviet leader Marshal Josef Stalin dies.
March 20, 1953	Nikita Khrushchev becomes the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
July 30, 1953	The first prototype of the Soviet M-4 Bison heavy bomber was surreptitiously photographed by the U.S. Air Attaché from the U.S. embassy in Moscow while sitting on a parking stand at the Russian Air Force’s Flight Test Institute at Ramenskoye airfield outside Moscow.
October 1953	The CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff agreed to a dramatic and far-reaching reorientation of the national intelligence collection effort against the Soviet Union, which focused on technical intelligence resources in order to monitor what was going on inside the Soviet Union.

May 6-7, 1954	The CIA parachuted two agents into southern Estonia. On the same night the CIA parachuted am agent into Latvia. All of these agents were quickly caught. Last known CIA agent parachute drop inside the USSR.
September 2, 1954	Work on digging the CIA’s Berlin Tunnel began.
March 28, 1955	Construction of the Berlin Tunnel tap chamber was completed and the three target cables exposed.
May 11, 1955	Intercept operations in the Berlin Tunnel commenced around-the-clock.
Mid-1955	Radio intercepts collected by NSA detected the initiation of construction by the Soviet Ministry of Defense of what was believed to be a Russian missile test facility in the middle of the Kazakh desert somewhere in the vicinity of the towns of Novokazalinsk and Dzhusaly. This later was determined to be the Tyuratam missile test center.
November 1955	Project Genetrix plan was approved by President Eisenhower. The project plan called for launching 2,700 high-altitude reconnaissance balloons from sites in Scotland, Norway, Germany and Turkey. The balloons would traverse the full length of the Soviet Union and land at designated points over the Pacific.
January 10, 1956	The first Genetrix reconnaissance balloon was launched from Turkey for an overflight of the USSR. Between January and February 1956, 516 Genetrix balloons equipped with cameras were launched from Western Europe and Turkey. According to declassified CIA documents, only 46 of the balloons were ever recovered, of which only 34 of the recovered payloads actually yielded useable photo intelligence. President Eisenhower halted the program in February 1956 after the Soviets publicly displayed some of the balloons that they had shot down.
April 21, 1956	A team of East German telephone maintenance workmen discovered the CIA’s Berlin Tunnel while inspecting the cable system. Two days later (April 23, 1956) the Soviets lodged a formal diplomatic protest about the tunnel operation.
June 20, 1956	CIA U-2 reconnaissance aircraft conducted the first overflight of East Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia.
July 4, 1956	First CIA U-2 overflight of the Soviet Union. Primary target was the city of Leningrad. The following day (July 5, 1956), another CIA U-2 aircraft overflew Moscow.

October 23, 1956	Peaceful anti-Soviet demonstrations in downtown Budapest, Hungary escalated into a full-blown armed insurrection against the Soviet-backed Hungarian government. The hardline Communist Hungarian government called for Soviet military assistance in putting down the riots, which by the end of the day had spread from Budapest to a number of other major Hungarian cities.
November 4, 1956	Soviet troops attacked Budapest and other Hungarian cities that had risen up in revolt. By 8:00 a.m. Soviet troops had captured the Hungarian parliament building in downtown Budapest and had arrested the entire Hungarian government and parliament, including Prime Minister Nagy.
December 18, 1956	Last USAF SENSINT overflight of the USSR. Three RB-57D aircraft conduct a reconnaissance mission over the Soviet Far East, including the port city of Vladivostok.
August 21, 1957	The Soviets conducted their first successful ICBM test firing from Tyuratam.
October 4, 1957	Soviets launch the first satellite, Sputnik I, into orbit above the Earth.
January 1959	Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev boasts that Russian factories were turning out ICBMs “like sausages.” Khrushchev’s statement led CIA intelligence analysts to conclude that the Soviets had begun serial production of ICBMs.
September 8, 1960	SIGINT revealed that the first Soviet arms shipment to Cuba had arrived on board the Russian merchant ship Ilya Mechnikov, which brought T-34 medium tanks and anti-aircraft guns.
April 12, 1961	First Soviet manned space flight by Major Yuri Gagarin in Vostok I.
August 12-18, 1961	Berlin Wall was erected by East Germany, effectively closing the border between East and West Berlin.
May 21, 1962	The Soviet Politburo decided to deploy Soviet troops to Cuba. The decision was unanimously approved by an expanded meeting of the Politburo Defense Council on May 24, 1962.

July 15, 1962	The first fully-laden Soviet cargo ships began sailing from Soviet Union for Cuba carrying troops and equipment.
October 14, 1962	U-2 reconnaissance plane discovered the first Soviet ballistic missiles in Cuba.
October 22, 1962	President John F. Kennedy revealed to the American people in a nationally televised broadcast that the Soviet Union had placed offensive missiles in Cuba that were capable of striking targets throughout most of the United States. President Kennedy also declared an immediate quarantine of Cuba, and ordered the U.S. Navy to stop and search any ships suspected of carrying weapons to Cuba.
October 28, 1962	Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev agreed to remove all Russian ballistic missiles from Cuba.
April 23, 1965	The Soviets launched their first communications satellite, designated Molniya 1.
Mid-June 1967	SIGINT determined that over the span of 27 days in June-July 1967, Soviet military transport aircraft flew 350 sorties bring military equipment, ammunition and supplies to Egypt and Syria to replace items lost in the Six Day War.
July 17, 1968	SIGINT detected the first signs that the Soviet military had began mobilizing its forces in the western USSR for a potential invasion of Czechoslovakia, which including the large-scale deployment of frontline combat units from their peacetime garrisons in the western USSR to forward positions from which they could invade Czechoslovakia.
August 3-4, 1968	U.S. intelligence detected the movement of large numbers of Soviet, East German and Polish troops to the Czech border, and further large-scale troop movements were detected within the Soviet Baltic and Belorussian Military Districts towards the Polish and Czech borders.
August 19, 1968	NSA issued a warning message stating that all indications appearing in SIGINT pointed to the strong possibility of a Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
August 20-21, 1968	Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia.

March 2, 1969	Chinese troops opened fire on a Soviet KGB border guard patrol on Damansky Island in the Far East, which the Chinese called Chen-pao. Seven KGB border guards were killed in the incident and another 23 were wounded.
October 1971	Divers from the submarines USS Halibut (SSN-587) placed a tap on a Russian communications cable that ran under the surface of the Sea of Okhotsk which linked the naval base at Petropavlovsk on Kamchatka with the naval base at Magadan on the Soviet mainland. The operation was designated Ivy Bells.
March 1972	Soviets began flight testing four new ICBMs, each carrying MIRV'd warheads. These missiles were arbitrarily designated the SS-16 Sinner, SS-17 Spanker, SS-18 Satan, and SS-19 Stiletto.
May 22, 1972	Nixon-Brezhnev summit meeting in Moscow begins. Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty signed by President Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev on May 26, 1972.
July 1972	Egyptian president Anwar Sadat throws all Soviet military personnel and advisors out of Egypt.

October 29, 1975	Soviet airlift of military equipment and supplies to Angola commenced. The airlift, which was performed by dozens of Russian military transport aircraft, was not completed until January 1976. NSA provided extensive SIGINT coverage of the Soviet airlift.
April 20, 1978	A Korean Air Lines Boeing 707 passenger plane (KAL Flight 902), with 110 passengers and crew on board, got lost on a flight from Paris to Alaska and accidently flew for two hours over the Kola Peninsula near the huge Soviet naval base of Murmansk until finally being forced down by PVO fighter interceptors.
August 1979	The submarine USS Parche  (SSN-683) installed a large tap on an Russian underwater communications cable just off the coast of the Kola Peninsula that linked the Soviet Northern Fleet headquarters at Murmansk with other naval bases along the Kola Peninsula.
August 10, 1979	CIA National Intelligence Officer for Warning writes a memo recommending that an Alert Memorandum be issued concerning the increasing likelihood of Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan.
September 14, 1979	Afghan President Nur Muhammed Taraki was deposed in a bloody coup d’etat. Taraki was killed by Soviet commandoes, and his pro-Soviet deputy Hafizullah Amin took his place as president.
December 19, 1979	The CIA alerted the White House that the Russians had landed three airborne battalions at Bagram Air Base outside Kabul, suggesting that the Soviets intended to intervene militarily in Afghanistan.
December 22, 1979	Three days before the first Soviet troops crossed the Soviet-Afghan border, NSA reported to the White House that recently received intelligence information indicated that the Russians intended to invade Afghanistan within the next 72 hours.
December 25, 1979	Soviets invade Afghanistan.
September 20, 1980	The increasingly threatening Soviet military moves taking place in the western USSR opposite Poland prompted the CIA to issue an Alert Memorandum, warning that the increasing tempo of Soviet military exercise activity in the USSR’s three westernmost military districts “manifest the Soviet leaders’ growing concern over developments in Poland.”
December 1980	NSA radio intercepts and satellite imagery determined that three  Soviet combat divisions in the Baltic, Belorussian and Carpathian Military Districts had been placed on alert along the Soviet border of Poland, along with the élite 76th Guards Airborne Division at Pskov in the Baltic Military District.

April 3, 1981	Using SIGINT and satellite imagery, U.S. intelligence analysts spotted the Russians making further military preparation along the border with Poland involving increased activity by between 12 and 20 divisions in the western USSR, leading the CIA to issue an Alert Memorandum, which stated that: “We believe that the Soviet leaders have been convinced by the evident impotence of the Polish party and government that military intervention is necessary. They have set preparations in motion and would have the capability to move in considerable force within 48 hours.”
September 1, 1983	Soviet fighter shoots down Korean Airlines Boeing 747 jetliner (Flight 007) off Sakhalin Island. All 269 passengers and crew on KAL 007 were killed, 61 of whom were Americans.
November 2, 1983	U.S. Able Archer nuclear-release exercise begins in West Germany. Between November 2-11, 1983, SIGINT detected Soviet ground forces in East Germany and the Baltic Military District moving to a heightened readiness status; Soviet air units in East Germany and Poland were placed on alert and routine training flights suddenly stopped; Soviet fighter interceptors and nuclear-capable fighter bombers were placed on runway alert on airfields in East Germany and western Poland; and the Soviets suddenly ceased broadcasting weather reports throughout the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
December 8, 1987	President Ronald Reagan and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev sign the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF Treaty) in Washington, which ordered the dismantling all U.S. and Soviet medium and short-range nuclear ballistic missiles in Europe.
April 1988	Mikhail Gorbachev signs an agreement committing the USSR to withdraw all Soviet troops from Afghanistan by February 1989.
January 1989	Last Soviet troops withdraw from Afghanistan.
December 1989	Communist governments fall in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Rumania.
October 3, 1990	East and West Germany reunited.
August 19, 1991	Revolt in Moscow against Mikhail Gorbachev put down.
October 25, 1991	CPSU General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev resigned all of his government positions.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
ORGANIZATIONAL GLOSSARY

PERSONALITIES GLOSSARY
Secretaries of defense
Central Intelligence Agency
Defense Intelligence Agency
National Reconnaissance Office
National Security Agency
Federal Bureau of Investigations

ACRONYMS


ORGANIZATIONAL GLOSSARY

Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA) - AFSA was the U.S. government's first centralized SIGINT organization from 1949 to 1952. After a turbulent three year lifetime that was marred by systemic organizational problems and a number of costly operational failures, AFSA was disestablished in November 1952 and redesignated as the National Security Agency (NSA).

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) - Successor to America's wartime clandestine intelligence gathering organization, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the CIA is today the U.S. intelligence community's principal human intelligence (HUMINT) gathering organization. Created by the National Security Act of 1947, the CIA then had three primary functions: serving as the U.S. intelligence community's lead producer of finished intelligence analysis; conducting clandestine HUMINT collection; and managing all covert action operations on behalf of the U.S. government. Between 1947 and April 2005, the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) was also responsible for managing and coordinating the efforts of the entire U.S. intelligence community until that responsibility was transferred to the newly created position of Director of National Intelligence (DNI). For most of its history, the CIA has operated its own SIGINT collection organizations which operated largely autonomously from NSA's jurisdiction.

Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) - Created in October 1961, the DIA is the intelligence arm of the Defense Department, producing tailored foreign military intelligence reporting for the Secretary of Defense's office, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and military commanders in the U.S. and overseas. It is an important consumer of NSA's SIGINT product.

Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) -  Created in 1935 under the direction of its first director, J. Edgar Hoover, the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) can trace its history back to 1908, when Attorney General Charles Bonaparte created a small force of Special Agents to investigate violations of federal law on behalf of the U.S. Department of Justice. Since 1935, the FBI grew dramatically both in size and in power. Today, the FBI?s 31,000 personnel investigate potential terrorist threats at home and abroad; closely monitor the activities of foreign intelligence agencies and their operatives inside the U.S.; investigate violations of federal criminal and civil statutes; and coordinate their intelligence and investigative activities with other federal, state, and local intelligence and law enforcement agencies and departments.

Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) - GCHQ is the British SIGINT and information security agency based at Cheltenham, England. GCHQ is the successor to the Government Communications & Cipher School (GCCS), the famed British codebreaking organization which solved the German Enigma cipher systems during World War II. After the end of the war, GCCS was disbanded and replaced by a new peacetime cryptologic organization called the London Signals Intelligence Centre (LSIC), which existed from September 1945 until it was formally renamed as GCHQ in June 1946. GCHQ?s operations have historically been closely coordinated with those of NSA and its predecessor organizations, first by virtue of the March 1946 British-USA COMINT Agreement (the BRUSA Agreement), followed in 1954 by the signing of the UKUSA Agreement, which expanded BRUSA to include the SIGINT activities of Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) - Formed on September 6, 1961, the NRO is a joint DOD-CIA intelligence organization that designs, builds and operates all reconnaissance satellites on behalf of the U.S. intelligence community, including SIGINT satellites on behalf of NSA. The NRO?s headquarters is located in Chantilly, Virginia. NRO is a pure collection agency, with the intelligence product from the satellites that it operates being processed, analyzed and reported by other agencies. For example, NSA is responsible for processing and analyzing all COMINT, ELINT and telemetry intelligence produced by NRO satellite systems in conjunction with other members of the U.S. intelligence community.

National Security Agency (NSA) - Created on November 4, 1952 from the assets of the former Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA), NSA?s is the U.S. government's principal cryptologic organization, responsible for both SIGINT collection and analysis, as well as protecting the communications and computer systems of the U.S. government and military. Its headquarters is located at Fort George G. Meade, Maryland. In addition to its headquarters staff, NSA also controls the activities of the three military SIGINT organizations, referred to as Service Cryptologic Elements (SCE), who historically have performed the majority of NSA's SIGINT collection activities: the U.S. Army Security Agency (USASA); the Naval Security Group (NAVSECGRU), and the U.S. Air Force Security Service (USAFSS). Since the mid-1990s, the U.S. Coast Guard has developed a small independent SIGINT organization of its own within its intelligence staff in Washington, D.C., which also reports to NSA for direction and support.

PERSONALITIES GLOSSARY

Secretaries of defense

James V. Forrestal	September 17, 1947 - March 28, 1949
Louis A. Johnson	March 28, 1949 - September 19, 1950
George C. Marshall	September 21, 1950 - September 19, 1950
Robert A. Lovett	September 17, 1951 - January 20, 1953
Charles E. Wilson	January 28, 1953 - October 8, 1957
Neil H. McElroy	October 9, 1957 - December 1, 1959
Thomas S. Gates, Jr.	December 2, 1959 - January 20, 1961
Robert S. McNamara	January 21, 1961 - February 29, 1968
Clark M. Clifford	March 1, 1968 - January 20, 1969
Melvin R. Laird	January 22, 1969 - January 29, 1973
Elliot L. Richardson	January 30, 1973 - May 24, 1974
James R. Schlesinger	July 2, 1973 - November 19, 1975
Donald H. Rumsfeld	November 20, 1975 - January 20, 1977
Harold Brown	January 21, 1977 - January 20, 1981
Caspar Weinberger	January 21, 1981 - November 23, 1987
Frank C. Carlucci	November 23, 1987 - January 20, 1989
Richard B. Cheney	March 21, 1989 - January 20, 1993

Central Intelligence Agency                     

Rear Admiral Sidney W. Souers, USN	January 23, 1946 - June 7, 1946
Lt. General Hoyt S. Vandenberg, USAF	June 10, 1946 - May 1, 1947
Rear Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, USN	May 1, 1947 - October 7, 1950
Lt. General Walter Bedell Smith, USA (ret.)	October 7, 1950 - February 9, 1953
Allen W. Dulles	February 26, 1953 - November 29, 1961
John A. McCone	November 29, 1961 - April 28, 1965
Vice Admiral William F. Raborn, Jr., USN	April 28, 1965 - June 30, 1966
Richard Helms	June 30, 1966 - February 2, 1973
James R. Schlesinger	February 2, 1973 - July 2, 1973
William E. Colby	September 4, 1973 - January 30, 1976
George H.W. Bush	January 30, 1976 - January 20, 1977
Admiral Stansfield Turner, USN	March 9, 1977 - January 20, 1981
William J. Casey	January 28, 1981 - January 29, 1987
William H. Webster	May 26, 1987 - September 1991
Robert M. Gates	November 6, 1991 - January 20, 1993

Defense Intelligence Agency

Lt. General Joseph F. Carroll, USAF	October 1961 - September 1969
Lt. General Donald V. Bennett, USA	September 1969 - August 1972
Vice Admiral Vincent P. de Poix, USN	August 1972 - September 1974
Lt. General Daniel O. Graham, USA	September 1974 - December 1975
Lt. General Samuel V. Wilson, USA	May 1976 - August 1977
Lt. General Eugene F. Tighe, Jr., USAF	September 1977 - August 1981
Lt. General James A. Williams, USA	September 1981 - September 1985
Lt. General Leonard H. Perroots, USAF	October 1985 - December 1988
Lt. General Harry E. Soyster, USA	December 1988 - September 1991
Lt. General James R. Clapper, Jr., USAF	November 1991 - August 1995

National Reconnaissance Office

Dr. Joseph V. Charyk	September 1961 - March 1963
Dr. Brockway McMillan	March 1963 - October 1965
Dr. Alexander H. Flax	October 1965 - March 1969
Dr. John L. McLucas	March 1969 - December 1973
James W. Plummer	December 1973 - June 1976
Dr. Charles W. Cook (Acting)	June 1976 - August 1976
Thomas C. Reed	August 1976 - April 1977
Dr. Charles W. Cook (Acting)	April 1977 - August 1977
Dr. Hans Mark	August 1977 - October 1979
Dr. Robert J. Hermann	October 1979 - August 1981
Edward C. 'Pete' Aldridge, Jr.	August 1981 - December 1988
Jimmie D. Hill (Acting)	December 1988 - September 1989
Martin C. Faga	September 1989 - March 1993

National Security Agency 

Rear Admiral Earl. E. Stone, USN	July 15, 1949 - July 15, 1951
Major General Ralph J. Canine, USA	July 15, 1951 - November 4, 1952
Lt. General Ralph J. Canine, USA	November 4, 1952 - November 23, 1956
Lt. General John A. Samford, USAF	November 24, 1956 - November 23, 1960
Vice Admiral Laurence H. Frost, USN	November 24, 1960 - June 30, 1962
Lt. General Gordon A. Blake, USAF	July 1, 1962 - May 31, 1965
Lt. General Marshall S. Carter, USA	June 1, 1965 - July 31, 1969
Vice Admiral Noel Gayler, USN	August 1, 1969 - July 31, 1972
Lt. General Samuel C. Phillips, USAF	August 1, 1972 - August 24, 1973
Lt. General Lew Allen, Kr., USAF	August 25, 1973 - July 4, 1977
Vice Admiral Bobby R. Inman, USN	July 5, 1977 - March 31, 1981
Lt. General Lincoln D. Faurer, USAF	April 1, 1981 - April 1, 1985
Lt. General William E. Odom, USA	May 8, 1985 - August 1, 1988
Vice Admiral William O. Studeman	August 1988 - 1992

Federal Bureau of Investigations

J. Edgar Hoover	March 22, 1935 - May 2, 1972
L. Patrick Gray (acting)	May 2, 1972 - April 27, 1973
William D. Ruckelshaus (acting)	April 30, 1973 - July 9, 1973
Clarence M. Kelley	July 9, 1973 - February 15, 1978
William H. Webster	February 23, 1978 - May 25, 1987
John E. Otto (acting)	May 26, 1987 - November 2, 1987
William S. Sessions	November 2, 1987 - July 19, 1993

ACRONYMS

AAA	Anti-Aircraft Artillery
ABM	Anti-Ballistic Missile
ACDA	Arms Control and Disarmament Agency
AEDS	Atomic Energy Detection System
AFB	Air Force Base

AFSA	Armed Forces Security Agency
AFTAC	Air Force Technical Application Center (nuclear test detection)
ASA	Army Security Agency
ASW	Anti-Submarine Warfare
C3	Command, control and communications

CCF	Chinese Communist Forces
CHICOM	Chinese Communist
CIA	Central Intelligence Agency (1947-present)
CIC	Counter-Intelligence Corps (1942-1960)
CIG	Central Intelligence Group (1946-1947)

CINCEUR	Commander-in-Chief, Europe
CINCFE	Commander-in-Chief, Far East
CINCLANT	Commander-in-Chief, Atlantic
CINCPAC	Commander-in-Chief, Pacific
CINCPACFLT	Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Fleet

CNO	Chief of Naval Operations
COMINT	Communications Intelligence
COMOR	Committee on Overhead Reconnaissance (CIA)
COMSEC	Communications Security
CONUS	Continental United States

COS	Chief of Station (CIA)
CP	College Park, Maryland (National Archives)
DA	Department of the Army
DCI	Director of Central Intelligence
DCID	Director of Central Intelligence Directive

DDI	Deputy Director for Intelligence (CIA)
DDO	Deputy Director Operations (CIA 1973-present)
DDS&T	Deputy Director for Science and Technology (CIA 1963-)
DEFSMAC	Defense Special Missile and Astronautics Center
DIA	Defense Intelligence Agency

DIRNSA	Director, National Security Agency
DOD	Department of Defense
ELINT	Electronics Intelligence
EUCOM	U.S. European Command
FBI	Federal Bureau of Investigation

FEAF	Far East Air Forces (U.S. Air Force)
FECOM	Far East Command (U.S. military)
FOIA	Freedom of Information Act
G-2	U.S. Army intelligence staff
GCHQ	Government Communications Headquarters (U.K.)

GDR	German Democratic Republic (East Germany)
GRU	Glavnoye Razvedatelnoye Upravleniye - Soviet General Staff Intelligence Directorate
GSFG	Group of Soviet Forces, Germany
HUMINT	Human Intelligence
HVCCO	Handle Via COMINT Channels Only

ICBM	Intercontinental ballistic missile
IMINT	Imagery Intelligence
INR	Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Department of State
IRBM	Intermediate-range ballistic missile
JCS	Joint Chiefs of Staff

KGB	Committee for State Security (Soviet)
LRA	Long Range Aviation (Soviet)
LRAF	Long Range Air Forces (Soviet)
MAAG	Military Assistance Advisory Group
MIRV	Multiple Independently Targetable Reentry Vehicle

MND	Ministry of National Defense
MRBM	Medium-range ballistic missile
MVD	Ministry of the Interior (Soviet)
NA	National Archives (U.S.)
NATO	North Atlantic Treaty Organization

NIE	National Intelligence Estimate
NOFORN	Not Releasable to Foreign Nationals
NPIC	National Photographic Interpretation Center (CIA)
NRO	National Reconnaissance Office
NSA	National Security Agency

NSC	National Security Council
NSCID	National Security Council Intelligence Directive
ONI	Office of Naval Intelligence
OSD	Office of the Secretary of Defense
OSS	Office of Strategic Services

PFIAB	President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board
PHOTINT	Photo Intelligence
PLA	People’s Liberation Army
PRC	People’s Republic of China
PVO Strany	Strategic Air Defense of the Homeland (Soviet)

RAF	Royal Air Force
RG	Record Group
RV	Reentry Vehicle
SAC	Strategic Air Command
SALT	Strategic Arms Limitation Talks

SAM	Surface-to-air missile
SECDEF	Secretary of Defense
SENSINT	Sensitive intelligence (USAF overflights 1949-1956))
SIGINT	Signals Intelligence
SIS	Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6 (UK)

SLBM	Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missile
SNIE	Special National Intelligence Estimate
SRF	Strategic Rocket Forces (Soviet)
SSM	Surface-to-Surface Missile
SSU	Strategic Services Unit (1945-1946)

TSCW	Top Secret Codeword
UK	United Kingdom
UN	United Nations
USAF	U.S. Air Force
USAFE	U.S. Air Forces, Europe (USAF)
USIB	U.S. Intelligence Board
USSR	Union of Soviet Socialist Republics