Melvin Goodman was a senior analyst in Soviet affairs at the Central Intelligence Agency, where he worked for two decades (1966-1986). He later served as a Soviet analyst at the State Department, and he currently is professor of international studies at the National War College and a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy. He is the author of three books on Soviet and Russian Affairs: "Gorbachev's Retreat: The End of Superpower Rivalry in the Third World," "The Wars of Eduard Shevardnadze," and "The End of the Cold War." He was interviewed for COLD WAR in January 1998.

On the CIA and the KGB:

I think there were major differences between the CIA and the KGB that in many ways reflected the political cultures of the Soviet Union and the United States. The Soviet Union, by and large, in terms of the Russian culture, [was] extremely conservative, somewhat risk-averse, and very cautious with regard to possible military confrontation. The United States' political culture is much different. I think we are far less conservative: we're rather bold in terms of political and military planning and actions, and the United States has certainly shown that it's been willing to take risks.

[For example in the] area of assassination, the last assassination that the Soviets themselves plotted took place in about 1959 or 1960, and I'm not aware of any direct involvement on the part of the Soviet Union with political assassination after that. Look at the CIA, on the other hand: not only do you have political assassinations -- attempts at least -- throughout the Fifties and the Sixties; possibly Vietnam in the 1970s, but you even have assassination attempts against international leaders: the Mongoose operation in Cuba over a period of years against Fidel Castro, which continued even after the Cuban missile crisis and even after John F. Kennedy was assassinated, when you would think that caution would suggest "maybe we need to stand down at this particular time." You had assassination attempts in Chile, where you were dealing with a country that wasn't even in the vital national interests or concerns of the United States. And you probably had an assassination attempt in Vietnam that was approved by the White House in the 1960s. And certainly you had an assassination attempt in the Congo against Lumumba in the 1960s. So the CIA, I think, over the years, has been much bolder in terms of coup plotting -- look at Iran and Guatemala -- much more aggressive in terms of violations of human rights and civil rights throughout Central America: think of the disasters in Guatemala and Honduras. I think it's been a much bolder organization over the years. ...

But one thing we learned from the Church Committee hearings in this country in the mid-1970s, is that all of these assassination attempts were done with the authorization of the White House, and the Administration had given the signal to the CIA to carry out such an operation. So the CIA was not the rogue elephant out of control, which Senator Frank Church said before the hearing (but which he later disavowed privately after the hearing). But [the hearings] did lead to a bill that was passed in 1976 which outlawed the use of political assassination by the Central Intelligence Agency.

On the CIA's strengths and weaknesses:

I think the major problem at the CIA -- and it exists to this day -- is that you have two cultures. You have an intelligence or analytical culture that must remain open, that needs contacts with the outside world, which must deal with the international community and the academic community in the United States, in Britain, and elsewhere. This group must stay dissociated from policy; they cannot have a policy axe to grind, and they must have a reputation for integrity and credibility and objectivity. That's the intelligence side.

The opposite of that is the clandestine side: it's secret, it's a policy branch of the government. The White House basically uses the operational component of the CIA to do its bidding: it's very useful to have a clandestine corps to carry out military or paramilitary actions very cheaply, without the hand of the United States or a particular president being obvious. And this is what Eisenhower did in Iran, in Guatemala, with so-called success -- even though when you look over the long term, I would argue these operations were misguided and ultimate failures. But it gave the president a policy arm within the CIA, a secret society, where the government can protect secrets from not only the people, [but] from the Congress. ...

I think, in looking back at the work of the CIA, we've seen the exaggeration of the value of clandestine reporting. ... I think the Cold War would have evolved no differently whether we were doing clandestine reporting or not -- that there were no overwhelming successes with regard to clandestine reporting. You can't say that about satellite photography, and you can't say that about signals intelligence. Satellite photography and signals intelligence really gave us a means of understanding what the Soviets were doing with very scarce resources in the way of military deployment. Signals intelligence and satellite photography gave us Soviet weapons plans: what was being designed, what was being conceptualized, what was being tested, what was the accuracy of the system, what was the capability in terms of warheads on the systems, which ones were single warheads, which ones were multiple warheads; [and] in terms of strategic systems, when they would reach a deployment phase. This was extremely valuable material to all American negotiators and policymakers who had any interest in arms control whatsoever. ... [I think this] worked to lessen tensions, because it's given the United States a very good idea, at the highest levels, of what is actually in the Soviet inventory.

Clandestine intelligence, [however], was very uneven in quality, and very subject to interpretation -- and it was important to know who the source really was, and what the access of the source was: was he really qualified to know what he is indeed talking about? And I think there is a lot of caution that people take to looking at clandestine intelligence. In many ways, you're getting worst-case assessments, because quite often the contacts of the CIA are people on the CIA payroll, telling the CIA what these people believe the CIA wants to know -- in return for payment. So the whole tradecraft is somewhat suspicious and somewhat corrupt from the very outset. Now there have been very important exceptions to this. The British and the Americans ran [Soviet military intelligence Colonel Oleg] Penkovsky [as a mole] for years; this was vital during the Cuban missile crisis. The British and [KGB mole Oleg] Gordievsky over a period of time -- this was also extremely important to U.S. and British intelligence. But these were the exceptions to the rule.

On legendary CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton:

James Angleton is probably an example of what was wrong with the outlook of the Central Intelligence Agency. The man himself was quite paranoid. He had a position of great power in the CIA: he was in charge of all counterintelligence with regard to the Soviet Union; he determined pretty much who was recruited and why they were recruited, and whether they had good qualifications to be run by the CIA. And Angleton's feeling was there were no genuine Soviet defections and no genuine Soviet agents who were willing to work for the [United States].

He was convinced there was a Soviet mole in the CIA; so a defector was most useful in trying to ferret out this particular mole from the CIA. This had a very chilling effect on the operational work of the CIA, because it meant there was no point out there trying to recruit Soviet agents who would never get past the scrutiny of James Angleton. James Angleton dominated some of the intelligence exchanges that existed between the CIA and other intelligence services.

When James Angleton was finally forced out of the building in the 1970s by Bill Colby, when people went into James Angleton's office and opened up the various safes in his office, they found serious collections of clandestine material from the Israelis and others that would have been extremely useful to the intelligence process, that Angleton had never distributed to the rest of the Agency -- not only to the intelligence side, but not even to the clandestine side. So James Angleton did tremendous harm to the CIA culture, and particularly to the culture of counterintelligence. It led indirectly to, I think, the Aldrich Ames scandal in the 1980s and 1990s -- because counterintelligence was looked at as a dead-end field, and it only attracted dead-end people such as Rick Ames, who was going nowhere in his career on the clandestine side [so he] went into counterintelligence, where he did tremendous harm to CIA operations against the Soviet Union. ... So the CIA paid for a very long period of time for James Angleton.

On the CIA's failure to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union:

Probably the greatest failure in the history of the CIA is the error with regard to exaggerating the size and the strength and the capabilities and the intentions of the Soviet Union. And I think this failure was a direct result of the greatest cultural change in the history of the CIA, which took place in 1981, when finally you got a very ideological individual, [William Casey], running the CIA, with a strong ideological and policy agenda with regard to the CIA, who introduced the notion that we are not going to say or introduce any intelligence to the policy process that talks about Soviet weakness or Soviet conciliation or Soviet interest in negotiation. So from 1981 on, and certainly throughout most of the two Reagan terms, you only got intelligence out of the CIA that talked about the strength of the Soviet Union, the perfidy of the Soviet Union, the threatening nature of the Soviet Union. And all of the intelligence that supported the notion that the Soviets were weak and that the economy was in trouble, and that military procurement was coming down and that the interest in arms control was great, and that the signals for a [Soviet] strategic retreat were in place -- this kind of intelligence could not get outside of the building to go to the White House. ...

When Gorbachev came into power in 1985, he made it very clear that this was a very different Soviet political animal, that he had very different policy ideas from all of his predecessors, and that he wanted to create an entirely new strategic environment for the Soviet Union and an entirely new Soviet-American strategic architecture. The CIA was wrong about this man, about his intentions, and about all of his policies -- so when you examine the period from 1985 to 1990 and you look at one bold initiative after another with regard to arms control, on-site inspection, the withdrawal of Soviet force, the withdrawal of the Soviet navy from the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, the cutbacks in defense spending -- in all of these areas the CIA was behind the curve in anticipating these policies. ...

I believe there is a myth out there that the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended because of a series of very high American budgets, that the Soviets were forced to capitulate because they were no longer able to compete with the United States. The intelligence certainly does not support that assumption. And I know of no conversation that any of the major players of the Reagan Administration ever conducted, in which they actually said, "We are spending all of this money on our military arsenal because we're trying to force the capitulation of the Soviet Union." The arms spending had a life of its own. And the collapse of the Soviet Union is a very complicated phenomenon that had a life of its own. The collapse, I think, was primarily for political and economic reasons that were quite internal. This was a bankrupt society, both in its political meaning and in its economic capabilities. And here is where the CIA really missed the boat. ... The Soviet Union collapsed like a house of cards because it WAS a house of cards. And that's what the CIA never understood, for ideological reasons.

On the role of intelligence in the Cold War:

I would argue that we probably exaggerate the significance of intelligence. Once policymakers decide on a course, I don't think correct intelligence or incorrect intelligence is going to bring any great changes in that course. Ronald Reagan's first term was devoted to a military buildup. If all of the intelligence the CIA could have produced got to Ronald Reagan, he would have found other justifications for his buildup. I think policy has its own energy and its own dynamics.

But on the other hand, I can think of very valuable strategic intelligence that the CIA produced over the period of the 1960s, that was read by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger and led to great strategic changes in the diplomatic alignment in the international community -- and that was of course the excellent work the CIA did in the late 1950s and early Sixties on the Sino-Soviet split. This wasn't acted on by the Kennedy Administration or the Johnson Administration, but was acted on by the Nixon Administration, in what we now call "triangular diplomacy." And we built a closer relationship with China and with the Soviet Union than the Soviet Union and China had with each other -- and therefore could manipulate that very important strategic relationship. I think good intelligence was at the root of that. ...

[And] if you look at the history of arms control and disarmament, I think you have to say that intelligence played a major role. Intelligence allowed policymakers to know exactly what was in the Soviet strategic inventory; intelligence allowed us to know when the Soviets were negotiating positions that were genuine and valid; we were allowed to verify and monitor arms control agreements with intelligence. So I think, in terms of some of the successes during the period of the early Sixties to the early Nineties, intelligence was vital. ...

I think the lesson for all of us in the intelligence business is that Harry Truman was right: you need a CIA as an independent, objective voice to inform presidents of what is going on in the international community. You do not need a CIA to conduct espionage, except in times of real peril, but you do need a CIA to do independent intelligence analysis; and that if the CIA can get that right, that's how the CIA will be judged by the American public, by the American Congress and by American presidents.