Robert Gates

“ If ever legends and stories of American technological genius were deserved and not yet realized, they would be about the scientists and engineers, the wizards of CIA and American intelligence who pioneered reconnaissance aircraft like the U-2 and the SR-71, photographic satellites from the KH-4 to the KH-11, an amazing array of signals intelligence satellites and people who worked brilliantly but anonymously to serve their country. ”

“ From the Berlin tunnel to the very end of the Cold War, CIA and other parts of the intelligence community developed astonishingly imaginative and advanced techniques, devices, and technical schemes on land, on sea, and undersea that, when combined with the operational skill of officers from the Agency’s clandestine service, yielded extraordinary information on Soviet military operations. ”

“ The Soviet military capabilities that we described were real, and those capabilities were created to a considerable degree at the cost of bringing an already fundamentally flawed economic system to its knees. It is one of history’s great ironies that the Soviet military thus helped destroy the system it was created to perpetuate.
In the economic arena CIA, in its statistical analysis, overstated the size and growth rate of the Soviet economy and relatedly underestimated the burden of military expenditures on that economy and on that society. ”

“ Those who figured out how to obtain information from a distance of hundreds or even thousands of miles, those who designed and built unique technical systems to monitor missile testing and deployments and who could make sense out of a bewildering array of squiggly lines and rows of numbers and at least at the beginning some very fuzzy satellite pictures. ”

“ In short, after Vietnam made the use of American military forces in the third world politically impossible at home for several decades, CIA became the primary instrument of successive Presidents and acted at their direction to maintain a decade’s long policy of containment of the Soviet Union - a policy based on the premise that a Soviet Union denied the opportunity to expand influence and power outside its own borders would eventually collapse from its own internal contradictions.
The Agency’s clandestine successes went beyond covert action. ”

“ Because of information provided by US intelligence, President Kennedy had an accurate picture of Soviet strategic inferiority during the Cuban missile crisis. And thanks importantly to US knowledge of Soviet strategic strength and capabilities, there would never again be a similar Soviet-American nuclear confrontation.
US intelligence information and collection capabilities made possible the negotiation of all arms control agreements and the ratification of those agreements by the Senate. US intelligence over a period of nearly 50 years helped keep the Cold War “cold”. ”

“ The American people, and I would say indeed most of the West in general owe a huge debt of gratitude to the unsung technical experts of US intelligence and to those in American industry who worked with them. ”

“ Throughout the Cold War, in the third world CIA worked successfully with governments friendly to the United States to combat subversion by the Soviet Union and its surrogates. We also waged a war of ideas and covert human rights campaign inside the Soviet Union itself and supported a growing opposition in Eastern Europe, especially in Poland. ”

“ For too long our support to US military operations was not as good as it should have been, plagued by democratic rivalries and turf wars on both sides, and by a cultural gap that grew too great after Vietnam. ”

“ As they targeted one of the most secretive countries in the world, it is a tribute to these remarkable men and women that, beginning in the 1960s, there were virtually no further Soviet military surprises of strategic importance. ”

“ We must begin to think about the possibility that that reality will include significant political instability.” I concluded, “As we look out to 1990 and 1991, we should not be confident of Gorbachev remaining in power, of the continuation of reform as presently structured with or without him, or of the continued manageability of widespread turmoil and even violence. ”

“ In that briefing, Kay concluded it by telling the President, and I quote, “We cannot foresee the time, but we can see the tendency between social aspirations and regime control eventually to confront the regime with challenges to its political control that it cannot contain.” ”