Second-Guessing the Experts: Citizens' Group Criticism of the Central Intelligence Agency's Estimates of Soviet Military Policy

Abstract

aldrich ames spy case, first revealed to the public in 1994, has focused new attention on the quality of the US Central Intelligence Agency's information about the Soviet Union during the cold war. Three unusual aspects of the case have so far attracted the most attention: the magnitude of Ames's betrayal of Soviet agents working for the CIA; the KGB's use of double agents to pass on to the CIA deliberately false as well as accurate intelligence; and the fact that the CIA knowingly passed such misinformation to Congress to obtain congressional approval of the annual US military budgets. According to John Deutsch, then director of central intelligence, these CIA reports 'had a substantial role in framing the debate' over the appropriate response to Soviet military policy for nearly ten years after 1985 when Ames began working for the Russians. The 'net effect', he argued, Svas that we overestimated their capability'.1 Discussions of the Ames case tended to overlook the fact that US intel-