Articles and reviews
Tuesday, 04 December 2007
Recent articles and book reviews on Russia, foreign policy (including Iraq), the uses and abuses of intelligence will eventually be available for downloading from this site. I will also post texts of different articles on this page from time to time. A comment on the Russian political scene, reviews of recent books on the Stalinist repressions by Orlando Figes and on Gorbachev by Archie Brown, an oped piece on Russia and the West, and a recent talk on the uses and abuses of intelligence are below: ************ WHY DO THEY LIKE MR PUTIN? (Comment, London 4 December 2007) Russia is not a riddle, nor a mystery, nor an enigma. As Churchill said, there is a key to Russian foreign policy: it is Russian national interest. The domestic politics of today’s Russia are no more mysterious. But you have to listen to what Russians say. And whether or not you like what you hear, you have to accept that they mean it. As he nears the end of eight years in office, Mr Putin enjoys popularity ratings of between 70% and 80%, which any Western leader could only dream of. That is no accident. The Russians were citizens of the only other superpower, first in space, bearers of an ideology of liberty, equality and fraternity (yes, many of them did believe that), uniquely able to meet America as a military equal. And in 1991 it all came crashing down: their political and economic systems, their cradle-to-grave welfare system, their empire, their ideology, their position in the world. Even so, many Russians were glad to say good-bye to all that. But what they got instead, as they now see it, was a misbegotten imitation of a market economy, foisted on them by a bunch of half-baked and ignorant Western advisers. They saw the country’s riches plundered in the name of “capitalism” by a mob of robber barons. They faced the political chaos of a bumbling democracy under the wayward Mr Yeltsin. They suffered desperate hardship as jobs collapsed, salaries went unpaid for months, and starvation loomed. Their former enemies gave them food aid, and they were expected to be grateful. They could still be proud of their defeat of Hitler, which began - though we barely remember that - even before Pearl Harbor, when they threw the Wehrmacht back from Moscow in the biggest and bloodiest battle in history. That apart, it was for Russians of all classes a time of deep national and personal humiliation. Enter Mr Putin. In 2000 the new president promised stability, prosperity, and even democracy and the rule of law when (and who but he would be the judge?) the Russians were ready for it. He has indeed given them a kind of stability, though at the cost of many of the democratic freedoms which they embraced so enthusiastically under Mr Gorbachev. He has given them a prosperity which is trickling downward even in the provinces, though it is based on a high and presumably unsustainable oil price. And above all he has given them back their self-respect: once again, most Russians are delighted to discover, their former enemies are having to take Russia seriously. No wonder he is popular. There is more to it than that. Fairly or unfairly, for Russians our moral standing has been destroyed by the Kosovo war, Iraq and Guantanamo. They will listen no longer to our endless lectures. It is they, not we, who will decide how their domestic politics evolves. And it is they, not we, who will define Russian national interests - in Kosovo, Iran, or wherever. If we don’t like it, tough; if we want to negotiate, fine. If there is a historical parallel, it is not with the Soviet Union or the Cold War. It is with the Russia of Tsar Alexander III at the end of the nineteenth century. Then too the regime was undemocratic. Then too Russia stumbled into misconceived adventures abroad. Then too the official slogan was “Autocracy, Orthodoxy, Tradition”. Then too Russia was much criticized in the West. But then too Russia was groping towards a kind of democracy and a kind of workable capitalism. The prospect of a better future was tragically cut off by war and revolution. But no historical law says that Russia cannot resume its erratic forward march. How soon depends in part on how Mr Putin now plays his hand, and on who succeeds him after the presidential election in March next year. The odd thing about Sunday’s parliamentary election is that his administration put so much pressure on the electorate to get the right result, when most people would have voted the Putin ticket anyway. That implies that even Mr Putin is not entirely sure what is going to happen next. ************ THE WHISPERERS: PRIVATE LIFE IN STALIN’S RUSSIA By Orlando Figes (Financial Times 27 October 2007) How do you preserve some shred of decency under a dictatorship? In the Soviet Union, an incautious word could cost you your home, your job, your liberty. Under Stalin it could cost you your life. People said what they did not believe while believing what they could not say. The Whisperers, Orlando Figes’ new book, carries on from his history of the revolution, A People’s Tragedy. It is about the millions of Soviet citizens who whispered because they feared their conversations might be monitored, or because they feared their treacheries might be overheard. Some dropped a poisonous word in the right ear to rid themselves of a rival, to get promotion, or to secure a better flat. Others succumbed to intolerable official blackmail to spy on their neighbours, their colleagues, their friends, even their spouses. The lightning might thus be induced to strike elsewhere. For a moment they might be safe. But safety was always relative, precarious, and conditional. Figes and his assistants interviewed hundreds of people who lived through those times, from all classes of society and from all over the country. Old men and women forget what actually happened, or remember it with convenient clarity: Figes’ last chapter is about the shifts his witnesses adopted as they tried to reconstruct a bearable past. Some memories were too painful to be decently paraded before the reader and were - rightly - pruned from the record. Figes skilfully accumulates the individual stories, the tattered letters and the family photographs into a tapestry of the whole Soviet period. He thereby pays deserved homage to the dogged endurance - itself a kind of heroism - which enabled people to survive in camps, communal apartments, factories and farms, in barely imaginable poverty even when not in actual fear. It was indeed a people’s tragedy. Soviet men and women naturally wanted to convince themselves that their life was in some way normal: how else could they live? So they existed on several levels at once. Despite the terrible human cost (“You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs”), they took pride in their country, in its victories in war, in its commanding international position, in its achievements in science, arts, and industry. Many participated in the public life of Party slogans, economic targets and official celebrations with something close to genuine conviction. But they also took refuge in a parallel private world of intimate relationships, of literature and music, of futile philosophical and political discussions, of work, sport, and - too often - of self-destructive drinking. For most there was another world too, where they lived in the secrecy of their own hearts. Civic courage was not the norm in Stalin’s Russia. Moral ambiguity was everywhere. For Figes, Konstantin Simonov (1915-1979) stands as an archetype. Simonov was a good poet, novelist and war correspondent. A man of great charm, equally attractive to men and women, he came from a most unpromising background. His mother was a princess, his father a Tsarist officer. But his talents were matched by legitimate ambition. He reinvented himself, and became one of Stalin’s favourite writers and one of the most powerful men in the Soviet literary establishment. Throughout much of his career he said and did what the regime expected of him. But he protected the victims when he prudently could, and spent his last years wrestling with his conscience and trying to understand what had happened to his country. What he wrote in those years could not be published until Gorbachev opened the floodgates. After he died his secretary said “To understand Simonov is to understand our times”. And despite everything decency did creep through the cracks. Some individuals - even Party officials, secret policemen, camp guards - helped the less fortunate at great risk to themselves. Many of the survivors still find it hard to disentangle the moral and psychological confusion, to overcome what one Soviet historian called “the Stalinism that entered into all of us”. What they went through and what they felt can probably be conveyed only by a great creative artist. Life and Fate, the epic wartime novel by the Soviet writer Vasili Grossman, deals magnificently with what Timothy Garton Ash calls “the treacherous moral maze of evaluating how people behave under dictatorship”. Those of us who have not lived in that maze should be very, very careful before we presume to pass judgement on those who did. ****************** ARCHIE BROWN: SEVEN YEARS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD: PERESTROIKA IN PERSPECTIVE (Oxford 2007) (Moscow Times, 7 September 2007) These days Mikhail Gorbachev is being airbrushed out of history. When Yeltsin died a couple of months ago, Western obituarists rushed to hail him as the man who ended the Cold War, dismantled the Soviet Union and introduced democracy into the New Russia. In fact Yeltsin did none of these things. But few of the commentators bothered to recall the Gorbymania that swept the West in the dying years of the Soviet Union. If they mentioned Gorbachev at all, it was to deride him for trying to remain true to his Communist past, for bungling economic reform, for trying to shore up a Soviet Union which was clearly doomed. Archie Brown is the dean of Gorbachev experts, and in his latest collection of essays he points out that these judgements are as crude as they are superficial. Many of the essays have appeared before; they are now supplemented with the fruits of his mature thinking, based on new archival and other material and set out, systematically and persuasively, the case for a more sober perspective. The trouble is that sobriety is very difficult to achieve. The events are too recent and still arouse too much emotion, above all inside Russia itself. Indeed the difficult questions will be debated by historians for a very long time to come. Why did the Soviet Union collapse when it did? Could it have been reformed? Could it have long survived in its unreformed state? Its disappearance was a cataclysmic event, both for Russia and for the rest of the world: why did it happen with so little expenditure of blood? The roots of the Soviet collapse go back well before Gorbachev was anywhere near the top of the Soviet system. In the early 1960s the Soviet Union was already in serious trouble. The economy was faltering, growth rates were down, and the Soviet government was forced to turn for grain to its Cold War enemy. Khrushchev tried a variety of ingenious expedients to jump-start the system. These hare-brained schemes, as his enemies in the PolitBuro rightly called them, were a failure, and he lost his job. His successors were equally unable to devise effective remedies. At a loss to know what to do next, they allowed the country to bumble along, spending vast sums on a military machine which was itself losing its way despite a glittering array of new weapons squeezed out of a national economy which could not afford it. There was a small margin to spare for the ordinary Soviet consumer: enough to give people the feeling that things were getting better. There was political repression too. But it was no longer on a mass scale, and so did not affect most people, who rather liked the political stability that seemed to come with it. But the successive deaths of the Three Old Men – Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko – forced the survivors to realize that things could no longer go on that way. They elected as General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev – young, energetic, imaginative, from the right peasant background, with a wealth of practical experience, and a good Party member to boot. Gorbachev identified three main problems: nuclear confrontation, imperial overstretch of the Soviet Union, and a stagnant economy. His remedies were unprecedented. Eighteen months before Gorbachev became General Secretary, a foolishly ill-judged NATO exercise (“Able Archer”) simulated a nuclear strike so convincingly that the Soviets began to gear themselves up for retaliation. Appalled at the prospect of nuclear war by accident, Gorbachev took his courage in both hands, and sought a negotiation with Ronald Reagan, the archpriest of anti-Communism. Luckily for him, Reagan turned out to share his intense dislike of the nuclear weapon – to the dismay of both men’s professional advisers. But once the process of dismantling the Soviet Union’s military and imperial positions had begun – under constant political and economic pressure from the Americans - it would have been hard to stop. Nuclear disarmament led to conventional disarmament. Withdrawal from outposts in distant continents led to withdrawal from Germany and Eastern Europe. The army came home. There was nowhere for it to live. Not surprisingly, the senior officers turned against Gorbachev. Many were involved in the attempted coup against him in August 1991. Gorbachev saw that the grey stagnation of the Soviet economy, its inability to match the vitality and inventiveness of Western capitalism, was not only due to the burden of empire and a bloated war machine. A stodgy political system inhibited imagination and enterprise. Gorbachev believed that the inventiveness of a talented nation could only be unleashed by letting ordinary people take more control of their lives through some form of democracy. He freed the media, and then organised the first contested elections to be held anywhere in the Warsaw Pact. In March 1989 Soviet voters threw out Party bosses all over the country, and transformed the nation's politics. Without the freedoms that Gorbachev introduced, Yeltsin might have remained an unconventional but authoritarian provincial Party boss. Gorbachev’s new politics made it possible for Yeltsin to mount his tank and to defy the men who made the putsch. But it was Yeltsin – not Gorbachev – who four months later announced, without consulting the people, that the Soviet Union had ceased to exist; and who reached naturally for the gun to resolve his political problems with the unruly Russian parliament in 1993, and with the Chechens in 1994. The Soviet Union may well have been doomed, even if Gorbachev had not tried to reform it. But its demise could have been much more bloody, much more protracted, and it could have spilled over into an incalculable international confrontation. It was in significant measure thanks to Gorbachev that a terrible threat was lifted from a world which had skirted nuclear annihilation for four decades. That is something for which we should be profoundly grateful. So should his countrymen. But for very many of them Gorbachev is the incompetent, vacillating and pusillanimous traitor who fatally undermined a great power, and who drove them into poverty and near starvation in the winter of 1991-2. The simultaneous collapse of the Soviet state, its political and economic system, its military power and its international prestige, to the undisguised satisfaction of its rivals and enemies, was a humiliation that few Russians could forget or forgive. They made Gorbachev the obvious scapegoat and turned to the more authoritarian Vladimir Putin to restore their self-respect. But it is implausible to attribute the whole historical process to one man, whether you like him or not. Gorbachev could not, single-handed, have brought down an otherwise healthy superpower. But he did, in Bismarck’s words, “hear God’s footsteps marching through history, and … catch on to His coattails as He marches past.” Although he made serious mistakes, his political courage and ingenuity began the process of transforming the Soviet Union into a modern country at ease with itself and the outside world. The transformation can only come to fruition over many decades, and then only with luck and with many fits and starts. But that is the historical perspective against which Gorbachev will eventually be judged. ***************** RUSSIA AND THE WEST (Financial TImes 2 May) The sour western comments on Vladimir Putin’s latest - and last? - address to the nation last week are only the most recent in a series of damaging rhetorical exchanges, fuelled on both sides by domestic considerations rather than a sensible understanding of the best interests of either. Some of the language is reminiscent of the cold war, even though today there is no comparable clash of interests between Russia and the west. It is partly a matter of disappointed love. We have come a long way from the hopes that seemed to unite Russia and the west after the Soviet Union collapsed. Two years ago Mr Putin described that collapse as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”. He was greeted by a storm of criticism in the west: was the Russian president really calling for the return of the old regime? Was the spectre of Stalin stalking Europe yet again? It was more complicated than that. After 1991, the Russians lost in short order their ancient empire, military pride, political system, ideology and economy. Millions fell into such poverty that former enemies sent them food aid, accompanied by well-meant but often inappropriate advice about building a liberal market democracy from the ruins. This was an overwhelming trauma, even for Russians who were delighted to see communism go. After years of humiliation, most are glad that Mr Putin’s Russia has now recovered some of the respect to which they believe their country is entitled. Russian politicians are once again confident enough to express their own view of Russia’s national interest, whether their views converge with those of the west or not. But the confidence is still shaky, still too rooted in the chance windfall of a high oil price, still too dependent on a domestic political stabilisation imposed by a centralising and stifling discipline. Russia’s sense of truculent vulnerability still filters through all the brave words. Take what Mr Putin said about the US proposal to base anti-missile installations in Poland and the Czech Republic. The Czechs and the Poles welcome the installations not because they will shield the US from non-existent Iranian missiles - the ostensible US justification - but because they strengthen their own countries’ political guarantee against the Russians. It is all to do with politics, not defence. Condoleezza Rice, US secretary of state, dismisses the Russian concerns as “ludicrous”. Mr Putin threatens to freeze the agreement on conventional forces in Europe in response. That agreement has in any case not been ratified by the Nato countries. In the real world, it will make no difference whether Mr Putin freezes the agreement or not. Meanwhile the politics deteriorates. Mr Putin worries that foreign money could destabilise his domestic politics. Perhaps that too is a symptom of insecurity. But he saw what happened in Ukraine, where millions of dollars were poured in to achieve an “Orange” Revolution that would probably have taken place anyway. Russian paranoia was inflamed, and inflamed again when Boris Berezovsky, the exiled Russian billionaire, recently said he supported a forceful overthrow of Mr Putin’s regime. All this makes life much harder for those gallant Russian non-governmental organisations that are trying to promote the evolution of democratic institutions in their country. Most of Mr Putin’s countrymen thoroughly dislike the corruption, the antics of the super-rich, the arrogance of politicians and bureaucrats, the influence of the secret policemen, the abuse of the courts and the gross failures to enforce the law that disfigure their country’s domestic politics. They may know in their hearts that Mr Putin’s version of “stability” has come at a price. But they still resent the constant lectures from foreigners. Whether we like it or not, most Russians believe that events in Iraq and elsewhere have thoroughly undermined our democratic credentials and our right to give them lessons. The name-calling serves no obvious Russian or western purpose. Both sides take even reasonable criticism as a deliberate offence: what can be said within the family is unacceptable if it comes from outside. Everyone would be better off if the politicians cooled things down. Real life being what it is, alas, they are more likely to go on stirring things up with intemperate language designed to please their own domestic audiences regardless of the effect in the outside world. *********************** THE USES AND ABUSES OF INTELLIGENCE (Talk at Essex University, 24 April 2007) Secrets are like sex. Most of us think that others get more than we do. Some of us cannot have enough of either. Both encourage fantasy. Both send the press into a feeding frenzy. I myself was never much fascinated by the secret world, and didn’t have much to do with it during my professional career. That is perhaps why I am irritated when the subject of intelligence attracts attention out of proportion to its real importance. INTELLIGENCE FAILURE That is particularly true when we have what the press calls an “intelligence failure”. “Intelligence failure” usually means that somebody has been caught out by an unexpected event. It is always followed by the demand that heads should roll. History is full of intelligence failures. I’m going to talk briefly about three of them: • the failure of Stalin to foresee the German attack on the Soviet Union; • the failure of the CIA to foresee the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan ; • and the various notorious intelligence failures surrounding the Invasion of Iraq in 2003. These three cases have one thing in common. In each mortal men failed to predict the future. They are not really to be blamed. No one has been able to predict the future since the Romans eviscerated chickens on the Capitol. WHY WE NEED INTELLIGENCE That does not mean we do not need good intelligence. Good intelligence is needed for much more practical and mundane tasks than making doomed attempts to predict the unpredictable. The government needs information about what its enemies and even its friends are up to, and some of this information it gets by secret means - underhand means, if you like. For example, we really do need to know what terrorists are up to. Dropping bombs on them has never been a good way of stopping them. To operate effectively against terrorists and their organisations is impossible without a major effort of human and technical intelligence. We have seen that in Northern Ireland and we are seeing it today. I am perfectly aware of the threats which all this can pose to our liberties if we are not careful. I’ll touch on that at the end. I will start by saying some basic things: how you get intelligence, how you analyse it, and what you do with it. THE PRINCIPLES OF INTELLIGENCE There are four main principles of intelligence. 1. The first principle is that there is no essential difference between secret and open information All information is either relevant or irrelevant. It is either timely or it is too late. It is either properly assessed or it is misunderstood. It is either acted on effectively or it is not. Just because information is gained by secret means, however ingenious, does not mean that it is necessarily more useful than what you can read in the newspapers or find on the internet. 2. The second principle is that secret information may well be wrong The stuff produced by spies is always suspect. Spies are vulnerable to human error: greed, fear, a desire to please, an urge to fantasise, and the practical difficulty of operating in secret. They may also be double agents, deliberately feeding you false information. The agencies try to sort out the wheat from the chaff. They do not always succeed. Graham Green’s novel “Our Man in Havana” is a cruel satire. But like any good satire, it has a grain of truth in it. The stuff produced by technical intelligence agencies – codebreakers, satellite photographers, eavesdroppers – is different, because it is in some sense documentary. Even so it may be neither timely nor relevant. And historians know that documents too can be ambiguous. 3. The third principle is that secret intelligence is no use unless you know what it means Little bits of information are not much use unless you can analyse them into a coherent picture. People say that you need special skills to analyse secret intelligence. I don’t believe that. The skills are the same as the skills of a historian or a judge summing up a complicated case. You have to sift through a mass of information, much of it ambiguous or even contradictory. You have to judge whether it is plausible. And then you have to try to draw some useful conclusions from it. That can be intellectually difficult. And unlike historians, intelligence analysts have to make judgements quickly, judgements which may soon be tested by reality. It is not surprising that things sometimes go wrong. 4. The fourth principle is that secret intelligence is no use unless you can act on it. But what really matters is what people - political leaders or generals - actually do with this analysis. Even the best assessment cannot guarantee that they will take the right decisions. Leaders in business or politics navigate by intuition and judgement. Those in their immediate entourage are driven by loyalty, the need to protect their boss, and the need to ensure that his decisions are implemented. Those inside the magic circle find it hard to be coolly objective. The same is true of political leaders and generals. Indeed the pressures are even greater because of the cross current of political rivalries, and nowadays because of the unrelenting curiosity of the press. It all works as long as the leader’s judgment and intuition are in order. But when these fail, the damage is serious. It happened to Stalin in 1941 on the eve of the German invasion. It happened to Tony Blair in the run up to the Iraq war in 2003. You can call it an intelligence failure if you like. Actually it is often a failure of leadership – all too common, all too human, and probably all too inevitable. CASE STUDIES: 1941 In the months before Hitler attacked the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, the Russians were gathering a huge amount of intelligence. They had their spies admirably placed in London, Tokyo, and in ministries in Berlin itself. As the Germans began to assemble their forces on the Soviet frontier, Soviet observers were counting trainloads of tanks and guns, and lorry loads of troops. By the time the Germans attacked, the Russians had a very good idea of the order of battle of the forces arrayed against them. And yet on that summer dawn, the Soviet forces were taken entirely by surprise and overwhelmed by catastrophe. The reasons for the disaster are not at all mysterious. They lie primarily in the successive misjudgements made by Stalin himself. But Stalin was not a stupid man and his misjudgements and were not stupid either. He always thought that the Germans would attack sooner or later. But Hitler had always sworn that Germany would never again fight on two fronts. Stalin assumed that Hitler meant what he said. Second, Stalin knew that the Red Army was in no shape to withstand a German attack: it had been too badly shaken by the purges, and thoroughly disorganised by the overhasty expansion and re-equipment of the last two years. His whole policy - from the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939 onwards - had been to gain time while the Soviet Union put itself in a better posture for defence. What is more, Stalin’s spies had told him that the Germans would attack on this date, then on that date. But the dates had passed and no attack had occurred. Stalin lost faith in his spies. And there were two possible ways of assessing all this intelligence. Either the Germans were indeed massing for an attack. Or Hitler intended to threaten Stalin into supporting Germany with still further supplies of raw materials and food, while Germany finished off the British. Stalin naturally chose the most convenient explanation: the Germans were not about to attack and he would have time to sort out his defences. He refused to allow his generals to take any precautions lest the Germans be provoked. The result was disaster. There is a footnote: the British Joint Intelligence Committee was also analysing the situation in the first five months of 1941. And they came to the same conclusion as Stalin. Hitler would not attack while the British were undefeated. Unfortunately for British self-esteem, the Germans had decided that the British were no longer a menace, and that their defiance would wither on the vine. The British were caught as much by surprise as Stalin was. CASE STUDIES: THE IRAQ WAR In September 2002 the Prime Minister published a dossier which had been prepared by the Joint Intelligence Committee. It was a pretty muddled affair. It was entitled “Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction”, a terrifying subject. The dossier said that Saddam could “deploy” weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes. It spoke of an “imminent” or “current” threat. The maps in the dossier showed that Iraqi missiles – if they existed – could hit Cyprus. Politicians talked of Saddam’s nuclear ambitions. They made much play with the image of the mushroom cloud. The press and the public came to alarming conclusions. The headline in The Sun was “45 Minutes to Doom”. Much of the information in the dossier was in the public domain. Much of it came from the United Nations inspectors. Much of the rest was said to be either "indicated" or "confirmed" by intelligence. Lord Butler’s subsequent enquiry largely confirmed that the intelligence was unable to bear the interpretation put upon it. What happened was not all that surprising. The people at the centre got carried away, as they so often do, the atmosphere of excitement. They are part of a team, whose task is to enable the leader to do what he thinks right. Whether they realised it or not, the Joint Intelligence Committee went beyond their limited task of assessment. They became part of the process of making and advocating policy. If I’d been there at the time, I’m sure I’d have been carried away too. But the objectivity of the intelligence analysts was inevitably undermined. The British government attached such importance to the claim that Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction because their other arguments for war were cutting too little ice with the public, and because their legal case for war was failing. They told us that the intelligence justified the war, even though it was too secret for them to reveal. That’s how they won the vote in Parliament on 18 March 2003. That was a gross misuse of intelligence. CASE STUDIES: AFGHANISTAN. The intelligence fiascos of 1941 and 2003 were only in part the fault of the analysts. It was Stalin and Blair who chose in each case the interpretation of the intelligence which best fitted their preconceptions. That was of course deplorable, but entirely human. The failure of the CIA to predict the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 was a failure of the analysts themselves. But this failure too was not an aberration. It stems from a recurrent weakness in the analytical process itself. Ever since Afghanistan had broken away from the British in 1919, it had been on good relations with the Soviet Union who had supported successive Afghan governments of whatever political colour. In April 1978 a Communist government came to power in Kabul. It was probably not put there by the Russians. But they felt they had no option but to support it. The Communists had worthy objectives. They wanted to liberate women, free the peasantry, and educate the people. But these were not objectives shared by most of the Afghan people. The Communists used the most brutal means to enforce their will. The result was a growing rebellion. In March 1979 there was a bloody uprising in the city of Herat. Among those killed, in very brutal ways, were Soviet advisers, their wives and their children. The communist leaders appealed to Moscow to send troops. The Politburo refused. They knew very well that the Soviet soldiers would find themselves killing Afghans in the middle of an Afghan civil war. The Soviet Union's international position would be seriously damaged not only in the West but also in the Third World. They confined themselves to sending military equipment and advisers to the Afghans, and to making some precautionary troop dispositions. As the year continued, and the situation in Afghanistan deteriorated, the troop deployments continued. But there was no disposition to intervene until after a further coup in Kabul had brought to power a Communist leader whom the Russians suspected might sell out to the Americans. Even then no executive decision was taken until the second week of December. The Soviet invasion began on Christmas Day, a couple of weeks later. Its objectives were limited. They were: • to secure the major cities and the communications, • shore up the government, • train up the Afghan army and police to take over security, • and leave within five to six months. The CIA had picked up almost all the Soviet military moves. But like the Politburo, they thought that a full-scale intervention would not be in the Soviet interest. And they also thought that the numbers of troops assembled could not achieve a useful objective. They might be sufficient to protect Soviet citizens in Kabul and elsewhere, and perhaps keep open lines of communication with the Soviet Union. But they were wholly insufficient to subdue the country. The Americans therefore assumed there would be no invasion. They were taken aback when the invasion actually took place. Afterwards the CIA analysed what had gone wrong. What had happened was quite simple. The CIA assumed that the Russians knew what they were doing, although until nearly the last minute the Russians had not decided what it was that they would do. But even the best intelligence will not allow you to get into somebody else's head. So this kind of mistake is also very common. DEMOCRATIC CONTROL These are all good reasons why you should be sceptical of anyone who makes inflated claims about intelligence. You should be especially sceptical when political leaders use intelligence to justify their actions. Fifteen years ago John Major took an important step towards transparency and democratic control of the British intelligence agencies. He finally broke the absurd convention by which the British pretended they had no intelligence agencies. He put the agencies on a legal basis for the first time. And he set up a Parliamentary Committee on Intelligence and Security as an instrument of democratic control. This is not an easy task. Secret agencies have to operate in secret by definition. There is an obvious limit to the extent to which outsiders can be allowed to penetrate the detail. Civil libertarians will always be dissatisfied. Yet the parliamentary committee has been quite effective. Its report on the Iraq crisis revealed some awkward details. It has strengthened its authority. That is good news. The Hutton and Butler enquiries into the Iraq intelligence fiasco marked a further step in the right direction. Thanks to them, the public knows a great deal about how the agencies work, and the nature of their relationship with government. I would like to think that the lessons have been learned for good. What is more, we live in a democracy. In a democracy the government should not try to justify its actions on the basis of information it is not prepared to reveal. If it wants to make a case, it should make the case on policy grounds. That, above all, is where the British government failed in the run up to the Iraq war. CONCLUSION I will end with one more point. There is a very important distinction to make between secrecy and mystery. Sunday newspapers and novelists thrive on the mystery which surrounds the intelligence agencies. So do the agencies themselves. It is good for recruitment. It frightens the enemy. And it helps to bamboozle the Treasury at budget time. But while secrecy is unavoidable, mystery is not. A senior official once accused me of “failing to believe in intelligence”. I answered that one can believe in God, little green men, or the world-wide Masonic conspiracy. But one can no more “believe” in intelligence than one can believe in the Inland Revenue. Both are legitimate and essentially humdrum functions of government. To glamorise or mystify intelligence, or to exaggerate what it is capable of doing, is not in anyone’s interests. At the tactical level, at the level of operations, good intelligence is essential, though it may be fallible. At the strategic level the most important things are judgement and instinct. Intelligence agencies are no better provided with those qualities than politicians, journalists, academics, diplomats, or ordinary people with common sense. At that level, what is called “intelligence failure” is so common as to be almost an iron law of nature. I’ll leave the last word with the Armed Services Committee of the House of Representatives of the United States Congress: "Policy makers and private citizens who expect intelligence to foresee all sudden shifts are attributing to them qualities not yet shared by the deity with mere mortals."
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