War and Peace in the Nuclear Age; Interview with Ray Cline, 1986 [1]

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WAR AND PEACE IN THE NUCLEAR AGE - TAPES C03020-C03021 RAY CLINE [1]

U.S. intelligence goals in the fifties and sixties

Interviewer:

DR. CLINE, COULD YOU DESCRIBE THE PROCESS BY WHICH THE OFFICE OF

NATIONAL ESTIMATES CAME TO BE?

Cline:

The Office of National Estimates was a creation long wanted by some of

the experts in the intelligence business, but actually brought to

fruition in the Korean War period. The the crisis caused by the North

Korean invasion of South Korea and the American intervention to save

South Korea caused everyone in the US government to take a much harder

look at intelligence. And one of the needs was to speed up and to

improve the quality of the judgmental papers being written about

probabilities future consequences, the kind of hard intelligence

analysis that CIA had always been supposed to do but had not in fact

had a very good opportunity to do before the Korean War. When "Beetle"

Smith, Walter Bedell Smith, the famous wartime deputy to Dwight

Eisenhower became the head of CIA, President Truman appointed him

shortly after the Korean War broke out. He set about to organize an

effective system of collecting all information from all sources and

reaching the most sophisticated estimative judgment possible about

probabilities and future courses of action. That was the estimate

system and it was created on the advice of the senior experts in CIA as

soon as Bedell Smith became the Director of Central Intelligence.

Interviewer:

...HE DIDN'T ONLY DEAL WITH THE CIA...

Cline:

Oh the concept--the concept was a Central Intelligence concept. Of

course CIA after all was the Central Intelligence Agency working with

the Army the Navy, the Air Force, the State Department, the FBI, and

some other agencies of government. But the truth is that in its early

years, 1947, '48 and '49 the inter-agency process was imperfect almost

a tragedy. The other agencies in the intelligence business were not

very keen on being coordinated by CIA, CIA had a very hard bureaucratic

development getting good people and itself organized to do its job and

to be fair, the President and the policy makers didn't show a great

deal of interest in intelligence in this period. They took things

somewhat for granted and used their own hunches and judgments to base

policy on so the inter-agency group had to be consulted for estimative

reports but they were consulted in such a spasmodic and piecemeal way

until the Korean War that their paper really wasn't very useful and the

process was so tardy and desultory that they were seldom ready with

something that anyone in policy level really needed. Now all that

changed because President Truman and his principle advisers suddenly

waked up that as they thought of it at the time World War III may be

about to begin. Maybe the Soviet backing and army of North Korea means

that a worldwide conflict, it's true began. At any rate we all think

about it, we ought to have the best intelligence possible so the CIA

was always instructed to but in 1950, began to coordinate that is bring

together the best intelligence and the best judgments of all of the

intelligence agencies of the United States government, that's what

central intelligence is.

Interviewer:

PROBABLY THE GREATEST...IN THE EARLY FIFTIES WAS TRYING TO ESTIMATE

WHAT THE SOVIETS HAD IN THE WAY OF WEAPON SYSTEMS THAT COULD STRIKE THE

CONTINENTAL UNITED STATES. WHO WAS DOING MOST OF THE WORK ON THAT IN

THE EARLY FIFTIES?

Cline:

Well, the military agencies of course, were deeply involved in making

estimates of the various weapon systems. The CIA and the atomic energy

agency were especially involved in the scientific estimates the--and

that was one of CIA's stronger points that it took out of the other

agencies the science and technology information and put it together

particularly to make an estimate about what the Soviet Union was

capable of doing to make weapons. Of course the nuclear bomb was the

key of the Soviet Union didn't have one until September of '49, and for

many years in the late '40s, '50s, even into the '60s, counting the

probable number of nuclear weapons was intelligence target number one.

And there automatically you shared the economic approach, the science

and technology approach of CIA and the military approach in the Army,

Navy and Air Force. But at the same time of course the limitations

related to weapons carriers and in the late '40s and early '50s, the

key question was how many armors could deliver a nuclear weapon what

range did they have, were they theater weapons, which meant they could

attack western Europe, a subject that was studied ad infinitem, and

then of course gradually the question became, could the armors as they

became longer in range reach the United States, which areas were

vulnerable as targets and how many bombers were there. So we went from

studying nuclear bombs to nuclear bombers, and of course we ended up in

the later '50s and early '60s studying missiles, a different and

superior form of bomb carrier.

Interviewer:

BUT WHEN THERE WERE DIFFERENT SCENES AS THERE WERE BETWEEN SAY THE

CIA'S ESTIMATE AND THE NAVY'S ESTIMATE OF HOW MANY BOMBERS THE SOVIET

UNION WAS LIKELY TO BE ABLE TO MAKE IN TWO OR THREE YEARS...HOW MANY...

ESTIMATE...PRESUMABLY THE EVIDENCE THAT THOSE AGENCIES HAD TO WORK ON

WAS ESSENTIALLY THE SAME ALTHOUGH THEY CAME TO VERY DIFFERENT

CONCLUSIONS...

Cline:

All of the agencies shared information after 1950 on what kind of

weapons the Soviet Union might be able to produce. The evidence however

was spongy enough particularly as to future capabilities and above all

future intentions, what the Soviet military leaders really intended to

do as distinct from what they conceivably could do that the different

agencies tended to come to different conclusions and that's not

unnatural there were genuine scientific and technical arguments. Well

on the other hand it's hard to escape the feeling that in part the

agencies tended to conclude judgments, reach judgments in conclusion

based n their expectations, their fears perhaps about Soviet behavior,

when the evidence was simply not very clear. And the reason you almost

have to conclude that is that they agencies came up with such different

answers. I think the CIA tended to be rather conservative because its

approach was a fundamentally technological and economic, what was the

signs about the direction the Soviet economy was moving and how was it

able to divert resources to weapons. And that is a very fact-oriented

thing although our facts, certainly weren't always very satisfactory

to--as a base for making the final judgments. The air force was

notorious perhaps, at least famous, well known, for taking a very high

profile view of Soviet capabilities and intentions. They--in those

early days nearly always expected the Soviet Union to produce more

weapons, whatever the type we were talking about, but particularly, if

it was airplanes then any of the other agencies expected, their sort of

classical rival in contrast was the Army, and the Army nearly always

expected military power to be put into other weapons which were indeed

important as well as airplanes. So there was a tendency to have a kind

of institutional point of view I don't think that's unreasonable, I

think it was good to have the same evidence looked at from many points

of view and it was essentially the job of the CIA staff to try to find

a reasonable central and defensible rationale for making a choice among

these different views, if the CIA could not reach a defensible

compromise that the agencies would agree to of course, each agency was

entitled to express its dissent in what we call the footnote, an

opinion contrary to the main group.

Interviewer:

DO YOU THINK IT'D BE FAIR TO SAY THAT UH... SERVICES IN GENERAL TENDED

TO PROJECT ONTO THEIR OPPOSITE NUMBERS IN THE SOVIET UNION, THEIR OWN

ATTITUDES IN OTHER WORDS, SAC FOR EXAMPLE RECKONED THAT ANY SENSIBLE

SUPER POWER WOULD WANT AN AWFUL LOT OF BOMBERS.

Cline:

I think it's reasonable to expect without any suggestion of hypocrisy

of cynicism for air men to expect bombers to be produced in numbers,

that they're going to have to cope with they believe in bombers in they

expect the enemy to do so. Yeah, there's a certain mirror imaging

effect in intelligence analysis inevitable. It's of course I think less

in the intelligence community than in most communities because

intelligence analysts are trained to be skeptical of their own

hypothesis. They're asked to look at the evidence from a variety of

viewpoints and I'm sure that the Air Force tried to be as objective as

they were able. On the other hand some of us were inclined to believe

that the intelligence estimates got slightly hyped up in the chain of

command so that perhaps on some occasions an Air Force officer might be

urged to increase the range of his estimate by a non-intelligence

officer who usually would be his superior. Now, I don't think that

probably was a very blatant but there was a little bit of a tendency to

inflation of the weapons estimates and we tended to blame not just the

Air Force, but in particular in the days of the arguments over the

bomber gap the SAC, the bombing command, the big bomber command,

Strategic Air Force Command...

[END OF TAPE C03020]

Sino-Soviet relations and the Taiwan Straits Crisis

Cline:

I think it's inevitable that the representatives of the different

military services tended to feel instinctively that there was a greater

probability of Soviet weapons of the kind they were concerned with

being produced. It, it was natural and of course, intelligence officers

are trained to try to reduce those institutional biases. I am afraid

that probably the most likely error if it existed was when the policy

level people in the Army, Navy and Air Force read the draft

intelligence estimates, they might be inclined to say, hey you guys are

minimizing the threat to us and how the hell are we going to get our

budget the next if you don't face up to the threat from the Soviet

Union. I'm sure there was some of that. But I was always impressed with

the attempt by the intelligence community as a whole to arrive at a

reasonable forward guess.

Interviewer:

WAS THAT KIND OF INSTITUTIONAL PRESSURE COMING FROM ANY PARTICULAR AREA

OF THE ARMED FORCES MORE THAN AN OTHER?

Cline:

Well the Air Force of course had a very strong element called SAC, the

Strategic Air Command, the big bomber boys. And they naturally tended

to exaggerate the probability that the Soviet Union was going to be

building and equally formidable force to the American bomber system. In

fact the Soviet Union never did match up to the American level and

moved ahead into the missile age before we did. So that was the great

drama of weapons estimates in the '50s.

Interviewer:

CAN I ASK YOU BRIEFLY ABOUT THE OCCASION WHEN YOU HAD TO PRESENT TO UH,

PRESIDENT EISENHOWER THE EVIDENCE THAT YOU HAD ABOUT SOVIET ICBM

TESTING AND HOW THAT INFORMATION WAS RECIEVED?

Cline:

Well, in mid-1957, we had a very confused and uncertain body of

evidence about what in fact was missile testing. They were firing

missiles from central Asia to Kamchatka and they were indeed practicing

orbiting a small earth satellite vehicle, what we now simply call

satellites. That evidence of course was from communications

Intelligence, from espionage from everything imaginable, and of course

we were beginning to get a little U-2 photography. So I felt that the

conclusions were not very clear as to where the Soviet Union was going.

But that it was indeed on the edge of a break through into some new

weapons situation. One where the confrontation between the United

States and the Soviet Union would be changed and that we should present

it to the National Security Council and the president. I had a little

argument with my boss, Allen Dulles over that who said, it's just too

damn confusing and complicated to present to the President at this

stage. But then one day, when we were briefing President Eisenhower on

something else, the economic situation of the Soviet Union, he suddenly

said to me, "Now Dr. Cline, you wanted to present something about this

new activity out in the missile range, didn't you?," and I was

absolutely flabbergasted, because I didn't have my papers or any

information with me. But I did in fact give a minute or two

presentation to the full National Security Council pointing at my

economic map to show where the base was and where the target was. I got

a rather strong response from President Eisenhower who was keenly

interested and asked more about the weapons possibilities than the

Satellite orbiting possibility, but asked sensible questions as to

range and so forth. I did my best to answer then, as a matter of fact I

think that probably was the only formal presentation of this subject

that was given before the Sputnik in the fall of 1957, that made us all

aware that a new missile age, a new weapons age had come about.

Interviewer:

...WHAT DID YOU KNOW AT THE TIME, WHAT DID THE UNITED STATES KNOW ABOUT

THE BATTLE THAT WE NOW KNOW WAS GOING ON BETWEEN KRUSHCHEV AND MAO OVER

THE CHINESE REQUEST FOR AN ATOMIC BOMB FROM THE SOVIETS?

Cline:

Well, what we knew was mainly from the speeches of Soviet and Chinese

leaders themselves about what seemed to be doctrinal and ideological

arguments. It was clear to me and the small staff of e experts I had

studying not just the Soviet Union and China but the relationship

between the two, the Sino-Soviet staff which I directed, that there

were fundamental disagreements taking place and we began to try and

zero in on what they were. Frankly we had a very confused and uncertain

picture of where the disagreements were and it turned out that they

rested on sort of basic geo-political and they even cultural

antagonisms, some personal disagreement between Mao and the Russian

leaders, so that it was hard to get hold of. But when I went to Taiwan,

when I left Washington in 1957, I knew that this was a likely prospect

that the rift between those two countries would grow rather than

diminish and the longer I spent in Asia the more sure of it I was and I

came to feel that the crisis over the Taiwan straight in 1958, was a

dividing point, a real split between China and Russia which in fact,

I'm sure now was the case.

Interviewer:

WHY WAS IT AND WHAT HAPPENED?

Cline:

Well, I think it the evidence which accumulated gradually was that Mao

Zedong, who was rather careless about the lives of Chinese people

because he had so many of them as he said really wanted to see a

conflict arise of global proportions over the confrontation with the

Republic of China and Taiwan the rival regime, the original ruling

regime in China. And I think Mao Zedong calculated as the Chinese do

that if you can sit on the mountain arid watch the tigers fight, you

don't suffer very much and he wanted the Soviet Union to attack in

Europe in order to take the pressure off China and Asia. He would have

liked to see I believe a US-Soviet war. Khrushchev went racing out to

China and had some personal confrontations with Mao, which he described

later in his memoirs and obviously Khrushchev scared the hell out of,

Khrushchev was, had the hell scared out of him by Mao Zedong over the

willingness to engage in a major war, Khrushchev didn't want any of it.

And I think the split went rapidly after the Taiwan straight crisis. If

the United States had not supported the Republic of China though it did

so only rather indirectly and the Republic of China survived in Taiwan,

that pressure from the mainland it's hard to know what would have

happened. But since the Mao effort failed there was no WWIII from then

on, Khrushchev began withdrawing nuclear weapons assistance from China

and in fact cut off by 1960 all of industrial aid to China, a gap in

relationships which lasted for many years.

Interviewer:

WHAT WAS THE ORIGIN OF THE CHINESE NUCLEAR BOMB PROJECTS AS FAR AS

YOU'RE CONCERNED? DID IT LIE IN THOSE YEARS TOO?

Cline:

They, they made a formal agreement in 1957, to share the nuclear

weapons of course, the Russians knew how to build them, the Chinese

didn't. The first two projects were a plutonium production plant and a

gaseous diffusion plant. We got intelligence about those, we eventually

got pictures of them from U-2 photography. And it was clear that the

Chinese were copying Soviet equipment to make nuclear weapons. It also

was clear that by 1959 and '60 something had happened those plants

stopped being constructed both of the original ones were completed by

the Chinese in this sort of half-baked way so that they did eventually

produce their nuclear weapons from the Soviet equipment but the

Russians took away the blueprints and the original assistance in 1960.

They cancelled the nuclear agreement. We now believe in 1958, very

promptly right after the Taiwan Straight crisis.

Interviewer:

SO YOU THINK THAT IT WAS, WHAT WAS IT LIKE FOR YOU AS AN INTELLIGENCE

OFFICER WHO KNEW ABOUT THIS TRYING TO CONVINCE UH, YOUR POLITICAL

MASTERS AS IT WERE, THAT THIS WAS AN IMPORTANT DEVELOPMENT AND THAT

THERE REALLY WAS A SINO-SOVIET SPLIT DEVELOPMENT.

Cline:

Yes, well it was difficult, because the evidence was flimsy as is

usually true in hard intelligence cases, you can argue different ways.

As the evidence accumulated I became absolutely convinced of the fact

that there was a rift developing and that because of these earlier

ideological and doctrinal disputes which we'd observed as academic

analyst of what they were saying and writing I was convinced it was

very fundamental. We also knew the historical antagonism between

Chinese and Russian peoples and their long conflicts. So I set about to

try to convince everybody. I had trouble in my own agency, there are a

lot of CIA people who didn't agree. Some of them never did agree I

guess. But by writing about, by talking whenever I had chance to brief

policy makers and later I went back to Washington I did have a chance

to talk to President Kennedy and his advisers I think we gradually

convinced them that the differences of behavior and position which we

observed were too fundamental and too great not to be a genuine split

between the two governments. And not necessarily eternal and

irreconcilable and in fact probably those rifts are being healed today.

But that's long time later.

Interviewer:

THERE WAS PRESUMABLY VERY STRONGLY IN AMERICAN PARTICULARLY MINDS AT

THAT TIME, THIS IMAGE OF THE SOVIET BLOC, WAS THERE NOT OF AN

INDIVISIBLE THING.

Cline:

As so often is the case we are victims of our own terminology. The

Sino-Soviet block was the clich頯f the period and just as the term,

block, in Eastern Europe meant total Soviet domination we tended to

think of that in Asia too. The fact is that Soviet Union dominated

North Korea and came to dominate Mongolia but it never dominated China

in my view is strategically indigestible Nobody can totally dominate

China. And that's what the Russians discovered. They tried to get the

kind of a intrusive controls and intelligence in military bases and

things which they had in Eastern Europe and Mao Zedong who was a good

communist but a very strong nationalistic culturally arrogant Chinese

evaded and refused to cooperate with the... with the Russians on most

of the cooperation they wanted. So the system broke down. And I believe

that we went into, by 1959, 1960, a long period of what you might call

parallel steps against American interests and against lots of other

people. But without any friendship or cooperation in fact a very

competitive relationship, competitive for the leadership in the

communist world revolution as they spoke about it that brought Moscow

and Peking to swords points.

The Soviet attitude to China's desire for nuclear weapons

Interviewer:

DO YOU THINK THERE'S ANY VALIDITY IN THE COMPARISON AS FAR AS NUCLEAR

WEAPONS ARE CONCERNED BETWEEN THE SOVIET ATTITUDE TO THE CHINESE DESIRE

FOR THEIR OWN NUCLEAR WEAPON AND THE AMERICAN ATTITUDE TO THE FRENCH

DESIRE FOR THEIR OWN NUCLEAR WEAPON?

Cline:

Well, I think the I think the Americans have a feeling that the spread

of nuclear weapons to friends or anyone else is dangerous because

future political evolutions may cause real trouble where ever weapons

are. The Soviet objection was different I think the Soviet Union will

deploy its weapons where ever it feels it has iron clad military and

political control and when they discovered that they couldn't get that

they couldn't get that kind of control over Mao's China, they broke off

the nuclear agreement. I think it was a real political contest of wills

in the Chinese-Russian case, while we had our differences with De

Gaulle, I think it was a matter of geo-political philosophy being

different.

[END OF TAPE C03021 AND TRANSCRIPT]

Transcript

Transcript

Series: War and Peace in the Nuclear Age

Raw Footage: Interview with Ray Cline, 1986 [1]

Contributing Organization: WGBH (Boston, Massachusetts)

AAPB ID: cpb-aacip/15-df6k06x371

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Description

Credits: Interviewee2: Cline, Ray S.
Publisher: WGBH Educational Foundation

AAPB Contributor Holdings: WGBH
Identifier: 9aa124197b5a45b2cefc06480088371a94c57d8b (ArtesiaDAM UOI_ID)
Format: video/quicktime
Color: Color
Duration: 00:00:00

Citations: Chicago: “War and Peace in the Nuclear Age; Interview with Ray Cline, 1986 [1],” 1986-03-11, WGBH, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC, accessed October 18, 2024, http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-15-df6k06x371.; MLA: “War and Peace in the Nuclear Age; Interview with Ray Cline, 1986 [1].” 1986-03-11. WGBH, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Web. October 18, 2024. <http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-15-df6k06x371>.; APA: War and Peace in the Nuclear Age; Interview with Ray Cline, 1986 [1]. Boston, MA: WGBH, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Retrieved from http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-15-df6k06x371