War and Peace in the Nuclear Age; Interview with Howard Stoertz, 1986

So could you tell me first about the years 1956 on a 57 on the way in which starting with the bomber gap and going to to the discovery of an ICBM in the Soviet Union. Can you tell me what you know member of that and how it happened. I joined the staff of the board in actual estimates in 1956 but I got in on what you I call the tail end of a period of concern about the bomber gap. As time went along in those years fifty six seven eight the intelligence community began to be aware that the large numbers of intercontinental bombers that the Soviets had been anticipated to build were not appearing in units and didn't appear to be coming out of the factories. And even as that information was developed more information was being developed about the progress of the Soviets were making in creating

medium and intermediate got the range missiles and that culminated in the latter part of 1957. In a flurry of intercontinental missile tests together with the launching of the world's first satellites the Sputniks which convinced the intelligence community that there was a big active program for the development of intercontinental missiles and led us to believe that the Soviet determination to bring the US under fire under the threat of attack which we were convinced was an important part of their policy had. Been shifted in priority from bombers to missiles. What was your own personal reaction to Sputnik. Well curiously enough those of us who were working the problem in the in the analytical business had anticipated that the Soviets would be

able to launch Earth's satellites at just about that time period. But the combination of that together with this flurry of intercontinental missile firings and the fact that the ICBM booster was being used as the. Launching rocket for the Sputniks led us to conclude that there was a much bigger and a program that had greater depth and figure than we had anticipated. You see in the United States there have tended to be a separation between the Earth satellite program and the missile programs. The Soviets combined them and to that extent they. Gained advantage in that in the common development and indeed the. ICBM that they were building took advantage as well of the previous development of medium range missiles. So we were mighty impressed with the with the combination of capabilities that was represented there.

It was taking all together you will you were surprised even though you'd been expecting it. Well Taken all together it caused us to early up is the date at which we thought the Soviets would be able to have intercontinental missiles in their operational and Torrie. As I recall that had been predicted for about the turn of the decade as 1959 1960 and after this. Flurry of tests and late 57 and early 58 my memory is that the conclusion was that the Soviets might be able to have an initial capability with intercontinental missiles as early as the end of 1958 and then estimates were made of. What kind of numbers they might be able to have in operational inventory. At various arbitrarily or arbitrarily selected numbers at various times in the future.

And again my memory is that we were projecting that they might have as many as they could have as many as 100 ICBMs in Torreon. 1959 or 60 and as many as 500 in 1961 or 62 depending on whether the program were. A crash program which meant one that had all all priority and high degree of success or whether the program were more moderately paced. Of course as it turned out those estimates are out to be wildly excessive. Can you. Can you just outline the factors that made you come to this fairly high estimate at the time with what the information that you had available and what information was available to you at that time. Well as I say there was hard information on this very impressive development program. And the pace of that.

In late 57 in the early 58 seemed dramatic. And the degree of success compared to the. Difficulty that the Americans were having in developing a comparable system. But in addition to that there was a lot of information on the extent of development of earlier some shorter range missiles which provided a background of technical capability. There was a. Conviction on the part of most analysts and indeed on the part of many presidential advisors and committees and commissions that the Soviets. Could and would want to put the United States under the threat of attack at an early early date. Just the Soviet premier was rattling his rockets and I think his exaggerated boasting contributed in that sense. He deceived us somewhat with respect to where he stood. At it. But at the time.

And finally. I think that. A contributor was our consciousness that we were able to go like good information about development. But we had inadequate means to collect information about deployment. So we were confronted with a situation where. We had an absence of information about deployment. As time went along but we were not able confidently to say that that meant anything. You had been used to Austral you. Well you had to. Indeed if the if the U-2 reconnaissance airplane had not been shot down on the 1st of May 1960 it might have collected the first positive evidence of intercontinental missile deployments under construction. So you know. But even if it had. It was not a system that was capable of. Searching large

areas of Soviet territory. After all the Soviet Union is large enough so that it covers as I recall a time zone and it has a huge transportation network. If one is to establish with some confidence that. A missile program is of a certain size one has to have a capability to look at a lot of territory and that we didn't have with the development of the. Satellite satellite reconnaissance capability and indeed U-2 as well was in fact. An important forward looking program. That was laid on by the Eisenhower administration. But. As development times and luck would have it the actual capability to search the Soviet Union didn't exist until after the change of administrations in 1961. How would you explain in retrospect the huge disparity in

estimates forward estimates of Sauvie ICBM deployment between the Navy and the army the CIA and FAA US intelligence. My memory of it is that those disparities didn't emerge right in the beginning. When we were making estimates of the earliest possible dates that the Soviets might have. Arbitrarily selected numbers of missiles like a hundred and five. And when we were. Leaving it on certain in our own minds as to whether there was a crash program or a more orderly program. My memory is that the intelligence community was pretty much all on board with those estimates. It was only as time passed and I believe the. Most significant change was made around the end in 1959 peony 1960 that we began to change the estimates based on additional information and.

Additional analysis. And at that point the agencies began to diverge. We didn't have an agreed estimate. Now what happened was first of all there were after this flurry of successful test there were long pauses in the Soviet program and there were some failures. And by the latter part of 59 at any rate and possibly somewhat sooner I can't move for sure. Those of us in CIA at least were convinced that there was no crash program. But this was an orderly more moderate program. Secondly we learned Droz or more as and we had known earlier about what it took to. Conduct an intercontinental missile deployment program. Now bear in mind there was no intercontinental missile deployment program anywhere in the world in 1957 and 58. So we couldn't even go to

American designers to find out all of the problems and tasks that would be involved. As we learned more about what was involved in it running a program we learned about the needs that a nation would have to. Build launchers to operate missiles to maintain them to train troops and so on. And we became convinced that the program was more complicated than just building inventories of missiles so the combination of these two factors the slowdown in a test program and learning more about it caused us to adjust the program downward that is to say to push back somewhat the date by which the Soviets could have various numbers of missiles. As I recall for instance we estimated that 150 to 200 missiles on launchers would be probable So it total for about the middle of 1961.

Well at that point the other agencies made their own estimates and the Air Force for example stuck pretty much with its original estimate and drew the conclusion for examples out the pauses in the program merely represented the Soviets getting ready to deploy. Instead of representative representing a slow development of difficulty. The Army and the Navy drew the conclusion that the absence of information clearly pointing to deployment meant that there probably was no plan. So we ended up with a badly split estimate. These views were held by some of these agencies for several years thereafter. A lot of people. Yeah. A lot of people of course of. Said that it can't be a coincidence that the Air Force which had the greatest vested interest in

in having a large threats. Because that would enable them to have. A large program of missile building themselves came up with the highest amounts that the army which had the least vested interest and deede didn't want to see money being spent on American programs had a vested interest in seeing a small Soviet threat that came up in the lowest estimate. And the CIA which had no vested interest came out in the middle. In other words that what people wanted to see they saw. What's your reaction to that. I've heard that repeatedly I know some of the new Some of these officers fairly well. I'm pretty well convinced that most of them felt that the evidence and their analysis of it was legitimate. For example an Air Force officer particularly somebody from the Strategic Air Command who was following the development of strategic nuclear capabilities. Had a conviction a professional conviction that building a

big Intercontinental strike capability was a sensible thing for a big country to do. And given the fact that we all knew it had set us as its adversary Mr Khrushchev made no bones about it. It seemed reasonable then that the planners would do would build up big capability as soon as they could. And indeed in due course they did what was happening was that their capability was was overestimated in the early years. I think that the Air Force people held on to their original estimate too long in the face of of evidence to the contrary that evidence was slow in accumulating and negative evidence is hard to deal with. Because you never know what it means. And indeed there was a considerable controversy after the turn of administrations when the missile gap was disappearing as to whether or not that was a valid conclusion to reach as well and the Air Force was on the high side of those questions as well.

There was a. Considerable public's cause by tickly some journalists who knew a bit about this process. Also up in particular. Said in a series of articles towards the beginning 1960 that the CIA and its political masters as he put it had irresponsibly and without justification in terms of evidence available to them. Changed the whole basis of their estimates from one of estimating capability to one of estimating intentions pop. And this as he saw it was a politically motivated and awfully responsible act. How did it seem to you at the time. Well Jonathan you remember it was the it was the Alsop brothers who were well-known columnists at the time who in who coined the term the missile gap and they used that to argue that the Eisenhower administration

was. Reacting with insufficient alacrity to the challenge posed by Soviet technical developments as represented by nuclear weapons sputniks ICBMs and so on. And this was part of that period in the late nineteen fifties when the issue of what U.S. defense policy should be and whether it was vigorous enough was an important element in the you know in a presidential campaign. Now when the change in Estimate occurred in the one I was referring to in the latter part of 1959 for example. With the administration and a couple of its spokesmen were the ones who first said this shows since the threat is not as great as had been projected that our programs are in fact adequate and when pressed by Democratic

adversaries in the Senate like senators I mean Ted and Senator Johnson as the spokesman for the administration said they're going to change from the estimate capabilities to intentions and Alsop leapt on that. And said that we were trying to read the Russian mind. And as I recall Senator Simonton said that the intelligence books had been cooked in order that the budget books could be balance and this suddenly hit the estimators and analysts in the CIA as a great surprise to us. The effort that they were making was to do as good a job as they could with evidence which frankly was. Inadequate and ambiguous. And if they had I think with conviction. Dropped the idea of a crash program

which would have been a capability and then added these considerations about what it would take to run a program. So from their point of view they were trying to estimate a program not try to read the Russians much but that was never really clarified successfully. It got to be a political football and remain a matter of controversy all during that ensuing election year. Joseph also maintained then and indeed still does that. The CIA's behavior was little short of traitorous. Well that had just nothing to do with the truth. All the analysts at estimators were doing the best they could to read through the evidence which was. Really not adequate and ambiguous to some extent. Try to come up with a program which would make some sense in terms of a realistic expectation. And the question of us budgets in US

politics just inherited. What was your reaction to all this external. Brouhaha around your own estimates. Well it was sort of a Who me we were we were working the Russian problem not working the U.S. political. There was another allegation made around about the time. This time this one by Thomas Lanphier who. Represented General Dynamics the magazine Atlas of course. Who went to Stewart signing to the as he now calls it and mentioned that his sources told him that. The intelligence community did not have a committee looking at the issue of ICBM deployment. They had a committee looking at testing that a committee looking at development. They had no committee looking at deployment and they weren't looking for deployment. In fact he says that as a result of his and last year at sonic his intervention

in how order that they used to go north to Siberia to look for missile silos. Is that the way you remember it. Well there was a committee which was the guided missile committee that was essentially a technical or scientific committee whether it had a subgroup that was assigned to looking for deployment I don't know. It certainly did later but it may not have at that time. If it didn't that means really nothing in terms of the amount of looking that was being done. The purpose of these committees was to bring together the various analysts and try to. Test their estimates against each other try to arrive at agreement if they could and try to help program collection resources. But in the absence of a committee a collection resources were programmed by the agencies which had responsibility. And indeed one of the reasons for committees is because because sort

of a competition in the intelligence business this is considered a good thing. People out there looking for deployment seeing if they can find it where the other fellow is looking as well and the shoe is a kind of you can get there first so that the charge if that's what it is that people were not looking for deployment is simply not correct. Indeed I remember as early as 1956 when Khrushchev was rattling his rockets in connection with the with the Suez crisis that Allen Dulles who was director at that time had several of us into his office wanting to know specifically what we had on deployment because he want to know whether we should put any credibility in Khrushchev's threats. And at that time we drew the conclusion that the deployment of shorter range missiles probably existed but we probably hadn't been able to find it. The U-2 was used to the extent of its capability. Some of the deployment areas were deep in the study and hard to get to. And as I said

earlier the U-2 really didn't have very good capacity to do an extensive search of the programming of Earth satellite reconnaissance capabilities represented a big effort to go for deployment and other things so I have to say I think it was. But Mr. Fear was alleging is just simply not correct. Does it surprise you that someone of Senator saw Minton's experience would get involved in basically claiming that he knew more than the director of the CIA did about intelligence. Well Senator Sam Eaton had been secretary of the Air Force. He was very experienced in defense matters. I would say that he probably knew more about air and missile programs than Allen Dulles as an individual simply because of his own expertise and background. Now the question of whether

he knew more about what was going on in the intelligence community is another matter. And my memory is that Sen. Simonton and Mr Lanphier came around and in effect told Allen Dulles that there was information within the intelligence community that was not getting to him and that caused Dulles considerable concern and he looked into it at great length and that committee that you were referring to was a principal source of looking into these allegations. We never found out where the where the allegations came from in the first place but we satisfied ourselves that there are not been a lot of additional missile tests and indeed to the speculation was that perhaps the testing of various ranges of missiles had been mixed together in some set of figures that had been given to the senator.

But this was not known for sure what the answer to it was to if you could just tell me that and that morning in summary there too will you know it's fun to just try to shorten down a little bit. Yes the question is. What else as far as you're aware of did did miss the Lanphier and some of the sobbing to tell Allen Dulles at that meeting that they went in. As I recall that was during one of these periods of law. And of some failures in the Soviet Intercontinental test program and Lanphier said that there were a number of tests that simply hadn't gotten to Mr. DULLES that he had found out about. But the people in the intelligence community knew about this was looked into very carefully. And no such tests. Were emerged. So that particular piece of information while it caused confusion in the community it was not correct and didn't change our estimate.

And so going to be would you attribute any particular motive to these interventions by I'm out of the thought of his position and his connections with the makers of the American ICBM. Well again I think that obviously there's a certain amount of vested interest but also there is good knowledge and knowledge of the technical factors involved and so on. And these people. Were convinced that the funding available to their programs didn't permit them to proceed as rapidly as they might otherwise have done so and they assumed that the Soviets had to kind of under a limited funding. And so it was their conviction that so it must be. Way ahead indeed. The demonstration of the Sputniks I think satisfied them that Soviets were ahead at least in the development of booster rockets and so they assumed that the Soviets would stay that Degree ahead. And as I mentioned earlier negative information is very hard to deal with and if you are convinced owing to where you sit is

that a certain outcome is logical it takes a fair amount of information to shake you from that position. These people were not taken from. Us we can talk about what information did finally shake most people from their connections in that area and how was the missile gap thing resolved. Well finally as I said it was it was a result of that the culmination of a long development period initiated during the earlier administrations that resulted in the availability to U.S. intelligence of reconnaissance satellites and the satellite coverage of Kerstin emerging all at once but it was better more extensive than U-2 coverage and as 1961 proceeded more and more coverage of Soviet territory was achieved. The other information was acquired of the agent pen KOSKY reported that Mr Khrushchev was exaggerating his missile capabilities. We also learned that there

was a second generation intercontinental missile that was under active development in the Soviet Union and that seemed to be much more capable of large scale deployment than the first generation which was a big bulky cumbersome vehicle and so it appeared as if the Soviets had another program which was coming along which could which could more practically be deployed in large numbers. But the key to it was establishing the fact that in large portions of the Soviet territory where intercontinental missiles had been thought possibly to be deployed there weren't any. Now I show you what do you want to ask another. Well I don't I'm particularly interested in the issue of what it looked like coming to sets can lead one of the keys was persuading the Air Force that you know what. What turned up in the field finally was an indication that the operational Soviet missile launchers and their facilities their support

facilities in fact bore a distinct relationship to the test facilities and they weren't something completely different and they weren't something that was impossible to identify. And this was because it takes a certain amount of of maintenance and fueling and other IT check out equipment and so on to operate a system. And so I let me just stop you there can you stop us saying OK let's try. Right. The missile gap finally disappeared. Owing to the ability of a state city like satellite photography on large areas of the Soviet Union. Which emerged mostly during 1961. There was additional helpful information the agent pen Koski indicated that Mr herself had been

exaggerating his capabilities and we learned about a second generation ICBM which was taking a good deal of development effort it looked as if it would be much more capable of large scale deployment than the first bulky cumbersome first generation system. But the key to it was searching large areas with some confidence that if there was an ICBM facility there we would be able to see it. And a key to that was finding out that. Yes we had suspected the facilities for deployment in the field for a close resemblance to the facilities at test range. This occurred sometime in 1961. Now a dispute existed long after that in that for example the Air Force and the Strategic Air Command and intelligence people. Held the view that an ICBM launching facility could. Look like anything. That it could be very easily concealed and that there might be

hundreds of launchers deployed this area that we haven't found. But as this connection between. Deployed large facilities and test range facilities became clearer and as we learn more about what it takes to operate a big system like this it's more than just physical characteristics there are a lot of other things as well. The view that there were hundreds of large facilities in the Soviet Union simply became less and less credible relation to the evidence and unfortunately by the time of the Cuban missile crisis even though I think there was still maybe some holdouts at that time the government as a corporate body had the confidence that indeed the missile gap was in favor of the United States. One other question about then you may not know the answer to this because not really directly in the field but. Air Force intelligence and particularly sac intelligence had as one of its prime functions the

identification of targets for a nuclear arsenal. If they sincerely believe that there were hundreds perhaps even thousands of missiles deployed in the Soviet Union presumably they would have been keen to tone it down where they were. Is it your impression that. Windmills and wool sheds and other things that might have been missile silos in their view will being targeted. By SOC intelligence. So that in the case of. Over war they would have been hit by our own nuclear weapons. Jonathan I don't know Terry. OK one other one just hit the final question that is is. What legacy or legacy is worth anything either for the CIA or for or for the country at large in this whole saga of the missile gap. Well that's a good question. History never repeats itself exactly. Of course one has to be

fairly tentative about any generalizations but first it does seem to me that when an intelligence estimate becomes a political football the nation's interest is not served. Now there's no way of keeping intelligence estimates from occurring at times when there are important political campaigns underway in this country and after all our views of how we stand in the relation of the rest of the world are in some respects political So I think there's some inevitable relationship there that you can't get away from. That being the case it seems to me that there's no substitute for information. The big problem that we had was inadequate in ambiguous information during the time. That I was with you here at the Eisenhower administration deserves a lot of credit. Seems to me for having. Developed imaginative forward looking collection systems

some of those collection systems. Were to the benefit of successor administrations. But it's a good thing that happened and it's interesting to remember that it takes a long time to develop those you have to be thinking weapon. Even with information on the current situation projecting another country's programs and decision making for some years in advance is just fraught with possibilities for error. We've made. Additional over estimates from time to time and we made an fair number of substantial under estimates as well in subsequent years. It may be that we're. Asking too much of ourselves to try to forecast with confidence. One now is sort of drawing towards making alternate projections and things like that under certain circumstances. And one possibility is of course that arms

control agreements. Which have other. Potential benefits and perils can at least limit some of the uncertainty about the future which confronts us plenty if you can have some confidence that you can monitor the other fellow's performance and that he'll comply that an arms control agreement by just interposing arbitrary negotiated limit does have the effect of kind of putting bounds on that open ended uncertainty about the future that was characteristic of this missile gap period. Isn't the attempt to pull costs and other government programs. Isn't that precisely the. Estimates of intention rather than capability that says it all so it was all about and what he was saying is nevermind what you think the government might do. Just concentrate on what they could do in the worst case and that's the only thing you can for there's no possibility of a he

of pure capabilities estimate. For example. One could devote his gross national product to military affairs if one estimated the Soviets could do that I suppose is true but it wouldn't be a realistic estimate. Neither is there I think a pure intentions estimate what these estimates were attempts to arrive at some reasonable program. In the light of an expectation that the Soviets wanted to bring us under fire and that's intentions. But taking into account the demonstrated events of the program and in the absence of information about deployment making some reasonable projections about what a deployment program might look like. If that's intention so be it. But I don't think it is I don't think it's really trying to read the other fellow's mind. And I don't think that it was a substantial change

from the way estimates were made previously and have been made since.