Kerby Anderson

Our nation’s intelligence gathering is in the news, so I read with interest a transcript of a speech Herbert Meyer did for a Hillsdale College leadership seminar. He served as a special assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence and was the Vice Chairman of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council.

Meyer reminds us that “From the end of World War II until 1982, every president’s objective had been not to lose the Cold War.” When President Ronald Reagan came into office, he wanted to change that mindset. He switched from playing defense to playing offense.

“So Reagan’s director of Central Intelligence, Williams Casey, asked the CIA’s Soviet Division two obvious questions: Where is the Soviet Union weak? and Where is it most vulnerable?” The surprising answer they received was “We don’t know. No one’s ever asked this before.”

Over the years, the CIA and other intelligence gathering agencies were able to gather lots of information about Soviet strengths (infantry divisions, nuclear missiles, tanks, submarines) but never collected information on Soviet weaknesses.

Meyer says that under Casey’s leadership, they refocused collection efforts and found all sorts of Soviet vulnerabilities. President Reagan used these weaknesses and vulnerabilities to put more pressure on the Kremlin. “Eight years later the Berlin Wall came down, and two years after that the Soviet Union ceased to exist.”

There is a lesson to be learned here. Sometimes the important information is out there but never collected because it doesn’t seem relevant to the intelligence gathering mindset the president or the bureaucracy might have.

Meyer says that intelligence work is like science. You don’t collect random information and hope that something will pop up. You need an informed view of the world and know what you want to accomplish.