Indeed, Moynihan felt, the CIA had done such a poor job in this area that he thought the Agency should be abolished. The CIA, in his view, had utterly failed to see how serious the USSR’s economic problems were, and he made that point over and over again. “For 40 years,” he wrote in 1990, “we have hugely overestimated both the size of the Soviet economy and its rate of growth. This in turn has persistently distorted our estimates of the Soviet threat—notably, in the 1980s when we turned ourselves into a debtor nation to pay for the arms to counter the threat of a nation whose home front, unbeknownst to us, was collapsing.”
Moynihan boasted later that year that he had been able to see as early as 1979 that “Soviet economic growth was coming to a halt,” and that “the society as well as the economy was sick.” “But our intelligence community,” he said, “just couldn’t believe this. They kept reporting that the economy was soaring!” In the public discussion, and to a certain extent even in the scholarly literature, such claims were treated as established fact.
“As the Bay of Pigs was to intelligence operations,” the columnist William Safire wrote in the New York Times in 1990, “the extended misreading of the Soviet economic debacle is to intelligence evaluation.” According to a 1992 article in the Wall Street Journal, the CIA’s track record “on the really big developments” was “hit-or-miss at best,” with “the downward spiral of the Soviet economy” counting as one of the “more spectacular misses.”
In 1994 a Newsweek columnist noted in passing that the CIA story was “one of repeated intelligence failures,” culminating in the “monumental miscalculation of the size of the Soviet economy, which the CIA judged to be three times as big as it really was.” And in 1995 the Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory asked rhetorically whether any government department had “goofed up more than the Central Intelligence Agency?” “Their most egregious and expensive blunder about the Soviet economy we are still paying for.”
