S E C T I O N X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X I 


PARTNERS

6

RONALD REAGAN, INTELLIGENCE, 

WILLIAM CASEY, AND CIA:

 A REAPPRAISAL

NICK DUJMOVIC

8

U.S. INTELLIGENCE ESTIMATES 

OF THE SOVIET COLLAPSE: 

REALITY AND PERCEPTION

BRUCE BERKOWITZ

21

WHAT SHOULD WE EXPECT 

FROM INTELLIGENCE?

 GREGORY TREVERTON

29

THE REAGAN COLD WAR 

TIMELINE, 1981-89

34

DECLASSIFIED INTELLIGENCE

 DOCUMENTS

36

SYMPOSIUM AGENDA AND 

SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES

65
6 RONALD REAGAN, INTELLIGENCE AND THE END OF THE COLD WAR PARTNERS 7 

The Historical Collections Division (HCD) of CIA’s Information Management Services is responsible for 

executing the Agency’s Historical Review Program. This program seeks to identify and declassify 

collections of documents that detail the Agency’s analysis and activities relating to historically 

significant topics and events. HCD’s goals include increasing the usability and accessibility of 

historical collections primarily by developing release events and partnerships to highlight each 

collection and make it available to the broadest audience possible. 

The mission of HCD is to:

• Promote an accurate, objective understanding of the information and intelligence that 

has helped shape the foundation of major US policy decisions. 

• Broaden access to lessons learned, presenting historical material to emphasize the scope 

and context of past actions.

• Improve current decision-making and analysis by facilitating refl ection on the impacts 

and effects arising from past decisions.

• Showcase CIA’s contributions to national security and provide the American public 

with valuable insight into the workings of its government.

• Demonstrate the CIA’s commitment to the Open Government Initiative and its three 

core values: Transparency, Participation, and Collaboration.

As one of eleven presidential libraries administered by the National 

Archives and Records Administration, the Reagan Library, under the 

Presidential Records Act, is the repository of presidential records for 

President Reagan’s administration. The Library’s holdings include over 60 

million pages of documents, over 1.6 million photographs, a half million 

feet of motion picture fi lm, tens of thousands of audio and video tape, and 

over 40,000 artifacts. The newly renovated Museum integrates hundreds of 

artifacts, over half never before seen, and dozens of interactive displays. 

These 18 new galleries pay tribute to America’s 40th president and his 

accomplishments by capturing his patriotic spirit, his respect for individual 

liberty, his belief in global democracy, and his support of economic opportunity. 

The History Staff in the CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence fosters 

understanding of the Agency’s history and its relationship to today’s intelligence challenges by communicating instructive historical insights to the 

CIA workforce, other US Government agencies, and the public. CIA historians research topics on all aspects of Agency activities and disseminate 

their knowledge through publications, courses, briefi ngs and Web-based 

products. They also work with other Intelligence Community historians on 

publication and education projects that highlight interagency approaches 

to intelligence issues. Lastly, the CIA History Staff conducts an ambitious 

program of oral history interviews that are invaluable for preserving 

institutional memories that are not captured in the documentary record.

H i s t o r i c a l C o l l e c t i o n 

Division

T h e R o n a l d R e a g a n 

Presidential Library

C e n t e r f o r t h e S t u d y 

of Intelligence
8 RONALD REAGAN, INTELLIGENCE AND THE END OF THE COLD WAR REAGAN’S USE OF INTELLIGENCE 9 

R O N A L D R E A G A N , 

I N T E L L I G E N C E , 

WILLIAM CASEY,

AND CIA: A REAPPRAISAL

Nick Dujmovic

Ronald Reagan became the 40th president of the United States more than 

thirty years ago, and ever since he stepped down to return to California eight 

years later, historians, political scientists, and pundits of all stripes have 

debated the meaning of his presidency. All modern presidents undergo 

reappraisal after their terms in offi ce. Dwight Eisenhower, for example, was 

long considered a sort of caretaker president who played a lot of golf but 

who was not very smart or capable; access to formerly closed administration 

records has changed the minds of historians, who generally consider him a 

president fully in charge of national policy, clear-minded, and even visionary.
10 RONALD REAGAN, INTELLIGENCE AND THE END OF THE COLD WAR REAGAN’S USE OF INTELLIGENCE 11 

Reagan has undergone a similar reappraisal. The old view, 

exemplifi ed by Clark Clifford’s famous characterization 

that Reagan was “an amiable dunce,” posited Reagan as a 

great communicator, to be sure, but one without substance, 

a former actor who knew the lines others wrote for him, but 

intellectually an empty suit. Many commentators, especially self-described political liberals, agreed with Norman 

Mailer’s view of Reagan as “the most ignorant president we 

ever had.” Gore Vidal joked that the Reagan Library burned 

down and “both books were lost”—including the one Reagan had not fi nished coloring.1 Even if these are extreme 

views, the perspective among many liberals, Democrats, 

even some Republicans, and most defi nitely public intellectuals (including historians) was that Reagan was never 

very intelligent, never very curious, and never read much; 

as president, he liked to watch movies and tell funny 

but pointless stories, delegated all hard choices, worked 

very little, and took lots of naps. If the Cold War largely 

ended on Reagan’s watch, and if he oversaw an economic 

recovery, he was just lucky. Reagan, in the old narrative, 

simply could not be the architect of anything positive that 

happened while he was president.

That perspective has changed forever and is marked by the 

continually improving regard historians have for Reagan. 

Whereas Reagan ranked 25th among US presidents in a 

1996 poll conducted by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., among 

fellow historians, in 2000 a bipartisan polling of scholars 

ranked Reagan eighth.2 Since 2001, the reappraisal 

really took off with the publication of Reagan’s voluminous 

personal and professional writings that demonstrate he 

was a voracious reader, a prolifi c and thoughtful writer, a 

fully engaged mind with a clear, reasoned, and consistent 

philosophy.3 More recently, scholarly analysis—some of it 

by former Reagan critics—of the Reagan administration 

record, including declassifi ed documents, makes a convincing case that the end of the Cold War and the demise 

of the Soviet Union were no accidents and that Reagan 

deserves credit for his national security policies that led 

to these developments.4 Finally, there are the illuminating 

Reagan diaries, which have persuaded many skeptics—including Iran-Contra prosecutor Arthur Liman—that Reagan 

was a thoughtful and capable president.5

L I N G E R I N G M Y T H O L O G Y A B O U T R E A G A N 

AS INTELLIGENCE CONSUMER

The earlier assessments of Reagan and the subsequent reappraisals should matter to CIA offi cers because they have 

implications for the history of the Agency and its work. If 

Reagan was a lightweight who read little, was disengaged 

from policy, and was ignorant about matters of statecraft 

and national security, there are implications about how CIA 

produced and presented its intelligence for the Chief Executive, how much that intelligence (and therefore CIA) mattered to the Reagan administration, and how the Agency 

might adjust its approach to another similarly intelligenceimpaired president. The lack of a scholarly reassessment of 

Reagan as a user of intelligence has led to the persistence 

of a series of assertions consistent with the earlier general 

view of Reagan but similarly in need of reappraisal. These 

assertions are in fact overlapping, self-supporting myths 

about Reagan and intelligence perpetuated by prominent 

writers about US intelligence. There are three such myths:

Reagan was profoundly ignorant of intelligence and never 

cared to learn much about it. He came to the presidency, 

according to the author of a recent and fl awed history of 

the Agency, knowing “little more about the CIA than what 

he had learned at the movies.” Others have seconded this 

view, including former Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) 

Stansfi eld Turner, who asserts that Reagan’s lack of interest 

in intelligence facilitated the unwarranted infl uence of DCI 

William Casey on the president and on policy.6

Reagan was not much of a reader of intelligence because 

he tended to read little of anything, especially material 

(like intelligence) with which he was not already familiar or 

interested in. Casey himself initially took this stance—saying to an aide, “If you can’t give it to him in one paragraph, 

forget it”—before he learned otherwise. Former DCI Turner 

says that Reagan paid little attention to CIA products like 

the President’s Daily Brief (PDB), citing Vice President 

George Bush’s statement that Reagan read intelligence 

only “at his leisure.”7 Others go so far as to assert that 

Reagan generally read no intelligence estimates or assessments of any kind; a highly regarded history of CIA’s work 

in Afghanistan from the Reagan years to the 9/11 attacks 

asserts that the Agency learned early that “Reagan was not 

much of a reader” and that detailed written intelligence 

“rarely reached his desk.”8 Variants on the theme that 

Reagan read little or no intelligence include the notion 

that Reagan’s PDB was unusually short (implicitly by the 

standards of other presidents) to encourage his reading 

it or that Reagan’s PDB was orally briefed to him so he 

would not have to read it.9

Because Reagan was not a reader, he preferred to watch 

intelligence videos and fi lms made for him in lieu of traditional printed intelligence products. This myth is supported 

by Reagan’s purported preference as a former career actor 

in fi lms and television and by the old perspective of Reagan’s simple-mindedness. One widely quoted intelligence 

scholar (a former CIA analyst) asserts that CIA managers 

made sure to give the president his intelligence in the 

form he preferred—images rather than text.10 Another 

sniffed that Reagan “wanted a show” instead of traditional 

printed reports, so he received “intelligence briefi ngs in 

video format in which predigested facts were arranged like 

decorations on a cake. . . a mode of presentation [that] 

blurred any distinction between fact and judgment, intelligence and advertising, reality and artist’s conception.”11

A recent (2009) study of intelligence analysis by a respected 

Washington think tank asserts that the PDB as prepared 

for Reagan conformed to his preferences, which were for 

“simple briefi ngs” and “audio-visual presentations.”12

them Reagan learned something about secret groups undertaking clandestine activities, the challenges of working 

against ideologically driven adversaries, and the value of 

intelligence sources with access (in this case, himself).15

Reagan lent his celebrity support during 1951 and 1952 

for the “Crusade for Freedom,” a fundraising campaign to 

benefi t Radio Free Europe (RFE). It remains unclear whether 

Reagan at the time knew he was participating in one of 

CIA’s most signifi cant Cold War infl uence programs. His 

involvement was sparked in September 1950, when Reagan, 

in his capacity as SAG president, wrote to the chairman 

of the Crusade for Freedom, retired general Lucius Clay, 

pledging the support of the more than 8,000 members 

of SAG: “We offer you our complete support in this great 

counter-offensive against Communist lies and treachery.” 

In his televised appeals, Reagan modestly introduced 

himself—he was a well known fi lm star at the time—and 

concluded by saying “The Crusade for Freedom is your 

chance, and mine, to fi ght Communism. Join today.” Reagan 

at the time might well have suspected US government 

involvement in the Crusade for Freedom, since its operating 

entity, the National Committee for a Free Europe, boasted 

Allen Dulles in its leadership (Dulles had not yet joined CIA 

but was well known as a former OSS spymaster). As a well 

connected Hollywood star, he could hardly have failed to 

notice when syndicated columnist Drew Pearson publicized 

the CIA backing of RFE in March 1953, or when another 

media personality, Fulton Lewis, attacked RFE’s CIA 

connection during 1957-58 in his radio shows and syndicated columns for King Features.16 Whether or not Reagan 

in the 1950s knew about CIA’s sponsorship of RFE, it 

probably would not have mattered to him, but in any case 

he would have found out when it was offi cially disclosed 

in 1971, after which it was publicly funded. Reagan never 

disavowed his participation in a covert “hearts and minds” 

operation that was consistent with his visceral anti-Communist beliefs, nor did he ever suggest he had been duped.

Reagan’s later emphasis on the importance of counterespionage as a vital pillar of intelligence stems in part from 

his time as governor of California from 1967 to 1975. 

Reagan had a cooperative, even warm relationship with the 

FBI, which opened a fi eld offi ce in Sacramento not long 

after Reagan was fi rst inaugurated. Reagan’s staff informed 

the Bureau that the Governor “would be grateful for any 

information [regarding] future demonstrations” at the 

Berkeley campus of the University of California—a major 

political challenge for Reagan at the time—and other types 

of “subversion.” Reagan sent a warm personal letter to FBI 

director J. Edgar Hoover praising the Bureau for its “continuing fi ght against crime and subversion” and pledging 

his help. At the bottom of the letter, Reagan wrote in his 

own hand, “P.S. I’ve just always felt better knowing your 

men are around.” Declassifi ed FBI documents show that 

Reagan received at least 19 discrete and credible threats 

against him during his eight years as governor, many of 

which were passed to him.17

These three Reagan intelligence myths are consistent with 

the old interpretation of Reagan the insubstantial president 

but directly confl ict with the more recent evidence that 

indicates Reagan was a capable and engaged Chief Executive. 

In any case, these myths persist, probably from a lack of 

published evidence specifi cally covering Reagan’s use of 

intelligence combined with a partisanship that blinds some 

intelligence writers to the facts that have come to light. 

This paper will present new intelligence-specifi c fi ndings 

on Reagan that will refute these myths.

R E A G A N ’ S U N D E R S TA N D I N G O F I N T E L L I G E N C E 

BEFORE HIS PRESIDENCY

Much—probably too much—has been made of Reagan’s 

acting career and its alleged infl uence on his substantive 

knowledge of intelligence and national security matters. 

Even the widely esteemed Professor Christopher Andrew of 

Cambridge University opens his otherwise superb discussion 

of US intelligence in the Reagan years with the observation 

that a third of the fi lms Reagan made in the late 1930s and 

early 1940s dealt with national security threats; Andrew 

considers especially telling the four “Brass Bancroft” fi lms 

in which Reagan starred as Secret Service Agent J-24. More 

signifi cant, however, was Reagan’s wartime service making 

fi lms for Army Air Corps intelligence, particularly those fi lms 

used for briefi ng pilots and bombardiers before their Pacifi c 

war missions. The intelligence unit to which Reagan was 

assigned used prewar photographs and intelligence reports 

to construct large scale models of targets, over which a moving 

camera would fi lm; Reagan would then record a narration 

telling the pilots and bombardiers what they were seeing and 

when to release their payloads.13 Reagan thereby had direct 

experience in the production of an overhead imagery product 

that had operational value.

The story of Reagan’s struggle with Hollywood’s leftists in 

the late 1940s is well known.14 After World War II, Reagan 

rose to the leadership of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), 

which was facing an attempted takeover by a stealth 

Communist faction and which had to deal with Communist-inspired labor unrest. Reagan successfully fought the 

attempts of the Communists to gain infl uence in SAG, 

and he persuaded union members to cross picket lines at 

Communist-organized studio strikes. He was threatened 

personally for his efforts—an anonymous caller warned he 

would have acid splashed into his face—and he acquired and 

started carrying a handgun. He became a secret informant 

for the FBI on suspected Communists and their activities, 

but publicly Reagan named no names and asserted that 

the fi lm industry could handle the problem itself without 

government intervention. These experiences are invariably 

described—apparently accurately, given Reagan’s subsequent 

move into politics—as hugely infl uential on a formerly politically naïve young actor, in particular by shaping his antiCommunist ideology. But these experiences were relevant 

also to Reagan’s understanding of intelligence. Through 
12 RONALD REAGAN, INTELLIGENCE AND THE END OF THE COLD WAR REAGAN’S USE OF INTELLIGENCE 13 

damentals and specifi cs of CIA’s missions, activities, and 

responsibilities as well as its organization, oversight, and 

legal and regulatory constraints.

In the immediate wake of his Commission experience, 

Reagan—who philosophically was suspicious of encroachments of the federal government on individual liberty—

enthusiastically defended the mission of intelligence in 

keeping the nation secure. As Congress continued its own 

investigations of US intelligence activities, Reagan publicly 

called for an end to ongoing congressional inquiries (the 

Senate’s Church Committee and the House’s Pike Committee 

investigations), saying that the Rockefeller Commission 

report satisfi ed the public’s need to know, that Congress 

was approaching the subject with “an open mouth and a 

closed mind,” and that further investigation would harm 

CIA’s ability “to protect the security of this country.”29

REAGAN’S DEVELOPING VIEWS ON INTELLIGENCE, 

1975-1979

Reagan put the knowledge he acquired from his membership on the Rockefeller Commission to good use during his 

“wilderness period” from January 1975, when he stepped 

down as California’s governor, to October 1979, as he was 

preparing to announce his candidacy for the Republican 

nomination for president. During this period, Reagan wrote 

and delivered hundreds of commentaries for his syndicated 

radio spot that ran fi ve days a week; he also drafted opinion 

pieces, private letters, and public remarks.30 In these 

writings, Reagan commented on a broad range of foreign, 

national security, and domestic topics, including intelligence 

and CIA. Early on, in a radio broadcast he titled “CIA Commission,” Reagan in August 1975 highlighted his service on 

the Rockefeller Commission and emphasized that, though 

instances of CIA domestic espionage were found, it did not 

constitute “massive” spying as reported in the media, the 

misdeeds were “scattered over a 28-year period,” and CIA 

had long ago corrected them. Reagan reiterated his concern 

that congressional investigations were assuming the character 

of “witch hunting” and threatened “inestimable harm” to 

CIA’s ability to gather intelligence. “There is no doubt,” 

Reagan warned, that intelligence sources worldwide “have 

been frightened into silence” and that CIA offi cer themselves 

were now less likely to take risks.31

The need for secrecy in intelligence and the potential harm 

of publicity is a frequent theme in Reagan’s writings and 

public statements during this period, frequently coupled 

with statements of enthusiasm for the work of US intelligence 

offi cers and of the overall need for a strong intelligence 

posture to protect US national security in a perilous world. 

Many of Reagan’s radio commentaries were mostly or entirely 

devoted to the subject of intelligence: “CIA Commission” 

(August 1975); “Secret Service” (October 1975); “Glomar 

Explorer” (November 1976); “Intelligence” (June 1977); 

“Spies” (April 1978); “Intelligence and the Media” (October 1978); “Counterintelligence” (January 1979); “CIA” 

the report.” Reagan, Gray said, played an important role in 

drafting the report: “I was surprised by how Ronald Reagan 

came up with a point of view and language that allowed the 

Commission, often divided on issues, to compromise.”25

Gray was not alone in his newfound appreciation for Reagan’s 

abilities. Wallison, at the time a “Rockefeller Republican” 

who initially shared his boss’s disdain for Reagan, quickly 

changed his mind: “As the commission began to draft its 

report . . . a contributing Reagan emerged. . . Rockefeller was 

not an analytical or critical thinker [and] was not able to offer 

much leadership in the actual drafting of the report.”26

For a while the commission seemed unable to 

develop a generally acceptable formulation of its 

views. As the discussions went on inconclusively, 

Reagan started to write on a yellow legal pad that he 

brought with him. At fi rst I thought he was simply 

taking notes. Then, on several occasions, when the 

discussion fl agged, he would say something like 

“How does this sound, fellas?” and would read 

aloud what he had written. His draft language was 

usually a succinct summary of the principal issues 

in the discussion and a sensible way to address 

them. Often, the commission found that they could 

agree with his proposal, which went directly into the 

report. . . Among a group of gifted and famous men, 

in the setting of the Commission on CIA Activities

in the United States, Reagan was a standout.

Wallison remembers his amazement that Reagan “was 

really able to digest a lot of very complicated stuff [and] 

to write it all down in a logical order, in a smoothly fl owing 

set of paragraphs that he then read off to the Commission 

members. It summarized for them and for all of the rest of 

us what we had heard.” This was so impressive, Wallison 

writes, because Reagan went beyond the understanding of 

complex issues to being capable of accurately describing 

them—“adopting actual words to describe these concepts 

can be quite diffi cult. . . if one’s understanding is limited, 

it is diffi cult to choose the right words. Having a suffi cient 

mastery of the subject matter to prescribe a solution is harder 

still. Reagan more than met these standards.” Wallison’s 

account is confi rmed by Commission member Douglas Dillon, 

a former Treasury secretary for Presidents Kennedy and 

Johnson, who recounted that Reagan’s intervention ended an 

“impasse” among the commissioners and who was surprised 

by the ease with which Reagan pulled it off.27

CIA’s critics and congressional Democrats have long derided 

the Rockefeller Commission’s fi ndings as a “whitewash,” 

but it was far from that. The report Reagan helped bring to 

life was critical of CIA. It described at length the domestic 

activities revealed by the New York Times and additionally 

uncovered a few other abuses for the fi rst time, such as the 

testing of LSD on unwitting Americans, one of whom had 

committed suicide.28 As a result of his membership on the 

Rockefeller Commission and his leading role in drafting its 

fi nal report, Reagan was well grounded on both the funsome meetings. Rockefeller accepted Reagan’s absences 

on the condition that he read the transcripts of the meetings 

he would miss. Reagan missed the next four meetings due 

to these previous commitments and because of the diffi culty 

commuting from California to Washington, where the 

Commission met. Following unfavorable media reports and 

critical editorials in February, Reagan offered to step down 

from the Commission, an offer Rockefeller refused, again 

on the basis of Reagan’s ability to read the transcripts.21

Reagan ended up attending eleven of the Commission’s 

26 sessions over the next six months, which irritated Rockefeller, who as a liberal Republican was a political rival of 

Reagan’s.22 According to Rockefeller’s counsel at the time, 

Peter Wallison, Rockefeller “regarded Reagan as a lightweight who was not taking his responsibilities seriously.” 

Scholarly critics ever since, when they mention Reagan’s 

participation in the Commission at all, point to his poor 

attendance record as evidence that Reagan was not very 

interested in CIA and intelligence.23

Testimony from participants and witnesses, however, paints 

a different picture. Reagan was not only substantively 

engaged, he emerged as a leader within the Commission. 

He did miss many meetings, especially in the beginning, 

but his absences were not due to lack of interest or ability. 

Former Commission staff counsel Marvin Gray remembers 

that “frankly, he didn’t miss very much in those fi rst 

stages. It wasn’t bad judgment on his part to miss those 

fi rst meetings, when we were just getting organized and before 

we really got started.” Wallison recounts that Reagan, when 

he attended, listened attentively to the proceedings. The 

Commission’s senior counsel, David Belin—who has been 

publicly critical of Reagan—has written that Reagan kept 

himself informed through his absences; Belin noted that 

“I was able to keep him advised on all key questions.” 

According to Belin, Reagan showed leadership in disagreeing with Rockefeller’s views on two issues: whether the 

Commission should investigate CIA assassination plots 

against foreign leaders, and whether the work of the Commission should be sealed from public access for fi ve years. 

Rockefeller opposed the fi rst and advocated the second. 

Reagan took the position that the Commission should look 

into assassination plots and opposed Rockefeller’s proposal 

for the fi ve-year moratorium. Reagan’s position on both 

issues infl uenced others on the Commission and became 

the majority view. On the matter of assassinations, the 

Commission ran out of time to conduct a full investigation, 

electing to transfer its materials on the subject to the 

President (who sent them to the ongoing Senate investigation 

known as the Church Committee), while Reagan’s view 

on openness helped lead to the June 1975 unclassifi ed 

publication of the Commission’s report.24

Testimony about the drafting of the report itself provides 

more insight into the question of Reagan’s understanding 

of complex issues such as intelligence. “Unlike other commissions where the commissioners merely sign off on what 

the staff has written,” Gray noted, “for the Rockefeller 

Commission the members were very involved in drafting 

Reagan’s tenure as governor also provided direct experience 

regarding classifi ed material and security clearances, since 

his duties included oversight of Lawrence Livermore National 

Laboratory—a national resource for nuclear research—which 

required Reagan to hold a “Q” clearance granted by the 

Atomic Energy Commission.18

T H E R O C K E F E L L E R C O M M I S S I O N , 

JANUARY – JUNE 1975

Reagan’s most formative and direct pre-presidential experience of CIA and intelligence undoubtedly was his participation in 1975 as a member of the President’s Commission on 

CIA Activities within the United States, better known informally as the Rockefeller Commission after its chairman, Vice 

President of the United States Nelson Rockefeller. President 

Gerald Ford created the commission on 4 January 1975 

to investigate allegations, published in the New York Times 

the previous month, that the Agency had illegally spied on 

domestic groups, especially the anti-war movement, during 

the presidencies of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. 

Reagan at the time was within days of stepping down after 

two terms as governor, and he was named along with a 

bipartisan mix of career public servants that included former 

cabinet secretaries, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of 

Staff, and leaders in labor and education. The White House, 

in announcing the appointments, noted that the eight members (including Rockefeller) were chosen because they were 

respected citizens with no previous connections with CIA—

though certainly most had some knowledge of intelligence.19

The FBI in January 1975 interviewed dozens of Reagan’s 

friends, associates, colleagues, and others pursuant to 

its background investigation of Reagan before he could 

participate on the Rockefeller Commission. Documents from 

Reagan’s FBI fi le indicates that almost all those interviewed 

highly recommended Reagan for the position, praising his 

intelligence, loyalty, honor, and dedication, but there were 

a few exceptions, mostly among Reagan’s former political 

rivals. Jesse Unruh, the former speaker of the California 

Assembly (whom Reagan had defeated in his reelection 

campaign in 1970) considered Reagan unqualifi ed for any 

government position because of his lack of “compassion” 

for people; former California governor Edmund “Pat” Brown 

said that Reagan was “out of touch with the common man” 

and that his “overemphasis” on security and law enforcement 

“would raise a question of possible bias in favor of the CIA”; 

US Senator Alan Cranston challenged Reagan’s capabilities 

for the position on the grounds that he was” insuffi ciently 

concerned about civil liberties.” None of Reagan’s critics, 

however, expressed the opinion that he was ignorant 

about intelligence.20

At the Commission’s fi rst meeting in the Vice President’s 

offi ce on 13 January 1975, Reagan informed Rockefeller 

that his busy schedule—booked full over several months 

with speaking engagements and taping sessions for his 

radio commentaries—meant that he would have to miss 
14 RONALD REAGAN, INTELLIGENCE AND THE END OF THE COLD WAR REAGAN’S USE OF INTELLIGENCE 15 

was responsible for keeping the President informed on 

national security and foreign affairs, and Reagan kept 

doing his “homework.”41

Reagan also took the initiative when it came to his 

intelligence reading. In addition to the tasking DCI Casey 

would give to the DI for analysis of interest to the President, 

Reagan himself would occasionally commission an intelligence assessment, as when he requested an interagency 

perspective on foreign involvement in Grenada after the US 

military’s operation there in October 1983.42 More often, 

however, Reagan would request specifi c reports from a menu 

of options placed before him. Beginning early in his administration, the PDB—generally the Saturday book—would 

contain an extra page titled “Selected Reports,” by which 

CIA provided titles and brief summaries of intelligence 

analysis that CIA had published the previous week and that 

were available in full if desired. Of the fi ve to seven reports 

listed, Reagan often would select one to three full reports 

by circling the item or placing a check mark next to it, or 

both, and writing something like “order for me, please.” On 

one “Selects” page in September 1982, Reagan marked a 

particular report with the words, “Send me another copy.” It 

is not known why he needed another copy, but the 11-page 

report he wanted (again) was not light reading but was rather 

a rather complicated treatment of a subtle technical point 

regarding an arms control matter.43

Thus far the evidence for Reagan as a reader of intelligence 

has been indirect because it is not in the nature of printed 

text on paper to reveal what particular eyes read it—the act 

of reading itself leaves no traces. Reagan, however, often 

would initial papers that he had read, perhaps as a personal 

way of keeping track of his progress working through a pile 

of “homework,” or perhaps as a signal to aides that he had 

done the reading they had requested. In any case, we 

have several examples of Reagan’s initialing intelligence 

products, sometimes also writing the date he had read the 

material (sometimes also a secretary would also stamp the 

document “The President has seen”). Reagan initialed, for 

example, Richard Allen’s cover memo on a special NIE that 

explained how Soviet military strength was largely dependent 

on Western trade; Allen had called this estimate to the President’s attention as “extremely important.” Likewise, Reagan 

initialed Robert McFarlane’s cover memo on CIA’s fi rst major 

assessment of Gorbachev in June 1985. The initials “RR” are 

prominent on the cover of an NIE on China provided to him in 

October 1983 and on a Soviet strategic nuclear NIE in April 

1985. We also have two of the monthly global threat updates 

from the NIC, from December 1984 and January 1985, 

that Reagan initialed and dated.44 These are a handful of 

examples scattered over a few years, to be sure, but they were 

found—and could only be found—by happenstance. There is 

no discrete collection of, and no way to specifi cally search 

for, intelligence products—classifi ed or declassifi ed—with 

Reagan’s distinctive “RR” inscribed thereon. These limitations suggest that the examples found thus far of Reagan’s 

reading and initialing intelligence are not isolated instances 

but indicative of a frequent practice of his.

PRESIDENT REAGAN AS AN INTELLIGENCE CONSUMER

Reagan’s inner circle decided to end CIA’s direct daily 

briefi ng of the President after the inauguration in favor 

of a briefi ng by his national security advisor and selected 

staff—a briefi ng that would include the PDB but without a 

CIA offi cer present.37 This deprived the Agency of further 

direct observation of Reagan’s reading intelligence as 

President, so we have to turn to other evidence to ascertain 

the degree to which Reagan read intelligence.

There is much indirect evidence that Reagan habitually 

read intelligence analysis from CIA. The fact that CIA 

reports of current interest to the administration were often 

routed to “PDB Principals”—including the President—indicates this material went to him, and DCI Casey often 

would attach personal cover notes to Reagan on reports

he thought the President should read, which suggests 

Casey had reason to believe Reagan read them.38 It is reasonable to assume that Reagan read CIA reports relevant 

to current policy issues. National security advisors would 

request from CIA—often directly through the DCI—analysis 

on relevant issues specifi cally for the President’s reading, 

and often ahead of a major policy decision. For example, 

a CIA assessment emphasizing Nicaragua’s importance to 

Moscow’s aim to increase its infl uence in Latin America 

at the expense of the United States was disseminated just 

days before Reagan signed a new covert action fi nding on 

1 December 1986 authorizing CIA to “conduct paramilitary 

operations against Nicaragua.”39 White House policy meetings of the NSC or the smaller National Security Policy 

Group (NSPG), over which Reagan also presided, were often 

preceded by distribution of relevant intelligence reports 

that served as the basis of discussion, for example, on the 

Soviet Union’s reliance on Western trade, the Siberian oil 

pipeline, or the status of Soviet ballistic missile defenses.40

Senior members of Reagan’s administration also have 

recounted that the President read and took seriously daily 

intelligence reports as well as longer intelligence assessments such as National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs). Former 

Secretary of State George Shultz, former presidential 

counselor Edwin Meese, former national security advisor 

Richard Allen, and former NSC senior staffer Richard Pipes 

have stated that Reagan regularly read and wanted to read 

intelligence assessments. Another former national security 

advisor, Robert McFarlane, recalls that Reagan enthusiastically read and marked up intelligence documents, and 

even recommended them to senior administration offi cials. 

Allen regularly prepared, as he put it, a “weekend reading 

assignment” on national security and foreign policy issues 

for the President to read at Camp David or on trips, and the 

package included intelligence assessments Allen selected 

for him. Reagan faithfully and regularly worked through the 

thick stack of his “homework,” as his diary entries call his 

after-hours and weekend reading—Allen said Reagan read 

it all—to the point that Nancy Reagan told the President’s 

aide Michael Deaver that the reading should be cut back 

at least 75 percent. Allen refused, saying he, not Deaver, 

nor read much of it. Proponents of this view (see footnotes 

6-9) ignore or are unaccountably unaware of the unclassifi ed 1997 Studies in Intelligence article on the subject, 

prepared by the PDB briefers for the President-elect, Richard 

Kerr and Peter Dixon Davis.34 Kerr and Davis recount that 

senior CIA offi cials had low expectations of Reagan as 

a reader of intelligence, given his lack of foreign policy 

experience and the presumption that his mind was made 

up on many issues, but even so they boldly asked George 

H.W. Bush, the Vice President-elect and former DCI, to 

urge Reagan to accept daily briefi ngs while he remained in 

California before the inauguration. Bush used his infl uence 

and CIA experience to make the case, Reagan agreed, and 

the briefi ngs were arranged.

Kerr and Davis’s article deals mostly with the process and 

logistical challenges in getting the PDB to the Presidentelect in California, but it also reveals a Reagan who was, 

contrary to the persistent stereotype, a careful, studious, and 

diligent reader of intelligence, who went over intelligence 

items “deliberately and with considerable concentration,” 

who asked questions and “showed no impatience or disdain 

with analysis that presented a different view” from his 

own; “the door seemed to be open to new ideas, even if 

they were not welcome or necessarily accepted.” Because 

of Reagan’s “willingness and patience in reading items,” 

Kerr and Davis were frank in pointing out where the factual 

basis of an article was weak or the analysis was superfi cial. 

For his part, Reagan expressed particular interest in, and 

asked more questions about, certain subjects of high priority 

to him, particularly on Middle East issues and the Iran 

hostage situation: “he absorbed whatever raw and fi nished 

intelligence we were able to offer on the subject.”35

CIA records confi rm this public account and enhance 

the picture of a President-elect deeply engaged with the 

global issues of the day that the Agency covered.36 Reagan 

showed particular interest in reports of Soviet consumer 

frustration and economic troubles, especially in agriculture; 

he was “very interested and attentive” to strategic arms 

control issues; he showed “keen interest” in reporting on 

foreign leaders’ attitudes and plans regarding the incoming 

administration; he was “very interested in and somewhat 

concerned over” Soviet strategic weapons capabilities and 

deployments, as well as the Polish situation. A typical 

observation was “Reagan read through the book slowly and 

carefully, clearly very interested, concerned, and receptive 

to material” that included additional background papers on 

selected countries and issues, often sparked by Reagan’s 

questions. On feeding Reagan supplementary reports, Davis 

once commented “What a willing customer!” Briefi ngs 

did not occur every day due to the competing demands 

placed on the President-elect’s time and attention, but 

when there was a gap between briefi ngs, Reagan carefully 

read the PDBs he had missed. In all, Reagan received 27 

CIA briefi ngs between 22 November 1980 and 14 January 

1981, more than half the working days of that period, which 

included major holidays.

(March 1979). Many more touched on intelligence subjects, 

sometimes to make a broader political point, sometimes for 

their own sake. Americans have more to fear, Reagan often 

said, from domestic regulatory agencies like the Internal 

Revenue Service and the Occupational Safety and Health 

Administration than from intelligence agencies like CIA 

or the FBI. The threat from Soviet expansionism, terror, and 

domestic subversion required robust US capabilities in intelligence collection—Reagan highlighted the need for human 

and technical collection alike—as well as in counterintelligence. Addressing well publicized intelligence issues of the 

1970s, Reagan advocated allowing journalists to volunteer 

as intelligence sources but declared “the US should not be 

involved in assassination plots.” He strongly favored covert 

action programs that might lead to freedom for people living 

under Communist regimes, and he supported FBI surveillance 

and infi ltration of domestic extremist groups. Not leaving any 

major intelligence function untreated, Reagan cited intelligence analysis to inform his radio audience of the threat from 

the North Korean military or from Soviet strategic weapons. 

He even praised liaison relationships for the intelligence 

they could provide while US agencies were “hamstrung” 

by investigations.32

Beginning in 1977, Reagan began to increase his public 

advocacy for the work of US intelligence agencies as he 

stepped up his criticism of President Jimmy Carter, who had 

called CIA one of the three “national disgraces” (along with 

Vietnam and Watergate) during his presidential campaign. 

Reagan had supported George H.W. Bush when President 

Ford had nominated him as DCI in early 1976, and a year 

later Reagan declared that Bush should remain DCI because of his success in rebuilding CIA’s morale. Reagan was 

reportedly horrifi ed at Carter’s nomination of former Kennedy 

speechwriter Ted Sorensen as DCI. “We need someone who 

would be devoted to an effective CIA” and who recognizes 

the danger posed by the Soviet military buildup so that the 

US would not be “fl ying blind in a dangerous world.” “Let’s 

stop the sniping and the propaganda and the historical 

revisionism,” Reagan said, “and let the CIA and other

intelligence agencies do their job.”33

The evidence of Reagan’s pre-presidential experiences 

demonstrate that the man elected in November 1980 to 

be the 40th President of the United States had a broad 

knowledge of and deep appreciation for intelligence and 

CIA and that he had refl ected on the wide range of intelligence issues, including its proper missions and activities.

T H E T R A N S I T I O N P E R I O D : R E A G A N A S F I R S T 

CUSTOMER-ELECT

In addition to the record of Reagan’s pre-presidential 

knowledge of intelligence issues, CIA’s experience with 

Ronald Reagan during the three-month period between 

the election of 1980 and his inauguration undermines the 

myth that Reagan was neither interested in intelligence 
16 RONALD REAGAN, INTELLIGENCE AND THE END OF THE COLD WAR REAGAN’S USE OF INTELLIGENCE 17 

exaggerate the signifi cance of the video intelligence Reagan 

consumed, especially compared with the great quantities of 

printed intelligence he read. If Reagan watched every single 

video prepared for him during his presidency, he would have 

watched an average of one video every two months.

A fi nal problem for the proponents of the view that Reagan 

or his advisors expected or demanded videos for the President is the fact that the impetus came from CIA, not from 

the White House. CIA suggested to the White House in the 

summer of 1981 that the videos, already in production 

as an in-house effort, might be helpful for Reagan. With 

DCI William Casey’s approval and support, the fi rst video 

for Reagan was delivered in September 1981.52 Feedback 

from the White House was invariably good, and there 

were increasing requests for more videos from around the 

Reagan administration, but the production schedule and 

limited resources dictated that CIA produce videos almost 

exclusively on subjects of interest to the President.

CONCLUSIONS

The view that Reagan was not a reader but at best a casual 

watcher of intelligence has been perpetuated by political 

conservatives and liberals, Democrats and Republicans 

alike. That view is not consistent with the general reappraisal of Reagan’s intellectual abilities as evidenced by 

new scholarship over the past decade, but it has persisted. 

Logic and evidence, rather than political bias or personal 

opinion, paint a different picture. Logic would support the 

notion that Reagan, whom recent scholarship has established 

as an enthusiastic reader, was also a reader of intelligence, 

and new evidence presented herein has confi rmed as myths 

the perceptions that Reagan was ignorant of intelligence, read 

little of it, and consumed it primarily in video form.

The record regarding Reagan’s pre-presidential experiences 

as an actor, union leader, state governor, and especially as a 

member of the fi rst high-level investigation of CIA (the Rockefeller Commission) indicates that these experiences gave 

the future president a background in and an understanding 

of many areas of intelligence, including espionage, secrecy, 

oversight and necessary safeguards, and the law. As a prolifi c 

radio commentator in the 1970s, Reagan refl ected and 

propounded on intelligence issues of the day, particularly 

on the balance between democratic values and intelligence 

operations, the value of espionage and counterintelligence 

in the Cold War, and the damage to intelligence operations 

and CIA morale stemming from leaks, media exaggerations, 

and an overly intrusive Congress more interested in civil 

liberties than national security. The preponderance of direct 

and indirect evidence, beginning with detailed observations 

of Reagan’s reading of the PDB as president-elect, conclusively demonstrates that he was an engaged and appreciative 

“First Customer” of intelligence who carefully read and used 

what he learned from intelligence products.

state, Reagan summed up the fi gures himself and wrote 

“5000 SOVIETS” in the margin. On a graphic of a Soviet 

mobile missile launcher, he scrawled “SCUD.” Reagan also 

considered policy issues when reading the PDB. At a time 

when his administration was following developments in 

a certain country undergoing political and social upheaval 

while his NSC was discussing policy alternatives, Reagan 

circled a relevant item on that country and wrote “This may 

become an incident suffi cient to” and then spelled out 

a particular policy option.

In one case, Reagan demonstrated how closely he read 

his intelligence by catching a mistake on the part of the 

PDB editor. He was reading a two-page Article on Soviet 

arms control. In the fourth paragraph on the fi rst page, the 

analysis said “The Soviets believe” so and so. In the middle 

of the second page, another country’s leaders were said to 

believe the same thing, “unlike the Soviets.” Reagan wrote, 

“Is this a misprint? See previous page.” He then underlined 

both passages. From my personal experience editing the 

PDB, this must have been horrifying for the PDB editorial 

staff. It is one thing to discover after the fact that a contradiction has made it into the President’s book, but for the 

President himself to point out the mistake must have been 

professionally scandalous. Perhaps the discomfort of CIA 

editors, however, would be exceeded by the confusion 

of those intelligence scholars and other writers who assert 

that Reagan did not pay much attention to intelligence.

WHAT HAPPENED TO ALL OF REAGAN’S VIDEOS

The recurrent myth about Reagan’s reliance on videos for 

his consumption of intelligence can fi nally be laid to rest. 

I requested a search for all videos produced from 1981 

through 1988, and I spoke with the offi cer, now retired, 

who supervised the unit producing those videos during 

1981-86. There are no PDB videos because none were 

made. A daily or even a weekly PDB video would have been 

impossible, given the minimum production time of three to 

four weeks for each video. At that time, daily short deadline 

productions were out of the question.

Although PDB videos were never made, a number of CIA 

video presentations were made specifi cally for Reagan. 

There is no doubt that Reagan found these intelligence 

videos useful. On one occasion, Reagan recorded in his 

diary watching “a classifi ed fi lm” on a particular leader: 

“These fi lms are good preparation. . . They give you a sense 

of having met him before.” Three of the intelligence videos 

are scene-setters or advanced travelogues for presidential 

trips, including side travel by Mrs. Reagan, but the majority 

by far were substantive and issue-specifi c. Reagan indicated 

how much he appreciated these videos when he recorded 

his viewing of one on 14 October 1982: “Back at the W.H. 

saw a 20 min. C.I.A. movie on the Soviet Space Prog[ram]. 

They are much further ahead than most people realize and 

their main effort has been military.”51 But no one should 

words or more, not 700 or 800. My personal observation as 

a former PDB editor during 1997-2000 is that the PDBs 

prepared for Ronald Reagan in the 1980s were very much 

alike in format and length to those I helped prepare for 

President Bill Clinton in the late 1990s.

But did Reagan provide tangible evidence of his reading 

the PDB? Robert Kimmitt, though he believes Reagan read 

the PDB, says there is no proof because Reagan did not 

write anything on it.49 Kimmitt’s impression is incorrect, for 

the review of the PDBs produced for Reagan shows that he 

did in fact write or mark upon it, but not as frequently as 

might be expected (or hoped)—less than ten percent of the 

time. Asked about the relative lack of presidential markings 

on Reagan’s copy of the PDB, Richard Allen revealed that 

he advised Reagan not to write on it:

Early on, I suggested the President not write on the 

PDB too frequently, as I did not know precisely who 

would be assessing his particular copy. . . It would 

not have been too clever to push down into any 

bureaucracy, mine [i.e. the NSC staff] or yours [CIA], 

any comments that could be quoted by status seekers, 

leakers, or for any other purpose.

Even so, Allen recounted that he was “sure” that Reagan 

did write occasionally on the PDB, as he had requested 

Reagan to indicate which PDB articles were of particular 

interest and which should be followed by tasking for 

additional analysis.50

Reagan did write occasionally on his copy of the PDB in often 

illuminating ways—they are sporadic but telling. The range 

includes everything from check marks to complete sentences. 

Most frequently, Reagan used a whole gamut of “non-verbal 

reader’s marks” that confi rm what CIA’s pre-inaugural PDB 

briefers found—that he was a careful, interested reader. The 

underlining, brackets (and double brackets), circling of items, 

and exclamation points (sometimes two or three) are marks 

of a reader, not a briefer (who would underline or highlight 

key sentences, as Allen and his successor William Clark did 

intermittently), and comparison with Reagan’s distinctive 

writing indicates they are in his hand.

Reagan would write words on his PDB to express different 

things. Sometimes he indicated his desire for more analysis 

with “And?” at the end of a paragraph. On one piece that 

concluded with a summary of CIA’s collection efforts on 

the problem, he wrote “but what else?” Reagan mused on 

whether a particular country would violate an arms control 

treaty by writing “breakout?” on an article covering the issue.

On occasion Reagan would tell CIA how he liked his intelligence presented. Items in the PDB normally ended with 

a horizontal line across the page. Once, when the line was 

omitted, Reagan drew it in and wrote, “I like line after item 

ends.” More often, however, Reagan was reacting to the 

substance of the intelligence provided. On a piece describing the movement of Soviet military forces to a client 

REAGAN AND THE PDB

No such limitations hindered research into Reagan’s 

reading of the PDB. Then as now, the President’s copy 

of the PDB was returned, with extremely rare exceptions, 

to CIA, where it was fi led and archived. If Reagan read 

the PDB, and if he marked it as a reader, we should have 

the evidence. As it turns out, that evidence exists, but 

interpreting it requires context.

That Reagan read the PDB regularly is established by those 

who served him closely. Richard Allen says that Reagan 

read the PDB “nearly every day,” and Edwin Meese said 

the President read the PDB “assiduously.” George Shultz 

disliked CIA analysis but read the PDB every day because 

he knew the President was reading it.45 Robert Kimmitt, 

an NSC staffer during the Reagan administration (and 

later Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs), helped 

prepare the daily package of the PDB and other national 

security readings for Reagan. In an interview with CIA’s 

Center for the Study of Intelligence, Kimmitt was asked 

about Reagan and the PDB.

My view is that he probably read the PDB pagefor-page, word-for-word every day. Because I can 

just think of so many occasions when issues would 

come up, that he would be on top of, that you 

could only have done it if you’d been keeping up 

with developments. . . whatever the sort of common 

knowledge is about President Reagan—his intelligence, his attentiveness, and all the rest—he was 

the most incredible listener, and fact and information 

absorber, I ever viewed at that level.46

I was able to review the President’s copy of the PDB for 

each day it was published from January 1981 through 

April 1984, about forty percent of his presidency, or about 

one thousand PDBs. The fi rst conclusion one can draw 

is that this is a lot of intelligence reading. This body of 

intelligence that his closest advisors say he read regularly 

consists of upwards of 10,000 pages just for this period,

or some 25,000 cumulative pages of daily intelligence 

reading for Reagan’s entire presidency.47

The second conclusion is that the individual PDBs prepared 

for Reagan were not thin, as some suggest. Christopher 

Andrew, in his otherwise indispensable For the President’s 

Eyes Only (1995), suggests Reagan was not much of a reader. 

Citing an “unattributable interview” with a “senior CIA 

analyst,” Andrew says the typical PDB for Reagan comprised 

four 150-word main stories plus “a few shorter pieces and 

the occasional anecdote,” giving the impression that Reagan 

could not bother to read more than 700 or 800 words in his 

daily intelligence report.48

If one reviews an actual “typical PDB” prepared for Reagan, 

however, the picture is quite different. A typical PDB for 

President Reagan actually comprised about 1600 to 1800 
18 RONALD REAGAN, INTELLIGENCE AND THE END OF THE COLD WAR REAGAN’S USE OF INTELLIGENCE 19 

he interrupted us, saying in effect that he already 

understood all that. And he did. Apropos the relationship of the DCI to the President, he said, “You 

understand, I call him Ron.”53

The phrase “I call him Ron”54 summarizes the Agency’s 

preferred thesis about this period—that CIA mattered 

in the 1980s largely because its director, William Casey, 

had a close friendship and an unprecedented infl uence 

with the President, manifested in his status as the fi rst 

DCI with Cabinet rank, which Casey emphasized in his

appearances before Agency employees.55 It certainly was 

the impression of many senior CIA offi cials that, as one 

of them put it, “[Casey’s] relationship with Ronald Reagan 

couldn’t have been closer. . . It was clear to me that there 

was a very personal, a very close tie between those two 

men.”56 This perspective is reinforced by outside assessments; one historian of the period called Casey “perhaps 

the most infl uential man in the Reagan cabinet after the 

president.”57 The author of a CIA history highly regarded 

within the Agency said that Casey was “much more than 

just a director . . . he personally gave the CIA access to 

the president. In short, he was the most important thing 

about the agency.”58

But was he? How valid is the perspective that Casey 

himself was the reason for CIA’s renewed prominence 

during the Reagan years? Did Casey overstate his access 

to and intimacy with Ronald Reagan, or at least did he 

consciously fail to correct the impression at CIA that such 

a relationship existed? Casey’s biographer Joseph Persico 

has documented that Casey early in his life freely embellished 

the level or degree of his access or infl uence. In 1940, for 

example, Casey, a young economic analyst and writer at 

the time, provided free market proposals to the presidential 

campaign of Thomas E. Dewey, a candidate for the Republican nomination, after which Casey claimed on his résumé 

that he had been a “tax and fi scal advisor” to Dewey. 

After Wendell Willkie defeated Dewey for the Republican 

nomination, Casey provided the same ideas to the Willkie 

campaign in the form of proposed language for speeches—

becoming in his curriculum vitae a “Willkie speechwriter 

in the 1940 presidential campaign.” While Persico’s point 

is to portend the various controversies in Casey’s later 

career —especially as DCI—that stemmed from Casey’s 

arguably casual regard for the truth, it does seem more 

specifi cally that Casey was predisposed to overstate his 

relationship with Ronald Reagan.

That Casey did not have the relationship he touted is the 

assessment of Robert Gates, who was executive assistant 

to Casey in 1981-82, head of the Directorate of Intelligence 

(DI) in 1982-86, and then Casey’s Deputy DCI. In a 1994 

interview, Gates said

I probably spent more time with Casey than anybody 

else in the Agency, and I just never had the sense that 

he had what I would call a close personal relationship 

APPENDIX

WILLIAM CASEY AND RONALD REAGAN: HOW CLOSE?

Because Casey is central to Ronald Reagan’s war 

against the Soviet Union, understanding him and 

the part he played at CIA is critically important.

Robert Gates, From the Shadows (1996), p. 199.

Every organization—be it family, tribe, nation, or intelligence 

service—has its lore, its mythology, its memory of How Things 

Were and Came to Be. These received historical narratives 

can be problematic for the historian, who tries to understand 

and interpret for others the past as it was and on its own 

terms—not, for example, bringing a “present-mindedness” 

into historical inquiry that judges the past by the knowledge, 

standards or sensibilities of the present. Inevitably, however, 

the received narrative is often a mixture of the demonstrably 

true, the uncertain, the dubious, and the patently false—

and the boundaries of all these categories constantly shift, 

thanks to the penchant of historians toward revisionism, 

re-revisionism, ad infi nitum. Far from being fi xed, the past 

is never over, it seems.

At CIA, there is an enduring internal narrative about the 

1980s, specifi cally the years 1981 through 1986, when 

the Agency was led by Reagan’s fi rst DCI, William Casey. 

The “Reagan-Casey” years are understood as a time of 

resurgence for CIA, a second “Golden Age” for the Agency 

(the fi rst was the Eisenhower-Dulles period, when CIA made 

a name for itself fi ghting the early Cold War). In the renewed 

and rejuvenated CIA of this narrative, CIA’s relevance is 

reasserted after a diffi cult period for the Agency known 

as the Time of Troubles: the press revelations, scandals, 

and congressional investigations of the 1970s, combined 

with Jimmy Carter’s perceived disdain for CIA as evidenced 

by the Carter administration’s budget and personnel cuts 

under one of CIA’s most disliked directors, Stansfi eld Turner. 

From an insider’s perspective, the 1970s were a disaster. 

A CIA offi cer at the time with twenty years’ service had 

joined in the Agency’s heyday (during the fi rst so-called 

Golden Age) but now saw an organization under siege.

Agency offi cers widely believe that William Casey gets the 

credit for resurrecting CIA with expanded resources and a 

renewed mission, thanks to his personal relationship, even 

intimate friendship, with the President. Casey, after all, 

had been Reagan’s campaign manager, saving a bankrupt 

and dysfunctional primary campaign for “the Gipper” and 

overseeing the contest through to Reagan’s electoral 

victory. Casey played up his closeness to Ronald Reagan, 

as expressed in this excerpt from an interview with Richard 

Lehman, a senior offi cer in the Directorate of Intelligence:

Just after Christmas [1980] DCI-designate Bill 

Casey called Bruce [Clarke, the Deputy Director 

for Intelligence] and me in for a get-to-know-you 

session. We prepared the standard briefi ng, but 

What are the lessons from this history for CIA offi cers? First, 

the conventional wisdom about presidents and intelligence 

may not be correct. Regarding any particular president’s 

engagement with intelligence, it is better to rely more on 

observation than on hearsay. Second, during the transition 

period it may help to research the president-elect’s background to determine what he or she actually understands 

about intelligence and how that person likes to receive 

information. This might help us to avoid surprises either 

pleasant—as in Reagan’s case when he exceeded CIA’s low 

expectations of him and the Agency learned that he was 

open to receiving a lot of intelligence material—or not so 

pleasant, if a future president-elect’s background suggests 

an unfamiliarity or even hostility toward CIA’s products 

(Richard Nixon comes to mind). Third, the true record gives 

us potential answers if we are asked by a future administration to deal with fi nished intelligence “like you did with 

Reagan.” If CIA is ever asked, for example, to produce 

a daily intelligence video briefi ng like those provided for 

Reagan, the Agency—independent of its capability and 

will to do so at that time—can respond with “Actually, sir, 

that’s a myth, and here are the data.” Finally, it always 

is preferable to have the true picture about CIA’s interactions with any president, for the Agency’s infl uence, its 

missions, and the morale of its employees depend on that 

vital relationship. 
20 RONALD REAGAN, INTELLIGENCE AND THE END OF THE COLD WAR U.S. INTELLIGENCE ESTIMATES OF THE SOVIET COLLAPSE: REALITY AND PERCEPTION 21 

calls with the President in 1982 also dropped from the 

previous year, to four. The DCI’s schedule for 1983 indicates 

he met privately with Reagan fi ve times that year and had 

ten phone calls—up slightly from the preceding two years.63

There is other evidence that in subsequent years Casey’s 

individual meetings with Reagan and his telephone calls 

with him remained in low single digit fi gures.64

Curiously, especially because during the 1980 campaign 

Casey had believed that Reagan was capable of absorbing 

only a paragraph of text at one sitting, after the inauguration 

Casey began sending detailed and lengthy letters to the 

President on topics such as progress in rebuilding US intelligence capabilities, Soviet espionage, and arms talks and 

US-Soviet relations. These seem to have become longer 

and more frequent as time went on, perhaps to compensate 

for fewer personal meetings.65

Contrary to the conventional wisdom at CIA, it does not 

appear that the Agency’s fortunes and infl uence during 

the Reagan administration rested entirely or even mostly 

on a close personal relationship between the DCI and 

the President. It is far more likely that CIA was infl uential 

because it served a President who understood intelligence 

and its importance, who appreciated how it would help him 

in policy decisions, and who appreciated the product CIA 

provided. These factors would have obtained for almost 

anyone Reagan chose to lead CIA. As it happened, he chose 

William Casey as a way to reward him for his crucial role 

in the campaign and because of his conservative views, 

particularly on foreign policy, that Reagan shared. History 

is not a science in that we can ever “run the experiment 

again,” but it is fascinating to speculate that CIA might not 

have been worse off, and perhaps could have been better 

off, with someone other than Casey as DCI.

[with Reagan]. I think that his relationship with the 

president was in a considerable way a distant one.59

Gates explained this perspective more fully in his 

1996 memoir:

I always believed that Bill Casey’s closeness to Ronald 

Reagan was exaggerated. I think the relationship 

was closest in the fi rst months of the administration, 

while there was still a genuine sense of gratitude 

on Reagan’s part for Casey’s management of the 

presidential campaign. . . Over time, however, their 

contacts grew less frequent. . . He could always 

get in to see the President when he wanted to, and 

could reach him on the phone, but he did so less 

and less as time passed.60

Preliminary research into DCI records confi rms Gates’s 

impression.61 DCI daily schedules for calendar year 1981—

the fi rst eleven months of the fi rst Reagan term—show 

that, while Casey as a Cabinet member saw President Reagan 

quite often at the White House as part of larger groups, he 

had surprisingly few personal meetings with Reagan. Starting 

with the fi rst meeting of Reagan’s NSC on 6 February 1981, 

through the end of December Casey attended at least 33 

such meetings, 18 meetings of the National Security Policy 

Group (a subset of the NSC that dealt with policy toward 

the Soviet bloc and also intelligence activities), and 17 

Cabinet meetings (often combined with a working lunch), 

for a total of 68 large-group White House meetings—an 

average of one every four days—not to mention an additional 

twelve White House social functions at which Casey and 

Reagan were both present. Casey may have sought to give 

the impression internally at CIA that many of his frequent 

trips to the White House were private visits with the President; 

Casey’s schedule for 5 October, for example, lists “Lunch 

with the President,” while Reagan’s diary indicates it was 

lunch for 29 people.62

Casey’s schedule for 1981, however, indicates he met alone 

with Reagan during this period only four times, or less than 

once every twelve weeks. In addition, he had six telephone 

conversations with the President. This is not the schedule 

of a man with a tremendously personal relationship with 

Ronald Reagan. Gates’s impression that Casey’s interactions with the President were most numerous in the fi rst 

year (a view consistent with the fact that one of Casey’s few 

close allies in the White House was Richard Allen, Reagan’s 

national security advisor, who lasted just a year) is supported 

by a review of Casey’s daily schedule for 1982. Casey in the 

second year of the Reagan administration saw the President 

in 54 large-group meetings (i.e. NSC, Cabinet, NSPG, down 

from 68 in 1981) and 5 small-group meetings; only three 

times did he meet with Reagan alone. Casey’s telephone 

Note: The footnotes for this article are not included here for reasons 

of space. The full version, with footnotes, can be found on the DVD.

U S I N T E L L I G E N C E 

E S T I M A T E S O F T H E 

SOVIET COLLAPSE:

REALITY AND PERCEPTION

Bruce D. Berkowitz

A commonly held belief is that the United States Intelligence Community (IC) 

failed to anticipate the collapse of the Soviet Union. Indeed, many of the U.S. 

offi cials who received intelligence about the Soviet Union, its decline in the late 

1970s and 1980s, and its fi nal crises in the 1989–1991 period, believe to this 

day that they were not warned—that they were, in effect, ‘‘blindsided.’’
22 RONALD REAGAN, INTELLIGENCE AND THE END OF THE COLD WAR U.S. INTELLIGENCE ESTIMATES OF THE SOVIET COLLAPSE: REALITY AND PERCEPTION 23 

This is odd, because the documented record shows that 

the Intelligence Community performed much better than 

most people seem to think. Indeed, this record suggests 

that U.S. intelligence provided about as good a product 

as one could reasonably expect. It detected the slowdown

in the Soviet economy; it noted that the Soviet leadership 

was running out of options to save the country; it stipulated 

a set of conditions that might signal the crisis had reached

a tipping point; and it notifi ed top U.S. leaders when these 

conditions were met.

So these facts raise two questions: Why do so many people 

think the Intelligence Community failed? And why do many 

of the U.S. offi cials who were professional consumers of 

this intelligence still feel that they were not adequately 

warned? The nature of these questions should be noted 

before answers can be proffered.

In part, the questions are not about empirical realities, but 

about perceptions of those realities. To use a photography 

metaphor, the questions ask not about the ‘‘picture’’ out 

there, but about the ‘‘camera’’ in human heads. As such, 

the questions are not asking about the external conditions 

that produce surprise, but rather, the collective cognitive 

architecture of surprise. Put another way, leaders usually 

do not ‘‘get’’ blindsided; they blindside themselves by how 

they perceive intelligence, by the mental hurdles intelligence 

must surmount before it can change their perceptions, and 

in the constraints that limit their ability to act on information.

The questions are also about wishful thinking. Deep down, 

offi cials seem to want intelligence to make decisions for 

them, when, in reality, it rarely can.

THE RECORD, ON BACKGROUND

In 1995 Jeffrey T. Richelson brought to my attention 

several intelligence assessments and National Intelligence 

Estimates (NIEs) that had been declassifi ed and cited in 

a study that Kirsten Lundberg carried out for the Kennedy 

School at Harvard.1 Richelson, a scholar at the National 

Security Archive, is one of the most frequent users of the 

Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), and has over the years 

assembled an extensive database of declassifi ed, leaked, 

and offi cially released intelligence products. When Richelson 

saw the citations in the Kennedy School study, he requested 

the documents under FOIA.

Richelson realized that these assessments were at odds 

with the popular conception that the Intelligence Community had failed to anticipate the collapse of the Soviet 

Union. The documents, since supplemented by others 

published by the CIA’s Center for the Study of Intelligence, 

provide a factual basis for evaluating the IC’s record. 

Richelson and I agreed to develop our own assessment 

of the U.S. Intelligence Community’s performance, and to 

consider how the distorted views of its Soviet analyses had 

developed. We interviewed most of the offi cials who participated in developing the analysis and several of the key 

consumers who served in the White House under President 

George H. W. Bush.2

We concluded that the performance of the U.S. Intelligence 

Community in anticipating the decline and collapse of the 

Soviet Union was generally good and sometimes outstanding. 

The Intelligence Community faced three basic tasks:

• First, analysts had to detect the overall slowdown of 

the Soviet economy and assess the underlying political, 

economic, and demographic factors that would make 

it diffi cult, if not impossible, for the Soviets to recover. 

This long-range analytical task had a time frame of 

approximately fi ve to ten years, partly because that is 

the length of time such tidal socioeconomic changes 

require, and also because that encompasses several 

U.S. electoral cycles. This long-range warning gives 

elected offi cials time to reshape U.S. strategy and the 

electorate time to absorb and (perhaps) support it.

• Second, the Intelligence Community had to detect 

shorter-range trends that could plausibly lead to a 

crisis in Soviet politics and trigger collapse. Analysts 

had to postulate plausible scenarios and, as the 

Soviet Union drew closer to a crisis state, compare 

the probability of one scenario with another. This kind 

of warning, with a one-to-fi ve-year time frame, permits 

a President to make signifi cant adjustments during his 

term. The challenge here was partly one of imagination, 

and partly one of understanding how to weigh the various political and economic factors that would determine 

the outcome.

• Third, the IC had to warn U.S. offi cials when the 

Soviet collapse was imminent and the fi nal endgame 

under way. The time frame for this task was a year or 

less. Analysts had to postulate specifi c ‘‘gates’’ that 

developments would need to pass through for the 

endgame to be triggered and then determine whether 

those gates had been passed.

Each task required an increasing level of specifi city and, 

by extension, that there were three opportunities in which 

U.S. intelligence analysts could fail. These levels of warning 

are also interrelated. If analysts and offi cials are unaware of 

strategic changes in their adversary, they are less likely to 

succeed at tactical warning, and if they have failed the tactical 

problem, they will more likely be unprepared for the task 

of immediate warning.

LONG-RANGE WARNING

The challenge of anticipating the Soviet collapse was even 

greater for U.S. intelligence because the very notion of collapse was inconsistent with the thinking of most Western 

analysts and scholars. The prevailing view up to the late 

1970s was that the Soviet Union would evolve, not collapse. True, some Sovietologists had long believed that a 

multiethnic, nondemocratic state dependent on a centrally 

planned economy was inherently unstable. Indeed, that 

was the assumption upon which containment was based.3

But hardly any of these scholars were willing to hazard a 

time frame for a Soviet implosion. So their views were more 

of a theory than an intelligence estimate. 

But by the mid-1970s there were growing signs that 

the Soviet economy and political system had ingrained, 

systemic problems. In the Intelligence Community, this 

economic slowdown was a basic underlying assumption 

for most intelligence analyses of the Soviet Union from 

the mid-1970s onward. Up to then, assessments often 

cited problems in the Soviet economy such as agricultural 

shortfalls and competition for resources and manufacturing 

capacity. After this point, the general understanding was 

that the Soviet Union as a whole was stagnating or declining 

economically, and that this slowdown would have profound 

political effects.

The main disagreement within the Intelligence Community 

was about how severe the effects of economic stagnation 

might be and how the Soviets would deal with them. The 

CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) took different approaches to measuring gross domestic product. In 

addition, while the CIA believed the economic slowdown 

might hinder the Soviet military buildup, the DIA believed 

that the continuing evidence of a military buildup illustrated 

that the Soviets were determined to outpace the United 

States despite economic constraints.

But hardly anyone in the IC—especially the CIA—argued 

that the Soviets were in great shape, despite what some 

critics of the Agency might suggest today. For example, 

in July 1977, the CIA reported the following:

The Soviet economy faces serious strains in the 

decade ahead. The simple growth formula upon 

which the economy has relied for more than a generation—maximum inputs of labor and capital—will no 

longer yield the sizeable annual growth which has 

provided resources needed for competing claims. 

. . . Reduced growth, as is foreshadowed over the 

next decade, will make pursuit of these objectives 

much more diffi cult, and pose hard choices for the 

leadership, which can have a major impact on Soviet 

relations with Eastern Europe and the West.4

This assessment of a stagnating Soviet economy was, in 

turn, refl ected in U.S. national strategy. Presidential Directive 18, which defi ned U.S. national strategy in the Carter 

administration, said that, ‘‘though successfully acquiring 

military power matching the United States, the Soviet Union 

continues to face major internal economic and national 

diffi culties, and externally it has few genuinely committed 

allies while lately suffering setbacks in its relations with 

China, parts of Africa, and India.’’5

The Reagan administration went a step further by arguing 

that the United States could take advantage of these 

weaknesses and, through a planned, integrated strategy, 

accelerate the metamorphosis of the Communist regime. 

The resulting policy was a combination of economic pressure (through an arms race and trade sanctions) and political and military pressure (by supporting opponents of the 

Soviets and their allies in Eastern Europe, Latin America, 

and especially Afghanistan). According to National Security 

Decision Directive 32, U.S. goals were to ‘‘foster, if possible in concert with our allies, restraint in Soviet military 

spending, discourage Soviet adventurism, and weaken 

the Soviet alliance system by forcing the USSR to bear 

the brunt of its economic shortcomings, and to encourage 

long-term liberalizing and nationalist tendencies within the 

Soviet Union and allied countries.’’6

In the late 1970s, though, before he became President, 

not even Ronald Reagan was willing to propose that the 

Soviet Union was on a course to collapse. In his speeches 

and essays during this period, Reagan was fully prepared to 
24 RONALD REAGAN, INTELLIGENCE AND THE END OF THE COLD WAR U.S. INTELLIGENCE ESTIMATES OF THE SOVIET COLLAPSE: REALITY AND PERCEPTION 25 

argue that the Soviet Union was evil, and that its economy 

was ineffi cient and unable to sustain itself indefi nitely. But 

he was not ready to say that it was on a course to collapse 

or that U.S. policy could accelerate this collapse. Reagan 

did not make those statements until after he entered 

offi ce, specifi cally in his June 1982 address to the British 

Parliament, and his March 1983 speech to the National 

Association of Evangelicals.7

If the documentary record is clear, then why do so many 

people believe that the Intelligence Community failed to 

detect the Soviet Union’s social and economic problems 

in the late 1970s?

One reason may have been that, at the time, the Soviet Union 

seemed ascendant. It had matched and even surpassed 

the United States in several measures of military capability, 

such as numbers of intercontinental ballistic missiles. It had 

expanded its infl uence through military cooperation treaties 

with clients in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The popular 

media (and the Intelligence Community) duly reported these 

events, and so the zeitgeist was that the Soviets were strong, 

and the United States was stuck in malaise. Since American 

offi cials did not effectively challenge this view in public, 

Americans logically concluded later that this refl ected the 

intelligence they were reading.

Besides, nothing was inevitable about a Soviet collapse 

in the late 1970s. At that point, many outcomes were 

possible. A more ruthless leader might have held the state 

together for another ten or fi fteen years; witness Alexander 

Lukashenko in Belarus and Kim Jong-Il in North Korea. A 

more fl exible leader might have managed a ‘‘soft landing’’ 

for the Soviet Communist Party; witness the current situation 

in China. To provide a more defi nitive estimate fi fteen years 

before the fact was impossible because the future was not 

yet certain. It never is.

INTERMEDIATE AND IMMEDIATE WARNING

By the early 1980s, the faltering Soviet economy was a given, 

the assumed context within which the Intelligence Community viewed Soviet political and military developments. 

For example, in 1985, as Mikhail Gorbachev took control, the 

National Intelligence Estimate on the Soviet domestic scene 

encapsulated the fundamental weaknesses in the Soviet state. 

It did not yet say that the conditions for collapse were present, 

but it explained how such a path was possible:

The growth of the Soviet economy has been systematically decelerating since the 1950s as a consequence 

of dwindling supplies of new labor, the increasing 

cost of raw material inputs, and the constraints on 

factor productivity improvement imposed by the rigidities of the planning and management system. . . .

The USSR is affl icted with a complex of domestic 

maladies that seriously worsened in the late 1970s 

and early 1980s. Their alleviation is one of the 

most signifi cant and diffi cult challenges facing 

the Gorbachev regime. . . . 

Over the next fi ve years, and for the foreseeable 

future, the troubles of the society will not present 

a challenge to the system of political control that 

guarantees Kremlin rule, nor will they threaten the 

economy with collapse. But, during the rest of the 

1980s and well beyond, the domestic affairs of the 

USSR will be dominated by the efforts of the regime 

to grapple with these manifold problems. . . . 

Gorbachev has achieved an upswing in the mood 

of the Soviet elite and populace. But the prospects 

for his strategy over the next fi ve years are mixed at 

best. . . .8

It is noteworthy that the forecasting horizon of the 1985 

NIE was fi ve years—normal for an NIE—and that the Soviet 

collapse occurred just beyond that horizon. But it was still 

premature in 1985 for a defi nitive forecast. As the Soviet 

situation got progressively worse, so did the prognosis by 

the Intelligence Community. By spring 1989—more than 

two years before the attempted coup that led to the ultimate collapse of the regime—the IC was telling U.S. leaders 

that the situation was essentially irretrievable and that a 

catastrophic end (from the Soviet leadership’s point of view) 

was possible. The 1989 NIE said: ‘‘It will be very diffi cult for 

[Gorbachev] to achieve his goals. In the extreme, his policies 

and political power could be undermined and the political 

stability of the Soviet system could be fundamentally threatened. . . . [A]nxiety, fear, and anger [of the Soviet political 

elite] could still crystallize in an attempted coup, legal 

removal of Gorbachev, or even assassination.’’9

In April 1991 the Offi ce of Soviet Analysis (SOVA), the 

offi ce within the Directorate of Intelligence that followed 

developments in the USSR, told U.S. leaders explicitly 

that the Soviet Union was in a state of crisis, offered a 

poor prognosis, and spelled out specifi c scenarios in which 

the regime could implode. In a memo titled, ‘‘The Soviet 

Cauldron,’’ SOVA’s director wrote,

The economy is in a downward spiral with no end in 

sight . . . infl ation was about 20 percent at the end 

of last year and will be at least double that this year 

. . . reliance on a top-down approach to problems, 

particularly in regard to republics, has generated 

a war of laws between various levels of power and 

created a legal mess to match the economic mess. 

. . . In this situation of growing chaos, explosive 

events have become increasingly possible.10

The memo then went on to describe possible outcomes, 

which included the assassination of Gorbachev or Boris 

Yeltsin, or a coup by ‘‘reactionary leaders who judge that 

the last chance to act had come’’—which is, of course, 

exactly what later occurred.

Did the Intelligence Community provide immediate warning 

of the coup that triggered the fi nal events of 1991? George 

W. H. Bush recalls in his memoirs:

Besides the coup rumors in July, which Gorbachev 

had dismissed, there had been some recent indication that the hard-liners in Moscow might be up to 

something. On Saturday morning, August 17, Bob 

Gates had joined me at breakfast where we went 

over the Presidential Daily Briefi ng. In it was a report that the prospective signing of the Union treaty 

meant that time was running out for the hard-liners 

and they might feel compelled to act. Bob thought 

the threat was serious, although we had no specifi c 

information on what might happen or when. The 

next day the plotters struck.11

Robert M. Gates, then deputy national security advisor, 

and soon to become Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), 

and currently Secretary of Defense, recalled the same 

briefi ng this way:

CIA warned us at the White House that once the signing date [for the Union treaty] was set a deadline of 

sorts would be established for the conservatives to act. 

The changes that would follow signature, together with 

public sentiment, would make action after that date 

much more diffi cult. . . . [I]t fell to me on August 17 

to hand the President his CIA President’s Daily Brief, 

which warned of the strong chance that the conservatives would act within the next few days. It said, ‘‘The 

danger is growing that hardliners will precipitate largescale violence’’ and described their efforts to prepare 

for an attempt to seize power. . . . [Bush] asked me if 

I thought the situation was serious and if the Agency’s 

warning was valid. I explained the meaning of the 

August 20 signing ceremony, and said I thought 

he should take the PDB warning quite seriously.12

Note how Bush and Gates score this event differently, 

even though they basically agree on the facts. Gates believes he gave Bush warning because the CIA had previously 

established the prerequisite conditions for there to be a coup, 

and he says that the President’s daily briefi ng for 17 August 

indicated that those conditions were present. Bush wanted 

to know whether any specifi c datum indicated what might 

happen or when, but Gates had no such specifi c datum.

These two different slants on the same material suggest 

just how controversial an assessment of whether one was 

‘‘blindsided’’ can be, and they also highlight exactly where, 

if anywhere, the Intelligence Community fell short. To 

reach this last step in anticipating the Soviet collapse, 

the CIA would have needed fi rst-hand information from the 

plotters themselves. Analysis alone can never fi ll that kind 

of gap, if only because an analysis is at best a probability 

assessment necessarily based on inference and deduction. 

The key datum that was lacking was, as Bush put it, the 

‘‘specifi c information on what might happen or when.’’ 

This was a very tough piece of information to collect. 

Even Gorbachev lacked it, obviously.

THE PERSISTENT MYTH—WHY?

All in all, this is a good record. So why has the Intelligence 

Community’s performance been so underappreciated, and 

why do offi cials to this day believe they were poorly served? 

What collective cognitive architecture explains the gap between the record and the perceptions, then and ever since?

One key reason is that the written record remained classifi ed for several years after the Soviet Union disintegrated. 

Even when the most important documents, the National 

Intelligence Estimates, were declassifi ed, they were initially 

not made widely available. Without being able to point 

to specifi c documents that presented the Intelligence 

Community’s consensus, the idea that the IC was caught 

fl at-footed took root by default. 
26 RONALD REAGAN, INTELLIGENCE AND THE END OF THE COLD WAR U.S. INTELLIGENCE ESTIMATES OF THE SOVIET COLLAPSE: REALITY AND PERCEPTION 27 

One example shows how such an information vacuum can 

be perpetuated into a ‘‘truth’’ with major effects. In 1991, 

former Director of Central Intelligence Stansfi eld Turner 

published an article on the general topic of the future of intelligence. In one passage, Turner cited the apparent failure of 

the Intelligence Community to anticipate the Soviet collapse:

We should not gloss over the enormity of this failure 

to forecast the magnitude of the Soviet crisis. We 

know now that there were many Soviet academics, 

economists and political thinkers, other than those 

offi cially presented to us by the Soviet government, 

who understood long before 1980 that the Soviet 

economic system was broken and that it was only a 

matter of time before someone had to try to repair it, 

as had Khrushchev. Yet I never heard a suggestion 

from the CIA, or the intelligence arms of the departments of defense or state, that numerous Soviets 

recognized a growing, systemic economic problem. 

. . . Today we hear some revisionist rumblings that 

the CIA did in fact see the Soviet collapse emerging 

after all. If some individual CIA analysts were more 

prescient than the corporate view, their ideas were 

fi ltered out in the bureaucratic process; and it is 

the corporate view that counts because that is what 

reaches the president and his advisers. On this one, 

the corporate view missed by a mile. . . . Why were 

so many of us so insensitive to the inevitable?13

This quotation has been repeated many times. It is usually 

portrayed as a mea culpa from a former head of the U.S. 

Intelligence Community, seemingly acknowledging that 

the community had failed to anticipate the Soviet collapse. 

However, it requires some parsing.

When Turner said he ‘‘never heard a suggestion’’ of a 

systemic weakness of the Soviet system, he was referring 

to the period he served as DCI, 1977– 1981. Also, when 

he criticized ‘‘revisionist rumblings’’ claiming the CIA did 

anticipate the collapse, neither the intelligence assessments reporting the Soviet decline in the 1980s nor the 

policy directives they supported had yet been released.

In reality, both the opinion of ‘‘individual CIA analysts,’’ 

such as the director of SOVA, and the ‘‘corporate view’’ 

expressed in NIEs, concluded that the Soviet Union was in 

decline throughout the 1980s. These views were reaching 

the President and, as indicated earlier, were incorporated 

into presidential directives. But this paper trail was not 

made public until four years after Turner wrote. Indeed, 

the inherent problems and the decline of the Soviet 

economy had become the working assumption on which 

U.S. intelligence was based by the time Turner left offi ce.

Nevertheless, this single quotation by Turner was cited 

repeatedly and written into the public record. Most notably, 

the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D, NY) referred 

to it during the confi rmation hearing of Robert Gates to 

be Director of Central Intelligence in 1991; included it 

in the 1996 report of the Commission on Protecting and 

Reducing Government Secrecy, which he chaired; cited it 

in Secrecy: The American Experience, a book he published 

in 1988; repeated it in an interview on The NewsHour with 

Jim Lehrer in 1998; mentioned it in his farewell speech 

to the U.S. Senate in 2002; and quoted it in his commencement address at Harvard in 2003. During this entire 

period, however, one is unable to fi nd a single instance 

in which Moynihan quotes from an actual intelligence 

publication, such as those declassifi ed in the early 1990s. 

Even when Moynihan submitted a bill in 1995 to abolish 

the CIA, he introduced the bill with a speech on the Senate 

fl oor that again claimed the Intelligence Community had 

failed to anticipate the Soviet collapse—and that again 

offered as its only evidence the aforementioned Turner 

quotation.14 Despite its paucity of actual evidence, the 

impact of Moynihan’s proposal was signifi cant. It was 

(along with reaction to the Aldrich Ames espionage affair 

and concerns over the performance of intelligence in the 

First Gulf War) responsible for the establishment of the 

Aspin-Brown Commission and the contentious intelligence 

reforms of 1996.15

Squaring the documented record with Turner’s comment 

from 1991 is diffi cult. Perhaps Turner simply was unaware 

of the mainstream opinion of the Intelligence Community 

in the 1980s, after he left offi ce. Even more diffi cult is the 

reconciliation of the views of anyone who did have access 

to intelligence and still believes that the CIA and other 

agencies failed to provide warning. But this is precisely 

what the phenomenon of being blindsided is all about. 

The perception of being warned becomes separated from 

the reality of the warning that was provided. The best to 

be said is that this may be a problem more appropriately 

examined in the discipline of psychology, rather than in 

history or political science.

Those who criticize the IC’s assessment of the Soviet 

Union often get caught up in details, faulting it on specifi c 

fi ndings that were secondary to the larger picture it was 

painting. In the early 1980s, the CIA believed the Soviet 

gross domestic product was growing at about two percent 

annually. Today we know that its economic growth was 

essentially nonexistent. But the CIA was not trying to make 

the case that the Soviet Union was growing; as indicated, 

the two percent growth estimate refl ected a conclusion 

that, after remarkable growth in the 1950s and 1960s, 

the Soviet economy was grinding to a halt. The growth 

estimates were based on a modeling process that was 

controversial even at the time, and should not divert 

attention from the key judgments that summarized the 

Intelligence Community’s bedrock views—that the Soviet 

Union was in trouble.

WHY DO OFFICIALS FEEL III-SERVED?

One interesting feature about the controversies over the 

Soviet collapse is that some offi cials who had read the 

intelligence and understood full well what it said still 

believe they were, in some important sense, surprised when 

the end came. When Gorbachev was toppled, it seemed as 

though the Bush 41 administration was not prepared to 

respond. Some critics wondered why Bush had not moved 

earlier to embrace Yeltsin, who ultimately prevailed. Would 

better intelligence have made a difference?

The fi rst President Bush described the warning presented 

to him as too limited for taking action. But his diary entry 

on 19 August 1991 suggests that more factors were in play 

than just this intelligence report. Refl ecting on the day’s 

events, Bush wrote:

[T] he questions for the most part were okay; [such 

as] ‘‘Why were you surprised?’’ There will be a lot of 

talking heads analyzing the policy, but in my view 

this totally vindicates our policy of trying to stay with 

Gorbachev. If we had pulled the rug out from under 

Gorbachev and swung toward Yeltsin you’d have seen 

a military crackdown far in excess of the ugliness 

that’s taking place now. I’m convinced of that. I think 

what we must do is see that the progress made under 

Gorbachev is not turned around.16

In other words, the Bush administration—despite receiving 

and acknowledging that conditions were ripe for a coup—

believed it had no option other than to stick with Gorbachev. 

This was a judgment based less on intelligence information

or the lack thereof than on the administration’s policy 

objectives. The administration’s goals were established 

by National Security Directive 23, which Bush signed on 

22 September 1989:

Our policy is not designed to help a particular 

leader or set of leaders in the Soviet Union. We 

seek, instead, fundamental alterations in Soviet 

military force structure, institutions, and practices 

which can only be reversed at great cost, economically and politically, to the Soviet Union. If we 

succeed, the ground for cooperation will widen, 

while that for confl ict narrows. The U.S.–Soviet 

relationship may still be fundamentally competitive, 

but it will be less militarized and safer. . . . U.S. 

policy will encourage fundamental political and 

economic reform, including freely contested elections, in East-Central Europe, so that states in that 

region may once again be productive members of 

a prosperous, peaceful, and democratic Europe, 

whole and free of fear of Soviet intervention.17

In short, the Bush administration did not intend to destabilize the Soviet Union (though it did envision the breakup 

of the Warsaw Pact). This is a subtle, but signifi cant, 

difference from the policy of the Reagan administration, 

which said that the United States would seek to exploit 

fi ssures within the Warsaw Pact and the weakness of the 

Soviet economy. The Bush administration, in contrast, 

aimed to use economic pressure as a means to encourage 

the existing regime to moderate. National Security Directive 

23 said:

The purpose of our forces is not to put pressure on a 

weak Soviet economy or to seek military superiority. 

Rather, U.S. policy recognizes the need to provide 

a hedge against uncertain long-term developments 

in the Soviet Union and to impress upon the Soviet 

leadership the wisdom of pursuing a responsible 

course. . . . Where possible, the United States 

should promote Western values and ideas within the 

Soviet Union, not in the spirit of provocation or destabilization, but as a means to lay a fi rm foundation 

for a cooperative relationship.
28 RONALD REAGAN, INTELLIGENCE AND THE END OF THE COLD WAR WHAT SHOULD WE EXPECT FROM INTELLIGENCE? 29 

Note that the directive says ‘‘impress upon the Soviet 

leadership [emphasis added]’’—meaning that the U.S. 

leadership expected the Soviet regime to remain in place 

as the directive was implemented. The Reagan administration’s view was different, as expressed in President Reagan’s 

address to the British Parliament on 8 June 1982:

I have discussed on other occasions . . . the 

elements of Western policies toward the Soviet 

Union to safeguard our interests and protect the 

peace. What I am describing now is a plan and a 

hope for the long term—the march of freedom and 

democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the 

ash-heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which 

stifl e the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of 

the people.18

In other words, the Reagan administration might not have 

sought the collapse of the Soviet regime, but it envisioned 

that the regime would fall, and thus would have been less 

surprised by the collapse. Signifi cantly, the Reagan policy 

was adopted before Gorbachev rose to power and provided, 

in the words of Great Britain’s then–Prime Minister, Margaret 

Thatcher, someone with whom ‘‘we can do business.’’ Had 

there been a third Reagan administration, it might have 

come to resemble the Bush administration as it adjusted 

to changes in Soviet realities.

In any event, the Bush policy was predicated on continuing 

to deal with the Soviet regime. So when the regime collapsed, 

as Bush recalled, the natural tendency was for observers to 

ask if the administration had been caught unaware. Apparently it was, but if so, that was not because of an intelligence failure, but rather the result of an intentional policy 

decision to support Gorbachev to the end.

Note: The footnotes for this article are not included here for reasons 

of space. The full version, with footnotes, can be found on the DVD.

W H A T S H O U L D 

W E E X P E C T O F 

INTELLIGENCE?

When I ran the process that produced America’s National Intelligence Estimates 

(NIEs), I took comfort when I was told that predictions of continuity beat any 

weather forecaster– if it was fi ne, predict fi ne weather until it rained, then predict 

rain until it turned fi ne. I mused, if those forecasters, replete with data, theory and 

history, can’t predict the weather, how can they expect us to predict a complicated 

human event like the collapse of the Soviet Union? The question behind the musing 

was what should people expect of their intelligence agencies? Not what they’d 

like, for policymakers would like perfect prescience if not omniscience, though 

they know they can have neither.

Gregor y F. Treverton

THE REAL THING

Americans know what an actual intelligence failure looks 

like. Recall, for example, the August 1978 assessment 

by the CIA that ‘‘Iran is not in a revolutionary or even a 

pre-revolutionary state,’’ six months before the Shah fell.19

Or more recently, the October 2002 NIE, which said that, 

‘‘in the view of most agencies, Baghdad is reconstituting its 

nuclear weapons program.’’20 Analysts lose sleep over these 

kinds of statements because, despite the cliche ́ about 

coordinated intelligence refl ecting the lowest common denominator, a hallmark of American intelligence analysis is 

the constant pressure to publish clear, defi nitive statements. 

So when the analysis is wrong, it is apt to be clearly wrong.

Conversely, when it is correct, it is clearly correct. Only the 

most convoluted reasoning can turn the summaries and key 

judgments of the Intelligence Community’s analysis of the 

Soviet Union in the 1980s into a case that the IC ‘‘missed’’ 

the Soviet collapse.

Holding intelligence organizations accountable for their 

performance is important. But acknowledging when intelligence is successful is equally important. So, too, is 

appreciating the differences between an intelligence failure 

and policy frailties whose sources lie elsewhere. Without an 

understanding that such things can happen, being blindsided 

in the future is certain.
30 RONALD REAGAN, INTELLIGENCE AND THE END OF THE COLD WAR WHAT SHOULD WE EXPECT FROM INTELLIGENCE? 31 

THE POWER OF “STORY”

Reasonably, expectations should differ across different intelligence problems. But start with that hoary Soviet case: 

should intelligence services have done better in foreseeing 

the end of the Soviet Union? After all, the premise of the 

West’s containment strategy was that if Soviet expansion 

were contained, eventually the empire would collapse from 

its own internal contradictions. So some monitoring of how 

that policy was doing would have seemed appropriate.

In retrospect, there were signs aplenty of a sick society. 

Emigrés arrived with tales of Soviet toasters that were 

as likely to catch fi re as to brown bread. The legendary 

demographer, Murray Feshbach, came back to Washington 

in the mid-1970s with a raft of Soviet demographics, most 

of which, like male life expectancy, were going in the wrong 

direction for a rich country. These factoids were puzzling, 

but we rationalized the fi rst on the grounds that the Soviet 

defense industry was special and apart from ordinary Soviet 

industry; the second we dismissed with “Russians drink 

too much” or some such. Emmanuel Todd did Feshbach 

one better and turned the demographic numbers into a 

prediction of the Soviet Union’s collapse. But he suffered 

the double misfortune of not only being, but also writing 

in French, and so was not likely to make much of a dent

in offi cial Washington.

Intelligence is about creating and adjusting stories – or so 

it has come to seem to me in a career as a producer and 

consumer of intelligence – and in the 1970s and into the 

1980s, the story in the heads of policymakers was Soviet 

expansion abroad, not disintegration at home. Thus, those 

Feshbach statistics were just curious factoids. The Soviet 

invasion of Afghanistan, the Evil Empire and “star wars” 

were still in the future. Imagine an intelligence offi cer who 

had tried to explain to the newly elected Ronald Reagan that 

the Soviet problem he faced was not power but impending 

collapse. That analyst would soon have found himself counting Soviet submarines in the Aleutian Islands. Questions not 

asked or stories not imagined by policy are not likely to be 

answered or developed by intelligence.

The best point prediction of Soviet implosion I have seen 

was a slightly whimsical piece written by the British 

columnist, Bernard Levin, in September 1977. He got 

the process exactly right: change would come not from the 

bottom but from the top, from Soviet leaders who “are in 

every respect model Soviet functionaries. Or rather, in every 

respect but one: they have admitted the truth about their 

country to themselves, and have vowed, also to themselves, 

to do something about it.” Levin didn’t get the motivation 

of the high-level revolutionaries right – he imagined a 

deep-seated lust for freedom, rather than concern over 

the stagnating Soviet economy – but at least he had a 

story. For the sake of convenience, he picked the 200th 

anniversary of the French revolution as the date – July 

14, 1989.

Closer to the end, CIA assessments were on the mark but 

still lacked for a story. The Agency had been pointing to a 

chronic slowdown in the Soviet economy since the 1970s, 

and a 1981 report was blunt: “The Soviet pattern in many 

respects conforms to that of a less developed country. 

There is remarkably little progress toward a more modern 

pattern.” By 1982, CIA assessments concluded that Soviet 

defense spending had stopped growing, and the next year 

revised their previous assessments, concluding that defense spending had tailed off beginning in 1976.

Interestingly, those who could imagine the story didn’t 

believe it could be true. Unlike Levin, they did not believe 

the Soviet Union could be reformed from the top. And in 

that they turned out to be right. The director of America’s 

eavesdroppers, the National Security Agency, Lt. Gen. 

William Odom wrote in 1987 that the Mikhail Gorbachev’s 

program, if followed to its logical conclusion, would lead 

to Gorbachev’s political suicide and the collapse of the 

system. Because this did not seem what Gorbachev had 

in mind, he and others, including Robert Gates, then the 

Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, concluded that 

Gorbachev could not intend to do what he said he would.

In fact, the Soviet Union didn’t have to end in 1991. 

Indeed, it might still be doddering along today but for the 

actions of that visionary bumbler, Mikhail Gorbachev, who 

understood his nation’s weakness but had no idea how 

to deal with it, and so set in motion an economic reform 

program that was pain for not much gain. What we could 

have expected of intelligence is not prediction but earlier 

and better monitoring of internal shortcomings. We could 

also have expected some imaginings of competing stories 

to the then prevailing one. Very late, in 1990, an NIE, The 

Deepening Crisis in the USSR, did just that, laying out 

four different scenarios, or stories, for the next year.

PUZZLES AND MYSTERIES

When the Soviet Union would collapse was a mystery, not a 

puzzle. No one could know the answer. It depended. It was 

contingent. Puzzles are a very different kind of intelligence 

problem. They have an answer, but we may not know it. 

Many of the intelligence successes of the Cold War were 

puzzle-solving about a very secretive foe: Were there 

Soviet missiles in Cuba? How many warheads did the 

Soviet SS-18 missile carry?

Puzzles are not necessarily easier than mysteries – consider 

the decade it took to fi nally solve the puzzle of Osama 

bin Laden’s whereabouts. But they do come with different 

expectations attached. Intelligence puzzles are not like 

jig-saw puzzles in that we may not be very sure we have 

the right answer – the raid on bin Laden was launched, 

participants in the decision said, with odds that bin Laden 

actually was in the compound no better than six in ten. But 

the fact that there is in principle an answer provides some 

concreteness to what is expected of intelligence.

That is especially so at the more tactical level of intelligence. In the simplest case, targeting (or producing, in 

wonderful Pentagonese, “desired mean points of impact,” 

DMPIs, pronounced “dimpies”), the enemy unit either is 

or isn’t where intelligence says it is. And the intelligence 

will quickly be self-validating as the fi ghter pilot or drone 

targeter discovers whether the enemy unit is in fact there. 

The raid on bin Laden’s compound refl ected the solution 

to a much more complicated puzzle, one that was a nice 

example of the various forms of collection and analysis 

working together. But in that case too it would have been 

immediately apparent to the raiders if bin Laden hadn’t 

been there.

Another puzzle, whether Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had 

weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in 2002, drives home 

the point that because intelligence is a service industry, 

what policy offi cials expect from it shapes its work. In the 

WMD case, neither the U.S. investigating panel nor the 

British Butler report found evidence that political leaders 

had directly pressured intelligence agencies to come to a 

particular conclusion. Yet it is also fair to report that some 

intelligence analysts on both sides of the Atlantic did feel 

they were under pressure to produce the “right” answer – 

that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

The interaction of intelligence and policy shaped the 

results in several other ways. Policy offi cials, particularly on 

the American side, when presented with a range of assessments by different agencies, cherry picked their favorites 

(and sometimes grew their own cherries by giving credibility to information sources the intelligence services had 

discredited). As elsewhere in life, how the question was 

asked went a long way toward determining the answer. In 

this case, the question became simply “Does Saddam have 

WMD?” Intelligence analysis did broaden the question, but 

issues of how much threat, to whom and over what time 

frame got lost in the “does he?” debate. Moreover, U.S. 

intelligence was asked over and over about links between 

Iraq and al Qaeda. It stuck to its analytic guns – the link 

was tenuous at best – but the repeated questions served 

both to elevate the debate over the issue and to contribute 

to intelligence’s relative lack of attention to other questions.
32 RONALD REAGAN, INTELLIGENCE AND THE END OF THE COLD WAR WHAT SHOULD WE EXPECT FROM INTELLIGENCE? 33 

In the end, however, the most signifi cant part of the WMD 

story was what intelligence and policy shared – a deeply 

held mindset that Saddam must have WMD. That mindset 

included outsiders like me who opposed going to war, as 

well as other European intelligence services whose governments were not going to participate in any war. For intelligence, the mindset was compounded by history, for the 

previous time around, in the early 1990s, U.S. intelligence 

had underestimated Iraqi WMD; it was not going to make 

that mistake again. In the end, if most people believe one 

thing, arguing for another is hard. There is little pressure 

to rethink the issue, and the few dissenters in intelligence 

are lost in the wilderness.

What should have been expected from intelligence in this 

case was a section in the assessments asking what was the 

best case that could be made that Iraq did not have WMD. 

That would not have made the slightest bit of difference in 

the rush to war, given the power of the prevailing mindset, 

but it would at least offered intelligence agencies some 

protection from later criticism – fair enough – that they 

had not done their job.

What policy offi cials expect from intelligence also shapes 

how intelligence is organized and what kind of people it 

hires. On the American side of the Atlantic, the crown 

jewel of intelligence products is the President’s Daily Brief 

(PDB), perhaps the most expensive publication per copy 

since Gutenberg. Often caricatured as “CNN plus secrets,” 

much of it is factoids from recent collection by a spy or 

satellite image or intercepted signal, plus commentary. 

On the British side of the ocean, there is less of a fl ood 

of current intelligence, and the assessments of the UK’s 

Joint Intelligence Committee are, in my experience, often 

thoughtful. But on both sides of the ocean, the tyranny 

of the immediate is apparent. As one U.S. analyst put 

it to me: “We used to do analysis; now we do reporting.”

The focus on the immediate, combined with the way intelligence agencies are organized, may have played some 

role in the failure to understand the contagion effects in 

the “Arab spring” of recent months. In the United States, 

especially, where analytic cadres are large, analysts have 

very specifi c assignments. The Egypt analysts are tightly 

focused on Egypt, perhaps even on particular aspects 

of Egypt. They would not been looking at ways events in 

Tunisia might affect Egypt. To be fair, the popular media 

probably overstated the contagion effect of events from 

one Arab country to the next, but that there was some such 

effect seems apparent in retrospect. Worse, my bet is that if 

asked whether events in Tunisia might affect Egypt, even 

slightly, those Egypt analysts would have said “no” with more 

or less disdain.

In the end, what is expected of intelligence also shapes 

what capabilities it builds – and hires. At the tactical level, 

teams of young analysts from the big U.S. collection agencies 

(the National Security Agency for signals intelligence or 

SIGINT and the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency for 

imagery, or IMINT), organized into “geocells” have become 

adept at combining SIGINT and imagery, and adding what 

has been learned from informants in the battle zones, in 

order to identify events of interests, and ultimately provide 

those DIMPIs.

The demand for those DIMPIs is plain enough, and the 

PDB’s unusually collected secrets are beguiling if not 

always very helpful. The demand from policy offi cials for 

more strategic, and perhaps longer-term, assessments is 

less clear. When asked, offi cials say they would like them: 

how could they answer otherwise? But in practice too often 

the response is: “That looks interesting. I’ll read it when 

there is time.” And there never is time. When I was at the 

National Intelligence Council (NIC) overseeing NIEs we 

had a good idea. We’d do a short intelligence appraisal 

of an important foreign policy issue, and the State Department’s policy planners would add a policy paper. We’d then 

convene the deputies – the number twos in the various 

foreign policy agencies – over an informal lunch. The conversation would begin with the outcome the United States 

sought a decade out, then peel back to current policy. We 

got such a session on the deputies’ calendar exactly once.

Lacking demand, it is not at all clear that intelligence 

agencies either hire or train people who could do good 

strategic analysis – that is, analysis that locates choices 

in a wider context of other issues and perhaps a longer 

time stream. Most analysts are trained to look for measurable evidence and struggle with alternative possibilities, 

but are not always willing to venture beyond the facts and 

the level of policy description. To be sure, there are differences across agencies. The State Department’s Bureau of 

Intelligence and Research, while small, does value deep 

expertise, letting analysts stay on a particular account for 

an entire career. By contrast, the analytic arm of the CIA 

believes good analysts can add value quickly as they move 

from account to account. As a result, it has more the feel 

of a newsroom than a university.

At the NIC, I came to think that, for all the technology, 

strategic analysis was best done in person. Indeed, I came 

to think that our real products weren’t those papers, the 

NIEs. Rather they were the NIOs, the National Intelligence 

Offi cers – experts not papers. We all think we can absorb 

information more effi ciently by reading, but my advice to 

my policy colleagues was to give intelligence offi cers some 

face time. If policymakers ask for a paper, what they get 

inevitably will be 60 degrees off the target. In 20 minutes, 

though, the intelligence offi cers can sharpen the question, 

and the policy offi cial can calibrate the expertise of the 

analyst. In that conversation, intelligence analysts can offer 

advice; they don’t need to be as tightly restricted as on 

paper by the “thou shalt not traffi c in policy” injunction. 

Expectations can be calibrated on both sides of the conversation. And the result might even be better policy.

Note: The footnotes for this article are not included here for reasons 

of space. The full version, with footnotes, can be found on the DVD.
34 TIMELINE 35 

THE REAGAN

COLD WAR

TIMELINE

1981 - 1989

1981 1982 1983 1984 1985

20 JAN

Ronald Reagan inaugurated 40th 

President of the United States.

10 NOV

Soviet General Secretary Leonid 

Brezhnev dies.

9 FEB

Yuri Andropov dies after only 

15 months as Soviet leader.

13 FEB

Konstantin Chernenko, at age 

72, is named General Secretary 

of the Soviet Communist Party.

8 MAR

In a speech to the National 

Association of Evangelicals, 

Reagan labels the Soviet 

Union an “evil empire.”

24 MAY

President Reagan visits CIA 

HQs for the grounadbreaking 

on the new headquarters 

building.

23 JUN

President Reagan visits CIA HQs 

to sign the Intelligence Identities 

Protection Act.

12 NOV

Yuri Andropov becomes General 

Secretary of the Soviet Union.

23 MAR

Ronald Reagan proposes the 

Strategic Defense Initiative 

(SDI, or Star Wars).

1 SEP

Civilian Koran Air Lines 

Flight 007, with 269 

passengers, is shot down 

by Soviet interceptor

aircraft.

16 MAR

Chernenko, after just more 

than a year in offi ce, dies 

in Moscow. Search for new 

leader begins. 

11 MAR

Mikhail Gorbachev becomes 

new leader of the USSR. 

He was the only general 

secretary in the history of 

the Soviet Union to be born 

under Communist rule.

16 DEC

Margaret Thatcher and the 

UK Government, in a plan 

to open new channels of 

dialog with the Soviet 

leadership candidates, meet 

with Mikhail Gorbachev 

at Chequers.

1986 1987 1988 1989 1990

19-20 NOV

Reagan and Gorbachev meet 

for the fi rst time at a summit in 

Geneva, Switzerland, where they 

agree to two (later three) more 

summits.

11-12 OCT 

Reykjavik Summit: a breakthrough 

in nuclear arms control, but SDI 

remains a sticking point.

26 MAY

President Reagan visits CIA 

HQs for the swearing in ceremony 

of William Webster as DCI.

8 DEC

The Intermediate-Range Nuclear 

Forces (INF) Treaty is signed in 

Washington, DC by President Reagan 

and Soviet leader Gorbachev. 

15 MAY

The Soviets begin withdrawingfrom Afghanistan.

9 NOV

The Berlin Wall is breached 

when a Politburo spokesman 

mistakenly announces at a news 

conference in East Berlin that 

the borders have been opened.

26 APR

Chernobyl disaster: A Soviet 

nuclear plant in Ukraine 

explodes, resulting in the worst 

nuclear power plant accident 

in history.

JUN

At the June plenary session of 

the Central Committee of the 

Communist Party, Gorbachev 

announces Glasnost and 

Perestroyka, which laid 

the political foundation 

of economic reform for the 

remainder of the existence 

of the Soviet Union

12 JUN

During a visit to Berlin, 

Germany, President Reagan 

famously challenges Soviet 

leader Gorbachev in a speech 

to “tear down this wall” 

(the Berlin Wall). 

29 MAY

Reagan and Gorbachev meet 

in Moscow. INF Treaty ratifi ed. 

When asked if he still believes 

that the Soviet Union is an evil 

empire, Reagan replies he was 

talking about “another time, 

another place.”
36 RONALD REAGAN, INTELLIGENCE AND THE END OF THE COLD WAR RON R O N A LD RE AGA N, INT ELL IGE N CE AN D T H E E ND OF TH E C OLD WA R DECLASSIFIED INTELLIGENCE DOCUMENTS 37 

D E C L A S S I F I E D 

INTELLIGENCE

DOCUMENTS
38 RONALD REAGAN, INTELLIGENCE AND THE END OF THE COLD WAR DECLASSIFIED INTELLIGENCE DOCUMENTS 39 
40 RONALD REAGAN, INTELLIGENCE AND THE END OF THE COLD WAR DECLASSIFIED INTELLIGENCE DOCUMENTS 41 
42 RONALD REAGAN, INTELLIGENCE AND THE END OF THE COLD WAR DECLASSIFIED INTELLIGENCE DOCUMENTS 43 
44 RONALD REAGAN, INTELLIGENCE AND THE END OF THE COLD WAR DECLASSIFIED INTELLIGENCE DOCUMENTS 45 
46 RONALD REAGAN, INTELLIGENCE AND THE END OF THE COLD WAR DECLASSIFIED INTELLIGENCE DOCUMENTS 47 
48 RONALD REAGAN, INTELLIGENCE AND THE END OF THE COLD WAR DECLASSIFIED INTELLIGENCE DOCUMENTS 49 
50 RONALD REAGAN, INTELLIGENCE AND THE END OF THE COLD WAR DECLASSIFIED INTELLIGENCE DOCUMENTS 51 
52 RONALD REAGAN, INTELLIGENCE AND THE END OF THE COLD WAR DECLASSIFIED INTELLIGENCE DOCUMENTS 53 
54 RONALD REAGAN, INTELLIGENCE AND THE END OF THE COLD WAR DECLASSIFIED INTELLIGENCE DOCUMENTS 55 
56 RONALD REAGAN, INTELLIGENCE AND THE END OF THE COLD WAR DECLASSIFIED INTELLIGENCE DOCUMENTS 57 
58 RONALD REAGAN, INTELLIGENCE AND THE END OF THE COLD WAR DECLASSIFIED INTELLIGENCE DOCUMENTS 59 
60 RONALD REAGAN, INTELLIGENCE AND THE END OF THE COLD WAR DECLASSIFIED INTELLIGENCE DOCUMENTS 61 
62 RONALD REAGAN, INTELLIGENCE AND THE END OF THE COLD WAR DECLASSIFIED INTELLIGENCE DOCUMENTS 63 
64 RONALD REAGAN, INTELLIGENCE AND THE END OF THE COLD WAR AGENDA 65 

1 2 : 3 0 - 5 : 3 0 P. M .

S Y M P O S I U M O N 

R O N A L D 

R E A G A N 

I N T E L L I G E N C E 

A N D T H E E N D O F T H E 

COLD WAR

12:30–12:35 Welcome & Introduction of Keynote Duke Blackwood 

Director, Reagan Library

12:35–1:15 Keynote Address – The Role of Intelligence 

in the Policymaking Process

Ken Adelman 

Former Director, ACDA

1:15–1:20 Introduction of Featured Speaker Peter Clement, CIA

1:20–1:45 Featured Speaker Oleg Kalugin 

Former General, Soviet KGB

1:45–2:00 Break

2:00–3:15 Panel #1 – Reagan’s Use of Intelligence, 

an Analyst Perspective

Nick Dujmovic (chair)

Douglas MacEachin

Bruce Berkowitz

David Lodge

Adm. Bobby Inman

3:15–3:30 Break

3:30–5:00 Panel #2 – Intelligence and the End 

of the Cold War, A Policy Perspective

Peter Clement (chair)

Mary Sarotte, USC

Greg Treverton, RAND

David Holloway, Stanford

Martin Anderson, 

Hoover Institution

Annelise Anderson, 

Hoover Institution

5:00–5:15 Presentation of Awards & Closing Remarks Duke Blackwood

Joe Lambert, CIA

5:30–7:00 Reception
66 RONALD REAGAN, INTELLIGENCE AND THE END OF THE COLD WAR SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES 67 

SYMPOSIUM

SPEAKER

BIOGRAPHIES

KENNETH ADELMAN

Fo r m e r D i r e c t o r, A r m s C o n t r o l 

and Disarmament Agency

During the Reagan Administration, Ken 

Adelman was a U.S. Ambassador to 

the United Nations for two-and a half 

years and then Director of the U.S. 

Arms Control & Disarmament Agency 

for nearly fi ve years. He accompanied 

President Ronald Reagan on his superpower summits with Soviet General 

Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. Along 

with his wife Carol, Adelman conducts 

leadership training for top executives in Movers and Shakespeares, 

which draws leadership lessons from 

Shakespeare. He began teaching 

Shakespeare in 1977 at Georgetown 

University, and taught honors students 

at George Washington University 

for years. Adelman graduated from 

Grinnell College in Iowa, majoring in 

philosophy and religion. He received 

his Masters (in Foreign Service studies) 

and Doctorate (in political theory) from 

Georgetown University. He has written 

hundreds of articles and is the author 

(or co-author) of fi ve books, most 

recently Shakespeare in Charge: 

The Bard’s Guide to Leading and

Succeeding on the Business Stage.

OLEG KALUGIN

Fo r m e r M a j o r Ge n e r a l 

in the Soviet KGB

Oleg Danilovich Kalugin is a retired 

Major General in the Soviet KGB. 

Born in Leningrad in 1934, his father 

was an offi cer in Stalin’s NKVD. Oleg 

Kalugin attended Leningrad State 

University and was recruited by the 

KGB for foreign intelligence work, 

serving in the First Chief Directorate. Undercover as a journalist, he 

attended Columbia University in New 

York as a Fulbright Scholar in 1958 

and then worked as a Radio Moscow 

correspondent at the United Nations 

in New York, conducting espionage 

and infl uence operations. From 1965 

to 1970, he served as deputy resident 

and acting chief of the Residency at 

the Soviet Embassy in Washington, 

D.C. General Kalugin rose quickly in 

the First Chief Directorate, becoming 

the youngest general in the history of 

the KGB, and eventually he became 

the head of worldwide foreign counterintelligence. In addition to currently 

teaching at The Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies, Kalugin 

has taught at Catholic University and 

lectured throughout the country. He is 

also chairman of Intercon International, 

which provides information services for 

businesses in the former Soviet Union. 

Since 1998, General Kalugin has been 

representing in the U.S. the Democracy 

Foundation, headed by Alexandr 

Yakolev, a former politburo member 

and close ally of Mikhail Gorbachev.

ANNELISE ANDERSON

Fellow, Hover Institution

Annelise Anderson is a research fellow 

at the Hoover Institution. From 1981 

to 1983, she was associate director 

for economics and government with 

the US Offi ce of Management and 

Budget, where she was responsible 

for the budgets of fi ve cabinet departments and over 40 other agencies. 

She has also advised the governments 

of Russia, Romania, and the Republic of Georgia on economic reform. 

Anderson coauthored Reagan’s Secret 

War: The Untold Story of His Fight to 

Save the World from Nuclear Disaster

(2010) with Martin Anderson. She 

has coedited a number of books, 

including Stories in His Own Hand: 

The Everyday Wisdom of Ronald Reagan (2007), with Kiron K. Skinner, 

Martin Anderson, and George Shultz; 

Reagan’s Path to Victory: The Shaping 

of Ronald Reagan’s Vision: Selected 

Writing (2004), with Kiron K. Skinner and Martin Anderson; Reagan: 

A Life in Letters (2004), with Kiron 

K. Skinner, Martin Anderson, and 

George Shultz; Reagan In His Own 

Voice (2001), with Kiron K. Skinner 

and Martin Anderson; and Reagan, 

in His Own Hand (2001), with Kiron 

K. Skinner and Martin Anderson. 

The holder of a Ph.D. in business 

administration from Columbia 

University, she has been a Hoover 

fellow since 1983.

MARTIN ANDERSON

Fo r m e r E c o n o m i c Po l i c y 

Advisor to President Reagan

A Hoover Institution fellow since 

1971, Anderson served as special 

assistant to President Richard Nixon 

from 1969 to 1971 and as domestic and economic policy adviser to 

President Ronald Reagan from 1981 

to 1982. He is also the co-editor of 

“Reagan In His Own Hand” (2001) 

and “Reagan: A Life in Letters” 

(2003), both with co-editors Annelise 

Anderson and Kiron Skinner. Martin 

Anderson is the Keith and Jan Hurlbut Fellow at the Hoover Institution, 

Stanford University. Born in Lowell, 

Massachusetts, August 5, 1936, 

son of Ralph and Evelyn Anderson. 

A.B. summa cum laude, Dartmouth 

College, 1957; M.S. in engineering 

and business administration, Thayer 

School of Engineering and Tuck 

School of Business Administration, 

1958; Ph.D. in industrial management, Massachusetts Institute 

of Technology, 1962. 

PETER CLEMENT

D e p u t y D i r e c t o r f o r I n t e l l i g e n c e 

for Analytic Programs

Peter Clement was appointed Deputy 

Director for Intelligence for Analytic 

Programs in January 2005. Mr. Clement joined the Agency in 1977 and 

spent much of his fi rst 25 years 

focused on the Soviet Union—in 

analytic and management positions, 

including Director of the Offi ce of 

Russia-Eurasian Analysis and as CIA’s 

Russia Issue Manager from 1997-

2003. Mr. Clement later was a PDB 

briefer for then Vice President Cheney 

and NSC Adviser Rice, and subsequently served as the DCI’s Representative to the U.S. Mission to the 

United Nations before assuming his 

current duties. Mr. Clement holds a 

Ph.D. in Russian history and an MA in 

European history, both from Michigan 

State University; and a BA in liberal 

arts from SUNY-Oswego. He has been 

a member of the Council on Foreign 

Relations since 2001. Mr. Clement 

taught Russian history and politics for 

over ten years as an adjunct professor 

at local universities, and has published 

some ten journal articles and book 

chapters on Russia, Central Asia, and 

the Cuban missile crisis. 

D O U G L A S J . M A C E A C H I N 

Former Deputy Director of Intelligence, 

Central Intelligence Agency

Douglas MacEachin is a former 

Deputy Director of Intelligence at 

the Central Intelligence Agency from 

March 1993 until June 1995. He 

joined the CIA in 1965 and, for the 

next 24 years, worked mainly on 

research and analysis of Soviet and 

European security affairs. He was Director of the Offi ce of Soviet Analysis 

from 1984 until March 1989, when 

he became Special Assistant to the 

Director of Central Intelligence for 

Arms Control. Mr. MacEachin holds 

baccalaureate and master’s degrees 

in economics from Miami University 

of Ohio. During the period 1964-65, 

he was a full-time member of the 

faculty there. Before retiring from the 

CIA in 1997, Mr. MacEachin was a 

CIA Offi cer-in-Residence at Harvard 

University’s John F. Kennedy School 

of Government. 
68 RONALD REAGAN, INTELLIGENCE AND THE END OF THE COLD WAR SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES 69 

DAVID HOLLOWAY

Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History, Stanford University

David Holloway is the Raymond A. 

Spruance Professor of International 

History, a professor of political science, and an FSI senior fellow. He 

was co-director of CISAC from 1991 

to 1997, and director of FSI from 

1998 to 2003. His research focuses 

on the international history of nuclear 

weapons, on science and technology in 

the Soviet Union, and on the relationship between international history 

and international relations theory. 

His book Stalin and the Bomb: The 

Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 

1939-1956 (Yale University Press, 

1994) was chosen by the New York 

Times Book Review as one of the 

11 best books of 1994, and it won 

the Vucinich and Shulman prizes of 

the American Association for the 

Advancement of Slavic Studies. It has 

been translated into six languages, 

most recently into Czech in 2008. 

Holloway also wrote The Soviet Union 

and the Arms Race (1983) and 

co-authored The Reagan Strategic 

Defense Initiative: Technical, Political 

and Arms Control Assessment (1984). 

He has contributed to the Bulletin of 

the Atomic Scientists, Foreign Affairs, 

and other scholarly journals. Born 

in Dublin, Ireland, he received his 

undergraduate degree in modern languages and literature, and his Ph.D. 

in social and political sciences, both 

from Cambridge University. 

BRUCE D. BERKOWITZ

Author

Bruce Berkowitz is the author of 

several books about intelligence and 

national security. He began his career 

at the Central Intelligence Agency 

and has since served in a variety of 

assignments in the Department of 

Defense and Intelligence Community. 

Berkowitz is a frequent contributor to 

the Wall Street Journal and has published in Foreign Affairs, The National 

Interest, Foreign Policy, Technology 

Review, and Issues in Science and 

Technology, the policy journal of the 

National Academies of Science and 

Engineering. He also writes regularly for the International Journal of 

Intelligence and Counterintelligence, 

where he is member of the editorial 

board. Berkowitz received his bachelor’s degree from Stetson University 

and his master’s and doctorate at the 

University of Rochester. 

MARY SAROTTE

Professor of Histor y and International 

Relations, University of Southern California

Mary Elise Sarotte’s newest book, 

1989: The Struggle to Create PostCold War Europe, appeared with 

Princeton University Press on the 

20th anniversary of the fall of the 

Berlin Wall. The Financial Times 

selected it as one of their “Books of 

the Year” and it has won three prizes: 

the Robert H. Ferrell Prize of the 

Society for Historians of American 

Foreign Relations (SHAFR), for distinguished scholarship on US foreign 

policy; the German government’s 

Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) 

Prize for distinguished scholarship 

in German and European Studies; 

and the Marshall Shulman Prize of 

the American Association for the 

Advancement of Slavic Studies 

(AAASS, recently renamed ASEES; 

co-winner). In addition, the book 

received reviews in Foreign Affairs, 

The London Review of Books, The 

New York Review of Books, The New 

York Times Book Review, Süddeutsche 

Zeitung, and The Wall Street Journal, 

among other places. Sarotte’s previous publications include the books 

Dealing with the Devil, and German 

Military Reform and European Security, 

plus a number of scholarly articles. 

She has also worked as a journalist for 

DR. NICHOLAS DUJMOVIC

CIA Historian

Dr. Nicholas Dujmovic has served as 

a CIA historian since January 2005. 

He came to the Agency in 1990 as 

an analyst on the Soviet Union. He 

has also served as speechwriter for 

Directors of Central Intelligence John 

Deutch and George Tenet and was the 

deputy chief editor of the President’s 

Daily Brief. A frequent contributor 

to Studies in Intelligence and other 

intelligence journals, Dr. Dujmovic 

also is the author of The Grenada 

Documents: Window on Totalitarianism (1988) and, under the pen name 

Charles Lathrop, a quotation book on 

intelligence, The Literary Spy (2004).

Time, Die Zeit, and The Economist, 

and appears as a political commentator on the BBC, CNN International 

and Sky News. Sarotte earned her 

B.A. in History and Science at Harvard and her Ph.D. in History at Yale. 

After graduate school, she served as a 

White House Fellow, and subsequently 

joined the faculty of the University 

of Cambridge. She received tenure 

there in 2004 and became a member of the Royal Historical Society 

before returning to the US to teach 

at USC. Sarotte is a former Humboldt Scholar, a former member of 

the Institute for Advanced Study in 

Princeton, and a life member of the 

Council on Foreign Relations. 

GREGORY TREVERTON

D i r e c t o r, R A N D C e n t e r f o r 

Global Risk and Security

Greg Treverton, a senior policy analyst 

at the RAND Corporation, is director 

of the RAND Center for Global Risk 

and Security. He has had several 

leadership positions at RAND, including as director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center and 

associate dean of the Pardee RAND 

Graduate School. Treverton’s work 

at RAND has examined terrorism, 

intelligence, and law enforcement, as 

well as new forms of public–private 

partnership. Treverton has served in 

government for the fi rst Senate Select 

Committee on Intelligence, handling 

Europe for the National Security 

Council; and, most recently, as vice 

chair of the National Intelligence 

Council (1993–1995), overseeing 

the writing of America’s National 

Intelligence Estimates. Recent RAND 

publications include Making Policy 

in the Shadow of the Future (2010); 

Reorganizing U.S. Domestic Intelligence: Assessing the Options 

(2008); Assessing the Tradecraft of 

Intelligence Analysis (with C. Bryan 

Gabbard, 2008); Breaking the FailedState Cycle (with Marla C. Haims

et al., 2008); War and Escalation

in South Asia (with John E. Peters et 

al., 2006); and The Next Steps 

in Reshaping Intelligence (2005). 

Reshaping National Intelligence for 

an Age of Information was published 

by Cambridge University Press in 

2001. Treverton holds an A.B. summa 

cum laude from Princeton University 

and an M.P.P. and Ph.D. in economics 

and politics from Harvard University.
70 RONALD REAGAN, INTELLIGENCE AND THE END OF THE COLD WAR ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 71 

A D M I R A L B O B B Y R . I N M A N 

Fo r m e r D e p u t y D i r e c t o r 

Central Intelligence

Admiral Inman graduated from the 

University of Texas at Austin in 1950, 

and from the National War College 

in 1972. He became an adjunct 

professor at the University of Texas at 

Austin in 1987. He was appointed 

as a tenured professor holding the 

Lyndon B. Johnson Centennial Chair 

in National Policy in August 2001. 

He served as Interim Dean of the 

LBJ School of Public Affairs from 1 

January to 31 December 2005 and 

again from January 2009 to March 

2010. Admiral Inman served in the 

U.S. Navy from November 1951 to 

July 1982, when he retired with the 

permanent rank of Admiral. While on 

active duty he served as Director of the 

National Security Agency and Deputy 

Director of Central Intelligence. After 

retirement from the Navy, he was 

Chairman and Chief Executive Offi cer 

of the Microelectronics and Computer 

Technology Corporation (MCC) in Austin, Texas for four years and Chairman, 

President and Chief Executive Offi cer 

of Westmark Systems, Inc., a privately 

owned electronics industry holding 

company for three years. Admiral 

Inman also served as Chairman of the 

Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas from 

1987 through 1990. 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Berkowitz, Bruce. U.S. Intelligence Estimates of the 

Soviet Collapse: Reality and Perception, International 

Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, 

21:2, 237-250, 28 Feb 2008. Reproduced 

by permission of Taylor & Francis Group, LLC., 

http://www.taylorandfrancis.com.

Treverton, Gregory. What Should We Expect of our 

Spies?, Prospect, No. 83, 25 May 2011. Reproduced 

by permission of New York Times Syndicate.

First Meeting between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail 

Gorbachev (photo). Reproduced by permission 

of Corbis Corporation.

Numerous videos, photographs, and other support 

provided by:

THE RONALD REAGAN PRESIDENTIAL

 LIBRARY & M U S E U M 

40 Presidential Drive 

Simi Valley, CA 93065

The complete bibliographic citations for the material 

provided by the above can be found on the DVD. 

DAVID LODGE

CIA Analyst

David Lodge served during the 

Reagan administration as a “Kremlinologist” and leadership analyst in 

the CIA Directorate of Intelligence. 

Throughout his 30-year career with 

the Agency, he also specialized in 

coordinating counternarcotics and 

related counterterrorism analytic and 

operational programs between the 

intelligence and law enforcement 

communities. Since retiring from CIA 

in 2005, he has worked for Science 

Applications International Corporation 

(SAIC), serving as a full-time analysis 

and writing instructor training new 

analysts in the CIA University’s Sherman Kent School for Intelligence 

Analysis. Mr. Lodge has a BA Degree 

in Soviet Studies from Syracuse 

University and an MA Degree in 

Soviet Studies from the University of 

Michigan, and he spent three years 

as an intelligence specialist in the 

US Army before joining the Agency. 
72 RONALD REAGAN, INTELLIGENCE AND THE END OF THE COLD WAR

The Historical Collections and Information Review Divisions of the Central 

Intelligence Agency’s Information Management Services have reviewed, 

redacted, and released a body of documents highlighting what the Central 

Intelligence Agency provided President Reagan and other top members 

of his national security team on key issues affecting US-Soviet relations. 

The accompanying DVD contains over 200 documents, some 60 of which 

are either being made available to the public for the fi rst time or are being 

re-released with new material.

The material is organized into the following categories.

• Document Collection—Features intelligence assessments, National 

Intelligence Estimates, high-level memos, DCI talking points, and other 

reporting. To help put this material in perspective, we have also included 

non-CIA documents from the archives of the Reagan Library, including 

minutes from relevant National Security Council and National Security 

Planning Group meetings on key US-Soviet issues, as well as copies

of key National Security Decision Directives (NSDDs).

• DI Videos—The highlight of the collection are the video briefi ngs produced 

by CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence on such varied topics as the Soviet 

space program, the Andropov succession, the Chernobyl disaster, and 

the Moscow summit. This was the fi rst time the Agency used videos 

on a regular basis to deliver intelligence to the policymaker, and this 

collection marks the fi rst substantial release of such material in one

of our historical collections.

• Other Multimedia—Includes photos, videos, and an interactive timeline 

featuring material from the Reagan Library’s AV archives and other sources.

• Background Material—Includes several assessments and overview articles 

on President Reagan’s use of intelligence and the end of the Cold War 

written by historians and leading experts.

This DVD will work on most computers and the documents are in .PDF format.

All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed in this booklet are those of the 

authors. They do not necessarily refl ect offi cial positions or views of the Central 

Intelligence Agency or any other US Government entity, past or present. Nothing 

in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying US Government 

endorsement of an article’s factual statements and interpretations.

DVD CONTENTS