SO COULD YOU TELL ME FIRST ABOUT THE YEARS 1956 ON AND '57, AND THE WAY WHICH, STARTING WITH THE BOMBER GAP AND GOING TO THE DISCOVERY OF ICBM IN THE SOVIET UNION. CAN YOU TELL ME WHAT CAN REMEMBER OF THAT AND HOW IT HAPPENED?

I joined the staff of the Board of National Estimates in 1956, so I got in on what you might call the tail end of the period of concern about the bomber gap. As time went along in those years '56, '57, '58, the intelligence community began to be aware that the large numbers of intercontinental bombers that the Soviets had been anticipated to build, were not appearing in units and didn't appear to be coming out of the factories and even as that information was developed more information was being developed about the progress of the Soviets were making in creating medium and intermediate and intercontinental range missiles. And that culminated in the latter part of 1957 in a flurry of intercontinental missile tests, together with the launching of the world's first earth satellites, the Sputniks, which convinced the intelligence community that there was a big active program for the development of intercontinental missiles and led us to believe that the Soviet determination to bring the US under fire, under the threat of attack, which we were convinced was an important part of their policy had been shifted in priority from bombers to missiles.

WHAT WAS YOUR OWN PERSONAL REACTION TO SPUTNIK?

Well curiously enough, those of us who were working the problem in the analytical business had anticipated that the Soviets would be able to launch earth satellites at just about that time period. But, the combination of that together with this flurry of intercontinental missile firings and the fact that the ICBM booster was being used as the launching rocket for the Sputniks, led us to conclude that there was a much bigger, and a program that had greater depth and vigor than we had anticipated. You see in the United States there had tended to be a separation between the earth satellite program and the missile programs. The Soviets combined them. And to that extent they gained advantage in the common development. And indeed the ICBM, that they were building took advantage well of the previous development of medium range missiles. So we were mighty impressed with the with the combination of capabilities that was represented here.

...YOU WERE SURPRISED EVEN THOUGH YOU HAD BEEN EXPECTING IT?

Well, taken all together it caused us to early up the dates at which we thought the Soviets would be able to have intercontinental missiles in their operational inventory. As I recall that had been predicted for about the turn of the decade as 1959, 1960. And after this flurry of tests in late '57 and early '58, my memory is that the conclusion was that the Soviets might be able to have an initial capability with intercontinental missiles as early as the end of 1958. And then estimates were made of what kind of numbers they might be able to have in operational inventory at various arbitrarily or arbitrarily selected numbers at various times in the future. And again my memory is that we were projecting that they might have as many as they could have as many as a hundred ICBMs in inventory in 1959 or '60 and as many as 500 in 1961 or '62. Depending on whether the program were a crash program which meant one that had all priority and a high degree of success or whether the program were more a moderately paced.

AS IT TURNED OUT THOSE ESTIMATES TURNED OUT TO BE WILDLY EXCESSIVE. CAN YOU JUST OUTLINE THE FACTORS THAT MADE YOU COME TO THOSE FAIRLY HIGH ESTIMATES AT THE TIME AND WHAT THE INFORMATION THAT YOU HAD AVAILABLE AND WHAT INFORMATION WAS AVAILABLE TO YOU?

Well, as I say, there was hard information on this very impressive development program And the pace of that in late '57 and early '58 seemed dramatic, and the degree of success compared to the difficulty that the Americans were having in developing a comparable system. But in addition to that there was a lot of information on the extent of development of earlier shorter range missiles which provided a background of technical capability, there was conviction on the part of most analysts and indeed on the part of many presidential advisers and committees and commissions that the Soviets could and would want to put the United States under the threat of attack at an early date. The Soviet premier was rattling his rockets and I think his exaggerated boasting contributed, and in that sense he deceived us somewhat with respect to where he stood at the top. And finally I think that a contributor was our consciousness that we were able to collect good information about development but we had inadequate means to collect information about deployment. So we were confronted with a situation where we had an absence of information about deployment as time went along. But we were not able confidentially to say that(45 54)that meant anything. In other words...

YOU HAD THE U-2 AFTERALL.

Well U-2 indeed. If the U-2 reconnaissance airplane had not been shot down on the first of May, 1960, it might have collected the first positive evidence of intercontinental missile deployments under construction in the Soviet Union. But even if it had, it was not a system that was capable of searching large areas of Soviet territory and after all the Soviet Union is large enough so that it covers as I recall eight time zones. It has a huge transportation network. If one is to establish with some confidence that a missile program is of a certain size one has to have a capability to look at a lot of territory. And that we didn't have with the U-2. The development of the satellite, the satellite reconnaissance capability, and indeed the U-2 as well, was in fact an important forward looking program that was laid on by the Eisenhower administration. But as development times, and luck would have it, the actual capability to search the Soviet Union didn't exist until after the change of administrations in 1961.

HOW WOULD YOU EXPLAIN... HUGE DISPARITY IN ESTIMATES -- FORWARD ESTIMATES OF SOVIET ICBM DEPLOYMENT, BETWEEN THE NAVY AND THE ARMY AND THE CIA AND AIR FORCE INTELLIGENCE?

My memory of it is that those disparities didn't emerge right in the beginning. When we were making estimates of the earliest possible dates that the Soviets might have arbitrarily selected numbers of missiles like a hundred and five hundred, and when we were leaving it uncertain in our own minds as to whether there was a crash program or a more orderly program, my memory is that the intelligence community was pretty much all on board with those estimates. It was only as time passed and I believe the most significant change was made around the end of 1959, the beginning of 1960, that we began to change the estimate based on additional information and additional analysis. And at that point the agencies began to diverge and we didn't have an agreed estimate. Now what happened was first of all there were after this flurry of successful tests there were long pauses in the Soviet program. And there were some failures. And by the latter part of '59 at any rate and possibly somewhat sooner, I can't remember for sure, those of us in the CIA at least were convinced that there was no crash program, that this was an orderly more moderate program. Secondly we learned rather more than we had known earlier about what it took to conduct an intercontinental missile deployment program. Now, bear in mind, there was no intercontinental missile deployment program anywhere in the world in 1957 and '58. So we couldn't even go to American designers to find out all of the problems and tasks that would be involved. As we learned more about what was involved in running a program, we learned about the needs that a nation would have to build launchers to operate missiles to maintain them, to train troops and so on. And we became convinced that the program was more complicated than just building inventories of missiles. So the combination of these two factors, the slowdown in the test program and learning more about it, caused us to adjust the program downward, that is to say to push back somewhat the dates by which the Soviets could have various numbers of missiles. As I recall for instance we estimated that a hundred and fifty to two hundred missiles on launchers would be the probable Soviet total for about the middle of 1961. Well at that point the other agencies made their own estimates and the Air Force for example stuck pretty much with its original estimate and drew the conclusion for example that the pauses in the program merely-represented the Soviets getting ready to deploy instead of represented representing a slow development and some difficulty. The Army and the Navy drew the conclusion that the absence of information clearly pointing to deployment meant that there probably was no deployment. So we ended up with a badly split estimate. These views were held by some of these agencies for several years thereafter.

A LOT OF PEOPLE OF COURSE HAVE SAID THAT THAT CAN'T BE A COINCIDENCE; THAT THE AIR FORCE WHICH HAD THE GREATEST VESTED INTEREST IN HAVING A LARGE THREATS, BECAUSE THAT WOULD ENABLE THEM TO HAVE A LARGE PROGRAM OF MISSILE BUILDING THEMSELVES, CAME UP WITH VERY ESTIMATES THAT THE ARMY WHICH HAD THE LEAST VESTED INTERESTS INDEED DIDN'T WANT TO SEE MONEY BEING SPENT ON AMERICAN PROGRAMS HAD A VESTED INTEREST IN SEEING A SMALL SOVIET THREAT...THE CIA WHICH HAD NO VESTED INTEREST CAME OUT IN THE MIDDLE. IN OTHER WORDS THAT WHAT PEOPLE WANTED TO SEE THEY SAW. WHAT'S YOUR REACTION TO THAT?

I've heard that repeatedly. I know some of the, or knew some of these officers fairly well I'm pretty well convinced that most of them felt that the evidence in their analysis of it was legitimate. For example, an Air Force officer, particularly somebody from the Strategic Air Command who was following the development of strategic nuclear capabilities, had a conviction, a professional conviction that building a big intercontinental strike capability was a sensible thing for a big country to do. And given the fact that as we all knew the Soviet Union had set us as its adversary, Mr. Khrushchev made no bones about that. It seemed reasonable then that(45 54)that the Soviet planners would build up big capabilities as soon as they could. And indeed in due course they did. What was happening was that their capability was overestimated in the early years. I think that the Air Force people held onto their original estimate too long in the face of evidence to the contrary but that evidence was slow in accumulating and negative evidence is hard to deal with, 'cause you never know what it means. And indeed there was a considerable controversy after the turn of administrations when the missile gap was disappearing as to whether or not that was valid conclusion to reach as well and the Air Force was on the high side of those questions as well.

THERE WAS A CONSIDERABLE PUBLIC STIR CAUSED BY PARTICULARLY SOME JOURNALISTS WHO KNEW ABOUT THIS PROCESS...HOW DID IT SEEM TO YOU AT THE TIME?

Well, Jonathan you remember it was the it was the Alsop Brothers who were well known columnists at the time, who in—who coined the term the missile gap. And they used that to argue that the Eisenhower administration was a reacting within insufficient alacrity to the challenge posed by Soviet technical developments as represented by nuclear weapons, Sputniks, ICBMs and so on. And this was part of that period in the late 1950s when the issue of what US defense policy should be and whether it was vigorous enough was an important element in the, in a presidential campaign. Now when the change in estimate occurred, in the one that I was referring to in the latter part of 1959, for example, the administration and a couple of its spokesmen were the ones who first said this shows since the threat is not as great as had been projected that our programs our in fact adequate and when pressed by democratic adversaries in the Senate, like Senator Symington and Senator Johnson, the spokesman for the Administration said they're going to change from estimating capabilities to intentions. And Alsop leaped on that and said that we were trying to read the Russian mind. And as I recall Senator Symington then said that the Intelligence books had been cooked in order that the budget books could be balanced. And this suddenly hit the estimators and analysts in the CIA as a great surprise you know, who—who. The effort that they were making was to do as good a job as they could with evidence which frankly was inadequate and ambiguous. And they had I think with conviction dropped the idea of the crash program, which would have been a capability. And then added these consideration about what it would take to run a program. So from their point of view they were trying to estimate a program not trying to read the Russian mind. But that was never really clarified successfully. It got to be a political football. And remained a matter of controversy all during that ensuing election year.

SEE, BECAUSE JOSEPH ALSOP MAINTAINED THEN, AND INDEED STILL DOES, THAT THE CIA'S BEHAVIOR WAS LITTLE SHORT OF TRAITOROUS.

Well, that had just nothing to do with the truth at all. The the analysts and estimators were doing the best they could to read through evidence which really not adequate and ambiguous to some extent, to try to come up with a program which would make some sense in terms of a realistic expectation. And the question of US budget and US politics just didn't enter their heads.

WHAT WAS YOUR REACTION TO ALL THIS EXTERNAL BREW-HA-HA AROUND YOUR OWN ESTIMATES?

Well, it was sort of, "Who, me?". We were we were working the Russian problem, not working the US political problem.

THERE WAS ANOTHER ALLEGATION MADE AROUND ABOUT THE TIME, THIS TIME, THIS ONE BY THOMAS LANPHIER WHO REPRESENTED GENERAL DYNAMICS, THE MAKERS OF ATLAS, OF COURSE, WHO WENT TO STUART SYMINGTON AS HE NOW RECALLS IT, AND MENTIONED THAT HIS SOURCES TOLD HIM THAT THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY DID NOT HAVE A COMMITTEE LOOKING AT THE ISSUE OF ICBM DEPLOYMENT. THEY HAD A COMMITTEE LOOKING AT TESTING, THEY HAD A COMMITTEE LOOKING AT DEVELOPMENT, THEY HAD NO COMMITTEE LOOKING AT DEPLOYMENT, AND THEY WEREN'T LOOKING FOR DEPLOYMENT. AND THAT, HE SAYS, THAT AS A RESULT OF HIS AND STUART SYMINGTON'S INTERVENTION, EISENHOWER ORDERED THAT THE U-2 GO NORTH TO SIBERIA TO LOOK FOR MISSILE SILOS. IS THAT THE WAY YOU REMEMBER IT?

Well, there was a committee which was the Guided Missile Committee, that was essentially a technical scientific committee. Whether it had a sub-group that was assigned to be looking for deployment, I don't know. It certainly did later, but it may not have at that time. If it didn't that means really nothing in terms of the amount of looking that was being done. The purpose of these committees was to bring together the various analysts and try to test their estimates against each other, try to arrive at agreement if they could, and try to help program collection resources. But in the absence of a committee collection resources were programmed by the agencies which had responsibility. And indeed, one of the reasons for committees is because a certain amount of competition in the intelligence business is considered to be a good thing. People out there looking for deployment, seeing if they can find it where the other fellow is looking as well, and the issue is kind of who can get there first? So that the charge, if that's what it is, that people were not looking for deployment is simply not correct. Indeed I remember as early as 1956 when Khrushchev was rattling his rockets in connection with the with the Suez Crisis, that Allen Dulles who was director at that time had several of us into his office wanting to know specifically what we had on deployment. Because he wanted to know whether we should put any credibility into Khrushchev's threats. And at that time, we drew the conclusion that the deployment of shorter-range missiles probably existed but we probably hadn't been able to find it. The U-2 was used to the extent of its capability. Some of the deployment areas were deep in the Soviet Union, hard to get to. And as I said earlier the U-2 really didn't have a very good capacity to do extensive searching. The programming of earth-satellite reconnaissance capabilities represented a big effort to go for deployment, and other things. So I have to say, I think what Mr. Lanphier was alleging is just simply not correct.

DOES IT SURPRISE YOU THAT SOMEONE OF SENATOR SYMINGTON'S EXPERIENCE WOULD GET INVOLVED IN BASICALLY CLAIMING THAT HE KNEW MORE THAN THE DIRECTOR OF THE CIA DID ABOUT INTELLIGENCE?

Well, Senator Symington had been Secretary of the Air Force. He was very experienced in Defense matters. I would say that he probably knew more about air and missile programs than Allen Dulles, as an individual, simply because of his own expertise and background. Now the question of whether he knew more about what was going on in the intelligence committee is another matter. And my memory is that Senator Symington and Mr. Lanphier came around and in effect told Allen Dulles that there was information within the intelligence community that was not getting to him. And that caused Dulles considerable concern, and he looked into it at great length. And that committee that you were referring to was a principal source of looking into these allegations. We never found out where the where the allegations came from in the first place, but we satisfied ourselves that there had not been a lot of additional missile tests. And indeed the speculation was that perhaps the testing of various ranges of missiles had been mixed together in some set of figures that had been given to the Senator. But this was not known for sure. I don't know what the answer to that was.

IF YOU COULD JUST TELL ME THAT IN A BIT MORE IN SUMMARY. THAT'S FINE, BUT JUST TRY TO SHORTEN IT DOWN A LITTLE BIT.

Ask the question again.

WHAT ELSE AS FAR AS YOU'RE AWARE OF, DID MR. LANPHIER AND SENATOR SYMINGTON TELL ALLEN DULLES AT THAT MEETING THAT THEY WENT TO?

As I recall, that was during one of these periods of lull and of some failures in the Soviet intercontinental test program. And Lanphier said that there were a number of tests that simply hadn't gotten to Mr. Dulles, that he hadn't found out about, but that people in the intelligence community knew about. This was looked into very carefully. And no such tests were emerged. So that particular piece of information, while it caused confusion in the community, simply was not correct. And didn't change our estimate.

ONCE AGAIN, WOULD YOU ATTRIBUTE ANY PARTICULAR MOTIVE TO THESE INTERVENTIONS BY A MAN IN MR. LANPHIER'S POSITION AND HIS CONNECTIONS WITH THE MAKERS OF THE AMERICAN ICBM?

Well, again, I think that obviously there is a certain amount of vested interest. But also there is good knowledge of the technical factors involved and so on. And these people were convinced that the funding available to their programs didn't permit them to proceed as rapidly as they might otherwise have done. So, and they assumed that the Soviets had kind of unlimited funding. And so it was their conviction that the Soviets must be way ahead. Indeed, the demonstration of the Sputniks I think satisfied them that the Soviets were ahead at least in the development of booster rockets. And so they assumed that the Soviets would stay that degree ahead. And, as I mentioned earlier, negative information is very hard to deal with. And if you are convinced, owing to where you sit, that a certain outcome is logical, it takes a fair amount of information to shake you from that position. And these people were not shaken from that position.

PERHAPS WE CAN TALK ABOUT WHAT INFORMATION WOULD FINALLY SHAKE MOST PEOPLE FROM THEIR CONVICTIONS IN THAT AREA. HOW WAS THE MISSILE GAP THING RESOLVED?

Well, finally, as I say, it was a, it was a result of...the culmination of a long development period initiated during their earlier administrations, that resulted in the availability to US intelligence of satellites. And the satellite coverage of course didn't emerge all at once. But it was better, more extensive than U-2 coverage. And as 1961 proceeded, more and more coverage of Soviet territory was achieved, other information was acquired. The agent Penkovsky reported that Mr. Khrushchev was exaggerating his missile capabilities. We also learned that there was a second-generation inter-continental missile that was under active development in the Soviet Union. And that seemed to be much more capable of large-scale deployment than the first generation, which was a big, bulky, cumbersome vehicle. And so it appeared as if the Soviets had a, another program which was coming along, which could more practically be deployed in large numbers. But the key to it was establishing the fact that in large portions of the Soviet territory, where intercontinental missiles had been thought possibly to be deployed there weren't any. Now, shall I go on, or do you want to ask another question?

WELL, I'M PARTICULARLY INTERESTED IN THE ISSUE OF WHAT IT LOOKED LIKE? I MEAN, ONE OF THE KEY ISSUES WAS PERSUADING THE AIR FORCE THAT --

Yeah, what turned up in the field finally was an indication that the operational Soviet missile launchers and their facilities, their support facilities in fact bore a distinct relationship to the test facilities, and they weren't something completely different, and they weren't something that was impossible to identify. And this was because it takes a certain amount of maintenance, and fueling and other check-out equipment and so on, to operate a system. And—

LET ME JUST STOP YOU THERE. CAN YOU STOP FOR A SECOND.

...The missile gap finally disappeared, owing to the ability of the United States to collect satellite photography on large areas of the Soviet Union, which emerged mostly during 1961. There was additional helpful information. The agent Penkovsky indicated that Mr. Khrushchev had been exaggerating these capabilities, and we learned about a second generation ICBM which was taking a good deal of development effort and looked as if it would be much more capable of large-scale deployment than the first, bulky, cumbersome, first generation system. But the key to it was searching large areas with some confidence that if there was an ICBM facility there we would be able to see it. And a key to that was finding out that, as we had suspected, that the facilities for deployment in the field bore a close resemblance to the facilities at the test range. And this occurred sometime in 1961. Now, a dispute existed long after that in that for example, the Air Force, and the Strategic Air Command, and the intelligence people held the view that an ICBM launching facility could look like anything. And that indeed it could be very easily concealed and that there might be hundreds of launchers deployed in the Soviet Union that we hadn't found. But as this connection between deployed launch facilities and test range facilities became clearer, and as we learned more about what it takes to operate a big system like this it's more than just physical characteristics; there are a lot of other things as well. The view that there were hundreds of launch facilities in the Soviet Union simply became less and less credible in relation to the evidence. And fortunately, by the time of the Cuban missile crisis, even though I think there were still maybe some holdouts at that time, the government as a corporate body had the confidence that indeed the missile gap was in favor of the United States.

ONE OTHER QUESTION ABOUT THAT, AND YOU MAY NOT KNOW THE ANSWER TO THIS BECAUSE IT'S REALLY NOT DIRECTLY IN THE FIELD, BUT AIR FORCE INTELLIGENCE, AND PARTICULARLY SAC INTELLIGENCE, HAD AS ONE OF ITS PRIME FUNCTIONS THE IDENTIFICATION OF TARGETS FOR OUR OWN NUCLEAR ARSENAL. IF THEY SINCERELY BELIEVED THAT THERE WERE HUNDREDS, PERHAPS EVEN THOUSANDS, OF MISSILES DEPLOYED IN THE SOVIET UNION, PRESUMABLY THEY WOULD HAVE BEEN KEEN TO TARGET THOSE, IF THEY'D KNOW WHERE THEY WERE. IS IT YOUR IMPRESSION THAT WINDMILLS AND WOODSHEDS AND OTHER THINGS THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN MISSILE SILOS IN THEIR VIEW WERE BEING TARGETED BY SAC INTELLIGENCE? SO THAT IN THE CASE OF A WAR THEY WOULD HAVE BEEN HIT BY OUR OWN NUCLEAR WEAPONS?

Jonathan, I don't know how they did their targeting.

OK. JUST THE FINAL QUESTION THEN, WHAT LEGACY OR LEGACIES WERE THERE, DO YOU THINK, EITHER FOR THE CIA OR FOR THE COUNTRY AT LARGE, IN THIS WHOLE SILO–TO–MISSILE GAP?

Well, that's a good question. History never repeats itself exactly, of course, so one has to be fairly tentative about any generalizations. But first, it does seem to me that when an intelligence estimate becomes a political football, the nation's interest is not served. Now, there's no way of keeping intelligence estimates from occurring at times when there are important political campaigns underway in this country. After all, our views of how we stand in the relation to the rest of the world are in some respects political, so I think there's some inevitable relationship there that you can't get away from. That being the case, it seems to me that there's no substitute for information. The big problem that we had was inadequate and ambiguous information during the time of that missile gap era. The Eisenhower administration deserves a lot of credit, it seems to me, for having developed imaginative, forward looking collection systems. Some of those collection systems were to the benefit of successor administrations. But it's a good thing they happened, and it's interesting to remember that it takes a long time to develop those. You have to be thinking way up ahead. Even with information on the current situation, projecting another country's programs and decision making for some years in advance is just fraught with possibilities for error. We made additional overestimates from time to time, and we made a fair number of substantial underestimates as well in subsequent years. And it...be that we're asking too much of ourselves to try to forecast with confidence. One now is sort of drawn towards making alternate projections and things like that under certain circumstances. And one possibility is of course that arms control agreements, which have other potential benefits and perils, can at least limit some of the uncertainty about the future which confronts US planning. If you can have some confidence that you can monitor the other fellow's performance, and that he'll comply that to an arms control agreement by just interposing arbitrary negotiated limits does have the effect of kind of putting bounds on that open-ended uncertainty about the future that was characteristic of this missile gap period.

ISN'T THE ATTEMPT TO FORECAST OTHER GOVERNMENT'S PROGRAMS, ISN'T THAT PRECISELY THE ESTIMATES OF INTENTION RATHER THAN CAPABILITY THAT JOSEPH ALSOP WAS ON ABOUT? I MEAN, WASN'T WHAT HE WAS SAYING IS NEVER MIND WHAT YOU THINK THE GOVERNMENT MIGHT DO. JUST CONCENTRATE ON WHAT THEY COULD DO IN THE WORST CASE, AND THAT'S THE ONLY THING YOU CAN FORECAST.

There's no possibility of making a pure capabilities estimate. For example, one could devote half his gross national product to military affairs if one estimated that the Soviets could do that, I suppose that's true, but it wouldn't be a realistic estimate. Neither is there I think a pure intentions estimate. What these estimates were were attempts to arrive at some reasonable program, in light of an expectation that the Soviets wanted to bring us under fire, and that's intentions, but taking into account the demonstrated events of the program and in the absence of information about deployment, making some reasonable projections about what a deployment program might look like. If that's intention, so be it, but I don't think it is, I don't think it's really trying to read the other fellow's mind. And I don't think it was a substantial change from the way estimates were made previously or have been made since.