always easy nor were there full agreement on the course of action. and those disagreements probable caused some consternation in washington. today we offer an insightful look at that amazing period of our history. we have assembled a stellar group of speakers and panelists who will provide important perspectives and perhaps some lively discussion. our keynote was there on the and we are quite fortunate to have him with us today because he graciously agreed to modify his schedule so he could be here. but unfortunately he has to leave at the break because he has to catch a red eye to go back to new york this evening. ken adelman has an impressive resume. author, professor, senior government official, arms control expert as well as ambassador. but there's a few other things that you might not know about him. in a program he called "movers and shakespeares" he uses the

lessons learned from shakespeare to teach leadership to top executives. being a renaissance man he also took part in the zaire river expedition in 1974 traveling down the congo river on the 100th anniversary of henry morton stanley's legendary expedition. he even translated for muhammad ali at the rumble in the jungle fight with george foreman. one of the many highlights of his distinguished career was accompanying ronald reagan to the superpower summits with general secretary mikhail gorbachev. all of this provides a unique perspective for our symposium today. ladies and gentlemen, please give a warm welcome to ambassador ken adelman. [ applause ] >> thank you, duke. that was a wonderful introduction.

it was so much nicer than the introduction i had in indianapolis when i was in office and the fellow there from the rotary club said that i had been in the -- with ronald reagan for all these important things. i was in and out of the white house constantly. i knew everything that was happening. so he ended the introduction of me with a grand flourish. he said, "so listen up carefully washington. here's ken adelman" [ laughter ] then about a year ago, a year and a half ago now, i was giving a talk on security interests in northeast asia. and the head of the foreign affairs committee in tokyo after my speech got up. a wonderful japanese man. after my speech he got up and he after my speech he got up and he said, "ambassador adelman, for your service to the free world

and for your remarks today, you deserve much clap. [ laughter ] i said, thank you, i appreciated the sentiment on that. and all the things in the world i wanted, much clap was not what i wanted. but it's an honor to be here today. and whenever i say that i always address ronald reagan gave as president of the united states. it was at his alma mater, eureka college. he was there a few months after he was shot. and reagan came out, and he thanked the president and the faculty for giving him an honorary degree. then he said, "it's wonderful to get an honorary degree from eureka college. to tell you the truth, i always thought the first degree i got was rather honorary as well"the night i didn't get great grades here, but just the other night i was sitting on the truman balcony of the white house and it was a starlit night, just beautiful. nancy and i were sipping some

wine. to the right i look and there's the lincoln memorial, straight ahead washington monument and the jefferson memorial. to the left the capitol building. i said, "nancy, next week i'm going to eureka college". she says, "yes, i know, dear". he says, "i didn't get very good grades at eureka college". she says "yes, i know, dear". he says, "you know, there's no telling what i could have become had i really applied myself and really been diligent at eureka college." [ laughter ] >> i want to start today this symposium that is a very important and wonderful symposium on the role of intelligence in the reagan administration by looking at the main question of that era. and the main question i hope our panel goes and talks about today. and that is the question of how did president reagan get it really right on the big issues? the really big issues?

when those of us who worked with him in the intelligence community, in academia, and policymakers, who had spent so much time, more time on these issues than he did, who knew the subject so much better, who were, we thought, so much smarter, how did he get it right and we didn't? for starters let's go to the finish. clearly by 1982, ronald reagan foresaw that communism would as he stated publicly in 1982, quote end up on the ash heap of history. according to marty anderson and a lot of materials i've read recently, it was in the 1970s that he worked out in his own mind how the cold war would end. namely, we win, you lose. the intelligence community didn't come to a conclusion like that until 1989. and even then with caveats and footnotes.

for this tardiness the cia has been roundly criticized. but that's something of a bum wrap since the agency assessments had been moving in that direction for years. besides, to conclude before 1989 that the soviet union would actually be relegated to the ash heap of history was not only unthinkable to the cia, it was also unthinkable to the kgb. during the whole of the reagan administration, such thinking was pie in the sky. believed singularly by ronald reagan, we policy wonks, the real soviet experts, we knew better. but we were wrong. i remember telling president reagan one time, or three times, in fact, that i said, "mr. president, you know, since 1917 some 35 countries have gone from capitalism to communism.

not one country has ever gone from communism to capitalism. and it's unlikely that it's going to happen anytime soon". he looked at me, shook that head of his in his wonderful way, said, "thank you, ken. that's very interesting. thank you, ken". and then went on to say it again a few minutes later. for ronald reagan to believe that we could and would win the cold war and fairly soon, that idiosyncratic view is more than just, as shakespeare would say, passing strange or of academic for it had real policy consequences then. consequences that none of us, including ronald reagan, could ever imagine. here's how. if you took the then conventional and quite convincing view that the u.s.-soviet rivalry was for all ages, as far as the eye could

see, as far as the mind, imagination could go, then you had to get along, avoid blowing each other up and make do. the rivalry then became like a bad marriage without divorce from which there was no escape. or in jean-paul sartre's play, with the characters of no exit. you strived as your goal to have the situation as least intolerable as you could make it. this mindset led to the liberal's view of u.s.-soviet accommodation, or to the nixon-kissinger view of hard, tough-minded detente. yet on the other hand, if you adopted the distinct mental construct that the u.s.-soviet competition was temporary, that it would end soon with their losing and our winning, since their system contradicted human nature and therefore was illegitimate and our system

complemented human nature, allowing the flowering of the human being and therefore was legitimate, then you took a radically different view. this approach, stemming as i say from a different mindset than ronald reagan had, broke with previous presidents, especially nixon-kissinger who felt they had to adopt a realistic foreign policy, one that accepted soviet power forever more, one which would legitimize this predicament and legitimize the soviet government. in contrast with reagan's mindset and policy stemming from it, he would be willing to sit down with the soviets, but you'd also be willing to stand up to them. moreover, you'd be game to adopt the so-called reagan doctrine, a vigorously challenging moscow, rollback as it's called, but not as originally envisioned in central europe. but rather in central america,

in central asia like afghanistan, and central africa like angola. moreover, you'd confront it where it hurt them most in the central nervous system. you'd engage mightily in the war of ideas. you'd say outright that the soviets "reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat" to advance their age -- their aims as ronald reagan did at his very first presidential press conference. now, you have to understand, this was okay for a speaker on the g.e. circuits to say. it was okay for a speaker at the republican national convention to say. it's okay to say in the rotary club. but for a president of the united states to say it at his first press conference, right there, setting the stage for diplomacy over the next eight years, that was awfully new.

presuming that their government was illegitimate, you'd call the soviet union a "evil empire" and the focus of evil in the modern world, and you'd cry out, "mr. gorbachev, tear down this wall". all this stems from the unconventional mindset that reagan somehow adopted. similarly, reagan saw or felt the transforming nature of sdi. now, a lot of us thought strategic defense was very helpful. in fact, i had written an article for the heritage foundation policy review a year before the inauguration saying we should really go revive strategic defense. but we considered it not revolutionary but complementary to traditional deterrents. i was amazed in november of 1985 during the first summit between reagan and gorbachev, the first

u.s.-soviet summit in seven years, when the soviet delegation spent 75% of their time in very agitated nature about sdi. i remember taking aside pat buchanan who was then the director of white house communications and saying" pat, don't they understand, this is just a presidential speech. after 2 1/2 years after the president gave his speech on march 23rd, 1983, advocating sdi, the pentagon had done virtually nothing on it. it was just rhetoric. it was just presidential words. and i remember pat saying" don't tell them that. they think it's a real program that the pentagon has under way". similarly, sdi became a make or break issue at the next summit. our best summit. at reykjavik 25 years ago last month. on that historic sunday morning

in october of 1986, we had negotiated -- after we had negotiated in the hofdi house from 8:00 at night until 6:20 in the morning, after i told president reagan in a secure bubble, the room within the room that for our top secret conversations at about 8:30 in the morning i said, "mr. president, we had accomplished more in the night before, previous evening, than we had for seven consecutive years in geneva cumulatively on that". gorbachev then played his sdi card. he tied all of our arms control agreements with the president either snuffing out or shaving down sdi. president reagan, of course, stood his ground. there was no way that was going to happen. in short, the soviets went nuts about sdi's possibilities.

while people like me were going nuts about the pentagon not beginning to work on sdi's possibilities. vigorously in the war of ideas and launching sdi were most critical -- not sufficient but nonetheless critical in bringing down the soviet union. i say that -- this to contradict today's common explanation, at least in some sophisticated circles, that the ussr collapsed because of its own internal decay. not because of any actions by any u.s. president. certainly not the one clark clifford, washington's foremost wise man, called that amicable dunce ronald reagan. since it was rotten at the core, the soviet union had to collapse. so says this argument.

but then you begin to wonder just why did it have to collapse? history is replete with poor countries that either stay poor or get poorer, yet which do not undergo systematic revolution. and especially not a peaceful abandonment of the empire. the turkish and russian empires were poor and got poorer over several centuries. yet only the calamity of world war i brought a violent end to those empires. to assert the inevitability of the soviet breakup is simple minded. it leaves out people in that era. to summon this chatters class, there is room for a portrait in that historic -- there is room for a face in that historic portrait of the era. that face is of mikhail gorbachev. now, mind you, gorbachev deserves some of the credit. no doubt about that.

but at some point, amidst all the adulation heaped on mikhail gorbachev, someone should apply the simple question posed on any leader in history. that question is, did that leader achieve her or his goals? let's apply it here. on march 11, 1985, did mikhail gorbachev set out to totally gorbachev set out to break up the soviet union and totally discredit the ideology that he and his wife had proclaimed for their whole lives? was this his goal? were these his aspirations when lifting up his arm to take the oath of office that march day? or are they a fairly neat summary of the goals and aspiration of that other fellow,

the one, the pseudointelligencia will go to any length to avoid giving any credit. to that other guy who raised his arm to take the oath of office a few years before on january 20th, 1981. when all the pundits resort to either of these twin claims, the inevitability of it all due to soviet decline or gorbachev's doing it all, they bring to mind george orwell's nice equip that "some ideas are so stupid that only an intellectual could have thought of them." [ laughter ] >> i somehow began this talk at the end. so now let me scramble back to the beginning. to return to the question posed for our two panels this afternoon, what and how did

intelligence do during the reagan administration? contrary to what i felt before researching the record very thoroughly for this talk this afternoon, the intelligence community did much better, fairly good, in fact, a solid b plus. now, i say this not only because the cia is host to this great conference this afternoon, and being joe, as you know, a basically polite fellow i'm not going to offend my host. but the record stand up very nicely. there is nothing like the massive intelligence failure that we had from 1995, actually, to 2003 on iraqi weapons of mass destruction. instead it was a solid record of reporting quite accurately, as it turned out, the status of soviet forces, the woes of its geriatric rulers, sliding rules of the economy and gorbachev's incoherence on these intractable problems. true, the cia failed to predict

the collapse of communism and the breakup of the soviet union which was one of the seminal events of the 20th century. as i said before, so did the kgb, so did gorbachev, so did the politburo, so did the supreme soviet. the decades of cia economic analysis has been controversial. it's treated very thoroughly by doug michekin here and bruce berkowitz that you'll hear this afternoon and by wonderful books that go with it. but to gallop through this grand terrain in the 1970s the cia estimated soviet defense spending at 6% of its gnp. this was clearly off base. the problem stemmed from the intelligence community hyping the overall size of the soviet economy, which low balled the defense burden. on the smaller than estimated economy. the intelligence community then deemed the soviet gnp half the size of the united states gnp,

where actually it was one-third or less. what's been dubbed a bombshell what's been dubbed a bombshell exploded in may of 1976 when the cia recalibrated its ruble prices and costs and raised the approval of soviet defense spending i was then working as a special assistant. i was young and to tell you the truth not too special to the young and very special secretary of defense don rumsfeld. rumsfeld launched a veritable first strike against the then director of central intelligence, george herbert walker bush, for low balling even this number. while bush's cia estimated 11 to 13%, rumsfeld felt it was more like 13% to 15%. these two men, whose futures would hold even bigger jobs,

had -- i don't know how to put this gingerly -- i would say a rather minimum regard for each other. president ford valiantly tried to mediate, but soon his administration and with it this angry, heated exchange ended. looking back we can now see that their hot dispute, 11 to 13% versus 13 to 15%, is rather comical. upon opening up the kremlin kimono we found the true figures were closer to 30% or even 40% of gnp. both the bush and the rumsfeld estimates were off by more than a factor of two. again, to be fair, in the forest of analysis on soviet military spending like in much of intelligence, there's a difficulty.

just how do we know anything for sure? like everything important in life, william shakespeare illustrates this point beautifully. an early scene in one of his wonderful plays, a fellow who's commander of venice's military is summoned by the duke and senators. he's asked to fight a turkish attack that he just learned about. a fellow needs to know how big an attack turkey launched to size his own forces to rebel that attack. in the 16th century situation room of venice, the first intelligence briefer declares that turkey has lost -- has launched -- turkey has launched 107 ships. now mind you, it's not around 110. it's not more than 100. 107 ships. sounds like he really knows what he's talking about, doesn't it? until the next briefer comes along and says he has a very clear report that turkey has launched 140 ships.

othello starts to look around the room deciding how do i know what's right around here? until a senator comes in, and he has a confirmed report that the turks have launched 200 ships. okay? as mcbeth says in another context, "confusion now hath made his masterpiece". everyone's confused, all right, especially when the scene ends. and yet another intelligence officer rushes in, directly from the front, telling "the turks have launched -- the turks have attacked. they are "of 30 sails". okay. they didn't know how many ships the turks had launched. it was probably somewhere between 30 and 200, but we don't know for sure.

anyway, othello didn't know and couldn't know, but presumably the turks knew how many ships they launched. now, in the case of the soviet union, as i'll talk about in one minute, i'm not sure they even knew that. but more about that. presuming precision on what we think we know may be myopic at times, complicating this already messy field of soviet defense estimates were where further doubts not only whether the cia was estimating these things right, but whether the cia was even estimating the right things. during the reagan years, the very gifted analyst harry rowen pushed for a grander definition, one that encompassed the soviet union's cost of empire. this category included costs of keeping the warsaw pact nations captive, of cuba and angola, of

national liberation battles and all that. it brought the agency's estimate to over 20% of soviet gnp, which is closer but as one beneficiary of the soviet cost of empire would say in havana, "still no cigar". these battles over soviet military and empire spending fought on so many fronts over so many years were actually a very minimum importance in the real world of evaluating the u.s. and soviet military balance. why is this? because a larger number didn't mean greater soviet capability. our technical collections showed and appraised these capabilities rather well. instead, a larger number showed greater soviet inefficiency. the issue became marginally important on a higher strategic plane as it indicated the determination to wit soviets would go to become and stay a

global military power. just how much the kremlin would make its people sacrifice for its worldwide ambitions. but this issue wasn't minimum or even marginal to me. in arms control it was major. why? because of the prevalent argument then that without arms control, the soviets could break out and build an even greater military arsenal. without having the, let's call them blessings of the office of management and budget, congressional appropriation committee, congressional hearings, and an array of liberal anti-defense ngos, it's a totalitarian regime like that in moscow could accelerate quickly and leave us in the dust militarily. yet if moscow was already allocating between 30% and 40%

of its gnp, there was very little acceleration left in that engine. it was already doing as much as it possibly could be doing. after all, during the world war ii life or death struggle for all of civilization, the united states allocated 32% of our gnp to defense in 1943, 36% in 1944, and the high-level mark was 37% in 1945. hence during the cold war, the soviets were allocating roughly what we had allocated during the hottest of all hot wars. intelligence during the reagan administration was, as before, the best in technical collection. there it counted most. what the cia knew and watched the ss 18s, the ss 24s, the ss 25, virtually every strategic system i had to deal with. such thorough and accurate monitor gave us a clear window on real soviet capabilities. hence from the 1960s onward,

this is very important, including throughout the 1980s when we were in office, there were no real surprises from the soviet weapons breakthrough. there were no bomber gaps, as in the '50s, no missile gap as in 1960. the start of the u2 monitoring in july of 1956 ended fears of a bomber gap. and the launch of intelligence satellites in 1961 proved the myth of the missile gap. though this came after john f. kennedy won a very close election highlighting that very charge. we quickly learned that the soviets were not building new icbms as quickly as the u.s. air force had forecast it. and in 1964, with corona in satellite, every single soviet missile field had been located and photographed. such thorough monitoring helped

gauge soviet compliance with arms control, but this was something of a mixed bag over the years. personally i became rather curious about all the fuss over verification, especially by my fellow conservatives. it was and remained the top of everybody's list of critical concerns, especially during the reagan administration. ronald reagan himself drove mikhail gorbachev fairly nuts with his constant refrain, "dovieri do provieri, trust but verify". it was a terrific slogan. it was crisp and rhyming in russian. a wonderful sentiment. yet i was unclear what, if anything, we'd actually do when our verification found their