A former CIA analyst exposes critical failures of U.S. intelligence during the Cold War.

Tuten’s book reveals, sometimes shockingly, the extent to which U.S. intelligence failed to recognize the threat to Europe posed by the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies during the Cold War. Tuten blames ideological bias for too often distorting the conclusions reached from years of historical evidence. He also criticizes Western intelligence agencies for not utilizing a broad array of both classified and unclassified Soviet sources, including journal articles written by military leaders, to cultivate a broader understanding of the Soviet mindset. This perspective included a singular focus on the victory of socialism at any cost, a belief in the intention of Western powers to commence a nuclear first strike, and an emphasis on stockpiling a range of weapons to meet all contingencies. Tuten further condemns U.S. intelligence for too often trying to translate Soviet concepts to fit fundamentally different Western frameworks. Overall, the author provides a lengthy and highly detailed examination of the composition and organization of Soviet military assets. Soviet “theaters of military action” (known by the Russian acronym TVDs) possessed both strategic and operational directions: The former focused on political or economic targets, the latter on configurations and movements of enemy forces. The failure of U.S. intelligence to link these directions with Soviet military exercises until the mid- to late 1980s was, for Tuten, a critical oversight, compounded by a misunderstanding of the Soviet concept of echelons, or massed forces deployed at different stages of an operation: “An analytic culture so deficient in basic reading comprehension is hardly capable of accurately judging complex problems with widely varied evidence.” The author demonstrates how the system of echelons could enable the USSR to continuously reinforce front-line armies, resulting in successive combat waves aimed at obliterating NATO defenses. Not only did U.S. intelligence fail to link satellite imagery of missile support bases with likely military fronts, but, as Tuten shows, several intelligence truisms were negated by the echelon system: namely, that the USSR would require time to move essential forces from the interior of the country, and that Soviet leaders would have to make a trade-off between troop strength and surprise.

Tuten hypothesizes that a series of uniquely designed bunkers built between 1959 and 1961 (termed Sensitive Operations Complexes [SOCs]) held stockpiles of both chemical and nuclear weapons, aimed for use on NATO countries. But U.S. intelligence analysts similarly failed to adjust their preconceptions to consider this possibility. Tuten’s expertise and the prodigious research he has devoted to his subject are unimpeachable. But a superfluity of detail and discussion overwhelm both the reader and, more importantly, Tuten’s conclusions. A textbook-like recitation of facts may be indispensable in vindicating the author’s hypothesis, but it’s likely to frustrate those readers with a more casual interest in the subject. Tuten does little to clarify obscure Russian military concepts, and frequent incomplete sentences and fragmentary thoughts complicate an already complex subject. Although serious students of intelligence will find useful material in Tuten’s work, this thorough investigation of a subject that should have international interest is unfortunately mired down by its tendency toward overcomplication and tangential argumentation.

An intermittently solid critique of Cold War–era U.S. intelligence marred by an overzealous focus on minutiae.