Intelligence

Predicting the Soviet-Afghan War

Douglas MacEachin, who served as CIA’s Deputy Director for Intelligence from 1993 to 1995, has an article analyzing the U.S. intelligence community’s performance in forecasting the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. “The military intervention the Soviets carried out in the last week of December 1979 – particularly its timing and scope – came as a surprise to the US intelligence community at large and to US policy officials in general … This was not because of an absence of intelligence information on Soviet preparations for the move. It was that the operation being prepared was contrary to what intelligence analysts had expected Moscow would be willing to do.”