OK, it’s pretty widely known that the Manhattan Project leaked to the Soviets in important ways. Is the amount of leakage in the other direction public knowledge yet? Does the public know how much the 1950s American government knew about 1950s Soviet nuclear weapons programs? How about American governmental knowledge of the Soviet space program?
Not entirely. We know bout some major events, but most of the archives are still classified, and may be for some time. Certainly we were able to collect fairly accurate info on what went on behind the Iron Curtain as well as reasonably accurate knowledge of the Soviet military power and arms trade. We had an AK-47 early, though it didn’t help push us to develop a similar weapon.
The intercepts were captured during WW2, but analysis was mostly afterwards, during the early years of the cold war. It was released publicly in 1995.
Most people should be aware of the U2 flights and spy satellites if they have any interest in the period.
Right. I am more interested in us having done to the Soviets what the Soviets did to us using Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, or Klaus Fuchs. Agents in place or defectors, and, yes, I know about Belenko and at least one during the Korean War.
Just a side note; one could argue that the M2 carbine the US used at the time is functionally similar to the AK-47; both are removable magazine-fed selectable-fire weapons, using similar sized cartridges; 7.62x33 mm for the M2, and 7.62x39 mm for the AK-47.
Uncle Sam kept a pretty tight lid on his espionage successes until after the Cold War ended. The revelation of the CIA’s famous Berlin Tunnel in 1956 made a splash at the time, but it was the Soviets who revealed it: https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/on-the-front-lines-of-the-cold-war-documents-on-the-intelligence-war-in-berlin-1946-to-1961/art-7.html
Karla kept killing our spies.
The submarine cable tapping in the Sea of Okhotsk seems to have been a major intelligence coup.
I suspect that there was a still-secret program to obtain samples of the vaccines used in the USSR, to determine if the Soviets were secretly immunizing their population against a biowarfare agent.
I’m not clear if the OP is asking specifically about US knowledge of Soviet nuclear and space programs, or just intelligence successes against the Soviets in general. Most of the replies seem to be about the latter, focusing on the period well after the Soviets were known to have tested a nuclear weapon.
In any case, here is a great summary of various issues relating to US knowledge of Soviet nuclear programs. Be sure to check out the source documents at the bottom, especially document 2.
In short, the US knew the Soviets were working on a weapon, but didn’t fully appreciate the speed of the development efforts (which were of course aided by the penetration of the Manhattan Project).
Ravenman: Thanks.
The Tom Clancy theory is that the CIA is far more effective than its public image. They make sure their screwups get publicized and conceal their successes.
I’m not sure they are that smart.
My own personal theory has been that the CIA deliberately takes the blame for the screwups of other agencies and/or entities which we hear little or nothing about.
I think so-some evidence:
-almost all of the eastern european intelligence agants parachuted into these countries in the 1950’s were captured within hours
-CIA director JJ Angleton was convinced that there was a high level “mole” in the CIA
-the Berlin Tunnel was compromised from the beginning (by British spies working for the KGB). The Sovs probably fed us lots of false information.
Indirect proof: the highly successful “Ivy Bells” operation (wherein the US Navy tapped Soviet submarine cables and recorded their transmissions) was a USNI-NSA operation-the Navy refused to allow the CIA into this (to compromise it)?
Seriously, given the CIA’s known incompetence (the Cuban “Bay of Pigs” fiasco, the total clusterfuck in iran (allowing the Shah to enter the USA after the revolution), and the Granada near-disaster, the CIA probably did more for Soviet intelligence (boosted its budget), than it ever did to help the US.
For the most part American success stories tended to be of a technical nature, while the soviets for the most part were more human oriented.
Declan
Except that Pelton revealed to the Soviets that information needed to determine their cables were being tapped, which compromised Operation Ivy Bells. Although the United States got a lot of information about naval operations from the communications through the cable, much of it already confirmed observations that had been made, which was useful but not revolutionary.
Which agencies are those? The problem with that theory is that it is pretty much impossible to operate something the size of an agency and the bureaucracy it entails without some degree of public awareness. Even when you hide the budgets, it is very difficult to hide people, especially when you have to go out and recruit people. As for the CIA deliberately accepting blame, it has always been the policy of the CIA not to comment on on-going operations, and politically, to avoid accepting any blame.
Now, it is true that elements within the CIA, operating semi-autonomously and with minimal or no executive oversight or direction, have run operations. The Bay of Pigs Invasion, while nominally a CIA operation, was actually run outside of the normal Directorate of Operations by a hand-picked crew by Dick Bissell, Jr. (E. Howard Hunt, Tracy Barnes, Jack Hawkins, et al). While Dulles knew details of the operation and the overall plan was approved by Eisenhower and later Kennedy, it was at best an extra-legal operation. Ditto for the Iran Contra dealings, which were run by several former CIA and Agency-affiliated individuals, but was not any kind of official operation.
Despite the claim that the CIA only publishes failures, the Company has had some notable successes, such as the 1954 overthrow of the Guzmán government in Guatemala, and it made little effort to conceal their involvement (perhaps intentionally pour encourager les autres). They may have also sucked up the blame for some semi-private ops, but that is incidental, not policy.
As for the specific questions of the o.p., we didn’t really know jack shit about the Soviet nuclear weapons program. Secrecy was far easier for the Soviets as they performed research and development in closed cities and remote facilities with the scientists and their families often segregated from the rest of the population. (Someone who has been to Los Alamos might say the same thing about LANL, but the difference is that a researcher there can grab the family, jump in the car, and be in Santa Fe in ninety minutes.) Much of our knowledge about weapons development and the Soviet industrial base came from tracking their procurement of precious materials on the open market.The detonation of Joe-1 (RDS-1), the first Soviet fission device, was almost a complete surprise. We knew that they had been provided the information on how to design a weapon, but the best estimates gave ten years before they would be able to manufacture the materials and fabricate a working device. Instead, they did it in under five. Joe-3 (RDS-4) we did have some limited information on, but it was shocking as it demonstrated that by 1952–three years after Joe-1–Soviets were actually developing effective technology to make weapons sufficiently compact to fit in the payload of a ballistic missile, which US analysts and engineers said wouldn’t be possible for several more years. By August 1953 the Soviets tested Joe-4 (RDS-6), a simple staged thermonuclear device nicknamed the “Layer Cake”. Although not a “true” multi-stage capable design, it placed the Soviets only a year or two behind American designers. In November 1955, the Soviet Union tested Andrei Sahkarov’s “Third Idea”, which was basically a Teller-Ulam device. While it was not a practical device for use with ballistic delivery, it became apparent to American observers that it would only be a matter of two or three years before the Soviets, who had a significant advance in large rocket delivery systems, would be able to couple thermonuclear weapons with medium range or intercontinental ballistic missile, which led to the fears of the “missile gap”. (The missile gap actually turned out to be fictitious; while the Soviets had the knowledge and technology to design such missiles, their manufacturing and industrial base prevented them from going into mass production as claimed by Khrushchev until well after the United States deployed Titan II and Minuteman I systems, and much of their missile fleet were cryogenic boosters that were slow to fuel and could only be stored in unhardened shelters.)
Much of US intelligence gathering capability, including Operation Gold (the tunnels in Berlin) was compromised from the beginning by leaks in British intelligence, particularly Kim Philby and the rest of the Cambridge Five. While the US also had operatives in that era in the Soviet apparatus (most notably Oleg Penkovsky) many of these were untrusted (rightly or no) as double agents or compromised by leaks in the British and American systems. This was portrayed in fictional fashion in John le Carre’s Karla Trilogy, with “Gerold the Mole” standing in for Philby and/or Maclean. This undercut many intelligence gathering operations in the 'Sixties and made Jesus James Angleton, the chief of counterintelligence at the CIA (fictionalized in DeNiro’s The Good Shepherd as Edward Wilson, played by Matt Damon). Several other notable security compromises happened in the late 'Seventies and 'Eighties, including the highly publicized Walker-Pelton ring and Christopher Boyce and Andrew Dautlon Lee. On the other hand, there were several highly useful defectors from the Soviet Union, including Oleg Gordievsky and Stanislav Levchenko, but also “false” double agents like Vitaly Yurchenko, who gave up Pelton and some loser named Ed Howard in order to cover for Aldrich Ames.
On the other hand, while the Soviets recruited many native agents of varying quality, they had great difficulty with installing their own counterintelligence and operations people in the West as they tended to become acclimated to “imperialist dogma”, and if not actually defect at least question the Soviet system. The effect of this may have been somewhat overstated, but it did result in overly cautious deployment of Soviet agents with onerous safeguards (such as holding families hostage) and a resulting lack of even basic information about everyday life in the West by Soviet agents. Some of analyses and reports from the KGB are high comedy as an exaggerated satire of Western life which they clearly obtained by watching re-runs of I Love Lucy and Father Knowns Best.
Stranger
Incidentally, for a great sf espionage novel about a Soviet sleeper agent in American academia, I highly recommend Joe Haldeman’s Tool of the Trade. Very, very good.
There is a great seal of the US that disagrees with you.
Great seal ? or Great Deal, not sure if thats what you meant or was it a typo.
Declan