GETTING TO KNOW THE ENEMY 259he was not the primary influence on Yurchenko’s decision to leave
America, he and other Soviet double agents undoubtedly supplied
information that compromised the CIA and FBI operations in the
USSR. The KGB arrested at least ten Soviet citizens who worked for
the American agencies. Although suspicions grew at Langley about
Soviet penetration, neither Casey nor his successors gave due import-
ance to the matter until the mid-1990s.^8
The CIA’s signals intelligence was always in better shape. The USSR
presented formidable problems to outside observers since it was a
closed society; but Casey claimed that America’s superior technology
gave the CIA an edge over Soviet countermeasures.^9 He expected the
worst of the Soviet leadership and rarely felt disappointed. His chief
specialist on the USSR was Fritz Ermath, who characterized Gor-
bachëv in mid-1986 as a ‘neo-conservative, not a liberalizer’ who
would never make serious concessions in arms talks. Ermath saw his
objective as being simply to get the West to slacken its defensive
build-up.^10
Throughout 1987 the CIA contended that if the USSR was to
remain a world power, it had to make changes much more fundamen-
tal than those that Gorbachëv had introduced.^11 It entirely mistrusted
his commitment to eliminating all his nuclear missiles.^12 It also cast
doubt on him as an internal reformer and suggested that he would
never run the risk of ‘systemic ruin’. It forecast that the USSR would
achieve only a marginal improvement in economic competitiveness
but would continue to renovate its military arsenal and meddle
throughout the Third World. Gorbachëv’s personal position was a
vulnerable one. He could be overthrown in a coup or might have to
confront serious disorder in Eastern Europe.^13 On 24 November
Casey’s deputy Robert Gates summarized the CIA’s advice in a briefing
paper for the President. The USSR, he stressed, was still committing
resources to ‘exotic’ new weaponry and stirring up trouble around the
world. America needed to keep up its guard. Gates said that Soviet
leaders wanted a more benign international environment only as a
breathing space to enable them to modernize their economy. He dis-
missed Moscow’s proposals on intermediate-range missiles as a cheap
ploy to divide NATO and win friends in Western Europe; he flatly
denied that the USSR had changed its underlying foreign objectives.^14
Gorbachëv certainly took the matter of his global image very
seriously. He had his book Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country
and the World speedily translated into the world’s main languages and