GETTING TO KNOW THE ENEMY 261he accused the agency of contaminating its reports with political pre-
judices.^24 He wanted information from espionage, not the opinion of
spymasters, and he knew that not all the CIA’s Soviet specialists agreed
with the analysis that Casey been propounding.^25 He also charged the
CIA leadership with saying things to the President that they with-
held from the State Department.^26 Gates rejected all the criticism. He
claimed that little or nothing was being held back from the foreign
service; he added that the CIA was internally divided and not a mono-
lithic agency. He asked Shultz to accept that the CIA and the State
Department often had simply an honest disagreement about what was
happening in the USSR. Gates and Shultz agreed to try to get on better
in future. Shultz joked: ‘I regard you as my psychiatrist and hope you’ll
help me be straight.’^27
The American and Soviet sides worked intensively to produce
agreements; but the struggle in public relations intensified and each
side attacked hard through the channels of its agencies of propaganda.
The Soviet priority was to denounce the Strategic Defense Initiative.
Booklets were rushed into English. The style was usually less stilted
than in earlier years, the appeal more emotional. Whence the Threat
to Peace went through multiple editions. The tone was accusing:
‘The threat to world peace comes from the American war machine, the
militarist policy pursued by the American Administration and its
efforts to conduct international affairs from the position of strength.’
America’s quest for military superiority had supposedly wrecked the
Reykjavik summit. Thule and Fylingdales were said to be a breach of
the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. The booklet claimed that big Ameri-
can corporations treated the Defense Initiative as the goose that lays
the golden egg. The expansion of arms systems to outer space would
disturb the global strategic equilibrium and make nuclear war more
probable. Soviet military analysts denied that Warsaw Pact forces had
numerical superiority over NATO.^28 The Committee of Soviet Scien-
tists for Peace Against the Nuclear Threat took the same line – Roald
Sagdeev and Andrei Kokoshin warned that the idea of a ‘limited
nuclear war’ was a dangerous nonsense.^29
The American political establishment accepted such tracts as
unavoidable in a free society, and everyone in Washington recognized
that it was impossible to insist upon publishing pro-Reagan booklets in
Moscow. The Reagan administration did, however, take exception to
the Kremlin’s continuing campaigns of disinformation. ‘Soviet active
measures’ were spreading downright lies about America’s foreign