GETTING TO KNOW THE ENEMY 267penetrated the CIA through double agent Ames, it had no human
‘assets’ elsewhere at the top of the administration. It could disclose
nothing important that Gorbachëv did not know. Whenever reports
arrived from the Lubyanka on principal topics for talks with America,
Gorbachëv passed them on to the central party apparatus for an
assessment of their reliability.^60 He explained his attitude at the Polit-
buro in February 1987 when grumbling about the quality of material
that was being forwarded to him about the European Economic Com-
munity. The academic research institutes were falling short in their
work and the KGB’s assessments were no better. Gorbachëv, with char-
acteristic frankness, said that Western open sources were more useful
for the groundwork of policy.^61 It was only much later, when Gor-
bachëv’s trusted associate Vadim Bakatin became KGB Chairman in
the late summer of 1991, that the political leadership discovered the
depths of chaos and incompetence in the way that the intelligence
agency gathered and processed the files of its agents. Chebrikov and
Kryuchkov received endless material from their 480,000 subordinates
but failed to eliminate the prevalence of ideological clichés in the
content.^62
Gorbachëv realized that Marxism-Leninism distorted the leader-
ship’s perceptions of other countries. The air was leaving his ideological
tyres:
We’ve long ago been taught that a general crisis of capitalism is
happening. So that if you take every opportunity to say the word
‘crisis’, you won’t go far wrong! (Laughter). And here we are and
now they’re assuring us that a crisis in the [American] adminis-
tration is taking place. Look how they’re covering the President
with unbelievable caricatures. And it’s not realized that a different
psychology – and a different political process – exists there. We
need a short-term prognosis, but we also need a prognosis that
extends for many years after Reagan.^63Soviet propaganda had always predicted the imminent dissolution of
world capitalism. Yet the advanced market economy had reinvented
itself in generation after generation despite intermittent crises. It was
time for the Politburo to throw away old comfort blankets.
Gorbachëv paused for reflection in early 1987 when telling some
bitter truths to the Politburo. If perestroika was going to succeed, the
USSR needed to achieve technological collaboration with foreign
countries.^64 He lamented how far the Soviet economy was lagging