The dispute reached a bitter stalemate—when along came Khrushchev’s belligerent bragging about the U.S.S.R.’s terrifying ICBM program and then, on October 4, the launching of Sputnik. That settled the great dispute over the bomber gap. The CIA’s economic analysts won. The big bomber projections were dropped from the NIE. But they were dropped only because Sputnik allowed all of the broad assumptions about Soviet behavior and intentions to be preserved. The intelligence community could still argue that the Soviets wanted a big nuclear force aimed at the United States, but that they had now decided to build one in the form of ICBMs, not bombers. The NIE could still be judged fundamentally sound in its assessment of the nature and magnitude of the Soviet threat. And the U.S. Air Force could still use the estimates as its rationale for a gigantic fleet of long-range bombers and missiles of its own.
A new consensus was reached. And the consensus included not just Air Force Intelligence officers but also CIA analysts. Very few, even among the CIA skeptics, had ever altered their assumptions about the nature of the Soviet threat. They had been a bit puzzled by their own discoveries. But they viewed themselves as independent analysts, not attached or beholden to any military service—unlike their adversaries in Air Force Intelligence, who were under constant pressure to make their estimates of Soviet forces consistent with the budgetary desires of the Air Force proper. And they were eager to get into the strategic-estimates game, where all the big action and excitement lay. Challenging the predominant strategic estimators, the officers of Air Force Intelligence, and doing so with solid evidence and creative but logical analysis, was the best way to go about getting there. But when it came to thinking about Soviet aims and intentions, there was no question in 1957, even among the skeptical economists in the CIA, that the Reds were out to clobber America.
And so, as the bomber gap ended, the missile gap began.
The members of the Gaither Committee, the analysts at the RAND Corporation, the Democrats in Congress who criticized Eisenhower’s defense programs, had no way of knowing that the missile-gap intelligence estimates virtually appeared out of thin air, supplanting the bomber-gap estimates as the latter proved illusory.
The first NIE ascribing a huge missile arsenal to the Soviet Union was released in November 1957, and projected that the Russians would have 500 ICBMs by the end of 1962 or, if they embarked on a crash program, the end of 1961. There was no solid evidence for this estimate. All the earlier intelligence assumptions had led to the conclusion that the Soviets could have 500 intercontinental bombers by that date. When that projection proved false, Air Force Intelligence essentially changed “bombers” to “ICBMs,” but retained the original number 500.
By 1958, mainly with the aid of photographs taken from U-2 reconnaissance airplanes, which had begun flying spy missions over Russia in 1956, the Air Force had enough data to estimate the floor space of factories producing missiles. As with the bomber-gap estimates, they could figure the most efficient use of that floor space, assume a “learning curve” in the production, go on to assume that additional production plants would be utilized once the “learning curve” peaked, and infer from all this some figures on production rate.
From these extrapolations, the Air Force essentially confirmed the NIE of the previous year. The NIE of 1959 also concluded that if the Soviets decided to start a general nuclear war, their first move would be to destroy the Western nuclear forces in order to minimize or prevent retaliation. Since the 100 ICBMs that the Soviets could have by 1959 or 1960 would be enough to demolish almost all of SAC’s air bases, the situation seemed very grim.
However, by mid-1958, something seemed to appear not quite right with this estimate, and the early skeptics came once again from the inner corridors of the CIA—this time from the science and technology division headed by Herbert (Pete) Scoville, Jr., and his specialist on missiles, Sidney Graybeal. Just as the CIA’s economic division got involved with the NIEs during the bomber-gap period because of its experience in examining factory markings, the CIA science and technology office became involved during this period in the late 1950s because it knew about missiles.
No American had ever laid eyes on an actual Soviet missile, but these CIA scientists came up with some ingenious methods for essentially reconstructing one. The method involved monitoring Soviet missile test flights—originally with radar technology, later with acoustic, telemetric, optical, and infrared sensors. From the data intercepted, Scoville, Graybeal and their staff could infer rough estimates of a missile’s size, weight, fuel loading, inner workings, accuracy and (based on its weight) explosive power.
In the course of monitoring these tests, however, the CIA scientists began to notice that the rate of Soviet ICBM testing had slowed down considerably. The Soviets were still testing plenty of short-range missiles; by the summer of 1958, they had tested a dozen medium- and intermediate-range missiles; but they had fired only six intercontinental-range missiles, and they had not fired any for quite a while. Still, the CIA stuck to its original estimate. Again, it was the dilemma of negative evidence: how long do you wait for something to happen before you conclude that it isn’t going to happen? It was too early to draw conclusions.
Still, officers in Air Force Intelligence thought that the CIA was vastly underestimating the Soviet ICBM test program, and began to worry that if the CIA were allowed to dominate on this issue, the estimate on Soviet missile production might eventually change—thus endangering the massive missile program that the Air Force was advocating. Word began to get around that the Soviets were doing a lot more testing than the CIA was reporting; that this information was being systematically suppressed and kept away from Allen Dulles; that in fact Soviet missile production was also a lot more vigorous than the NIEs suggested.
Finally, the word trickled down to Stuart Symington, the Democratic Senator from Missouri. Symington was the ideal man to take on the job of pushing the Air Force’s case. A senior member of the Armed Services Committee, former Secretary of the Air Force in the Truman Administration, sharp critic of Eisenhower’s defense policies, the most vocal advocate of the Gaither Report’s public release, the most spirited warning siren on the missile gap and clearly laying the groundwork for his ambitions in the upcoming 1960 Presidential election, Symington was a man who was eager to jump on board any claim or statistic bemoaning America’s military weakness or decrying Russia’s military strength.
Symington heard about the reports of underestimating in the CIA from Colonel Thomas Lanphier, a man well plugged into the Air Force gossip network, having ridden for more than a decade on his fame as the war hero who directed the air ambush that trapped and shot down Japanese war leader Admiral Yamamoto during World War II. Lanphier had also been Symington’s executive assistant when he was Secretary of the Air Force; he was president of the Air Force Association shortly after that, and he was now assistant to the president of Convair, manufacturer of the Atlas ICBM. Lanphier had his own stakes in beating down the CIA, since a large Soviet ICBM program made it more likely that his own company would be awarded a large ICBM production contract.
Symington, meanwhile, saw in Lanphier’s report the makings of a terrific scandal that would work to his own political favor. Symington requested a personal briefing from Allen Dulles at CIA headquarters in late July 1958. The data that Dulles gave him on Soviet missile testing differed so considerably from Lanphier’s data that Symington requested another session with Dulles on August 6, this time bringing Lanphier with him. Dulles brought in Howard Stoertz, the Soviet specialist on the ONE staff, to comment and take notes. Lanphier’s basic message to Dulles was that he, the Director of Central Intelligence, was being misled by his own people on the number of ICBM tests the Soviet Union was conducting, that the real number was much higher than six. Stoertz and Dulles both said they had never heard anything like this before, but would investigate the matter.