“I was surprised,” says Lawrence Eagleburger, US secretary of state in 1992.
“Although by the end of the 1980s I was aware that the USSR was changing rapidly, I don’t think it was possible at the time to say it was about to collapse.”
“I was surprised,” says James Baker, Eagleburger’s predecessor at the State Department. “We were mainly surprised by the speed of the collapse. Not only was our intelligence surprised, so was Gorbachev. Actually, we were all surprised.”
“I was surprised,” says George Shultz, Baker’s predecessor. “The collapse was a surprise even though at the end of President Reagan’s terms of office, we felt that the Cold War had to all intents and purposes ended.”
“I was surprised,” says Robert Blackwell of the CIA, senior Sovietologist at the National Intelligence Council during the second half of the 1980s. “We did not think that the USSR would collapse.”
“I was surprised,” says Professor Dimitri Simes, director of the Nixon Institute in Washington, “when I realized that the USSR had collapsed.”
“I was surprised,” says Paul Goble, director of the Jamestown Foundation, na expert on Soviet nationalities and former senior US government official. “None of us imagined that the Soviet Union would simply cease to exist.”
“I was surprised,” says Serge Schmemann, New York Times correspondent in Moscow at the end of the 1980s. “Neither I nor the US Embassy staff estimated that the USSR was about to collapse. We assumed we would go on living with the Soviets well after the year 2000.”
“I was surprised,” says Richard Pipes, professor of Russian history at Harvard University. “We had a good understanding of the changes that were taking place, we thought they would be significant, but we did not think that they would lead to collapse.”
Source: p. 7 of Western Intelligence and the Collapse of the Soviet Union
1980-1990: Ten Years that did not Shake the World
Ran Edelist and David Arbel
Routledge 2003
