Abstract
Intelligence history remains a difficult topic to research, and the intelligence history of recent conflicts represents an object of special difficulty all on its own. Among the key difficulties facing scholars in this field has traditionally been the ability to draw lines of causation between intelligence material and political decision-making, and the ability to distinguish the important from the unimportant. Panagiotis Dimitrakis’s study of Anglo-American intelligence assessments of Chinese and Soviet decision-making during the period of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan (1979–89) struggles throughout to overcome both of these obstacles, creating in the process an interesting but ultimately frustrating and unsatisfactory piece of work.
Dimitrakis endeavours to meet the main challenge yet facing any scholar working in this field – the vast mass of still classified material – by working on a wider view, but to a much shallower depth, than the actual title of his book implies. Chinese intelligence assessments and decision-making for this period remain in reality largely a sealed box, which Dimitrakis attempts to open up by recasting American and British assessments of what they thought the Chinese were thinking. Most revealing (but not a new revelation) here is Washington’s willingness at the time to support Chinese military modernization, and in turn the scale of China’s own military aid to the Afghan mujahidin, which led to a sharp drop in the black-market price paid by the CIA for AK-47s, largely because of the role of covert Chinese supply (p. 170). Lacking, however, is any sense of how the Chinese politburo itself discussed or assessed the events in Afghanistan. In going wide in scope, Dimitrakis also by proxy ends up in places writing another history of the late Cold War, rather than a new assessment of the actual war in Afghanistan. Thus we get again the story of the general American-led arms build-up that occurred during this period and the near disastrous 1983 NATO war game Able Archer (pp. 139–41), both of which take the reader some distance away from the alleged core subject of the book – intelligence in the Afghan war. In not using a single Chinese or Russian language source, Dimitrakis casts further doubt over whether his account can really be considered comprehensive at the open-source level, even after factoring in the undoubted difficulty of the great quantity of still classified (and therefore unavailable) material from the side of Moscow or Beijing. Finally, the necessity to scavenge what material is available also leads Dimitrakis down some seemingly irrelevant and contentious byways with regard to the Afghan war itself, such as the mixed evidence regarding the alleged Soviet use of chemical weapons in that theatre (pp. 154–7). Dimitrakis repeats verbatim a series of reports made at the time, without coming to any conclusions himself about this subject; absent meanwhile is any consideration of the ‘dirty propaganda’ used by all sides during the course of this war. Without the ability to unpick the planted newspaper stories and fabricated eyewitness accounts used by the intelligence services of all countries with regard to this conflict, Dimitrakis is therefore left in the unenviable position of, in many places, merely shadowing and replaying the content of material which was produced, at the time, with motivations that remain indefinable from the existing declassified record. The notion that intelligence services are politically non-partisan and always tell the truth therefore stands in danger of being implicitly accepted in this account.
There remains an interesting potential for a book that could be written about the role of intelligence services on all sides in the final years of the late Cold War, and Dimitrakis provides intermittent revelations and insights that would inform such a larger work – the CIA and JIC’s repeated inability to accurately assess or understand Gorbachev is a case in point (pp. 216–26). However, on the core theme of Afghanistan, this book unfortunately adds little that is new, and much verbatim material that additionally still remains either ambiguous or analytically muddled, or is potentially unreliable. In so doing the book underlines once again both the perils of and obstacles to attempting to conduct transnational intelligence history with regard to the modern era.