To understand what happened to the United States over the past three decades, a good place to start is by examining the battles fought within the CIA’s analytical division over evidence of Soviet capabilities and intentions, which were systematically hyped by Cold War hardliners.
By exaggerating the Soviet menace, these hardliners manipulated the American people into allowing vast sums of taxpayers’ money to flow into the military-industrial complex. But a newly released U.S. document demonstrates how badly the intelligence was distorted, as former CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman writes in this guest essay:
How the Soviet Menace Was Hyped
On Monday, August 6, 1945, after six months of intense firebombing of 67 other Japanese cities,...
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