1981 and Beyond: CPD Members in Reagan Administration Wildly Exaggerate Soviet Threat, Politicize Intelligence

Richard Allen. [Source: David Hume Kennerly / Getty Images]After Ronald Reagan takes office, he appoints 33 members of the powerful, far-right Committee on the Present Danger (see 1976) to his administration, 20 of them in national security positions. Reagan himself is a member, as is:
Kenneth Adelman, the US’s deputy representative to the UN;
Richard Allen, Reagan’s assistant for National Security Affairs;
William Casey, director of the CIA;
John Connally, a member of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board;
Jeane Kirkpatrick, US ambassador to the UN;
John Lehman, Secretary of the Navy;
Michael Novak, the US representative on the UN’s Human Rights Commission;
Richard Perle, Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy;
Eugene Rostow, director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency;
George Shultz, Secretary of State.
The CPD members in the Reagan administration are able to convince large portions of the American public that the US faces a grave and imminent threat from the Soviet Union, even though the Soviet Union is on the verge of dissolution. CIA official Melvin Goodman, who will resign in 1990 over the increasingly blatant politicization of intelligence on the Soviet Union, will say that the tremendously exaggerated estimates of the Soviet Union’s military strength “meant that the policy community was completely surprised by the Soviet collapse, and missed numerous negotiating opportunities with Moscow.” An extensive study by the General Accounting Office (GAO) will show that military officials consistently exaggerate the Soviet threat in order to get Congress to fund the largest defense buildup in the nation’s history. [Unger, 2007, pp. 58-59]