Soviet Acquisition of Militarily Significant Western Technology: An Update (1985)

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Public domain: a work of the US federal government (17 U.S.C. § 105).

On 18 September 1985 Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger held a crowded news conference, took no questions, and handed out a 33-page booklet. Its subject was the Soviet effort to obtain Western military technology, and its tone was set by the first paragraph: the West was "subsidizing the Soviet military buildup." UPI reported that the booklet came from a committee chaired by the CIA, drew on data from 22 government agencies, and updated a report given to Congress in 1982^1,2.

What it says

The paper describes two Soviet programs. The first, run by the Military Industrial Commission (VPK), turned requests from weapons designers in 12 defense industries into collection "requirements" for one-of-a-kind hardware and documents, backed by a fund of about half a billion rubles a year. The second, run through the Ministry of Foreign Trade and the intelligence services, diverted export-controlled production equipment in bulk¹.

What made the paper new was its numbers, which it presents as the Soviets' own. Over 3,500 requirements were fulfilled in 1976–80; more than 5,000 military research projects a year in the early 1980s drew on Western material; documents on the F-18's fire-control radar were credited with saving five years and millions of rubles. The VPK, it explains, compiled such figures in an annual report for the Soviet leadership¹. An annex lists several hundred Soviet weapons said to have benefited, from Space Shuttle heat-shielding documents to the Mk 48 torpedo¹.

The section on the KGB describes Directorate T of the First Chief Directorate, about 1,000 officers with nearly 300 abroad in units called Line X, and notes in passing that Paris had been one of its largest stations "until mass expulsions in 1983." The GRU, with about 1,500 officers abroad, is judged the more successful collector. It closes with a call for tighter export controls and counterintelligence¹.

The Farewell connection

The paper never says where its Soviet figures came from. It says only that the information was obtained directly by the United States and its allies, and gives "much more detail than could be revealed previously"¹. The obvious candidate is the Farewell material: about 4,000 Directorate T documents that the KGB officer Vladimir Vetrov gave French counterintelligence in 1981–82, including the directorate's reports on its own results. Gus Weiss, the National Security Council economist who read them, wrote that they showed Line X had met two-thirds to three-quarters of its requirements, with the largest gains in radar, computers, machine tools and semiconductors³.

The link is made by journalists, not by the government. John J. Fialka, writing in 1997, attributed the figure of 5,000 Soviet systems a year to Russian documents copied by Vetrov and quoted the paper's "subsidizing" line as the verdict of "one government report." Dwayne A. Day, writing in 2012, presented the paper as the CIA's account of the program Vetrov exposed^4,5. Weiss's own article does not mention the paper³.

How to read it

This is an argument for export controls as much as an intelligence summary, and it says nothing about what the West was doing in return. Weiss later wrote that by then the CIA and the Pentagon were feeding Line X "improved" products designed to fail³.

The DTIC scan is a black-and-white copy of a color original; some figures are hard to read. Nothing is redacted¹.