In Memoriam an unsung hero of the Cold War: William T. Lee

(Washington, D.C.): A formidable intellect and tenacious analyst of Moscow and Beijing’s military capabilities passed away last week. His friends and colleagues on the Center for Security Policy’s National Security Advisory Council remember William T. Lee as a fearless intelligence officer whose assiduously documented and generally correct views often brought him at odds with the intelligence establishment.

In the darkest days of the Cold War, Bill Lee was one of the behind-the-scenes intelligence professionals who never received public recognition for his tough estimates concerning the Soviet Union’s vast military expenditures. At a time when the conventional wisdom within the intelligence community (IC) deemed such spending to be relatively close to the Kremlin’s officially released, laughably low and wholly misleading numbers, he disagreed with his characteristic truculence.

His often lonely judgments were largely embraced in 1976 by the famous “Team B,” a committee of skeptics whom then-Director of Central Intelligence George H.W. Bush chartered to provide a second-opinion on Soviet military capabilities. More importantly, they were confirmed as far more accurate than the IC’s low-balled estimates when the demise of the Soviet Union provided Bill and others a fleeting opportunity to examine selected Kremlin archives.

After he retired from government service in 1992, Bill Lee continued with his work, making extraordinary use of open sources to penetrate and unravel Soviet/Russian secrets. Of particular importance was his path-breaking analysis of documents from the former USSR, including memoirs published by officials associated with the Kremlin’s anti-ballistic missile programs.

His book, The ABM Treaty Charade: A Study in Elite Illusion and Delusion, distilled from these materials a stunning conclusion: As a matter of state policy, the USSR never complied with the requirements of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and built and deployed a territorial ABM system explicitly prohibited by that accord. What is more, according to Mr. Lee, post-Soviet Russia maintained this illegal capability and took steps to modernize the complex of radars, dual-capable anti-air/anti-missile interceptors and associated launchers that comprised it.

The Bottom Line

So long as the United States continued to adhere to this treaty, the U.S. intelligence community, in a phenomenon known as “cognitive dissonance,” studiously ignored the fact of Soviet/Russian non-compliance that Bill Lee spent his life monitoring. Now that the United States is no longer bound by the ABM Treaty, however, there is no excuse for failing to look at evidence with the same unflinching determination to find the truth that Bill Lee brought to his work. It would be a fitting tribute indeed for this career intelligence professional if the subject of his final investigation were to achieve the sort of validation, however belated, ultimately secured by his earlier, courageous Cold War analyses.