Putin’s Lie

(Washington, D.C.): Today’s Wall Street Journal features an extraordinarily timely column by the newspaper’s highly respected Assistant Editorial Page Editor, Melanie Kirkpatrick. Thanks to Ms. Kirkpatrick, a dirty little secret is now in the public domain: Even as Russian President Vladimir Putin goes to great lengths to denounce President Bush’s commitment to defend the American people against ballistic missile attack, railing about the threat thus posed to the sacrosanct 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and seeking to divide United States from its allies, Russia is maintaining a national missile defense of its own that is clearly inconsistent with the terms of the ABM Treaty.

This revelation demands several responses: 1) President Bush should task his Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board or some other independent blue-ribbon group to perform an immediate and rigorous assessment of former Defense Intelligence Officer William Lee’s work on the Soviet/Russian NMD system and the classified official analyses that have, to date, minimized its strategic capabilities and significance. 2) Present the findings of such a study to the American people and U.S. allies. And 3) end the official U.S. practice inherited by Mr. Bush of allowing the United States to be the only nation whose missile defense programs are encumbered by the outdated and increasingly dangerous ABM Treaty, thereby clearing the way for deployment as soon as possible of effective anti-missile protection for this country, as well as Russia.

Bad treaties are bound to be violated.

The current flap over Russia’s underground testing in the Arctic is one example: Some U.S. intelligence officials believe Russia is detonating small nuclear blasts in violation of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Understanding that it was all too easy to violate, the Republican Senate was right to reject the CTBT in 1999.

But there is no better example of this treaty- violating rule than the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, subject of so much debate today. The most clear-cut violation was the Soviets’ Krasnoyarsk phased-array radar, which by the ’90s even the Russians agreed was a violation

Curiously, in all the current talk about the ABM Treaty — to withdraw or not withdraw, to amend or not amend, is it “a relic” or a “cornerstone of strategic stability” — no one seems to be talking about violations anymore. Which is why it’s a good time to take a look at the work of William T. Lee.

Mr. Lee is a retired spook, one of the guys in white hats whose unsung efforts helped the West win the Cold War. From 1951 until his retirement a few years ago, he toiled in the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and other U.S. intelligence organizations. His specialty was Soviet military and economic affairs.

Like Mr. Lee, the Soviet generals whose Cold War adventures he used to follow from afar are now also retired. Many are spending their golden years writing their memoirs, proud of their work in building one of history’s great military powers and, in the new openness that prevails in Russia, finally able to tell the story of their accomplishments and even brag a little.

Their reminiscences provide a stack of interesting reading material for Mr. Lee, who, in his own golden years, has plenty of time for perusing such Russian-language volumes as “The Rocket Shield of the Motherland” and “Soviet Military Might From Stalin to Gorbachev.” The writers include: G.V. Kisunko, chief designer of the Moscow ABM system; Gen. Col. Yuri Votintsev, commander of ABM and space-defense forces from 1967-85; and B.V. Bunkin, designer of the SA-5 and SA-10 surface-to-air missiles. There are many others.

Along the way, having pieced together information from memoirs and recently declassified material, Mr. Lee says he has discovered hard evidence of something the U.S. long suspected but was never able to prove: Russia already has a national missile defense. Started by the Soviets even before the ABM Treaty took effect, the original defense was pretty rough. But, as Mr. Lee says, unlike the Americans, the Soviets realized that “some defense is better than none,” and kept upgrading its NMD even after it signed the ABM Treaty. Russia has continued to modernize the NMD system over the past decade, he adds.

If true, all this would make a mockery of the ABM Treaty, which explicitly forbids the U.S. and the Soviet Union (now Russia) from developing any national defense against ballistic missiles. It would also make a mockery of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s call for President Bush to abandon his plan to build a national missile defense. Mr. Putin can hardly denounce an American defense when Russia has one of its own.

Mr. Lee’s analysis is complex. To vastly simplify, he says he has evidence that Russia’s surface-to-air interceptor missiles (SAMs) carry nuclear warheads and therefore are capable of bringing down long- range ballistic missiles, not just aircraft and shorter- range missiles, which is their stated purpose. Russia has 8,000 of these missiles scattered around the country, and Mr. Lee says he has found numerous Russian sources that describe how successive generations of SAMs were in fact designed with the express intention of shooting down ballistic missiles, which is illegal under the treaty.

Mr. Lee also says he has evidence that Russia’s early warning radars are much more capable than the treaty permits. In addition, he says, they are illegally interlocked into a battle-management system that allows Moscow to track incoming missiles and pass the targeting data to command posts, which in turn hand the data over to the SAMs.

Krasnoyarsk, now closed, was one such radar; the only reason Moscow was caught out on it was because of its inland location, which is illegal under the treaty. It was a battle-management radar, passing along tracking and targeting information to a command-and-control system in Moscow — precisely what the radars on Russia’s periphery are doing today, Mr. Lee says. He cites the 1991 visit of an American inspection team to the Pechora radar in the Arctic Circle, when inspectors learned that the radar was passing along target-tracking information to a central command. The U.S. objected at the time but didn’t follow through to the logical conclusion: that all the radars were networked.

Mr. Lee wrote up his research in a 1997 book, “The ABM Treaty Charade” and in a series of subsequent articles in scholarly journals. Henry Cooper, former head of the Strategic Defense Initiative Office, says of Mr. Lee: “I think he’s got a very good case.” Frank Gaffney, a former Reagan defense official, calls Mr. Lee’s work “scrupulously documented” and says that while some aspects of Mr. Lee’s analysis aren’t new, “Bill stitches it together for the first time.”

In particular, Mr. Cooper calls Mr. Lee’s evidence on the radars “pretty compelling.” This issue has been raised before, he says, “but we never got to a point that we called them on the treaty.” The Russians, he says, intentionally improved their radars, taking “advantage of the ambiguities in the treaty.” In the U.S., on the other hand, “we restrained our engineers” in order to stay within the limits imposed by the treaty. In other words, the U.S. is honest.

There are many good reasons for the U.S. to exercise its option to withdraw from the ABM Treaty, as Article XV permits. Proof of continuing violations by the Russians would surely be one of them.

Melanie Kirkpatrick is the assistant editor of the Journal’s editorial page.