THE SOVIET DECISION TO INTERVENE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP79B00887A000500010026-3
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: C
• Document Page Count: 6
• Document Creation Date: December 14, 2016
• Document Release Date: April 3, 2003
• Sequence Number: 26
• Publication Date: August 21, 1968
• Content Type: IM

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Confidential
DIRECTORATE OF
INTELLIGENCE
Intelligence Memorandum
Confidential
21 August 1968
No. 0616/68
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CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
Directorate of Intelligence
21 August 1968
MEMORANDUM
1. Between the end of the Cierna-Bratislava
meetings and yesterday's invasion nothing happened
inside Czechoslovakia to support Moscow's claim
that these meetings were a great victory for Com-
munist orthodoxy. Neither was there a notable
recrudescence in Czechoslovakia of the "anti-
socialist" trends which brought on the Warsaw
meeting and its harsh ultimatum. Thus, we doubt
that a rising sense of alarm in Moscow is the
essential explanation for Soviet intervention.
2. The Soviet politburo on its return to
Moscow did not summon the Central Committee to
report on the Cierna and Bratislava meetings, but
instead issued a communique in the name of the
entire politburo saying that those meetings were
a good piece of work. The Soviet leaders seem
shortly thereafter to have scattered for their
usual summer holidays. The Soviet press stood
down its attacks on Czechoslovakia. The appear-
ance given was that Moscow was willing at last
to give the Czechs--presumably chastened by the
nearness of their approach to the brink--a
respite. What went on in Czechoslovakia during
the short span of time since Cierna proved
only that the Czechs had not understood Cierna
to mean that they should put their reform move-
ment into reverse.
3. It is not likely that the Soviets, even
though they have persistently underestimated
the strength of reformist spirit in Czechoslvakia,
expected miracles to be done by Dubcek in three
weeks' time. Even if Dubcek had promised them,
there was no chance he could deliver. What, then,
brought the Russians, after they had decided to
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step back at Cierna, to give the signal yesterday
to crush the Czechoslovaks?
4. It may be some time before we can answer
this question with any assurance. On the strength
of what we know now, the most likely explanation
appears to be that, under the impact of internal
pressures within the leadership and of importuning
from its anxious allies in Eastern Europe, the So-
viet decision at Cierna to give Dubcek and company
more time became unravelled. This would suppose--
as there seems some reason to suppose--that the
Soviet politburo when it went to Cierna was divided
in mind, and that the standoff reached there de-
rived mostly from Soviet irresolution. The fragile
balance in the Soviet leadership which produced the
Cierna agreement has, in the space of less than three
weeks, been upset in favor of those who may all
along have wanted the toughest kind of policy and
have made use of the time and developments since
Cierna to undo the agreement.
5. If, indeed, the political scales in Moscow
have been in such precarious balance, it would not
have needed a great shock to upset them, but only the
absence of solid signs that developments in Prague
were going Moscow's way. There were few of these.
In the short time available to Dubcek his efforts
to demonstrate that he could insure the unquestioned
domination of the Communist party had not been impres-
sive. Czechoslvak information media remained unruly
and unrepentant. There was no indication that non-
Communist political elements--for example, the Club
of Committed Non-Party People and the revised
Socialist party--were being forced to take cover.
Despite the renewed pledges of fidelity to CEMA
given at Cierna, there continued to be much talk
in Prague of broader. economic ties with the West.
6. The visits to Prague of Tito and Ceausescu
were all too visible reminders that the ranks of in-
dependent Communist states were swelling. And,
finally, with preparations moving ahead rapidly
for the party congress scheduled to open on 9 Sep-
tember, it was becoming clear that the congress
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might sound the death knell over the Czechoslovak
party conservatives, Moscow's last hope for a brake
on reformism in Prague. The congress would have
meant not a check on the momentum of the Czechoslovak
reform movement, but its confirmation. In addition,
the cost of maintaining the mobilization of massive
intervention forces may have created pressures in the
leadership to use these forces or disband them.
7. Despite the smoothness of the Soviet mili-
tary operation in Czechoslovakia, a number of Soviet
political actions suggest that the decision to exe-
cute the plan of intervention came at a fairly late
stage. Among these were Dobrynin's approach to the
President, the convening of the Central Committee
in the midst of the top leaders' vacation, the flimsi-
ness of the legal base for Soviet action, and the
failure to surface quickly an alternative leadership
in Prague. Thus it would appear that Soviet inter-
vention in Czechoslovakia did not follow naturally
from the Cierna meeting but represents, instead,
a scrapping of the position arrived at there.
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