On Aug. 20, 1968, Soviet troops crossed the Czechoslovakian border, invading the nation.
President Lyndon Baines Johnson condemned the invasion after it happened, but CIA political analysts did not believe the Soviets would engage in military action against the Czechs, and thus top military officials did nothing to prevent the invasion.
“We have to look at our own history to learn from our own mistakes,” said Peter Nyren with the historical collections division of the CIA. “We have to reach out to the public so that [they] can learn, and the analytic community can also learn.”
After releasing more than 500 formerly classified documents concerning the United States’ role in the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the CIA partnered with the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum to host a symposium analyzing how the information is still relevant.
Although some of the documents were already available to the public, the entire collection was open for the first time Friday.
“We can and should tell the American people what we did and how we did it,” said Joseph Lambert, director of Information Management Services at the CIA.
The released documents are the CIA’s social contract with the American people, Lambert said.
Before the symposium, CIA agents noted their mistakes in understanding various “strategic warnings,” which are warnings that occur before aggressive acts, and their own role leading up to the Soviet invasion.
Prior to the invasion, Czechoslovakia had a new leader, Alexander Dubcek. Dubcek wanted to establish a democracy in the country. While he continued to show his allegiance to Moscow, the Soviets feared he would reform too much, creating a blow to the Warsaw Pact — which was then a military alliance. Because of their fears, the Soviets amassed their troops on Czech borders in preparation to invade.
“We have to get to the issue that led up to the evidence,” said former CIA analyst Doug MacEachin. “If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck and quacks like a duck, can you really prove it’s a duck? The dominant question was — will they really do what it looks like they’re preparing to do?”
MacEachin said U.S. policymakers and analysts should have tried to prevent the Soviets from carrying out the plan.
The wrong analysis led intelligence agencies to stay out of a military situation they might have been able to prevent. The lessons these agents learned from the invasion can still be applied today.
“Political decisions are most often the hardest thing to assess and predict,” said Peter Clement, deputy director for intelligence, as he applied the lesson to current events such as the invasion of Iraq. “You can be really wrong for all the right reasons.”
Clement said analysts were clearly mistaken in their belief that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction but that Saddam Hussein had used chemical weapons in the past.
“We were arguing against history,” Clement said.
He said he believed policymakers and analysts would have come to the same conclusion regarding Iraq because of the country’s history — that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction — even after accumulating all the evidence suggested otherwise.
Clement said that if all the facts are made available, then the public will know where the line between fact and CIA conjecture lies, tying his argument back to the invasion.