ne of the major failures of American and other Western governments is that they do not understand the thinking of their adversaries.

Apparently there was a picture in the offices of William Webster, the then-head of the CIA. It was a satellite image of an exploded Russian oil pipeline somewhere in Siberia. The explosion was so enormous that it was thought to be a nuclear test. It even registered on the Richter scale. What caused the explosion? Webster and his spook colleagues understood their USSR adversary.

The USSR had the unenviable task of trying to keep up with the United States militarily. The outlays were enormous and were one of the reasons that the Russians could not improve their economy: much of their money had to go to building submarines, planes, nuclear bombs and the like in order to keep up with the U.S. as a legitimate superpower. One way that the Russians then and the Chinese today could short-circuit both expenses and time was industrial espionage. If the Russians could steal a blueprint or get their hands on some advanced microchip, they could save a fortune and years of research and development. The CIA understood the Russians’ actions and had two paths to deal with it.

The first was to try to catch the Russians in the act and stop them. Just as the U.S. had set up front companies to buy all of the titanium from the Russians used in the production of A-12 and SR-71 aircrafts, the Russians had their fake firms that could buy necessary materials and components for their military needs. It would be a whack-a-mole kind of job to try to weed out their front firms, and the Russians could go back into business under a new name. The second approach, the one actually employed, was to intentionally sell sensitive material to the USSR but make sure that a certain percentage of the products was defective. That exploded gas........

© Townhall