The status of relations between the United States' and the ex-Soviet Union's intelligence communities is almost impossible for the layman to assess without prejudice: Cold War politics and "national security" information restrictions have created in the public emotional responses to the entire issue. This situation exists for both sides, ex-Soviet as well as American; it is excess baggage that affects national policy-making from the top down to street-level decision-making.
Indeed, recent revelations concerning information gathering policy within the U.S. intelligence community during the Reagan and Bush Administrations indicate that personal ideology framed by pre-and-post World War II Soviet-American relations took precedence over objective analysis of raw data. One need not wonder, then, at the almost two year delay by George Bush, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, in embracing Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 as an ally in the quest for world peace: Bush's entire career had been colored by the rhetoric of confrontation with the "Evil Empire" (to use his predecessor, Ronald Reagan's, scripted words). To overcome such ideological anchors and recognize a Soviet political leader as a legitimate proponent of cooperation was as much an upheaval of world reality for the American president as the tear-down of the Berlin Wall had been for Germans only months earlier.
The former states of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics are also in disarray concerning their thoughts on the two major "intelligence" organizations: the KGB and the CIA. A new openness has ex-Soviet intelligence files being publicly flung open to the world - while retaining a very closed hand on specifics. Under the new structure of independent states, President Boris Yeltsin of Russia, the primary inheritor of the Soviet structural heritage, has recently demonstrated this schizophrenia, on the one hand making public KGB documents indicting the...