Our Soviet espionage efforts had virtually never, or had very seldom, produced any worthwhile political or economic intelligence on the Soviet Union.
There are so many things a large intelligence espionage organization can do to justify its existence, that people can get promotions for, because it could result in results.
We had periodic crises in this country when the technical intelligence didn't support the policy. We had the bomber gap, the missile gap.
In my professional work with the Agency, by the late '70s, I had come to question the value of a great deal of what we were doing, in terms of the intelligence agency's impact on American policy.