The Soviets' Psychic Hurts

By Hugh Sidey

The Presidency

American spies these days do not often get something to chuckle about. Over the past few weeks they have not only had a laugh or two at Soviet expense, but have also been given a small shot of pride to use during the continuing struggle with Moscow's agents in the world's back alleys.

Our intelligence network around the globe has picked up fragments of Soviet anguish about how come the Israelis, flying American F-15s and 16s over Lebanon, shot down Syrians flying MiG-23s at a ratio of 83 to zip. And how come those SAM-6s and 8s in the Bekaa Valley, the same kind of missile that devastated the Israelis in the 1973 war, could hit only one enemy plane this time.

The people in the various capitals of the world who follow wars knew instantly, after those figures came out, that the power equation had been subtly reshaped by technology and training. When speculation first appeared about the age and inferiority of Soviet equipment, the Kremlin uncharacteristically went off like a firecracker. There were angry rebuttals, flurries of military meetings. Leonid Zamyatin, the Kremlin's chief propagandist, went on Moscow television to wash away doubts with his rotund tones. General Yevgeni Yurasov, deputy head of Soviet air defense, gathered up his experts and headed to the Bekaa Valley to study the scorched debris.

The real measure of the psychic hurt came in a hundred cocktail parties and reception lines from Canberra to Warsaw, where Moscow's diplomats, military attaches and KGB operatives went to work after a few belts of Stolichnaya vodka. Arabs can't be trusted to do anything right, the Soviets told other customers for their military hardware. In the air and on the ground, the Syrians were "incompetent and cowardly," the Soviets complained. The SAMS are mobile missiles. So what did the Syrians do? They left them in one place, rooted like oaks, and the Israelis knocked them down. And in the air? Those MiGs are equipped with a buzzer that goes off when radar locks on a plane, a warning that a missile may be fired. When Syrian pilots heard the buzzer, they were so frightened that they bailed out before they knew if a missile was even fired or not, said the disgusted Soviets.

Naturally, the Syrians were outraged, not only by the insults but also by their own conviction that Soviet equipment is just not as good as American, and thus they are bound to lose in any future encounters with Israel. The doubt about Moscow's military gear has crept into the dialogues of other customers, and it is having a quiet impact around the world.

Nobody believes that the Soviets have been fundamentally humbled or have changed their intentions. The balance of nuclear terror is still tipping their way. But the lesson from the Lebanon experience, that technology can compensate for the huge Soviet numerical abundance in weapons and men, has stung. More important, perhaps, in the great power game is the shot in the arm that both the Lebanon and the Falklands experiences have given the West. British infantry showed that allied forces are not the reluctant dragons so often depicted.

The new cracks in the Soviets' fac,ade of iron invincibility could hardly have come at a more inopportune time for them. The leadership situation is fuzzy. Their forces are still bogged down in Afghanistan even though they have increased their strength to 100,000 troops. Worries about unrest in Poland are rising again. All this adds up, in the minds of some U.S. analysts, to a belief that for the moment the Soviet Union is less inclined to take aggressive action in faraway places. Score one for Yankee ingenuity--something we had almost forgotten.

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