In a startling disclosure yesterday at a Kennedy School of Government conference, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) released documents providing a top-secret analysis of Soviet military policy and ballistic missile forces as well as an entirely new look at the Cold War.

The CIA said the documents are the most sensitive information ever made public by the agency. The 494 pages of files released thus far span three decades of National Intelligence Estimates (NIE), from 1954 to 1983.

The documents show that U.S. intelligence analysts believed throughout the Cold War that Soviet nuclear weapons were not designed for a direct attack on the United States. In addition, during the 1950s the CIA accurately predicted a Soviet build-up in long-range missiles but underestimated the size of the increase, according to the documents.

The CIA released several hundred Soviet intelligence files on mainly non-strategic matters last year following a 1992 initiative by former CIA Director Robert Gates to review all intelligence estimates on the Soviet Union that were at least 10 years old.

But according to former CIA officer Raymond L. Garthoff, who himself wrote some of the newly available estimates, "these [documents released today] were considered on the whole to be more sensitive."

CIA Director R. James Woolsey officially declassified the National Intelligence Estimates (NIE's) on November 16 in preparation for yesterday's conference, which was attended by more than 100 intelligence officials and scholars.

Harvard's Warren Center for Studies in American History and the CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence co-sponsored the conference.

The intelligence estimates chronicle a time that saw satellite technology vastly change the nature of CIA analysis.

"After satellites we were no longer estimating what they [the Soviets] had, we were estimating what they would have," former CIA official Richard Lehman said in an interview yesterday.

This new batch of 80 declassified documents--70 of which will not be available until January--is being released "with some excisions," according to J. Kenneth McDonald, chief of the CIA's history staff.

Omitted from the documents are specific estimates of the number and destructive force of Soviet missiles.

The conference yesterday consisted of panel discussions by intelligence officials and journalists. Key topics were the evolution of intelligence estimates and the media perspective of intelligence activities.

There was substantial criticism of the documents. Lawrence K. Gershwin, a national intelligence officer, said many of the estimates failed to show an understanding of communist society and government.

"One of our problems was that our analysts did not have a specifically Red perspective," he said.

A much harsher criticism of CIA officers came from Nicholas Daniloff, director of the Northwestern School of Journalism and former Moscow Bureau Chief for U.S. News and World Report.

Intelligence officers he encountered, Daniloft said, seemed "woefully naive" and demonstrated a "fantastic lack of knowledge of that country [the Soviet Union]."