The following article mentions how the Soviet Union apparently duped US intelligence during a particular May Day parade in the 1950s and made it appear as though they had many more Myasishchev M-4 "Bison" bombers than they actually possessed.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/mil...edium=referral
It's an interesting though small article without much in the way of supporting links but it raises a pertinent question in regard to T2k.
We know both sides practiced a level of deception so that the other side would not know exactly what they had and a lot of info was kept strictly secret from the public for quite some time.
When the writers were compiling info for the game, we know they had limited resources and basically had to use public access resources (such as asking military attaches, military publicity officers, consult various books and research papers and so on) to get the info on WarPac forces.
This is entirely in the realms of speculating on the writer's situation in the 1980s but I wonder how much the misinformation ploys influenced what military writers thought and what they wrote for public consumption? Could this be part of the reason why the GDW staffers wrote the Soviet forces as being more powerful than what they actually were? Beyond the usual propaganda to influence the military budget or hype that media corporations used to sell newspapers that is.