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The Infamous "Team B" Matthew Yglesias writes about the infamous "Team B": TAPPED: November 2003 Archives: IF AT FIRST YOU DON'T SUCCEED. Over the weekend, The Boston Globe ran an interesting profile of Richard Pipes, the historian of the Soviet Union whose anti-communist zeal led him to Washington to do some practical work as a cold warrior: In late 1975, a dramatic reshuffling of the Ford administration installed a new defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, a new chief of staff, Dick Cheney, and a new CIA chief, George H.W. Bush. It was Bush who approved the formation of "Team B," a group of 16 outside experts charged with challenging what some considered the CIA's sanguine estimates of Soviet military strength. Pipes, named the group's chairman, brought in a brilliant young weapons analyst, Paul Wolfowitz. "Richard Perle recommended him," Pipes says of Wolfowitz today. "I'd never heard of him." Team B was engulfed in controversy from the outset. A top CIA analyst called it "a kangaroo court of outside critics all picked from one point of view." Others said its mission was to hype the Soviet threat. Pipes disagrees. "We dealt with one problem only: What is the Soviet strategy for nuclear weapons? Team B was appointed to look at the evidence and to see if we could conclude that the actual Soviet strategy is different from ours. It's now demonstrated totally, completely, that it was," he says, adducing documents in Polish archives that show the Soviets planning to use nuclear weapons in the event of war. This is a pretty serious misrepresentation on Pipes' part of Team B's work. As Fareed Zakaria wrote in Newsweek over the summer: It all started with the now famous "Team B" exercise. During the early 1970s, hard-line conservatives pilloried the CIA for being soft on the Soviets. As a result, CIA Director George Bush agreed to allow a team of outside experts to look at the intelligence and come to their own conclusions. Team B--which included Paul Wolfowitz--produced a scathing report, claiming that the Soviet threat had been badly underestimated. In retrospect, Team B's conclusions were wildly off the mark. Describing the Soviet Union, in 1976, as having "a large and expanding Gross National Product," it predicted that it would modernize and expand its military at an awesome pace. For example, it predicted that the Backfire bomber "probably will be produced in substantial numbers, with perhaps 500 aircraft off the line by early 1984." In fact, the Soviets had 235 in 1984. The reality was that even the CIA’s own estimates--savaged as too low by Team B--were, in retrospect, gross exaggerations. In 1989, the CIA published an internal review of its threat assessments from 1974 to 1986 and came to the conclusion that every year it had "substantially overestimated" the Soviet threat along all dimensions. For example, in 1975 the CIA forecast that within 10 years the Soviet Union would replace 90 percent of its long-range bombers and missiles. In fact, by 1985, the Soviet Union had been able to replace less than 60 percent of them. This is significant because the Team B personnel are now back working in the government, where they once again decided to circumvent the intelligence agencies and over-over-estimate a threat that it appears the agencies were already over-estimating on their own. Take a look at Pipes' defense of the intention-based approach to intelligence gathering: Today Pipes defends his approach. "Hardware doesn't tell you anything. You can have a neighbor who's a peaceful man who likes to collect guns because he likes to collect guns. But he may also be a criminal, or someone who collects them for a different reason." The big question, in other words, is intention. This makes no sense whatsoever. Clearly, if you want to know whether or not somebody is going to shoot you, you need to know two things. First, does he have a gun? Second, does he want to use it? In Pipes' example it's simply taken for granted that the neighbor has a gun, but we now know Saddam Hussein's WMD program was all hat and no cattle, so his intentions hardly seem relevant. Pipes and his collaborators seem to have gained a lot of confidence from America's victory in the Cold War, but the fact remains that they had relatively little to do with it. In the second Reagan administration, a reform-minded Soviet leader came to the helm and the president largely sidelined the super-hawks in favor of a return to containment. As a result, the Soviet Union was kept in its box and the communist system collapsed under its own weight. The Soviet menace wasn't growing any more than Iraq was on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons. Getting something like this wrong once is pretty understandable -- intelligence gathering is an inexact science -- but having been proven wrong once, the same group of people came back to power, used the same methods again, and were proven wrong again. Pay attention to administration statements about the WMD search and you'll see the goalpost-moving strategy Pipes employed in this article -- trying to switch the conversation from whether Saddam had weapons to whether he wanted them. Doubtless we'll see the younger members of today's team back 20 years from now insisting that the CIA is underestimating the looming Peruvian threat or something. Some people never learn. --Matthew Yglesias _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
