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Reagan's Victory
On Nov. 4, 1980, with Carter unable to free the hostages and Americans humiliated by the year-long ordeal with Iran, Ronald Reagan won the presidency in a landslide.
For his loyal service in the campaign, the neoconservative Silberman was put in charge of the transition team's intelligence section. The team prepared a report attacking the CIA's analytical division for noting growing weaknesses in the Soviet Union, a position despised by the neocons because it undercut their case for a costly expansion of the Pentagon's budget.
Silberman's transition team accused the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence of "an abject failure" to foresee a supposedly massive Soviet buildup of strategic weapons and "the wholesale failure" to comprehend the sophistication of Soviet propaganda.
"These failures are of such enormity," the transition report said, "that they cannot help but suggest to any objective observer that the agency itself is compromised to an unprecedented extent and that its paralysis is attributable to causes more sinister than incompetence."
In other words, Silberman's transition team was implying that CIA analysts who didn't toe the neoconservative line must be Soviet agents. Even anti-Soviet hardliners like the CIA's Robert Gates recognized the impact that the incoming administration's hostility had on the CIA analysts.
"That the Reaganites saw their arrival as a hostile takeover was apparent in the most extraordinary transition period of my career," Gates wrote in his memoir, From the Shadows. "The reaction inside the Agency to this litany of failure and incompetence" from the transition team "was a mix of resentment and anger, dread and personal insecurity."
Amid rumors that the transition team wanted to purge several hundred top analysts, career officials feared for their jobs, especially those considered responsible for assessing the Soviet Union as a declining power rapidly falling behind the West in technology and economics.
According to some intelligence sources, Silberman expected to get the job of CIA director and flew into a rage when Reagan gave the job to his campaign director William Casey, who also was tied to the October Surprise operations. (The U.S. hostages in Iran were released immediately upon Ronald Reagan taking the oath of office on Jan. 20, 1981.)
Silberman's consolation prize was to be named a judge on the powerful U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, where he helped frustrate the Iran-Contra investigation by overturning Oliver North's conviction in 1990 and to this day is a defender of the neocons' foreign policy -- as witnessed by his Sept. 11, 2009, ruling blocking civil lawsuits against U.S. government contractors implicated in torturing Iraqis.
