But that tradition came under attack in 1976 when conservative outsiders demanded and were granted access to the CIA's strategic intelligence on the Soviet Union. Their goal was to contest the analytical division's assessments of Soviet capabilities and intentions. The conservatives saw the CIA's tempered analysis of Soviet behavior as the underpinning of then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's strategy of de'tente, the gradual normalizing of relations with the Soviet Union. De'tente was, in effect, a plan to negotiate an end to the Cold War or at least its most dangerous elements.
This CIA view of a tamer Soviet Union had enemies inside Gerald Ford's administration. Hard-liners, such as William J. Casey, John Connally, Clare Booth Luce and Edward Teller, sat on the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Another young hard-liner, Dick Cheney, was Ford's chief of staff. Donald Rumsfeld was then - as he is today - the secretary of defense.
Team B
The concept of a conservative counter-analysis, which became known as "Team B," had been opposed by the previous CIA director, William Colby, as in inappropriate intrusion into the integrity of the CIA's analytical product. But the new CIA director, a politically ambitious George H.W. Bush, was ready to acquiesce to the right-wing pressure.
"Although his top analysts argued against such an undertaking, Bush checked with the White House, obtained an O.K., and by May 26 [1976] signed off on the experiment with the notation, 'Let her fly!!," wrote Anne Hessing Cahn after reviewing "Team B" documents that were released more than a decade ago. [See "Team B: The Trillion Dollar Experiment," The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.]
The senior George Bush offered the rationale that Team B would simply be an intellectual challenge to the CIA's official assessments. The elder Bush's rationale, however, assumed that Team B didn't have a pre-set agenda to fashion a worst-case scenario for launching a new and intensified Cold War. What was sometimes called Cold War II would demand hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayers' money for military projects, including big-ticket items like a missile-defense system. [One member of Team B, retired Lt. Gen. Daniel Graham, would become the father of Ronald Reagan "Star Wars" missile defense system.]
Not surprisingly, Team B did produce a worst-case scenario of Soviet power and intentions. Gaining credibility from its access to secret CIA data, Team B challenged the assessment of the CIA's professional analysts who held a less alarmist view of Moscow's capabilities and intentions. "The principal threat to our nation, to world peace and to the cause of human freedom is the Soviet drive for dominance based upon an unparalleled military buildup," wrote three Team B members Pipes, Nitze and Van Cleave.
Team B also brought to prominence another young neo-conservative, Paul Wolfowitz. A quarter century later, Wolfowitz would pioneer the post-Cold War strategy of U.S. preemptive wars against countries deemed potential threats by using the same technique of filtering the available intelligence to build a worst-case scenario. In 2001, George W. Bush made Wolfowitz deputy secretary of defense under Rumsfeld.
Though Team B's analysis of the Soviet Union as a rising power on the verge of overwhelming the United States is now recognized by intelligence professionals and many historians as a ludicrous fantasy, it helped shape the national security debate in the late 1970s. American conservatives and neo-conservatives wielded the analysis like a club to bludgeon more moderate Republicans and Democrats, who saw a declining Soviet Union desperate for arms control and other negotiations.
Reagan's Rise
Scary assessments of Soviet power and U.S. weakness also fueled Ronald Reagan's campaign in 1980, and after his election, the Team B hard-liners had the keys to power. As Reagan and his vice presidential running mate, George H.W. Bush, prepared to take office, the hard-liners wrote Reagan's transition team report, which suggested that the CIA analytical division was not simply obtuse in its supposed failure to perceive Soviet ascendancy, but treasonous.
"These failures are of such enormity," the transition team 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." [For details, see Mark Perry's Eclipse.]
With Reagan in power, the Team B analysis of Soviet capabilities and intentions became the basis for a massive U.S. military buildup. It also was the justification for U.S. support of brutal right-wing governments in Central America and elsewhere.
Since Soviet power was supposedly on the rise and rapidly eclipsing the United States, it followed that even peasant uprisings against "death squad" regimes in El Salvador or Guatemala must be part of a larger Soviet strategy of world conquest, an assault on the "soft underbelly" of the U.S. southern border. Any analysis of these civil wars as primarily local conflicts arising from long-standing social grievances was dismissed as fuzzy thinking or worse.
In the first few months of the Reagan administration, the hard-liners' animosity toward the CIA's analytical division intensified as it resisted a series of accusations against the Soviet Union. The CIA analysts were obstacles to the administration's campaign to depict Moscow as responsible for virtually all acts of international terrorism, including the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in Rome in 1981.
With William Casey installed as CIA director and also serving in Reagan's Cabinet, the assault on the analytical division moved into high gear. Casey put the analytical division under the control of his prote'ge', Robert Gates, who had made his name as an anti-Soviet hard-liner. Gates then installed a new bureaucracy within the DI, or Directorate of Intelligence, with his loyalists in key positions.
This CIA view of a tamer Soviet Union had enemies inside Gerald Ford's administration. Hard-liners, such as William J. Casey, John Connally, Clare Booth Luce and Edward Teller, sat on the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Another young hard-liner, Dick Cheney, was Ford's chief of staff. Donald Rumsfeld was then - as he is today - the secretary of defense.
Team B
The concept of a conservative counter-analysis, which became known as "Team B," had been opposed by the previous CIA director, William Colby, as in inappropriate intrusion into the integrity of the CIA's analytical product. But the new CIA director, a politically ambitious George H.W. Bush, was ready to acquiesce to the right-wing pressure.
The senior George Bush offered the rationale that Team B would simply be an intellectual challenge to the CIA's official assessments. The elder Bush's rationale, however, assumed that Team B didn't have a pre-set agenda to fashion a worst-case scenario for launching a new and intensified Cold War. What was sometimes called Cold War II would demand hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayers' money for military projects, including big-ticket items like a missile-defense system. [One member of Team B, retired Lt. Gen. Daniel Graham, would become the father of Ronald Reagan "Star Wars" missile defense system.]
Not surprisingly, Team B did produce a worst-case scenario of Soviet power and intentions. Gaining credibility from its access to secret CIA data, Team B challenged the assessment of the CIA's professional analysts who held a less alarmist view of Moscow's capabilities and intentions. "The principal threat to our nation, to world peace and to the cause of human freedom is the Soviet drive for dominance based upon an unparalleled military buildup," wrote three Team B members Pipes, Nitze and Van Cleave.
Team B also brought to prominence another young neo-conservative, Paul Wolfowitz. A quarter century later, Wolfowitz would pioneer the post-Cold War strategy of U.S. preemptive wars against countries deemed potential threats by using the same technique of filtering the available intelligence to build a worst-case scenario. In 2001, George W. Bush made Wolfowitz deputy secretary of defense under Rumsfeld.
Though Team B's analysis of the Soviet Union as a rising power on the verge of overwhelming the United States is now recognized by intelligence professionals and many historians as a ludicrous fantasy, it helped shape the national security debate in the late 1970s. American conservatives and neo-conservatives wielded the analysis like a club to bludgeon more moderate Republicans and Democrats, who saw a declining Soviet Union desperate for arms control and other negotiations.
Reagan's Rise
Scary assessments of Soviet power and U.S. weakness also fueled Ronald Reagan's campaign in 1980, and after his election, the Team B hard-liners had the keys to power. As Reagan and his vice presidential running mate, George H.W. Bush, prepared to take office, the hard-liners wrote Reagan's transition team report, which suggested that the CIA analytical division was not simply obtuse in its supposed failure to perceive Soviet ascendancy, but treasonous.
"These failures are of such enormity," the transition team 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." [For details, see Mark Perry's Eclipse.]
With Reagan in power, the Team B analysis of Soviet capabilities and intentions became the basis for a massive U.S. military buildup. It also was the justification for U.S. support of brutal right-wing governments in Central America and elsewhere.
Since Soviet power was supposedly on the rise and rapidly eclipsing the United States, it followed that even peasant uprisings against "death squad" regimes in El Salvador or Guatemala must be part of a larger Soviet strategy of world conquest, an assault on the "soft underbelly" of the U.S. southern border. Any analysis of these civil wars as primarily local conflicts arising from long-standing social grievances was dismissed as fuzzy thinking or worse.
In the first few months of the Reagan administration, the hard-liners' animosity toward the CIA's analytical division intensified as it resisted a series of accusations against the Soviet Union. The CIA analysts were obstacles to the administration's campaign to depict Moscow as responsible for virtually all acts of international terrorism, including the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in Rome in 1981.
With William Casey installed as CIA director and also serving in Reagan's Cabinet, the assault on the analytical division moved into high gear. Casey put the analytical division under the control of his prote'ge', Robert Gates, who had made his name as an anti-Soviet hard-liner. Gates then installed a new bureaucracy within the DI, or Directorate of Intelligence, with his loyalists in key positions.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
