Reply #107: BINGO. Pipe's dad, Richard Pipes, was Team Leader for TEAM B.

[Octafish]

Here'a Who's Who of Team B.

That's where Intel was slanted to make the Soviets look like a bigger threat than they were.

The trillions wasted ended up in somebody's numbered Swiss bank account.

Team B Strategic Objectives Panel

John S. Foster, Jr., organizer
Richard Perle
Daniel Pipes
Richard Pipes, team leader
Donald Rumsfeld, promoter
William Van Cleave, member
Paul Wolfowitz, member

Committee on the Present Danger


The most notorious attempt by militarists and right-wing ideologues to challenge the CIA was the Team B affair in the mid-1970s. The 1975-76 “Team B” operation was a classic case of threat escalation by hawks determined to increase military budgets and step up the U.S. offensive in the cold war. Concocted by right-wing ideologues and militarists, Team B aimed to bury the politics of détente and the SALT arms negotiations, which were supported by the leadership of both political parties.

The historical record shows that the call for an independent assessment of the CIA’s conclusions came from the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB--pronounced piffy-ab). But the fear-mongering and challenges to the CIA’s threat assessments--known as National Intelligence Estimates--actually started with nuclear strategist Albert Wohlstetter, who laid down the gauntlet in a 1974 Foreign Policy article entitled “Is There a Strategic Arms Race?” Wohlstetter answered his rhetorical question negatively, concluding that the United States was allowing the Soviet Union to achieve military superiority by not closing the “missile gap.” Having inspired the Gaither Commission in 1957 to raise the missile gap alarm, Wohlstetter applied the same threat assessment methodology to energize hawks, cold warriors, and right-wing anticommunists in the mid-1970s to kill the politics of détente and increase budget allocations for the Pentagon.

Shortly after President Gerald Ford appointed Bush to be the new director of intelligence, replacing the beleaguered William Colby, Bush authorized PFIAB’s plan for an alternative review. The review consisted of three panels: one to assess the threat posed by Soviet missile accuracy; another to determine the effect of Soviet air defenses on U.S. strategic bombers; and a third--the Strategic Objectives Panel--to determine the Soviet Union’s intentions. The work of this last panel, which became known as the Team B Report, was the most controversial. As Paul Warnke, an official at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency at the time of the Team B exercise, wrote: “Whatever might be said for evaluation of strategic capabilities by a group of outside experts, the impracticality of achieving useful results by ‘independent’ analysis of strategic objectives should have been self-evident. Moreover, the futility of the Team B enterprise was assured by the selection of the panel’s members. Rather than including a diversity of views ... the Strategic Objectives Panel was composed entirely of individuals who made careers of viewing the Soviet menace with alarm.” (4)

Team members included Richard Pipes (father of Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum) and William Van Cleave, both of whom would become members of the second Committee on the Present Danger, as well as Gen. Daniel Graham, whose “High Frontier” missile defense proposal foreshadowed President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), or “Star Wars.” The team’s advisory panel included Paul Wolfowitz, Paul Nitze, and Seymour Weiss--all close associates of Albert Wohlstetter. Although Richard Perle played no direct role in Team B, he was instrumental in setting it up. It was Perle who had introduced Richard Pipes, a Polish immigrant who taught Czarist Russian history at Harvard, to Sen. Henry Jackson, catapulting Pipes into a clique of fanatically anti-Soviet hawks. Pipes, who served as Team B’s chairman, later said he chose Wolfowitz as his principal Team B adviser “because Richard Perle recommended him so highly.” (5)

The Team B Report, released as an “October surprise” in an attempt to derail Jimmy Carter’s 1976 presidential bid, argued that “Soviet leaders are first and foremost offensively rather than defensively minded.” The team had arrived at this conclusion of Soviet intent from an assessment of the USSR’s capabilities, but they ignored evidence pointing to an opposite conclusion. Although it was true that the Soviets had been expanding their military capacity in the early 1970s, the USSR’s military production--along with the Soviet economy in general--began to stagnate by the mid-1970s. Dismissing this new trend, Team B accused the CIA of consistently underestimating the “intensity, scope, and implicit threat” posed by the Soviet Union. By relying on technical or “hard” data rather than “contemplat Soviet strategic objectives,” charged the panel, the CIA was setting up the United States for defeat in the cold war.

SNIP...

The Team B report paved the way for the second Committee on the Present Danger, which formed weeks after Team B had released its findings. The committee’s first major policy statement, titled What Is the Soviet Union Up To? was written by Team B leader Richard Pipes, who along with other participants in the Team B exercise--including Foy Kohler, Paul Nitze, and William Van Cleave--were founding members of the Committee on the Present Danger.

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These devils are the scum of the earth.