I have been reading this book,
The Rise of the Vulcans, which has a wealth of info regarding the histories of the players currently involved in this misadministration. I highly recommend this book.
Anyway, it has a bit of info on Team B:
To set the stage
Sometime during the Ford administration, when Reagan was making his move in his bid for presidency, Reagan was attacking Ford's foreign policy (Ford and Kissinger believed detente was the best approach with Soviet Union, others thought not: Cheney was Ford's new chief of staff and was not supportive of detente, nor was Rumsfeld, his predecessor edited to add that Rumsfeld was, at this time, Ford's secretary of defense). Ford eventually retreated from using the word so much.
While Rumsfeld and Cheney were eviscerating Kissinger's Soviet policies at the top levels of the Ford administration and the Republican party, Paul Wolfowitz was engaged in a parallel effort inside the US intelligence community.
At the end of each year, at a time when new defense budgets were being drafted, the CIA ... produced a secret National Intelligence Estimate on the intentions and capabilities of the Soviet Union. ...congressional critics complained that the intelligence community was offering too benign and too optimistic a view of the Soviet leadership and military. The underlying issue was whether the CIA and other agencies were underestimating the threat, either intentionally tailoring intelligence to support Kissinger's policy of detente or by simply failing to give enough weight to darker interpretations of Soviet intentions.
In 1976 Bush, the CIA new director from the Soviet Union, moved to counter the criticism. He appointed a team of outside experts, called the B Team, to review the classified data and to draw up its own separate report on the Soviet Union and its intentions. Team B was headed by Richard Pipes, a professor of Russian history from Harvard University. Wolfowitz, still working at the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, was one of the ten members.
The report, delivered at the end of 1976, presented an analysis of Soviet motivations profoundly different from the one US intelligence had been offering. The team concluded it was possible to interpret the available intelligence data as showing that the Soviet Union was striving for military superiority over the United States and that it viewed detente as a means of achieving this goal ... it criticized the CIA for relying too much on satellites and other technology and for failing to give enough weight to what Soviet leaders were saying.
This Team B exercise represented an important step in Wolfowitz's career. For the first time he was focusing on the underpinnings of American foreign policy, on the hidden assumptions and leaps of logic that lay beneath the dry, purportedly unbiased studies of the intelligence community. Many years later, in a retrospective interview with the CIA's own internal historians, Wolfowitz said he came to the conclusion that US intelligence analysts had been operating in the fashion of priesthood, issuing conclusions as if they were commandments written on tablets. "The B-Team demonstrated that it was possible to construct a sharply different view of Soviet motivation from the consensus view of the analysts, and one that provided a much closer fit to the Soviets' observed behavior (and also provided a much closer fit to the Soviets' observed behavior up to and through the invasion of Afghanistan)," Wolfowitz said.
The Team B exercise created an important precedent. From that point forward, whenever members of Congress believed that the CIA was minimizing the seriousness of a foreign policy problem, there were calls for a Team B to review the intelligence and make its own independent evaluation. During the mid-1990s, the Republican majority in Congress set up a special commission, modeled upon Team B, to study the threat to the United from ballistic missiles. After reviewing the intelligence, an independent commission concluded that the danger of a missile attack was considerably greater than the US intelligence community had reported. That missile defense commission was headed by Donald Rumsfeld, and one of its leading members was Paul Wolfowitz.
Wolfowitz's work on the B Team seems to have had a particularly strong influence on his own thinking. From then on the inadequacies of American intelligence became a frequent Wolfowitz theme. From his own perspective, the intelligence community simply wasn't being skeptical enough; it was too satisfied with information that confirmed its preconceptions. Critics made the reverse accusation against him; there were complaints that Wolfowitz was too eager to obtain intelligence reports that fitted in with his own conservative views. pp. 73-75
Hmmm...why does this seem so familiar. Oh yeah!: White House Iraq Group; DSM: "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy..."; Office of Special Plans, etc.
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