September 6, 2011--Team B
Until recently I thought of the presidency of Gerald Ford as a moment of calm after the tumult and conspiracies of the Nixon administration and before the disappointment of the Carter years.
Yes, Ford pardoned unindicted co-conspirator Richard M. Nixon; but even that included a sense of justice and saved the country from what would have been years of acrimony and divisive bickering and partisanship. We know now about such things and retrospectively Ford's pardon seems wise.
But during those otherwise quiet years, below the political surface and largely undetected by the sleepy media, something very ideological and in its own way conspiratorial was underway which had profound consequences for U.S. foreign policy. For those years as well as into the present.
As I recount one aspect of this--the work of Team B--note how many names from the early 1970s are depressingly familiar.
With the approval of then-director of the CIA--George H. W. Bush--President Ford agreed to establish Team B to analyze threats the Soviet Union posed to the security of the United States. Among neoconservatives there was the claim that the CIA systematically and even intentionally underestimated the nature of that threat, and that assessment lead to Nixon and Henry Kissinger naively seeking to find ways to negotiate with and find ways to reduce tension between the two nuclear superpowers. At the time they called it détente.
In spite of and disregarding the best available evidence, Team B concluded that the CIA's annual National Intelligence Estimate of the Soviet Union underestimated Soviet military power and misinterpreted Soviet strategic intentions. They concluded that these intentions were anything but benign. Its findings were leaked to the press shortly after Jimmy Carter's 1976 election in an attempt to appeal to anti-communists in both parties and thus not appear to be partisan.
The Team B report became the intellectual foundation for the idea of "the window of vulnerability" and of the massive arms buildup that began toward the end of the Carter administration and accelerated under President Ronald Reagan.
Looking back at the work of Team B, virtually all of their findings and conclusions have in recent years proven to be inaccurate. In addition, there is evidence that the most forceful team members, because they had an ideological agenda, knew they were not reporting the truth. Their actual goal was to make the case for a much more aggressive and preemptive foreign and military policy.
Is any of this sounding familiar?
A classic example is their "finding" about the Soviet's nuclear submarine capacities:
The report argued that despite the NIE's assessment in its 10-year forecast that the Soviet Navy was not aggressively developing more accurate anti-submarine warfare (ASW) detection tools and would not be able to deploy new, advanced ASW capabilities in the next 10 years, Team B's report cautioned that to determine the real extent of Soviet ASW development would require significantly more research and access to classified materials but that the US Navy would not release its data to either Team B, or the CIA. They thus concluded that the probability of advanced Soviet ASW research was significantly greater than zero.
In spite of any lack of evidence that Soviet ASW technology was progressing rapidly they came to this conclusion.
When pressed by experts, skeptics, to reveal the basis for its claim, Team B members said that it was the very fact that there was no proof proved that the Soviet ASW program existed. It was that clandestine and effective.
This sort of double-think and dissembling was so effective at the time--it did have a profound effect on how aggressively we acted during the Cold War--that it was put to use in subsequent situations where ideology overruled evidence. Like the more contemporary claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction even though there was no proof that they did.
Team B members included people such as Paul Wolfowitz and was urged on President Ford by his Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and chief-of-staff Dick Cheney.
As they say, the past is prologue and the rest turned out to be history.
Yes, Ford pardoned unindicted co-conspirator Richard M. Nixon; but even that included a sense of justice and saved the country from what would have been years of acrimony and divisive bickering and partisanship. We know now about such things and retrospectively Ford's pardon seems wise.
But during those otherwise quiet years, below the political surface and largely undetected by the sleepy media, something very ideological and in its own way conspiratorial was underway which had profound consequences for U.S. foreign policy. For those years as well as into the present.
As I recount one aspect of this--the work of Team B--note how many names from the early 1970s are depressingly familiar.
With the approval of then-director of the CIA--George H. W. Bush--President Ford agreed to establish Team B to analyze threats the Soviet Union posed to the security of the United States. Among neoconservatives there was the claim that the CIA systematically and even intentionally underestimated the nature of that threat, and that assessment lead to Nixon and Henry Kissinger naively seeking to find ways to negotiate with and find ways to reduce tension between the two nuclear superpowers. At the time they called it détente.
In spite of and disregarding the best available evidence, Team B concluded that the CIA's annual National Intelligence Estimate of the Soviet Union underestimated Soviet military power and misinterpreted Soviet strategic intentions. They concluded that these intentions were anything but benign. Its findings were leaked to the press shortly after Jimmy Carter's 1976 election in an attempt to appeal to anti-communists in both parties and thus not appear to be partisan.
The Team B report became the intellectual foundation for the idea of "the window of vulnerability" and of the massive arms buildup that began toward the end of the Carter administration and accelerated under President Ronald Reagan.
Looking back at the work of Team B, virtually all of their findings and conclusions have in recent years proven to be inaccurate. In addition, there is evidence that the most forceful team members, because they had an ideological agenda, knew they were not reporting the truth. Their actual goal was to make the case for a much more aggressive and preemptive foreign and military policy.
Is any of this sounding familiar?
A classic example is their "finding" about the Soviet's nuclear submarine capacities:
The report argued that despite the NIE's assessment in its 10-year forecast that the Soviet Navy was not aggressively developing more accurate anti-submarine warfare (ASW) detection tools and would not be able to deploy new, advanced ASW capabilities in the next 10 years, Team B's report cautioned that to determine the real extent of Soviet ASW development would require significantly more research and access to classified materials but that the US Navy would not release its data to either Team B, or the CIA. They thus concluded that the probability of advanced Soviet ASW research was significantly greater than zero.
In spite of any lack of evidence that Soviet ASW technology was progressing rapidly they came to this conclusion.
When pressed by experts, skeptics, to reveal the basis for its claim, Team B members said that it was the very fact that there was no proof proved that the Soviet ASW program existed. It was that clandestine and effective.
This sort of double-think and dissembling was so effective at the time--it did have a profound effect on how aggressively we acted during the Cold War--that it was put to use in subsequent situations where ideology overruled evidence. Like the more contemporary claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction even though there was no proof that they did.
Team B members included people such as Paul Wolfowitz and was urged on President Ford by his Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and chief-of-staff Dick Cheney.
As they say, the past is prologue and the rest turned out to be history.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
5:05 AM
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