TEAM B THE REALITY BEHIND THE MYTH

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP93T01132R000100050007-2
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 18
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 18, 2012
• Sequence Number: 7
• Publication Date: September 30, 1986
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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-3 0 SEP 1986
nriv
VOLUME EIGHTY-TWO ? t
The Tenured Left/Stephen H. Balch and Herbert
Shcharansky's Secret/Edward Alexander;
Sodomy and the Supreme Court/David Robinson, Jr.
Our Conservatism and Theirs/Brigitte Berger and Peter L. Berger
The Truth About Titoism/Nora Beloff
Walter Laqueur at Sixty-Five/Roger Kaplan
"Whose Palestine?'LAn Exchange/Erich Isaac and Rael Jean Isaac & Critics
Books in Review: Alvin H. Bernstein / Scott McConnell /
S. Fred Singer / Kenneth S. Lynn / Joshua Muravchik
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Commentary
Team B: The Reality Behind the Myth
Richard Pipes
F OUR years ago, the Secretary of De-
fense, Caspar Weinberger, in answer
to a question whether the United States expected
to emerge victorious from a nuclear war, re-
sponded that anyone in his position who did
not prepare to prevail in a war deserved to be
impeached. This statement did not attract a great
deal of attention, for it seemed obvious, although
in fact it repudiated the doctrine of Mutual As-
sured Destruction (MAD) that had dominated
U.S. policy since the late 1950's. To understand
this evolution in American strategic thinking it is
worthwhile recalling the episode of "Team B"
which occurred ten years ago as a result of the
decision of the-then Director of Central Intelli-
gence, George Bush, to commission alternative
assessments of the Soviet strategic threat.
When the United States dropped atomic bombs
on Japan, the military effect of these new weap-
ons escaped no one, but their impact on future
strategy was only dimly understood and a sub-
ject of controversy. The consensus of the scien-
tific community, which had designed the new
weapons, held that by virtue of their unprece-
dented destructiveness as well as their impervious-
ness to defenses, they had fundamentally and
permanently altered the nature of warfare. Once
other countries had acquired the ability to manu-
facture similar weapons-and the scientists cor-
rectly predicted that this was bound to occur be-
fore long-they would become unusable. With
more than one power disposing of nuclear weap-
ons, they could not be employed with impunity,
as they had been by the U.S. against Japan: hence
they would have only one conceivable function
and that would be to deter others. Since victory
in nuclear war was out of the question, nuclear
weapons could not be rationally put to offensive
purposes.
This outlook, championed in the pages of the
Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and, later, Scientific
American, did not gain immediate ascendancy.
RICHARD PIPES is Baird Professor of History at Harvard
and served in 1981-82 at the National Security Council as
Director, East European and Soviet Affairs. His latest book
is Survival Is Not Enough. Among his previous articles
in COMMENTARY are "How to Cope With the Soviet
Threat" (August 1984) and `Soviet Global Strategy" (April
1980).
Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, confronting
Communist aggression in Europe and Asia and
unable-because of fiscal restraints-to stop So-
viet expansion with conventional forces, had no
choice but to rely on the threat of nuclear re-
sponse. That this threat could be effectively used,
Eisenhower demonstrated in 1953 when he com-
pelled the North Koreans to accept an armistice.
Later he and his Secretary of State, John Foster
Dulles, coined the slogan of "massive retaliation"
with which they hoped to contain the Soviet
Union and its clients at minimum cost and with-
out resort to the unpopular military draft.
Such nuclear blackmail, of course, was possible
only as long as the United States retained a
monopoly on the manufacture of nuclear weap-
ons and the vehicles (bombers) able to deliver
them to other continents. This monopoly eroded
faster than expected. The Soviet explosion of a
fission bomb in 1949 and fusion (hydrogen) bomb
four years later shocked the United States, but it
did not yet force it to abandon the strategy of
"massive retaliation" because the Russians lacked
adequate means of delivering these explosive de-
vices against the United States. These means they
acquired in 1957 when Sputnik demonstrated
their ability to launch intercontinental missiles.
Since there existed at the time no effective means
of intercepting such missiles, certain to be armed
with nuclear charges, the United States faced, for
the first time in its history, a direct threat to its
national survival.
This prospect traumatized President Eisenhow-
er, forcing him radically to alter U.S. strategic
doctrine. Unable to resort to the threat of nuclear
annihilation to contain the Soviet Union, he de-
cided henceforth to seek security through accords
with Moscow. Such a course had been urged by
many leading scientists. Within weeks after Mos-
cow had sent Sputnik into space, Eisenhower
moved the Science Advisory Committee chaired
by the provost of MIT, James Killian, to the
White House to give him guidance in these mat-
ters. This step marked a break in the U.S. defense
planning because it involved, for the first time,
civilian experts in the formulation of military
strategy. Henceforth the scientific community,
working through the Advisory Committee as well
as other channels, acquired a dominant voice in
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the formulation of U.S. nuclear strategy. The
scientists used this voice to lead U.S. strategy away
from traditional ways of military thinking and to-
ward arms-control negotiations. They were to re-
tain this voice for nearly a quarter of a century,
until the advent of the Reagan administration.
T HE growing influence of scientific
modes of thinking on all aspects of
life is probably the most outstanding feature of
modern Western culture. It began in the 16th
century with the revolution in astronomy and
then spread into other realms of thought, includ.
ing the humanities and social studies. Properly
speaking, science is not content but method-a
strictly empirical way of dealing with phenomena
which assumes that whatever cannot be observed
and measured does not exist.
Applied to human affairs, this method has pro-
duced the "science of man" or sociology. Con-
ceived in France in the early years of the 19th
century, sociology and its theoretical underpin-
ning, positivism, deprecate national culture and
history as factors that shape human behavior in
favor of abstract conceptions of man, isolated
from time and space. In the words of Leszek
Kolakowski:
Contemporary positivism is an attempt to over-
come historicism once and for all . . . it . . .
frees us from the need to study history, which-
since any philosophy worthy of the name must
be cumulative in character-must appear to
those professing this doctrine as a succession of
barren, futile efforts, basically unintelligible as
to results, and only very occasionally illumi-
nated by a ray of common sense.
Scientists are by schooling and experience com-
mitted positivists. They are impatient with every-
thing that they regard as "irrational," that is,
outside the reach of scientific observation. F.A.
Hayek has explained well the deformation pro-
fessionelle of the scientist when confronted with
the messy world of living human beings:
What men know or think about the external
world or about themselves, their concepts and
even the subjective qualities of their sense per-
ception are to Science never ultimate reality,
data to be accepted. Its concern is not what
men think about the world and how they con-
sequently behave, but what they ought to think.
When they run into what they regard as "irra-
tional" ideas or forms of behavior, scientists turn
into educators who instruct wayward mortals what
to think. It is psychologically as well as intellec-
tually impossible for most of them, and especially
for the most gifted, to accept the irrational as real.
So persuaded are many scientists of the incontro-
vertible and universal validity of their method
that in their public capacity they readily succumb
to a fanaticism that is quite impervious to both
argument and experience. They are no more pre-
pared to take seriously the proposition that nu-
clear weapons might be effective instruments of
warfare than to waste time proving that the earth
is not flat.
Of course, there is no iron necessity that a scien-
tifically trained person must think and act in this
manner: Andrei Sakharov and Edward Teller are
proof that great scientists can entertain a variety
of points of view on human affairs. But it takes a
great deal of civic courage to stand up to a con-
sensus of one's peers, especially if it is reinforced
with political influence and access to funding. Ex-
perience shows that most people will more readily
face enemy bullets than what Samuel Johnson
called the hiss of the world.
H AVING been brought into the process
of decision-making and given political
influence never before er.joyed by members of
their profession, American scientists quickly for-
mulated a body of opinion that brooked no op-
position. Alternative views were silenced, their
advocates ostracized. The scientists were divided
among themselves on certain issues but they were
united in the belief that the only rational func-
tion of nuclear weapons was to deter.
One group, which soon came to dominate the
debate, called for deterrence through agreement.
Its advocates, among whom Hans Bethe was one
of the most visible, believed that nuclear weapons
were so destructive that they could deter at a low
level. Instead of building more weapons of this
kind (especially the hydrogen bomb, which they
opposed), the U.S. should intensify efforts to
reach arms-control agreements with the Soviet
Union. A second group, led by Edward Teller,
advocated deterrence through strength. It wanted
to neutralize the Soviet threat with still more po-
tent and accurate bombs on the ground that in a
world of sovereign states international accords
provided inadequate guarantees of national secur-
ity. The first group urged avoiding an arms race
with Moscow in favor of "educating" the Russians
to its futility and striving, through bilateral agree-
ments and even, if need be, unilateral conces-
sions, for mutual reductions. The second group
wanted, if necessary, to match and surpass the
Soviet effort. How intolerant scientists can be
when vested with political power they demon-
strated in 1957 by excluding Teller and all who
thought like him from the influential Science Ad-
visory Board. In this way, through exclusion, they
achieved a consensus that allowed them to offer
Presidents advice with singular authority.
The strategic policy imposed by scientists and
adopted by the U.S. government in the 1960's may
be summarized as follows: the only scientifically
sound strategy is Mutual Assured Destruction.
This means that once both superpowers have ac-
quired a certain level of retaliatory power, should
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TEAM B: THE REALITY BEHIND THE MYTH/27
either of them dare to attack the other, it ades arms control rather than arms build-up be-
would be struck with so devastating a blow came the centerpiece of U.S. defense policy: a
that it would suffer as much as its victim. As situation without historic precedent and testi-
defined by Secretary of Defense Robert Mc- mony to the success of American scientists in per-
Namara, MAD demanded that the United suading the country that the atomic bomb had
States, after absorbing a Soviet surprise first completely altered the conduct of international
strike, be capable of responding with a retalia- affairs, creating an environment in which, as in
tory strike that would wipe out between one- Alice's Looking Glass world, everything was topsy-
fifth and one-third of the Soviet Union's popula- turvy.
tion and between one-half and three-quarters of
its industrial capacity. Anything beyond this ar- Tconfirming Ha
bitrarily established standard of "unacceptable table T scientists rng Hayek' s observation, ervati U.S. tion, bland-
damage" , was redundant and "destabilizing." Mc- ly ignored that human affairs are subject to dif-
Namara decided that a force of 1,000 ICBM's, 41 ferent rules and that in a century-and-a-half of
submarines, and 600 bombers would ensure the strenuous efforts sociologists have failed to come
U.S. of the ability to inflict such damage on the up with universal laws of human conduct remote-
Soviet Union even under the "worst-case" scenario. ly resembling those of the exact sciences. They
This strategy regarded defenses of any sort as seem to have been unaware of the distinction be-
unsettling the balance because they raised the tween the value-free ("objective") natural sciences
prospect that either country, using them as a and the value-determined ("subjective") social sci-
shield, could launch a preemptive strike with ences which philosophers like Heinrich Rickert
relative impunity. For MAD to work, both sides and Nicholas Mikhailovsky had demonstrated al-
had to be vulnerable to destruction. One of the ready in the 19th century. Their ignorance of his-
earliest advocates of this doctrine, Arnold Wolf- tory blinded them even to the possibility that the
ers, formulated what must surely be the most Soviet leadership, steeped as it was in a radically
bizarre doctrine in the history of military thought different political culture and pursuing different
when he argued that for the United States to feel objectives, could also view nuclear weapons dif-
secure from the Soviet Union it had to make cer- ferently.
tain that the Soviet Union possessed the ability The Soviet nomenklatura (the ruling elite of
totally to destroy it. the Communist
The public at large was not initiated into the ing advantage of therweaknesses rofnis d victims,
)
complexities of Mutual Assured Destruction. It was brilliantly exploited the political innocence of
told simply that there was "overkill," that nuclear American scientists (as well as the vanity which is
build-ups beyond the figures set by McNamara perhaps the most vulnerable trait of intellectuals)
constituted "madness," and that henceforth secu- to persuade them of a spurious identity of views
rity lay not in unilaterally arming but in mutual- and interests between East and West. At Pugwash,
ly disarming. These propositions became dogma. Dartmouth, and countless other formal and infor-
Since scientists tend to endow people, as they mal meetings held now in the U.S. and now in the
do inanimate objects, with an innate logic, they Soviet Union, they told the Americans just what
entertained no doubt that nuclear weapons could the Americans wanted to hear: that MAD was
have but one "rational" use. The Soviet Union indeed the only strategic doctrine that made sense,
could no more produce a Communist nuclear that parity was all their country wanted, and that
strategy than a Communist science of physics, arms control, not arms build-up, was the way to
This reasoning led to the inescapable conclusion assure both national and international security.
that the Soviet Union had either already adopted The time had come for scientists of all coun-
MAD or would do so in time, in deference to the tries to take power away from politicians and
immutable laws of nuclear reality. That the USSR generals.
was indeed moving in this direction, the scientists When more skeptical American scientists raised
had an opportunity to persuade themselves in the awkward questions, their Soviet counterparts had
course of arms-control negotiations, in which they ready answers. The Soviet civil- and military-de-
played an important role, as well as from contacts fense effort? That was against China, of course.
with Soviet scientists at various private confer- Continuing quantitative and qualitative improve-
ences which proliferated in the 1960's. Totally ig- ments in Soviet missiles? The Russian tradition,
norant of Communist politics and not particular- shaped by centuries of foreign invasions, calls for
ly interested in them, these scientists turned overinsurance. The refusal to furnish figures on
strategists and diplomats allowed themselves to be the Soviet nuclear arsenal or to allow on-site in-
persuaded by their Soviet counterparts that the spection? Unfortunately, Russians have always
latter enjoyed the same influence in Moscow that been a secretive nation. By pretending (in private
they themselves had in Washington, and were only) to hold their people and some of its leaders
also working to restrain their own "hawks" and in low esteem, they created an atmosphere of
their own "military-industrial complex." make-believe mutual trust that dissolved such mis-
Thus it happened that for two-and-one-half dec- givings as American scientists might still have had.
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Had U.S. scientists not relied so much on pri-
vate confidences but taken the trouble to read
Soviet military literature and to look, without
preconceptions, at ongoing Soviet strategic pro-
grams, they would have had to realize that some-
thing was terribly wrong with their assumptions.
Soviet military publications, which are subject to
the most rigid censorship imaginable and there-
fore always speak with an official voice, made no
secret of the fact that Moscow had decided nu-
clear weapons could be used not only to deter but
also to overpower. From the early 1960's on, So-
viet strategists argued that nuclear weapons were
the decisive weapons of modern warfare and the
key to victory, for which reason the Strategic
Rocket Forces had become the mainstay of Soviet
armed might.
Had Soviet strategists done nothing more than
assert this thesis, one could have dimissed such
talk as pap for the generals. But they also pro-
vided a rationale. They argued that nuclear
charges and intercontinental missiles had revolu-
tionized warfare by making it possible to launch
preemptive strikes, which, in contrast to conven-
tional war, allowed a country to gain a strategic
decision at once rather than slowly, from a patient
accumulation of tactical victories. When speaking
to each other in the pages of Soviet military jour-
nals, Soviet experts simply ignored the doctrine of
Mutual Assured Destruction which Soviet disin-
formation agents were ladling out at their con-
vivial encounters to science professors from Har-
vard, MIT, and Stanford. Nor did Soviet experts
pay more than marginal attention to arms con-
trol, so central to U.S. strategic thinking. Soviet
professional literature, such as the journal Voen-
naia mysl' (Military Thought), concerned itself
exclusively with the question that has stood at the
center of military thinking since the dawn of his-
tory: how to win wars.
It is especially baffling that American strategic
amateurs ignored even the warnings of Andrei
Sakharov, a fellow scientist and a member of the
Soviet defense establishment, whose moral integ-
rity and expertise were beyond question. In 1975,
this creator of the Soviet hydrogen bomb stated
in a book published in English in the United
States, as if it were a self-evident truth, that the
introduction of missiles with multiple and inde-
pendent warheads (MIRV's) would make it attrac-
tive for a potential aggressor to attack:
The fact that the Vladivostok agreement seemed
to legitimize multiple, independently targetable
warheads is ... alarming.... Put quite simply,
it would become strategically advantageous, and
relatively safe, for either side to deliver a pre-
emptive strike with nuclear missiles.*
And if such "soft" evidence did not convince,
then the "hard" data on Soviet deployments
should have provided food for thought. When
McNamara served as Secretary of Defense, the
U.S., accepting his notion of what was required
to inflict "unacceptable damage," unilaterally
froze its strategic arsenal. By this restraint it en-
abled the Soviet Union to catch up and thereby
create the "stability" posited by MAD. The only
subsequent upgrading of U.S. strategic forces was
the introduction of MIRV's intended to give the
U.S. retaliatory force the ability to respond effec-
tively after much of it had been lost to a Soviet
first strike.
The Soviet Union took advantage of this re-
straint to gain strategic parity by 1969. Then, in-
stead of freezing its arsenal as well, it merrily pro-
ceeded to deploy a fourth generation of MIRVed
missiles with throwweights and accuracies that
could have no other conceivable mission than the
elimination of the U.S. deterrent in time of war.
Concurrently, it carried out an ambitious pro-
gram of strategic defenses which had no counter-
part on the U.S. side: air defense, anti-satellite
systems, civil defense, and an anti-ballistic-missile
defense system around its capital city. These meas-
ures alone should have alerted the American
scientific community that the Soviet Union did
not subscribe to MAD, since they contradicted its
fundamental principle that each country had to
remain a willing hostage to the other.
But all the evidence which did not accord with
the hallowed MAD doctrine was ignored. The
American scientific community, soon joined by
bevies of political scientists, economists, philos-
ophers, and even lawyers, physicians, and psychi-
atrists, came to regard strategy not as a theory of
conflict but as an intellectual game. And since in
intellectual circles the highest honors go to indi-
viduals who produce the most innovative ideas,
whatever their relationship to reality, if any, the
greatest fame and influence went to those who
formulated the most original and elegant ideas.
Soviet views were ignored precisely because they
fell far short of these standards.
And indeed, the strategic theories formulated
by American natural and social scientists were en-
tirely fresh: they demonstrated how wrong it is to
say that there are no new ideas under the sun.
Among these were such propositions as "the task
of the military is not to win wars but to prevent
them," "offense good, defense bad," and "killing
cities is right, killing missiles is wrong." All such
propositions would qualify for what Ivan Tur-
genev used to call "reverse commonplaces."
THE task of collecting and analyzing
data on Soviet strategic deployments
falls on the U.S. intelligence community, headed
by the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), who
also serves as Director of the Central Intelligence
? My Country and the World (Knopf. 1975), p. 71, em-
phasis added.
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TEAM B: THE REALITY BEHIND THE MYTH/29
Agency (CIA). It consists of a number of bureaus
of which the most important are the Defense In-
telligence Agency (DIA) and the National Secu-
rity Agency (NSA). In producing its estimates, the
intelligence community relies almost exclusively
on satellite and electronic surveillance because
the Soviet Union has consistently refused not only
to allow on-site inspection but even to provide
comprehensive figures on its nuclear arsenal.
Possibly the single most important product of
the intelligence community is the National Intel-
ligence Estimate on Soviet Strategic Objectives,
known as NIE 11-3/8. Prepared annually, toward
the end of the year, in time for the new defense
budget, it is released to a select body of officials who
have the "need to know." This NIE summarizes
the information available on Soviet strategic capa-
bilities, projects them into the future, and assesses
their probable missions. The personnel assigned
the task of drafting this document under the Na-
tional Intelligence Officer for the Soviet Union
are to ignore U.S. capabilities and avoid balance-
of-power estimates ("net assessments"). The func-
tion of NIL' 11-3/8 is simply to inform the deci-
sion-maker: as best as we can determine, the So-
viet Union is developing such and such strategic
capabilities; it is up to you to decide what these
developments portend for U.S. security and how
to respond to them.
Although the bulk of such data is gathered by
mechanical devices that are free of value judg-
ments, they must be interpreted by human beings
who are never without them. In practice it is not
possible completely to divorce an assessment of
capabilities from the judgment of intention: the
significance of a person's purchasing a knife is dif-
ferent if he is a professional chef or the leader of
a street gang, although the technical "capability"
which the knife provides is the same in each case.
In one way or another, more often unconsciously
than not, the analyst who studies Soviet nuclear
capabilities injects into his analysis subjective
opinions as to their purpose, which, in turn, de-
rive from his view of why the Soviet Union builds
a nuclear arsenal in the first place. Even the most
technical assessment of "capabilities," therefore,
entails some view of the motives of the opposite
party.
Now he who speculates on the motives of others
can proceed in one of two ways. He can ask him-
self: (1) given what I know of these people, what
can be on their mind?; or (2) if I were in their
shoes, why would I do what I observe them doing?
Clearly, the first of these approaches is preferable.
It is also the more difficult because it requires
knowledge of alien cultures and psychologies, not
to speak of an effort of the imagination. If we add
to this difficulty the fact that the scientists and
engineers entrusted with responsibility for pre-
paring these estimates tend to belittle the influ-
ence of cultural factors on human behavior, it is
hardly surprising that the U.S. intelligence com-
munity, in assessing Soviet strategic programs, has
relied heavily on the second approach, popularly
known as "mirror-imaging." This practice attri-
butes to others one's own motives and intentions
on the unspoken assumption that these alone are
"normal" or "rational." "Mirror-imaging" is the
very antithesis of the scientific method which seeks
to eliminate personal and subjective factors from
the process of observation and analysis. Yet, para-
doxically, it is precisely how scientists are likely
to proceed once they leave the realm of the exact
sciences.
A NATION'S intelligence community re-
flects the habits of thought of its
educated elite from whose ranks it is recruited
and on whom it depends for intellectual suste-
nance. The CIA is no exception. Its analytic staff,
filled with American Ph.D.'s in the natural and
social sciences along with engineers, inevitably
shares the outlook of U.S. academe, with its
penchant for philosophical positivism, cultural
agnosticism, and political liberalism. The special
knowledge which it derives from classified sources
is mainly technical; the rest of its knowledge, as
well as the intellectual equipment which it brings
to bear on the evidence, comes from academia.
In the 1970's, collating and analyzing the evi-
dence on Soviet strategic programs, the U.S. intel-
ligence community (with some exceptions, nota-
bly the DIA) tended to reason in terms of conven-
tional wisdom. It took for granted the universal
validity of MAD and interpreted the data on So-
viet strategic programs to mean that whatever the
USSR constructed had to serve deterrent pur-
poses exclusively. It ignored Soviet pronounce-
ments to the contrary, partly because they ap-
peared scientifically absurd, partly because it felt
uncomfortable with "soft" data. On these grounds,
it implicitly minimized the Soviet strategic threat.
The intellectual predispositions which led to
such conclusions were reinforced by political pres-
sures from the Nixon White House. Having staked
their political careers on detente, Richard Nixon
and Henry Kissinger disliked intelligence esti-
mates that stressed the Soviet threat to the
United States and showed the USSR moving be-
yond deterrence. Persons who at the time worked
in the intelligence community assert that in 1969-
70 the White House began to intervene in the esti-
mating process. It did so not by demanding that
the estimates come up with politically acceptable
conclusions, but that they concentrate exclusively
on the technical data or hardware, avoiding what
Kissinger called "talmudic" estimates. This had
the same effect because by eliminating informed,
conscious, and overt political judgment from the
estimates, it led to the injection of surreptitious
political judgments disguised as hardware anal-
yses.
Thus, paradoxically, as satellite surveillance en-
hanced the ability of the U.S. to monitor Soviet
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30/COMMENTARY OCTOBER 1986
nuclear deployments, its ability to interpret them
declined. The intelligence community expressed
no alarm at the unanticipated build-up of Soviet
strategic capabilities in the 1970's, the decade
when the United States virtually froze its nuclear
arsenal in the expectation that Moscow would
do likewise. The fact that in the 1970's the USSR
deployed eleven new strategic systems as against
one deployed by the U.S. was brushed aside with
arguments that made sense only in terms of the
MAD doctrine.
Some individuals in and out of government,
however, grew uneasy about the assurances issued
by the CIA and began to urge an independent
review of its data base to determine whether a
second reading of the evidence would not yield
different results.
O VERSEEING the performance of the in-
telligence community on behalf of
the Executive is the responsibility of the Presi-
dent's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board
(PFIAB), composed of prominent business execu-
tives and other public figures, engineers, and
scientists. The group meets several times a year
to review intelligence reports, raise questions,
serve as devil's advocate, and make recommenda-
tions to the President and the Director of Central
Intelligence. In the summer of 1976, PFIAB had
fourteen members. Four of them were chief execu-
tive officers of high-technology corporations: Wil-
liam O. Baker of Bell Telephone Laboratories,
John S. Foster, Jr. of TRW, Robert W. Galvin
of Motorola, and Edwin H. Land of Polaroid.
Two-Admiral George W. Anderson, former
Chief of Naval Operations, and General Lyman
L. Lemnitzer-were professional soldiers. Edward
Teller was the sole scientist. The remaining seven
figured prominently in public life: John B. Con-
nally (former Governor of Texas), Gordon Gray
(one-time Secretary of the Army), Clare Booth
Luce (the writer and former Ambassador to
Rome), Robert D. Murphy (a retired diplomat),
George P. Shultz (then ex-Secretary of the Treas-
ury), and Edward Bennett Williams (a well-known
Washington attorney). Leo Cherne, an economist
and director of Freedom House, chaired the
group. The composition of PFIAB was weighted
in favor of realists who viewed with varying de-
grees of skepticism the doctrines of soft-line scien-
tists and professional arms controllers.
Early in 1975 PFIAB began to feel uneasy
over the performance of the CIA in estimating
the trend of Soviet strategic forces. Several factors
contributed to this anxiety. In 1974, Albert Wohl-
stetter, a leading specialist on nuclear weapons,
had published evidence to show that although the
public, remembering the "missile-gap" fiasco, con-
sidered the intelligence community guilty of ex-
aggerating the Soviet nuclear threat, in fact it had
persistently underestimated it. It so happened that
at about the same time, on the basis of fresh data,
the CIA upgraded its estimate of Soviet defense
expenditures from 6-8 percent of GNP (which was
only slightly higher than the American figure) to
11-13 percent. This radically revised estimate not
only made the Soviet threat loom much greater,
but cast fresh doubts on the quality of intelli.
gence assessments. Quite independently, John
Collins of the Congressional Research Service, on
the basis of open sources, published in January
1976 a study of the Soviet military effort which
painted a much grimmer picture than that prof-
fered by intelligence: an updated edition, com-
pleted later that year, proved so disturbing and so
much at odds with the government's policy that
the study's sponsor, the Senate Armed Services
Committee, saw fit to suppress it.
Reports of such contrary opinions worried
PFIAB, which approached President Nixon at the
beginning of 1975 with the suggestion that he ap-
point an independent body of experts to look
into the intelligence data. Nixon showed no inter-
est in this suggestion, the more so since William
Colby, his Director of Central Intelligence, strong-
ly objected to outsiders "second-guessing" the
staff of his agency.
When Gerald Ford replaced Nixon as Presi-
dent, PFIAB restated its concerns. In August
1975, its chairman, Admiral Anderson, proposed
a "competitive analysis," to be carried out under
the direction of the White House through its
National Security Council, that would pit a team
of outside experts against the CIA, to determine
whether the two groups, using the same data,
would or would not reach the same assessment of
the Soviet strategic threat. Ford liked the idea but
Colby remained adamantly opposed. To appease
the critics, Colby now proposed to conduct an
in-house review of the Agency's "track record" in
regard to the three most controversial aspects of
the Soviet strategic effort: air defense, missile ac-
curacy, and strategic objectives. For this project,
he selected active and recently retired personnel
of the CIA. According to Lionel Olmer, who was
PFIAB's executive secretary at the time:
The CIA produced a "track record" study about
75 pages long. It was so astonishing that Bush
(Colby was gone by then) had absolutely no op-
tion but to accept the A-B Team proposal. The
study was so condemnatory of the performance
of the community over a period of ten years on
those three issues that it left no room for argu-
ment that something ought to be done.*
In late 1975 George Bush took over a battered
and demoralized CIA: he was so troubled by its
condition that soon after assuming office he com-
missioned the consulting firm Arthur D. Little to
look into its problems. Bush was much more
? "Watchdogging Intelligence," in Seminar on Command,
Control, Communications, and Intelligence (Incidental pa-
per, Center for Information Policy Research, Harvard Uni-
versity, 1980), pp. 179-80.
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receptive to PFIAB's proposal, and in June
1976 agreed with its new chairman, the ebullient
Leo Cherne, to carry out an experiment in "com-
petitive analysis," but under his own auspices
rather than those of the National Security Ad-
viser. Three outside teams were to be selected
to look into Soviet air defenses, missile accuracies,
and strategic objectives. The CIA's group,
charged with drafting the current (1977) NIE
11-3/8 would be known as "A Team." "B Teams"
would consist of independent outside experts:
they were to work with the same raw data that
the Agency supplied to its A Team. The analyses
were to be completed by November 1976, in time
to permit revisions in the forthcoming NIE, due
in December, if such were deemed necessary. The
experiment required complete secrecy in order to
prevent the leakage of sensitive intelligence mate-
rial and to keep the findings from being exploited
for partisan political purposes.
The rules having been agreed upon, the CIA
(rather than PFIAB, as is often erroneously
asserted) began the search for outside experts to
man the three B teams. It encountered little
difficulty in staffing the groups investigating mis-
sile accuracies and air defenses, for their tasks
were narrowly technical. Staffing Team B on So-
viet strategic objectives proved more difficult
because its task called not only for technical
expertise but also for political judgment. As I was
to learn later, the Agency approached unsuccess-
fully two individuals to chair this team. One, on
active government service, was refused leave by
his superior, Secretary of State Kissinger, to take
on the assignment. The other declined for person-
al reasons. On the recommendation of his Nation-
al Intelligence Office staff, and in agreement with
William Hyland of the National Security Coun-
cil, Bush then selected me for the post.*
M Y WIFE and I were spending the sum-
mer of 1976 in London where I was
working in the British Museum Library on the
Russian Civil War. I knew, of course, nothing of
the negotiations between PFIAB and the CIA
over competitive analyses of National Intelligence
Estimates. By profession and preference a his-
torian, I had had only limited political experi-
ence, owing mainly to the interest which Senator
Henry Jackson and his assistant, Dorothy Fosdick,
had shown in my criticism of detente. In 1973,
Richard B. Foster, head of the Strategic Studies
Center in Washington, a branch of the Stanford
Research Institute (SRI), had invited me to join
his Center as a consultant, in which capacity I
directed several studies of Soviet foreign policy.
Even so, I was in no sense a member of the estab-
lishment of defense experts; since the purpose of
Team B was to take a fresh look at the Soviet
nuclear effort, however, my being an outsider,
without a vested interest in the consensus, was
an advantage.
TEAM B: THE REALITY BEHIND THE MYTH/31
In mid-July 1976 Foster called me in London
to say that I had been offered, through SRI, an
interesting and important assignment connected
with Soviet strategy. Since I intended to return to
the United States soon, we agreed that he would
give me the details when we next met in Wash-
ington.
I returned home on July 22, and the following
day saw Foster as well as a representative of the
CIA, John Paisley, who outlined to me the pur-
pose and scope of the undertaking. I then spoke
with E. Henry Knoche, the Agency's Deputy Di-
rector, and Howard Stoertz, the National Intelli-
gence Officer responsible for drafting NIE 11-3/8,
whose counterpart I was to become. To these offi-
cials I posed the principal questions on my mind.
Our mandate: how far-reaching an inquiry did
they envisage? I also wanted to know whether we
were expected to act as a panel of judges, adjudi-
cating between contending points of view, or ad-
vocates of an alternative point of view to that
found in the official estimates. The answer I
received to the first question sounded vague, from
which I concluded that the team I was being
asked to chair could cast its nets as widely and
deeply as it thought necessary. In view of the com-
plaints repeatedly voiced later that our team had
"exceeded its mandate," it needs to be stressed
that all the officials to whom I spoke before and
after accepting the assignment left it up to us to
determine what we needed to do to answer the
question: what are Soviet strategic objectives? The
response to the second question was: make as
strong a case as you can if you disagree with the
official estimate.
The task looked challenging and important. If,
nevertheless, I hesitated at first to take it on, it
was because of fear that I lacked the necessary
expertise in the scientific and engineering issues
involved in the designing, testing, deploying, and
targeting of nuclear missiles. Foster dispelled
these doubts by arguing that the whole
b
su
ject
had too long been analyzed in narrowly technical
terms, as if the strategic competition involved im-
personal weapons systems rather than the human
beings who controlled them. As for the technical
expertise, this could be assured by appointing to
the group professional missile specialists.
Inasmuch as the work required access to highly
classified sources, I had to undergo a series of
intensive security clearances that included an en-
counter with the polygraph. These and other
preliminaries were completed by the middle of
August, at which time I began work. The Agency
assigned to me as liaison John Paisley. Paisley had
retired two years earlier as Deputy Director of
the CIA's Office of Strategic Research, in which
For the eor sake of brevity, I shall henceforth apply the
term "Team B" to the group charged with analyzing soviet
strategic objectives, but it must be borne in mind that
there were two other B Teams.
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capacity he had participated in the drafting of
NIE's. This soft-spoken man with a perpetually
worried face, who was to die a mysterious death
two years later, rendered my Team B essential
services. But he also had an additional task, which
was to keep an eye on Team B on behalf of the
Agency: in this second capacity he was later to
behave in a quite unsavory manner.
Paisley presented me with a list, drawn up by
the Agency, of candidates for membership on my
team: as far as I recall, it consisted mostly of mili-
tary officers and defense scientists. From this list
I selected only two names: Lieutenant General
John W. Vogt, Jr., the recently retired com-
mander of the U.S. Air Forces in Europe, and the
missile specialist, Brigadier General Jasper A.
Welch, Jr., then still on active service.
For the other members of the team, I preferred
to go outside the ranks of technical specialists in
the narrow sense of the term. I acted on the
premise (which I still believe correct) that Soviet
leaders, in contrast to those of the West, neither
draw a sharp distinction between nuclear and con-
ventional weapons nor divorce military objectives
from political ones. Soviet strategy claims to be
and indeed is "grand strategy" which avails itself
of a wide range of instrumentalities, military
force very much included, to pursue what, in the
end, are always political ends. Seen from this
perspective, Soviet strategic forces can have no in-
dependent mission as determined by the alleged
properties of nuclear weapons: in Soviet practice,
military missions are driven by political missions,
not the other way around. This view is axiomatic
in Soviet military writings: "The organic unity of
military strategy and policy with the determining
role of the latter," in the words of one Soviet gen-
eral writing in a publication "for official use
only," "signifies that military strategy proceeds
from policy, is determined by policy, is totally
dependent on policy, and accomplishes its specific
tasks only within the framework of policy."?
Nothing could be more emphatic. Clearly, to
understand the task of Soviet Strategic Rocket
Forces one has to combine knowledge of Soviet
nuclear capabilities with an understanding of the
policy in which it is embedded.
With these criteria in mind, I recommended to
the DCI nine additional names. They were: Paul
Nitze, a one-time Deputy Secretary of Defense
and probably the country's leading expert on
arms control; Lieutenant General Daniel O. Gra-
ham, who had retired earlier that year as Director
of the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, an
institution which had consistently taken a more
somber view of Soviet capabilities and intentions
than the CIA; Professor William van Cleave, a
strategic expert from the University of Southern
California and one-time member of the SALT I
delegation; Foy Kohler, an ex-Ambassador to
Moscow; Paul Wolfowitz, a young specialist from
the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency;
Thomas Wolfe of RAND, the author of several
works on Soviet military doctrine; and Seymour
Weiss, then Ambassador to the Bahamas, recently
retired as Director of the Bureau of Political and
Military Affairs in the Department of State. These
names received approval. The CIA turned down
two additional candidates I proposed, one on the
grounds that he lacked the necessary security clear-
ances, the other for reasons which it did not care
to spell out.
TEAM B held its first meeting on August
25 in quarters assigned to it in Arling-
ton, Virginia. The group promptly agreed on the
structure of its report: it would not be an alter-
native NIE 11-3/8 but a broad and in-depth sur-
vey of Soviet strategic policies and programs. We
had to work on an exceedingly tight schedule be-
cause to be of use to the CIA our report had to be
in hand early in November. We agreed to have a
preliminary draft ready on October 14: a deadline
which proved unrealistic and had to be extended.
The report was to consist of three parts. Part One
would analyze the methodology used by the CIA
in arriving at its estimates: I assumed responsibil-
ity for this task. Part Two would have several
studies of specific Soviet strategic programs each
of which would lay out the nature of the avail-
able evidence, the interpretation given this evi-
dence by the CIA, and possible alternative inter-
pretations. Responsibility for this, the longest
segment of the report, was distributed among
members of the team in accord with their special
expertise and personal preferences. Part Three,
to be drafted collectively, was to provide a gener-
al political-military assessment of the Soviet stra-
tegic build-up. (Later on, we added an Appendix
with recommendations for improving the NIE
process.)
We set to work at once. Paisley and his assist-
ant, Don Suda, supplied us with the intelligence
data used by Team A to prepare the current NIE
11-3/8, and such additional information as we re-
quested. Some of this material was so sensitive
that the Agency would not let it out of its Langley
headquarters and made us read it on the prem-
ises. I found the personnel at Langley correct but
suspicious and hostile: they seemed-to look on our
undertaking as yet another assault on their Agency
which was still reeling from recent congressional
investigations.
Team B met in its full complement a dozen
times. At these meetings we heard from the rap-
porteurs and went over their drafts. Opinion was
far from unanimous and as the work progressed
some heated exchanges took place. Part Three
proved to be especially contentious. It had to be
? Colonel General A. Maiorov in Voennaia mysl', No. 1,
January 1975.
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-.-... ucnal~il 1 tit, MYTH/33
edited over and over again to produce a consen-
sus. For a while it looked as if it would require
separate majority and minority statements, but
in the end this proved unnecessary.
Paisley, who attended most of our meetings as
an observer, seems to have sent Langley alarmed
reports that Team B was going beyond its man-
date: instead of focusing exclusively on current
intentions of the Soviet Union, it was also delving
into the reasons why the Agency had in the past
misinterpreted these intentions. Not long after our
work had gotten under way, I received through
him a request from Langley that we not engage
in "recriminations" over the CIA's track record.
We decided not to follow this advice and this
on grounds that can best be explained in connec-
tion with the recent space-shuttle accident. The
commission appointed to study the causes of the
Challenger's explosion could have confined itself
strictly to technical matters, namely, the reasons
for the failure of the booster mechanism. If NASA
had been in charge of the inquiry, this almost
certainly would have been its preference. But
NASA's mistakes are not shielded by walls of
secrecy as are those of the intelligence commu-
nity. The commission President Reagan appointed
wisely chose to broaden its investigation to in-
clude questions of management and decision-mak-
ing at NASA. It did so not to engage in "recrimi-
nations" and find scapegoats but to identify the
human failures behind the mechanical ones. The
inquiry quickly ascertained serious managerial
failings that had caused the catastrophe and recom-
mended changes in personnel and procedures.
Team B felt, on similar grounds, that if the
Agency had for years turned out faulty estimates-
and, in common with Colby's in-house review, we
believed that this had been the case-then it
would be of little value to provide merely an
alternative estimate. Our group, after all, was an
ad-hoc body, destined to dissolve in a couple of
months. If the CIA reverted to its old ways after
the experiment was over and continued to pro-
vide flawed estimates, then our whole effort would
have been in vain. On this reasoning we felt it
necessary to broaden our inquiry to include meth-
odological as well as procedural factors responsi-
ble for the faulty estimates so that they could
be corrected. Robert Galvin, whom PFIAB had
designated to deal with our team, agreed with
this reasoning during my only encounter with
him early in September.
TEAM B's report remains highly classi-
fied. Its classification is so restrictive
as to grant access to it only to a very small num-
ber of persons among the many who have a pro-
fessional interest in it. I cannot help feeling that
such extreme restrictiveness has less to do with
the sensitivity of its material than with the politi-
cal embarrassment that it has caused the CIA. It
should certainly be possible to remove from it
references to the classified data and to release
publicly a sanitized version.
Be that as it may, it is not possible at this time
to reveal the contents of Team B's report, and
one can refer to it only in the most general terms.
The report charged that in estimating Soviet stra-
tegic objectives the CIA had consistently engaged
in "mirror-imaging," including insertions of un-
proven assumptions about Soviet behavior, as well
as surreptitious "net assessments." The products
of such faulty methodology had served to buttress
the apparent belief of the Agency's analysts that
the Soviet Union, like the United States, accepted
the Mutual Assured Destruction doctrine and
built its strategic arsenal for strictly defensive
(retaliatory) purposes. Without actually proving
the point with reference to U.S. capabilities
(which they were enjoined from doing), CIA anal-
ysts had conveyed the impression that the Soviet
strategic build-up presented no threat to U.S.
security.
The political implications of such an assess-
ment happened to favor detente and to place the
main burden for its success on the United States,
to the extent that Soviet deviations from MAD
were ascribed to Russian paranoia that America
alone could assuage. Although the Agency's
analysts had a great deal of both "hard" (tech-
nical) and "soft" (verbal) evidence to demonstrate
if not necessarily the validity then at least the feasi-
bility of another interpretation, they chose to ig-
nore it. Their approach indicated neither knowl-
edge of Russia and Communism nor concern with
these subjects: they treated the Soviet threat as if
it derived from inanimate objects, not from the
people who stood behind them.
We, on our part, concluded that the evidence
indicated beyond reasonable doubt that the So-
viet leadership did not subscribe to MAD but re-
garded nuclear weapons as tools of war whose
proper employment, in offensive as well as de-
fensive modes, promised victory. Soviet nuclear
strategy had to be seen in the context of "grand
strategy." We also suggested procedures for the
preparation of NIE's that would ensure that such
faults as we had identified would not recur: they
essentially boiled down to the proposition that
Soviet nuclear programs be interpreted in Soviet,
not American, terms.
D URING the first two months of their
work, Team A and Team B did not
communicate. Then, toward the end of October,
as prearranged, the two teams exchanged drafts.
The Team A document which we were given did
not differ much from previous NIE 11-3/8's either
in premises or in conclusions. It continued to in-
terpret Soviet behavior in American terms: here
and there, for purposes of self-protection, the
analysts inserted cautionary statements to the ef-
fect that perhaps, after all, the USSR did not
have exclusively defensive objectives in mind.
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34/COMMENTARY OCTOBER 1986
On November 5, at 1 P.M., the two teams con. courage in allowing an external review f the
fronted each other at Langley to criticize their
wor
k for which he bore ultimate o responsibility.
respective drafts. The news of what was certain to
Lat d
er on, during congressional hearings, he stated
be a lively encounter spread quicklY in the intel- tat h
he strongly favored competitive analyses and
ligence a
community and admission to the crowded would recommend
to his successor that he con-
h th
room was said to have been at a Premium. In this tinue em
. That day he signed the revised NIE
h'
tgh1y charged atmosphere, Teams A and B took I13/8
that was to seta new standard.
seats on opposite sides of a Iong table. Howard Four years later, when I l joined the staff of he
t
toertz, the head of Team A, chose to sit in the
S N
National Security Council, I had a chance to con
b
ack, entrusting the opening skirmish to his
vince myself that the post-1976 strategic esti-
junior staff. mates in every respect excelled those which we
As subsequently reported in the Press the meet- hd
a read and criticized. And these new estimates
,
ing proved a "disaster" for Team A. This out-
of course, exerted influence on U.S. defense pol-
come was at least in some measure due to the
'
Agency
s unwise decision to field against senior
outside experts a troop of young analysts, some of
them barely out of graduate school, who, even if
they had had a better case to make, could not
help feeling intimidated by senior government
officials, general officers, and university professors.
The champion for Team A had barely begun his
criticism of Team B's effort, delivered in a con-
descending tone, when a member of Team B fired
a question that reduced him to a state of catatonic
immobility: we stared in embarrassment as he
sat for what seemed an interminable time with an
open mouth, unable to utter a sound. Later
Stoertz came to the rescue, but he did not save
the Agency and his office from emerging badly
mauled.
I do not know what happened within the
Agency immediately after this encounter, but I
strongly suspect that George Bush intervened to
have Team A substantially revise its draft to al-
low for Team B's criticism. On December 2, the
chairmen of both teams presented their findings
to PFIAB. Bush attended the meeting but did not
speak. I listened with mounting disbelief as Team
A advanced an estimate that in all essential points
agreed with Team B's position. Then my turn
came to deliver a summary of our findings. It was
slightly disconcerting to have no reaction from
PFIAB, for the few questions which followed
were quite perfunctory. At the time I did not
know what to make of it but I was later told that
the panel's silence was due to its being "thunder-
struck" at hearing what many of its members re-
garded as the first realistic assessment of Soviet
strategic intentions to come before it.
Team B met for the last time on the morning
of December 21 at Langley. Here, in a large
auditorium filled with personnel from various
branches of the intelligence community, the A
team and the three B teams presented sum-
maries of their findings. George Bush thanked us
for our efforts and invited us to lunch: I could
not help noticing that no member of my Team
B was asked to sit at his table. Bush's position was
delicate in the extreme, given the sweeping criti-
cism of his Agency by a group which he had
brought into being, and he may not have wished
to identify openly with it. He had shown great
in a major one under President Reagan.
T HERE was one respect in which the ex-
periment in competitive analysis did
not succeed and that was in maintaining secrecy.
While our work was still in progress, Paisley told
me that he had received a call from David Binder
of the New York Times. He managed to put
Binder off for the time being but the secret clear-
ly was out and, given its explosive nature, the
press was certain soon to be in hot pursuit. In-
deed, on October 20, 1976, the Boston Globe car-
ried an article by William Beecher, one of Wash-
ington's outstanding defense reporters, with a
brief description of Team B's work and a partial
list of its members. Other media ignored this
news, as they did Beecher's account on December
17, which concluded that "well-placed sources
familiar with the story say [Team B's report] is
the most devastating indictment ever made of the
CIA's Board of Intelligence Estimates." Who had
leaked to Binder and Beecher I have never found
out. In view of these leaks it occurred to me that
it might be advisable for the DCI and PFIAB
to release a brief official statement. The powers
that be, however, rejected this suggestion: its only
effect was to make me a prime suspect in the leaks.
Then the New York Times once again demon-
strated that in the United States an event is news
only when its editors designate it as such. On
Sunday, December 26, the Times carried on its
front page an article by Binder headlined "New
CIA Estimate Finds Soviet Seeks Superiority in
Arms." This item stimulated an avalanche of
public inquiries, and for the next several weeks
Team B was constantly in newspaper headlines
and on prime-time television.
Binder (who had been a tutee of mine at Har-
vard in the 1950's) called me a few days prior to
the appearance of his article to request an inter-
view. I refused but promised to reconsider when
he told me that he had already spoken with George
Bush and Richard Lehman, a high CIA official.
I called Lehman to verify Binder's account. He
confirmed it and encouraged me to talk to Binder
as well. I saw Binder subsequently at Washing-
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TEAM B: THE REALITY BEHIND THE MYTH/35
ton's National Airport and gave him a hurried
interview on the Team A-Team B experiment, in
broad outline, avoiding particulars.
Binder confused some of the facts, but in its
essentials his account was correct. The TV net-
works at once seized on the news and deluged me
with requests for appearances, all of which I
turned down. I did, however, give some addition-
al newspaper interviews and published rejoinders
in the Times and the Washington Post.
The story broke at the very time the Ford ad-
ministration was about to vacate the White
House. Although as its whole previous history
indicates, the experiment in competitive analysis
had nothing whatever to do with this transition,
which was as unanticipated as it was irrelevant to
its task, journalists and, following them, some
legislators hastened to interpret Team B as noth-
ing but a crude political ploy. President-elect
Carter had pledged to pursue SALT II nego-
tiations and to cut back the defense budget by $5
billion. If, at the very moment he was assuming
office, the intelligence community, acting under
alleged external pressure, had altered its estimate
to make the Soviet threat appear more menacing,
the effect pointed to the motive: to wreck SALT
II and compel Carter to increase the defense
budget. To make this argument it was necessary
to impugn the integrity of Team B and PFIAB.
The initial reaction of the Carter administra-
tion-whether out of ignorance or for purposes of
obfuscation, it is difficult to tell-was to pretend
that Team B had questioned the U.S.'s ability to
meet the Soviet military threat. On January 1,
1977 President Carter stated: "We're still by far
stronger than they are in most means of measur-
ing military strength." He repeated this assurance
in his State of the Union Address later that month.
The Secretary of State designate, Cyrus Vance, dur-
ing his confirmation hearings showed more caution
but was equally far off the mark when he voiced
confidence that there existed "general parity" be-
tween the two superpowers. When pressed, he
conceded that he had neither read the Team B
report nor received a "thorough briefing" on it.
The outgoing Secretary of State also rushed
into the fray. When the experiment was taking
place Kissinger seems to have raised no objections
to it, possibly because it began during the presi-
dential campaign when he had other things on
his mind and ended when he was about to leave
office. But he realized that the thesis of the Team
B report struck at the very heart of his Soviet pol-
icy, which had posited that the nuclear competi-
tion should not prevent the two sides from reach-
ing accords on a broad range of issues because
they both subscribed to MAD. On January 10,
1977, at a farewell gathering at the National Press
Club, he disposed of the whole exercise as nothing
more than an effort to "sabotage SALT II." He
went on to assure his audience "that no American
President would ever allow the Soviet Union to
gain superiority over the United States." In the
next breath, he added that "the concept of
'supremacy' makes no sense in the nuclear age."
Sober heads among his listeners must have won-
dered why, if supremacy no longer made sense, a
President of the United States should work so
hard to deny it to the Soviet Union.
It may be added as a postscript that two years
later, in a complete about-face, Kissinger told the
London Economist that he had erred in adhering
to the MAD doctrine: nuclear supremacy did, in-
deed, matter very much. Why he had once held
the one view and now its opposite, and what had
made him change his mind, he did not explain.
P ROMINENT legislators also rushed into
the fray. One of them was Senator Wil-
liam Proxmire, who lost no time declaring that
Team B's supposed allegations-that the Soviet
Union had "already achieved military superiority
over the U.S." and was "not only aiming at
superiority but preparing for war"-could only
be explained by the tendency of the "military es-
tablishment ... to cry wolf at budget time." Even
a cursory reading of press reports should have
told the Senator that Team B neither made such
claims nor worked for the military establishment.
Proxmire cited the opinion of the chairman of
the joint Chiefs of Staff, General George Brown,
who said that while he believed the Soviet Union
did not as yet enjoy military superiority, "the
available evidence indicates that the USSR is en-
gaged in a program" to achieve such superiority.
This, of course, was exactly the conclusion of
Team B: the "available evidence" to which the
General referred could only have been its report
and the revised NIE. Yet Proxmire praised Gener-
al Brown for his "courageous statement," although
he did nothing but echo Team B which Proxmire
himself had accused of "crying wolf."
I clipped and filed the press notices, which were
almost uniformly hostile. The editorial writ-
ers and columnists of the New York Times, the
Washington Post, and the Washington Star con-
curred that the Team A-Team B exercise had
been misbegotten and that its primary purpose
had been not to reach an objective judgment but
to derail the "orderly process of intelligence eval-
uation" for purely political ends. The British
press, taking its cue from the U.S., fell into step.
So did Red Star, the organ of the Soviet military,
and Pravda, which cited Western opinions to ar-
gue that Team B was yet another effort of Ameri-
can "hawks" to scuttle detente and raise defense
expenditures. Brezhnev professed to be bored by
the whole affair. "Frankly speaking," he declared
in mid January, "this noisy and idle talk has be-
come quite tiresome. The allegations that the So-
viet Union is going beyond what is sufficient for
its defense, that it is striving for superiority in
armaments with the aim of delivering a first strike
are absurd and totally unfounded." For good
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36/COMMENTARY OCTOBER 1986
measure Brezhnev added that his country "will
never take the path of aggression, and will never
raise a sword against other nations." This was go-
ing a bit far perhaps, but at least Brezhnev
showed that unlike the incumbent U.S. President
and his Secretary of State, much of Congress, and
most of the Western media, he at least knew what
Team B was about: not Soviet capabilities but
Soviet intentions.
Among the self-styled "experts" on Team B
who proliferated at this time, the most voluble
was a certain Arthur Macy Cox. Cox had long
ago worked for the CIA, which lent him an air of
authority in matters concerning intelligence. By
the time the Team B story broke, he was among
the most extreme advocates of detente: a reviewer
of a book Cox published in 1976 said that the au-
thor believed the "arms race will end when the
United States decides to end it." Cox had never
seen the Team B report even from a distance, but
this did not inhibit him from declaring categori-
cally in the New York Review of Books that "all
its conclusions are either wrong, or distorted, or
based on misinterpretation of the facts."
And finally, there was the scientific community.
Team B challenged its most cherished political
convictions as well as its political interests. If
Team B's conclusions became U.S. policy, then
the hold which the scientists of the "deterrence-
through-agreement" school had had on U.S. stra-
tegic planning and weapons programs for twenty
years would be broken. The scientists reacted,
therefore, with understandable anger. I did not
follow their pronouncements on the subject close-
ly, but I see no reason to think that the reaction
of two prominent scientists from Cambridge,
Massachusetts in an interview with the Harvard
Crimson was an isolated example. Bernard Feld,
an MIT physicist, dismissed Team B's findings on
the grounds that the group consisted of "well-
known spokesmen for the American Right." The
Harvard chemist, George Kistiakowsky, labeled
the undertaking "one of those red-herring stories."
Neither gentleman was familiar with the contents
of Team B's report, and neither responded to
its findings as reported in the press. Their re-
action was strictly ad hominem, a kind of pseudo-
argument that always betrays the absence of
ideas.
T HE shower of confused and ignorant
abuse was, of course, unpleasant. But
it was even more disturbing. It revealed that the
intellectual elite of the United States, which had
arrogated to itself the right to determine U.S. de-
fense strategy, was unable, intellectually as well as
psychologically, to cope with alternative points of
view.
Having spent my entire adult life in scholar-
ship, I took it for granted that a statement of fact,
provided it is not meaningless, can only be either
correct or false-it cannot be "good" or "bad,"
"moral" or "immoral." He who makes a factual
statement can be faulted on no other grounds than
wrong perception of the facts or faulty inference
from them. His motives in making it are as irrele?
vant to its veracity as are its implications. This much
seems obvious. No one in his right mind would
accuse a physician who diagnoses a patient as suf-
fering from terminal illness of harboring ill will
toward the patient and his family: at most one
would question his judgment and seek another
opinion. But in politics, as I was to learn in the
winter of 1976-77, other rules prevail. Here the
first, and often the last, question asked is not: is
the proposition true?, but: why has it been made
and what are its practical consequences?
In all the discussions of Team B the one ques-
tion that mattered the most was never raised: was
the Soviet Union really seeking nuclear superiority?
So preoccupied were the politicians, journalists,
and left-wing intellectuals with what they pre-
sumed to have been the motives of Team B and
the potential political fallout from its findings
that they never bothered to inquire whether its
principal conclusion was correct. In any event, in
my extensive collection of newspaper clippings
there is not one which addresses itself to this cen-
tral issue. In this respect, the writers for the New
York Times, Washingon Post, London Sunday
Times, Red Star, and Pravda differed only in
their journalistic manners, not in the quality of
their thinking.
It was also disconcerting to learn that those
who had claimed the final say on nuclear stra-
tegy could not distinguish the discrete ele-
ments that go into security estimates. Soviet nu-
clear capabilities and intentions were hopelessly
mixed up with each other and with the separate
question of the overall military balance. The
proposition that "the Soviet Union strives for nu-
clear superiority" was confounded with the ques-
tion of whether the Soviet Union intended im-
minently to attack the United States. In the end,
the reaction boiled itself down to the juvenile
boast, "I am stronger than you," supplemented
with the MAD qualifier, "But even if I am not,
it does not matter because there can be no fight-
ing." It is not difficult to imagine with what
amusement Soviet professional strategists must
have followed this particular "national debate."
Regrettably, the same confusion was to attend
subsequent U.S. public discussions of arms con-
trol, nuclear programs, and strategic defenses.
ON JANUARY 7 and 8, 1977, the press
announced that no fewer than three
congressional committees were undertaking to in-
vestigate the Team A-Team B affair. The most
important of these was the Senate Select Commit-
tee on Intelligence whose Subcommittee on Col-
lection, Production, and Quality of Intelligence,
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TEAM B: THE REALITY BEHIND THE MYTH/37
chaired by Adlai Stevenson, was to determine
whether any improper pressure had been brought
to bear on the Agency to have it "slant" its esti-
mate. It gives some idea of the spirit in which
these inquiries were carried out that neither I
nor any other member of Team B was invited to
testify before these committees. Their source of
information was the CIA, which thus enjoyed the
enviable position of appearing as both plaintiff
and sole witness.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee held
a closed hearing on January 18, at which George
Bush testified. Although the Washington Post
headlined its report "'Worst-Case' Intelligence
Hit," every Senator who spoke to its correspond-
ent after the hearing praised the Team A-Team B
experiment. Hubert Humphrey, Clifford Case, and
Jacob Javits commended the Agency for organiz-
ing the competition and incorporating Team B's
findings into its estimate. Case declared that "po-
litical considerations" had not altered the official
estimates. Humphrey expressed the opinion that
the U.S. still enjoyed a nuclear "edge," but that
it was "questionable whether we can maintain
that edge" into the 1980's. Charles Percy thought
that to alert the Russians to American concerns,
the new findings should be made public, but he
failed to convince Bush.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee held
"hearings," a format which permits diverse opin-
ions to be heard and enables the Senators to take
part in the inquiry. The Senate Intelligence Com-
mittee, however, chose a different and much less
satisfactory route of preparing a "report." This
procedure requires no witnesses to be called. It
is a research effort in which busy Senators do not
participate personally but rely on their staffs: at
best the Senators read the finished product before
affixing their signatures to it and contribute a per-
sonal statement. In such an exercise, the quality of
the staff is critical. The Intelligence Committee
assigned the task of drafting its report on Team
A-Team B to two staff members who had strong
ideological and personal biases against Team B
and everything it stood for. The staff director of
the Committee, William G. Miller, had drafted
the Cooper-Church Amendment that cut off aid
to Vietnam and, as Senator Cooper's assistant, had
actively fought the ballistic-missile defense pro-
gram (ABM). It was presumably his responsi-
bility to select the person in charge of the Team
A-Team B report. His choice fell on Harold
Ford, a recently retired employee of the CIA
(which he subsequently rejoined). By virtue of his
entire background, Ford could hardly have been
expected to sit in impartial judgment on a case so
painful to his colleagues in the Agency. The two
men worked assiduously and quietly, with the
assistance of the CIA. So it happened that the
Team A-Team B inquiry was conducted by active
and retired CIA personnel-that is, essentially by
Team A. Ford briefly interviewed some members
of Team B, but he relied mainly on testimony by
Paisley who provided a highly partisan account.
I FIRST learned of these developments in
July 1977 when I received a letter
from General Graham in which he wrote that he
had heard through the "grapevine" that the In-
telligence Committee had drafted, in utter secrecy,
a biased and denigrating report on Team B. I im-
mediately wrote Senator Stevenson requesting per-
mission to see this document. I argued that if the
intelligence community had been given the op-
portunity to present its side, then Team B should
at least be allowed to read and comment on the
Committee's product. Senator Stevenson must have
been unaware of what Messrs. Miller and Ford
had been doing on his Subcommittee's behalf, for
he immediately agreed that Nitze, Graham, and
myself should be given access to the classified
report.
The document I saw was an indictment of
Team B, filled with slanderous accusations. As I
now learned, it had been completed as early as
May but had not yet received the approval of the
Committee, which gave us an opportunity to cor-
rect its misstatements and slurs. Its most offensive
feature was its questioning of the personal integ-
rity of PFIAB and Team B, whose members
stood accused of conniving to carry out, in the
guise of intelligence estimating, a political opera-
tion. It charged Team B with exceeding its orig-
inal mandate; of ignoring the "raw data" sup-
plied to it by the Agency; of conspiring with
PFIAB in the selection of personnel as well as
the formulation of conclusions; of reaching con-
clusions before it had seen the evidence; and
of leaking to the press. The principal source of
these accusations was Paisley.* These charges not-
withstanding, the report found many of the criti-
cisms which Team B had made, and many of its
recommendations, to be sound and worthwhile. It
did not explain how a group of such low integrity,
using such flawed procedures, could produce any-
thing of value, but this contradiction could not
be avoided since the authors of the report, while
condemning Team B, had to explain why the
Agency had allowed itself to be so strongly influ-
enced by it.
Appended to the report was a personal state-
ment by Senator Gary Hart which summarized
this whole indictment. "The [Intelligence] Com-
? Except for some minor matters connected with Team
B finances, this was my last contact with Paisley. On Octo-
ber 1, 1978, his badly decomposed body was found Boating
in Chesapeake Bay. There was a bullet wound in his head
and diver's belts were wound around his waist. The circum-
stances of his death have not been cleared up to this day
(the CIA conducted an investigation but did not release its
findings). The most likely verdict is suicide but murder
cannot be precluded. Some journalists have claimed that at
the time of his disappearance Paisley had materials on Team
B on his sailboat. See the New York Times Magazine, Janu-
ary 7, 1979.
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mittee report and the information from other
sources," Hart wrote, "has convinced me that
'competitive analysis' and use of selected outside
experts was little more than a camouflage for a
political effort to force the National Intelligence
Estimates to take a more bleak view of the Soviet
strategic threat." Whether he realized it or not
(for such senatorial statements are usually pre-
pared by staff), Senator Hart was accusing the
fourteen members of PFIAB and the ten mem-
bers of Team B of placing their personal political
objectives ahead of the nation's interest.
I submitted to Senator Stevenson a point-by-
point rebuttal. (So did, separately, Nitze and Gra-
ham.) I asserted that we could not have "exceeded
our mandate" since no responsible person in the
Agency had restricted the scope of our inquiry.
As for our alleged disregard of the "raw data," I
observed that the Committee could arrive at such
a conclusion only by ignoring Part Two of our
report, which almost entirely relied on them. I
stated that prior to joining Team B, I had not
met a single member of PFIAB (I later learned
that PFIAB had been equally ignorant of my
existence) and hence that no "collusion" could
have taken place even if it had been on anyone's
mind. I had talked only once to Robert Galvin,
and then in Paisley's presence. I, not PFIAB, had
personally selected all the members of Team B,
and my choices had the approval of the Director
of Central Intelligence who had picked me to be
chairman. The charge that Team B had reached
its conclusions before analyzing the CIA material
could be disproven with reference to its work
schedule, which I provided. The Committee re-
port furnished no evidence to substantiate its
charge that members of Team B had had un-
authorized communication with the media. As for
Senator Hart's accusations, I found them con-
temptible slander: the best that could be said in
his favor was that he did not realize what he was
saying when he accused ex-Secretaries of the
Treasury and the Army, an ex-Deputy Secretary
of Defense, a one-time Chief of Naval Operations,
and presidents of major corporations of deliberate-
ly misleading their government on a matter of the
greatest importance to national security.
T HESE rejoinders fortunately did attract
the attention of the Committee, because
it held up approval until the report could be re-
vised to allow for our corrections. The staffs of
Senators Malcolm Wallop and Daniel Patrick
Moynihan greatly contributed to this editorial
work. The Committee finally approved the revised
text on February 16, 1978. I have not seen the full,
classified text but the public version showed con-
siderable improvement.* The verdict remained
negative. While it commended Team B for having
made "some valid criticisms" and "some useful
recommendations," the Committee thought that
the experiment proved less valuable than it might
have been because Team B was too one-sided in
its composition and had exceeded its mandate.
Press leaks had further reduced its value. Still-in
the public version, at any rate-the personal at-
tacks on members of PFIAB and Team B were
omitted. The Committee report also accepted
one of the basic premises of Team B, that "stra-
tegic" should be interpreted "in the context of
Soviet interests and policies."
Appended to the Committee's public report,
alongside Senator Hart's statement, were "sepa-
rate views" by Senators Moynihan and Wallop
which appraised positively the work of Team B
and refuted some of the criticisms by the Commit-
tee's majority. Moynihan disposed of the com-
plaint that the undertaking had been carried out
in an "adversarial" manner because of the "one-
sided" composition of Team B:
Given the B Team's purpose, it is hardly sur-
prising that its members' view reflected "only
one segment of the spectrum of opinion." Inas-
much as the main purpose of the experiment
was to determine why previous estimates had
produced such misleading pictures of Soviet
strategic developments, it was reasonable to
pick team members whose views of Soviet
strategy differed from those of the official esti-
mators, just as a similar experiment, had one
been conducted in 1962, might have called for a
"B Team" composed of strategic analysts who
had been skeptical of the "missile gap."
Senator Wallop criticized the preoccupation of
the Committee's report with procedures. The In-
telligence Committee, in common with the media,
had refused to address itself to the central issue,
namely, the soundness of Team B's findings, pre-
ferring to concentrate on the procedures it had
used. This was a strange self-imposed limitation
for a group charged with overseeing the quality
of intelligence. Conceding that the revised report
improved on the original, Wallop nevertheless
thought it "still fundamentally flawed, because,
in the words of the [Committee] report, it
"makes no attempt to judge which group's esti-
mates concerning the USSR are correct." There-
fore the report's "findings and recommenda-
tions for improving the quality of future NIE's
on Soviet capabilities and objectives are pri-
marily directed at procedural issues." But it is
logically impossible to determine the quality of
opposing arguments without reference to the
substance of those arguments. After all, the
quality of an estimate depends above all upon
its accuracy. In order to make judgments con-
cerning quality, never mind suggesting improve-
ments, one must judge where the truth lies
against which the estimate's accuracy is to be
measured.
? The National Intelligence Estimates-A-B Team Epi-
sode Concerning Soviet Strategic Capability and Objectives,
released by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on
February 16, 1978.
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By the time this report was released, Team B
had faded from memory, and it attracted little at-
tention. The original draft, however, even though
eventually discarded, managed to inflict serious
harm on the intelligence process. In May 1977,
when Harold Ford completed his draft, PFIAB,
which it cast as the chief culprit, was peremp-
torily abolished. Leo Cherne, its chairman, re-
ceived, along with his letter of dismissal, an
application for unemployment insurance. The
timing may have been coincidental; but it is more
likely that the new DCI, Admiral Stansfield Tur-
ner, used the initial draft of the report to rid
himself of the group charged with overseeing his
Agency.*
T HE subject which remains to be dis-
cussed is Team B's influence on the
attitudes of the U.S. government and public opin-
ion toward the Soviet nuclear threat. Such mat-
ters are inherently difficult to appraise. Team B
did not so much come up with fresh revelations
as articulate and justify doubts about Soviet in-
tentions which had been gaining ground among
political and military experts for some time.
Such impact as it exerted resulted from the fact
that it stated what many were thinking but did
not dare to say. This is confirmed by the speed
with which the views of Team B, once the spell of
conformity had been broken, spread in and out
of government. Proponents of MAD found them-
selves for the first time confronted with an articu-
late and well-informed opposition: their monopoly
on opinion fell apart. Barely a year after the
event, in his appendix to the Intelligence Com-
mittee's report, Senator Moynihan wrote that
Team B's "notion that the Soviets intend to sur-
pass the United States in strategic arms and are in
the process of doing so, has gone from hearsay to
respectability, if not orthodoxy." Ideas spread this
rapidly only when they have already germinated
in many minds.
Within the government, as I have noted, the
views advanced by Team B initially affected
thinking through the revised 1977 NIE and its
successors. In the years that followed, the Agency's
analysts ceased to "mirror-image": this fact alone
gives the lie to the charge that Team B had "pres-
sured" the Agency to alter its 1977 estimate. In
fact, miniature Team B's had existed all along
inside the intelligence community, the CIA in-
cluded, but they were silenced by the official con-
sensus and confined to cautionary remarks and
dissenting footnotes. Team B gave these minority
views such strong and persuasive support that
they emerged on top. Team B through its recom-
mendations also had a lasting effect on the man-
ner in which estimates were henceforth prepared.
According to Herbert Meyer, who recently retired
from the National Intelligence Council of the
CIA, "We have put a major emphasis on competi-
tive analysis. The estimates now routinely include
dissenting opinion."t
The responsibilities of office quickly cured the
Carter administration of its glib and uninformed
opinions of Team B. On assuming his duties,
Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's National Security
Adviser, commissioned a number of studies on
the Soviet strategic threat and potential U.S. re-
sponses. This work, carried out quietly to avoid
the kind of public controversy that had followed
the A-B Team experiment, promptly led to the
conclusion that Team B had been correct in its
assessments: the Soviet Union was indeed develop-
ing a first-strike capability. In 1980, probably in
an effort to refute candidate Ronald Reagan's
criticism of their administration's nuclear policy,
Carter's officials began to leak these findings to
the press. Once again, the redoubtable William
Beecher of the Boston Globe broke the news. On
July 27, 1980, he published an article headlined
"U.S. Reshaping N-Strategy Against the Soviets,"
in which he reported that a new statement was
being drafted in the National Security Council on
U.S. nuclear strategy. It would reject Mutual As-
sured Destruction and the targeting doctrine
based on it, which called for the retaliatory strike
to concentrate on civilian targets, in favor of one
directed principally at political and military tar-
gets. The purpose of the new strategy was to en-
sure that even if attacked in a first strike, the U.S.
would have the ability to wage a protracted war.
The new strategic doctrine, formulated in the
summer of 1980 in a Presidential Directive (PD
59), marked the beginning of a radical shift in
U.S. strategic policy.
No less important were parallel shifts in public
opinion. Here a major contribution was made by
the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), a bi-
partisan body of prominent public figures founded
in Washington in the summer of 1976. (To pre-
vent exploitation of its findings for campaign pur-
poses, the founders of CPD postponed formal an-
nouncement until after the presidential election
of that year.) Paul Nitze, a member of Team B, was
one of the Committee's founders. Its other leaders
-among them, Eugene V. Rostow, Dean Rusk,
Lane Kirkland, Max Kampelman, Richard Allen,
David Packard, and Henry H. Fowler-felt appre-
? President Reagan reinstituted PFIAB shortly after as-
suming office.
t Insight, June 23, 1986, p. 15. People well informed
about the NIE process say that the current "competitive
analyses" are in-house undertakings, much more limited in
scope than Team B had been. Recently the CIA has let the
press know that it once again takes a "less grim" view of
Soviet military preparations than the Pentagon, and main-
tains its "independence" from the Reagan administration's
"more conservative direction." As an illustration of "past
political pressures," its spokesmen referred to the A-Team/
B-Team experiment. This may be a sign of the changing
political climate. See Michael R. Gordon in the New York
Times, July 16, 1986.
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hensive about the strategic balance and dedicated
themselves to alerting the public to the decline in
U.S. military capabilities.
Early in 1977 I was invited to join CPD's
Executive Committee and wrote two program-
matic statements for it, one on Soviet global
strategy ("What Is the Soviet Union Up To?"),
the other on Soviet arms-control policies ("Why
the Soviet Union Wants SALT II").* Under the
skilled direction of Charles Tyroler, CPD con-
ducted press conferences, commissioned opinion
polls, and released facts and figures on the stra-
tegic balance. In the propitious atmosphere cre-
ated by the Team B controversy, public interest
was keen. CPD had much influence on public per-
ceptions of the Soviet threat, with the result that
voters soon took a more favorable view of in-
creased defense expenditures and a more critical
one of SALT II, which CPD selected as its
particular target. My article, "Why the Soviet
Union Thinks it Could Fight and Win a Nuclear
War," published in the July 1977 issue of CoM-
MENTARY, explained how and why politicized
scientists and uncritical devotees of arms control
had misconstrued the Soviet strategic threat.
By the time President Reagan took office, the
views of Team B and CPD were unmistakably in
the ascendant. A remarkable shift in public opin-
ion had taken place, which helped the new ad-
ministration to proceed with its ambitious pro-
gram of defense procurements. Several commen-
tators, seeking to define President Reagan's views
on foreign and defense policies, found their
source in Team B.t It did not escape them, either,
that nearly thirty of the officials whom Reagan-
himself a member of CPD-chose for high posts
in the first weeks of his administration belonged
to the Committee on the Present Danger, an or-
ganization that saw eye-to-eye with Team B. Presi-
dent Reagan's distaste for arms control as a politi-
cal tool, his insistence on building up first offen-
sive nuclear forces and then anti-nuclear defenses,
all rested on the premise that the USSR held a
different view of the utility of nuclear weapons
from the United States, regarding them as guar-
antors not of peace but of victory. From this
premise it followed that if the U.S. deterrent
were to prove effective it had to be constructed in
terms that were credible to the Soviet General Staff,
even if they held no appeal for American civilian
strategists.
Thus the United States government at last
came to terms with the military implications of a
weapon that it was the first to develop and em-
ploy but for a long time refused to acknowledge
as a reality in the international balance of power.
The opponents of this realistic view have had to
retreat. They have regrouped and returned to the
fray in President Reagan's second term, bringing
to bear powerful pressures from such diverse
sources as the Department of State, much of Con-
gress, and the European allies. President Reagan
is once again told that national security is best
assured not by the construction of offensive and
defensive weapons but by accords with the Soviet
Union. The battle is far from won. But at least
the arms-control lobby no longer has a monopoly
on opinion: it obstructs but it does not dictate
U.S. defense policies.
? These documents, along with others released by the
Committee, are reproduced in Charles Tyroler II, ed.,
Alerting America (Committee on the Present Danger, 1984).
pp. 10.15 and 166-69.
t See, for example, Hedrick Smith in the New York
Times, May 25, 1980 and Godfrey Hodgson in the New
Statesman, September 5, 1980. Hodgson wrote that "Rea-
gan's foreign policy is rooted in the world view of Team
B." Jim Klurfield concluded, in what is one of the best
journalistic accounts of Team B (Newsday, June 14-15,
1981), that "on November 4, 1980, Team B, in essence, be-
came Team A."
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Ttatt B
To THE EDITOR OF COMMENTARY:
In "Team B: The Reality Be-
hind the Myth" [October 1986],
Richard Pipes gives the impression
that in 1976 the U.S. intelligence
community drastically revised its
estimate of Soviet strategic objec-
tives as a consequence of the com-
petitive analysis presented by him
and his team of outside authorities.
This same impression was conveyed
in press reporting about the Team
B experiment at the time. How-
ever, as the Senate Intelligence
Committee pointed out in the sum-
mary report of its inquiry into the
Team B episode, the view that U.S.
intelligence had suddenly reversed
its estimate is not correct.
What actually happened was that
in succeeding annual estimates dur-
ing the mid-70's, the intelligence
community expressed growing con-
cern about Soviet strategic nuclear
objectives and prospective capa-
bilities. The primary reason for
this trend was mounting evidence
of the continuing broad scope and
determined pace of Soviet strategic
offensive and defensive force-im-
provement programs, despite the
advent of U.S.-Soviet strategic arms-
limitation agreements and detente
in 1972. Some of the adjustments
made in the 1976 estimate did in
fact respond to valid points made
by the three B Teams (Mr. Pipes
was chairman of the team which
dealt with Soviet strategic objec-
tives), but the estimators did not
---simply adopt their views, some of
which were quite extreme.
Like Mr. Pipes, I think today's
estimates on these subjects are bet-
ter than those over which I pre-
sided when I was the responsible
national-intelligence officer. Among
other things, more emphasis is now
placed on Soviet military doctrine
and on the operational practices
of Soviet strategic forces, and for
this the B Teams deserve some of
the credit. Also, outside consultants
are now used more widely during
the preparation of estimates,
though their role is that of advisers
rather than competitors and they
are selected to represent a broader
range of,-viewpoints than --the B-
Teams of 1976.
Mr. Pipes implies that until his
Team B came along, there was
some kind of official consensus or
--conformity of view in the intelli-
gence community that nobody
dared break. On the contrary , the
right and duty to register dissent-
ing or alternative views in National
Intelligence Estimates (NIE's) was
and remains a time-honored tradi-
tion, understood and exercised by
the representatives of the various
U.S. intelligence agencies since at
least as far back as the 1950's. In-
deed, from my point of view, one of
the negative aspects of the Team B
experiment was that it focused so
heavily on differences that it tend-
ed to obscure the large and impor-
tant areas of agreement among U.S.
intelligence authorities about the
threat.
In his article, Mr. Pipes makes
it plain,hat he considers his inter-
pretatten of Soviet strategic policy,
and of the requirements of deter-
rence, to represent the only realis-
iic-interpretation. He warns against
those in the U.S. who cling to illu-
sion or may revert to it. To aid U.S.
policy-makers in the long-term
competition with the Soviet Union,
it would certainly be ideal if every
intelligence judgment and forecast
about the adversary were in full
accord with reality and could stand
the test of time. But this ideal is
clearly too much to expect in an
uncertain and changing world. It
seems to me, for example, that So-
viet behavior since 1977 casts doubt
on Mr. Pipes's own conclusion,
published in COMMENTARY that
year, "Why the Soviet Union
Thinks -It Could Fight & Win a
Nuclear War" [July 1977].
Given the inherent difficulty in
making judgments and forecasts,
therefore, good practice in estimat-
,ing -.includes.- readiDrss_ to make
Soviet policies and capabilities.
HOWARD STOERTz, JR.
modifications whenever new evi-
dence or analysis warrants it. From
long association, I know that my
successor estimators continue to fol-
low this practice. And I am confi-
dent that they seek to reflect the
available evidence and analysis re-
gardless of whether this results in
more or less somber assessments of
Herndon, Virginia
RICHARD PIPES Writes:
I believe that a comparison of
the original draft of the NIE for
1977 with that finally submitted by
the CIA will bear out my conten-
tion that it was drastically revised
after it had been criticized by Team
B. Such it comparison, unfortunate.
1y, will not be possible until after
the relevant documents have been
declassified.
As I stated in my article, the
NIE's did allow dissenting opin-
ions, but they almost invariably
relegated them to the footnotes.
They did not affect the thrust of
the estimate.
I do not know on what evidence
Mr. Stoertz bases his opinion that
"Soviet behavior since 1977" has
cast doubts on my contention that
the Soviet Union thinks it could
fight and win a nuclear war. True,
boasts of this nature, routinely pub-
lished in Soviet military literature
during the 1960's and early 1970's,
have been muted, in large measure
because the publicity given to
Team B has made the leadership of
the Soviet Union aware of what
harm they were doing to its image
abroad (it was immediately after
the Team B story had broken, in
January 1977, that Brezhnev' first
proclaimed nuclear war "unwin-
nable"). But nothing in the Soviet
nuclear build-up since 1977 allows
us to believe that the Soviet Union
seeks nothing beyond parity and
views its strategic arsenal as serving
exclusively deterrent purposes.
Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/18: CIA-RDP93T01132R000100050007-2