TEAM B THE REALITY BEHIND THE MYTH

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88T00988R000100020034-3
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 18
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 31, 2011
• Sequence Number: 34
• Publication Date: October 9, 1986
• Content Type: REPORT

G.E.F.
VC/NIC
Attachment: "Team B, The Reality
Behind the Myth,"Corunentary
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.MEMORANDUM FOR: All NIOs
NIC/AG
9 Oct 86
I believe most NIOs will find this fascinating
reading--an outsider's view of our estimative
process. Even though this is limited primarily
to strategic weapons issues, it has significance
for the work of almost all of us and is worth
reading.
PORM USE PREVIOUS
5-75 (~f EDITIONS
Date
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'~ VOLUME EIGHTY TWO ? NUMBER FOUR ? OCTOBER 1986
? ;
? ~ ? ~ ; . '.
?
~' The Tenured Left/Stephen H. Balch and Herbert I. London
~,.
Shcharansky's Secret/Edward Alexander
Sodomy and the Supreme Court/-David Robinson, Jr.
Dur Conservatism and Theirs/Brigitte Berger and Peter L. Berger
The Truth About Titoism/11lora Beloff
welter Laqueur at SixtyFive/Roger Kaplan
`Whose Palesdne?"-An Fxcbange/Erich Isaac and Rael Jean Lsaac & Critics
Books in Review: Alvin H. Bernstein /Scott McConnell /
S. Fred Singer /Kenneth S. Lynn / Joshua Muravchik
Pueusr~ ev TMe nM~Ricr-N ,~wisH con~rr~Eis3.ss
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Commentary
Team B: The Reality Behind the Myth
Richard Pipes
F outt 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 defetSses, .they had fundamentally and
permanently altered the nature of warfare. Once
ocher 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 Har~?ard
and served in 1981.82 at the National Security Council as
Director, East European and Soviet Affairs. His latest book
is Survival Is 11'ot Enough. Among his previous articles
in COMMENTARY are "How to Cope N'ith the Soviet
Threat" (August 1984) and "Soviet Global Strategy" (April
980).
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 co 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 (h}'drogen) 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 195i 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 1tloscow. Such a course had been urged by
many leading scientists. Within weeks after Afos-
cow had sent Sputnik into space, Eisenhower
moved the Science Advisory Committee chaired
by the provost of AfIT, James Killian; to the
White House to give him guidance in these mat-
ters. This step marked a break in the L'.S. defense
planning because it involved, for the first time,
civilian experts in the formulation of military
strategy. Henceforth the scientific communit}?,
working through the Advisory Committee as well
as other channels, acquired a dominant voice in
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the formulation of (J.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.
THE growing influence of scientific
modes of thinking on all aspects of
life is probably the most outstanding feature of
modern ~Vestern 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-
fessionellt 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 chink 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 chat a scien?
tificalty 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 wvtNC been brought into the process
of decision-makingandgiven political
influence never before enjoyed by members of
their profession, American scientisu quickly for-
mulated abody 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 Eunc?
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 chat 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 acertain level of retaliatory power, should
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works at once seized on the news and deluged.me
with requats 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
i
di
n
cates, 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.H.as noth-
ing but a crude political ploy. President-elect
Carter had pledged to pursue SALT II nego-
fissions and to cue 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-
inghisconfirmation 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
Jr~~ >r~periority over the United States." In the
~' bZeath, he added that "the concept of
~emacy' makes no sense in the nuclear age."
Solna hmda among his listeners must have won-
dered svhy, if supremacy no longer made sense, a
pt~eaident of the United States `should work so
hard to deny it to the Soviet Union.
3t may be added as a postscript that two years
later, in a complete about-face, Kissinger told the
lE:andon 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.
PROrtrNFSVr legislators also rushed into
the fray. One of them was Senator ~Vil-
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 "Qying 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
~ti'ashington 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 Slar, the organ of the Soviet military,
and Prnrda, which cited Western opinions to ar-
gue that Team B was yet another effort of Ameri-
can "hawks" to scuttle drstente 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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s$/COMMENTARY OCTOBER 1966
measure Brezhnev added chat 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 11'tm York Rc+vieru 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 "decerrence-
through-agreement" school had had on U.S. stra-
tegic planning and weapons programs for twenty
yeah 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
iu 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 xE 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. der
fence strategy, was unable, intellectually as well as
psychologically, to cope with alternative points of
view. '
Having spent my entire adult life in scholar-
ship, Itook it for granted that a statement of fact,
provided it is not meaningless, can only be either
correct or false-ic 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..~om 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, Rid Star, and Pravda ditiered only in
their journalistic manners, not in the quality of
their chinking.
It was also disconcerting to learn that those
who had claimed the final say on nuclear stra-
tegy could not distinguish the disaete 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 rnnfounded 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 atntegic defenses.
O iv JwivuAaY 7 and S. 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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,. ": Tc THE 1tEALiTY BEHIND THE 11[YTH/~
chaired by Adlai Stevenson, was to determine .:' ; ,
whether any improper pressure had been brought ~ ~m ~' but he relied mainly on testimony by
to bear on the Agency to have it :'slant" iq esti- left w+ho provided a highly partisan account.
mate. It gives some idea of the spirit in which .. " ,
these inquiries were carried out that neither I ~ ~T learned of these developments in
nor any other member of Team B was invited to ~; July 1977 when I received a letter
testify before these committees. Their source of General Graham in which'}te wrote that he
information was the CIA, which thus enjoyed the ~ d head through the "grapevine" that the In-
enviable position of appearing as both lainti$ a lligetlce Committee had drafted, in utter secrecy,
and sole witness, p biased and denigrating report on Team B. I im-
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee held ~on l o see tthSs doeutnente Ian requesting per.
a dosed hearing on January 18, at which Ge argued that if the
Bush testified, Although the Washington p~t mtelligence community had been given the op-
headlined its report "'Wo~t~ase' Intelligence po'.unit~ to present its side, then Team B should
tu:. ~~ --- ~ - -
~-=urn=~u- ..ommtctee?s product. Senator Stevenson must have
ent after the hearing praised the Team A-Team B been unaware of what Messrs. Miller and Ford
acperiment: Hubert Humphrey, Cli$ord Case, and had been doing on his Subcommittee's behalf, for
Jacob Davits commended the Agency for- organiz- he immediately agreed that Nitze, Graham, and
ing the competition and incorporating Team B's myself should be given access to the classified
Endings into its estimate. Case declared that "po- report.
litical considerations" had aoc altered the official The document J saw was an indictment of
estimates. Humphrey expressed the opinion that Team B, Elled with slanderous accusations. As I
the U.S. still enjoyed a nuclear "edge," but that now learned, it had
it was "questionable whether we can maintain May but had not et receivedmthpe ate ~ early as
that edge" into the 1980's. Charles Per thou ht Committee 'which ve us an o pproval of the
that to alert the Russians to American concerns, rest its misstatemengts and slurs. I~most o$ensive
the new Endings should be made public, but he feature was its questioning of the
failed to rnnvince Bush. personal integ-
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee held sttood acpcused ofaconniveianm to/a hose members
"hearings," a format which permits diverse o in- g fi' out, in the
ions to be heard and enables the Senators to take ton. Itf chaelligence estimating, a political opera.
part in the inquiry. The Senate Intelligence Com- final mandatre of dam B with exceeding its orig_
mittee, however, chose a di$erent and much less plied to it by ~egrloring the 'raw data' aup-
satisfactory route of preparing a "re ~ncY: of conspiring with
procedure requires no witnesses to be called. It the formulations olfcconclusions~of reaching ]cons
is a research effort in which busy Senators do not elusions before it had seen the evidence; and
participate personally but rely on their staffs: at of leaking to the press. The prindpal source of
best the Senators read the C~nished product before these accusations was Paisley.? These
affixing their signatures co it and contribute aper- withstanding, the re charges not-
sonal statement. In such an exercise, the quality of cisma which Team B had madea nd manyeoE its
the staff is critical. The Intelligence Committee recommendations, to be sound and worthwhile. It
assigned the cask of drafting its report on Team did not explain how a
A=Team B to two sta$ members who had strop usi group of such ltiw integrity
ideological and a ng such flawed procedures, could produce any.
personal biases against Team B thing of value. but this contradiction could not
and everything it stood for. The staff director of be avoided since the authors of the report, while
the Committee, William G. Miller, had drafted condemning Team B, had to explain why the
the Cooper?Church Amendment that cut o$ aid Agency had allowed itself to be so strongly influ-
to Vietnam and, as Senator Cooper's assistant, had enced by it.
actively fought the ballistic-missile defense pro- Appended to the re
gram (ABM)., It was presumably his res port was a personal state-
bility to select the person in cha ponsi- ment by Senator Gary Hart which summarized
rge of the Team this whole indictment. "The (Intelligence) Com-
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 co 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
? Except for some minor matters connected' with Team
8 finances, Chia was my last contact with paisley. On Otto-
her 1, 1978, his badly denim
in Chesapeake IIay. There was~a bulble ywound tin hies head
and diver's belts were wound around his waist. The circum-
atattce~ 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 aailbwt. See the New York Times Magezine, Janu?
ary 7, 1979.
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38/CO~IHE,yTgRY OCTOBER 1988
mittee report and the information from ocher
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." ~Nhether 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 apoint-by-
point rebuttal. (So did, separately, Nitze and Gra-
ham.) Iasserted 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 Paisle
'
y
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 tY-
port furnished no evidence to substantiate its
charge that members of Team B had had un-
authorized communication with the media. As for
Senator Hazt's accusations, I found them ron.
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~ecretarie of the
Treasury and the Army, an ex-Deputy Sea~etary
of Defense, cone-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.
THFCII 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 cziticisms" and "some usefut
recommendations," the Committee thought that
the experiment proved less valuable than is 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-
~mudt ~ Ehe ~~~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 pt'eoccupation 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
' maker nQ.attempt to judge which group's eti-
maces concerning the USSR-are.correct." Thera
fore the report's "findings and recommenda-
tions for improving the quality of future NIE's
on Soviet capabilities and objective are pri.
marily directed at procedural issues." But it is
logically impossible to determine the quality of
aubs~tcn a o~'~~ without reference co the
quality of an estimate depends above allllup~
its accuracy. ~ order to make judgments oan-
cerning quality, never mind suggesting improve-
ments, one must judge where the truth lien
a ~insutt~which the etimate's accuracy is to be
? Tl~e National Intettigence Ertimater~d-B Tsan Epi-
rode Cor+cerning Soviet Stsategic Capabitity aad Objectives,
s+eleased by the Senate Select Committee on Intdliaena an
gory l8. 1978.
Approved For Release 2011/08/31 :CIA-RDP88T00988R000100020034-3
 Approved For Release 2011/08/31 :CIA-RDP88T00988R000100020034-3
...-ate a: z'rii; iCl:Ai,l i Y ne.riltvu i ritr MYTH/89
By the time this report was released, Team . B
had faded from memory, aad it attracted little a>~
tension. The original draft, however, even though
eventually discarded, managed to inflict serious
harm on the intelligence process. In May 1979,
when Harold Ford completed his draft, PFIABr
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 xE 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 seated 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 persuasi~?e support that
they emerged on cop. 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
Cl