Team B Strategic Initiatives Panel
Team B Strategic Initiatives Panel, according to Anne Hessing Cahn's article Team B: The Trillion Dollar Experiment, was "an experiment in competitive threat assessments approved by then-Director of the Central Intelligence Agency George Herbert Walker Bush. Teams of 'outside experts' were to take independent looks at the highly classified data used by the intelligence community to assess Soviet strategic forces in the yearly National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs). NIEs are authoritative and are widely circulated within the government. U.S. national security policy on various issues as well as the defense budget are based on their general conclusions. Although NIEs represent the collective judgment of the entire intelligence community, the lead agency is the CIA."
Actually, Hessing writes, there were three B Teams: "One studied Soviet low-altitude air defense capabilities, one examined Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) accuracy, and one investigated Soviet strategic policy and objectives. But it is the third team, chaired by Harvard professor Richard Pipes, that ultimately received considerable publicity and is commonly referred to as Team B."
For full details, read the remainder of Hessing's article (Part I) and scroll down the page for Part II written by John Pradas.
"Team members included Richard Pipes (father of Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum) and William Van Cleave, both of whom would become members of the second Committee on the Present Danger, as well as Gen. Daniel Graham, whose 'High Frontier' missile defense proposal foreshadowed President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), or "Star Wars." The team's advisory panel included Paul Wolfowitz, Paul H. Nitze, and Seymour Weiss--all close associates of Albert Wohlstetter. Although Richard Perle played no direct role in Team B, he was instrumental in setting it up. It was Perle who had introduced Richard Pipes, a Polish immigrant who taught Czarist Russian history at Harvard, to Sen. Henry Jackson, catapulting Pipes into a clique of fanatically anti-Soviet hawks. Pipes, who served as Team B's chairman, later said he chose Wolfowitz as his principal Team B adviser 'because Richard Perle recommended him so highly.'"[1]
Other SourceWatch Resources
- Andrew Marshall
- Office of Net Assessment
- Office of Special Plans
- President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board
- University of Chicago
External Links
- Tom Barry, A History of Threat Escalation. Remembering Team B, RightWeb Analysis, February 12, 2004.
