Feith's OSP = Richard Pipes' & G. H. W. Bush's "Team B"

[Emit]

Kpete recently posted this topic concerning Feith and the OSP: "CIA Analysts: Over 50% Of Bush's Iraq War Justifications Untrue..." which jogged my memory of Wolfowitz's participation in "Team B" from the 70's. Here's Kpete's thread: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x178468

Here are some excerpts from that article pertinent to the historical "Team B":

~snip~

Although the Pentagon Inspector General's report released Friday did not address the accuracy of such assessments, it documented the unusual efforts by Defense Department policymakers to bypass regular intelligence channels and influence officials at the highest level of government.

Feith's work was of critical importance to Vice President Dick Cheney, who once referred to the Pentagon team's conclusions as the "best source" for understanding the relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

~snip~

A critical question raised by the inspector general's report is whether Feith and his office were just critiquing CIA analysis, or were creating their own intelligence assessment, a role that is supposed to be left to the CIA and other intelligence agencies.

~snip~

Feith's work had the blessing of his boss, former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. The operation was set up at the behest of then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz with approval from Rumsfeld, Gimble noted. By most accounts, those three officials had distrust, if not disdain, for the work of the CIA and other intelligence agencies.

~snip~

P.J. Crowley, a retired Air Force colonel and a senior fellow at the Center of American Progress, said that the intelligence peddled by Feith tainted the public dialogue.

"They weren't creating intelligence, but they were assembling the pieces to create a rationale for war," Crowley said. "Their production was discredited, but they had the desired effect. The little pieces ended up infecting the process."

So, here we have a striking resemblance to "Team B" from the 70's. Note below the players involved. (Also of interest is that "The Committee on the Present Danger (CPD) was resurrected in June 2004 by a largely neoconservative group of 41 members...Republican Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona and Democratic Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut serve as CPD's honorary cochairmen, giving the CPD the appearance of a bipartisan initiative. Like the second CPD, the current CPD is largely a grouping of national security militarists and neoconservatives..." http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/3301 )

Overview of "Team B"

Team B was part of a competitive analysis exercise initiated by U.S. government officials in the 1970s to analyze intelligence on the Soviet Union. Team B was a group of "outside experts" who would counter a group of established CIA intelligence officials known as Team A.(1) Team B argued that the National Intelligence Estimate on the Soviet Union, generated yearly by the CIA, underestimated Soviet military power and misinterpreted Soviet strategic intentions. Its findings were leaked to the press in an unsuccessful attempt at an October surprise to derail Jimmy Carter's 1976 presidential bid.(2) The Team B reports became the intellectual foundation for the idea of "the window of vulnerability" and of the massive arms buildup that began toward the end of the Carter administration and accelerated under President Reagan.(3)

Team B was approved by the Director of Central Intelligence George H. W. Bush. A team of 16 "outside experts" were to take an independent look at highly classified data used by the intelligence community to assess Soviet strategic forces in the yearly National Intelligence Estimates.(3)(4)

There were three 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.
It is the third team, chaired by Harvard professor Richard Pipes, that ultimately received considerable publicity and is most commonly referred to as Team B.(3)

~snip~

Creation
In 1974, Albert Wohlstetter, a professor at the University of Chicago, accused the CIA of systematically underestimating Soviet missile deployment, in his 1974 Foreign Policy article entitled "Is There a Strategic Arms Race?" Wohlstetter concluded that the United States was allowing the Soviet Union to achieve military superiority by not closing the missile gap. Many conservatives then began a concerted attack on the CIA's annual assessment of the Soviet threat.(2)(3)

The organization chosen in the administration to challenge the CIA's analysis was the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB). PFIAB's Team B was headed by:

Richard Pipes, a Harvard historian and specialist in Russian history.
Paul Nitze, who also helped to create the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), the objectives of which were to raise awareness about the Soviets' alleged nuclear dominance and to pressure the American leadership to close the gap.(5)
Team B's members included:

Clare Booth Luce
John Connally
Daniel O. Graham
Edward Teller
Thomas Wolf
Paul Wolfowitz
William Van Cleave (6)

In 1975, PFIAB members asked director of the CIA William Colby to approve the initiative of producing comparative assessments of the Soviet threat. Colby refused, stating it was hard "to envisage how an ad hoc independent group of analysts could prepare a more thorough, comprehensive assessment of Soviet strategic capabilities than could the intelligence community."<5>

In 1976, when George H. W. Bush became the new director of central intelligence, the PFIAB renewed its request for competitive threat assessments. Although his top analysts argued against such an undertaking, Bush checked with the White House, obtained a go-ahead, and by May 26 signed off on the experiment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_B



Here's some more information on "Team B", highlighting Wolfowitz's and Rumsfeld's historical involvement:

To set the stage for this excerpt (no link) -- Sometime during the Ford administration, when Reagan was making his move in his bid for presidency, Reagan was attacking Ford's foreign policy (Ford and Kissinger believed detente was the best approach with Soviet Union, others thought not: Cheney was Ford's new chief of staff and was not supportive of detente, nor was Rumsfeld, Cheney's predecessor. Rumsfeld was, at this time, Ford's secretary of defense). Ford eventually retreated from using the word 'detente' so much.

While Rumsfeld and Cheney were eviscerating Kissinger's Soviet policies at the top levels of the Ford administration and the Republican party, Paul Wolfowitz was engaged in a parallel effort inside the US intelligence community.

At the end of each year, at a time when new defense budgets were being drafted, the CIA ... produced a secret National Intelligence Estimate on the intentions and capabilities of the Soviet Union. ...congressional critics complained that the intelligence community was offering too benign and too optimistic a view of the Soviet leadership and military. The underlying issue was whether the CIA and other agencies were underestimating the threat, either intentionally tailoring intelligence to support Kissinger's policy of detente or by simply failing to give enough weight to darker interpretations of Soviet intentions.

In 1976 Bush, the CIA new director from the Soviet Union, moved to counter the criticism. He appointed a team of outside experts, called the B Team, to review the classified data and to draw up its own separate report on the Soviet Union and its intentions. Team B was headed by Richard Pipes, a professor of Russian history from Harvard University. Wolfowitz, still working at the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, was one of the ten members.

The report, delivered at the end of 1976, presented an analysis of Soviet motivations profoundly different from the one US intelligence had been offering. The team concluded it was possible to interpret the available intelligence data as showing that the Soviet Union was striving for military superiority over the United States and that it viewed detente as a means of achieving this goal ... it criticized the CIA for relying too much on satellites and other technology and for failing to give enough weight to what Soviet leaders were saying.

This Team B exercise represented an important step in Wolfowitz's career. For the first time he was focusing on the underpinnings of American foreign policy, on the hidden assumptions and leaps of logic that lay beneath the dry, purportedly unbiased studies of the intelligence community. Many years later, in a retrospective interview with the CIA's own internal historians, Wolfowitz said he came to the conclusion that US intelligence analysts had been operating in the fashion of priesthood, issuing conclusions as if they were commandments written on tablets. "The B-Team demonstrated that it was possible to construct a sharply different view of Soviet motivation from the consensus view of the analysts, and one that provided a much closer fit to the Soviets' observed behavior (and also provided a much closer fit to the Soviets' observed behavior up to and through the invasion of Afghanistan)," Wolfowitz said.

The Team B exercise created an important precedent. From that point forward, whenever members of Congress believed that the CIA was minimizing the seriousness of a foreign policy problem, there were calls for a Team B to review the intelligence and make its own independent evaluation. During the mid-1990s, the Republican majority in Congress set up a special commission, modeled upon Team B, to study the threat to the United from ballistic missiles. After reviewing the intelligence, an independent commission concluded that the danger of a missile attack was considerably greater than the US intelligence community had reported. That missile defense commission was headed by Donald Rumsfeld, and one of its leading members was Paul Wolfowitz.

Wolfowitz's work on the B Team seems to have had a particularly strong influence on his own thinking. From then on the inadequacies of American intelligence became a frequent Wolfowitz theme. From his own perspective, the intelligence community simply wasn't being skeptical enough; it was too satisfied with information that confirmed its preconceptions. Critics made the reverse accusation against him; there were complaints that Wolfowitz was too eager to obtain intelligence reports that fitted in with his own conservative views. The Rise of the Vulcans, James Mann, pp. 73-75

And, lastly, a final note from rightweb:

~snip~

Shortly after President Gerald Ford appointed Bush to be the new director of intelligence, replacing the beleaguered William Colby, Bush authorized PFIAB’s plan for an alternative review. The review consisted of three panels: one to assess the threat posed by Soviet missile accuracy; another to determine the effect of Soviet air defenses on U.S. strategic bombers; and a third--the Strategic Objectives Panel--to determine the Soviet Union’s intentions. The work of this last panel, which became known as the Team B Report, was the most controversial. As Paul Warnke, an official at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency at the time of the Team B exercise, wrote: “Whatever might be said for evaluation of strategic capabilities by a group of outside experts, the impracticality of achieving useful results by ‘independent’ analysis of strategic objectives should have been self-evident. Moreover, the futility of the Team B enterprise was assured by the selection of the panel’s members. Rather than including a diversity of views ... the Strategic Objectives Panel was composed entirely of individuals who made careers of viewing the Soviet menace with alarm.”

~snip~

Right-wing ideologues and militarists frequently cite the example of Team B as a successful model for challenging moderate threat assessments by the foreign policy establishment, particularly the CIA and the State Department. In prevailing over the CIA, Team B demonstrated that “strategic intelligence” based on a policy-driven analysis of an adversary’s perceived intentions could triumph over fact-based intelligence. Through adroit organizing by hawks inside and outside of government, the Team B effort helped re-launch the cold war.

The end of the cold war did not bring to a close the long-running dispute between the national security alarmists on the right and the more conservative analysis of security threats by the CIA, the State Department, and the military itself. In the case of Iraq, the ideologues and militarists, following the Team B model, insisted on the primacy of strategic intelligence. Once again the U.S. government allowed a militarist policy by ideology and fear-mongering to trump facts and reason--at a tremendous cost to U.S. taxpayers as well as a mounting casualty list in the case of the Iraq invasion and occupation.

http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/2822


edit typo

[upi402]

1. k/r

Thanks for this post.

[illinoisprogressive]

2. I have posted about this 70s group and it's link to now. Thanks so much!

you provided so much information. I got the little I knew from Bluementhal's book How Bush Rules. it stunned me the players and similarities to the PNAC of the neocons. I really feel that this needs to come to light in the general public that this is where the hairbrained iraq garbage origniated from. Once this is widely and generally known it would be easy for people to see these guys have been operating and planning a war of some kind with whatever country of the moment for 30 years and Rummy and Cheney are the ones responsible for this disaster of everyting.

[Emit]

5. I haven't read Blumenthal's "How Bush Rules"

I'll add that to my list. Thanks. I do recommend "Rise of the Vulcans" for some history on these players. It will likely confirm your gut feeling that these guys have been "operating and planning a war of some kind ... for 30 years." "The Rise of the Vulcans" (and reading on DU) gives me great insight into Cheney's, et al long history with the White House. Reading these accounts helps put things that are happening now into perspective.

[H2O Man]

3. Thank you!

It is not difficult to take bits and pieces of intelligence out of context, and to twist them to support any preconceived conclusion one is pushing as a matter of agenda. This Wolfowitz group has an agenda, and what they are promoting is a threat to our constitutional democracy.

[Emit]

7. And now we have the Office of Iranian Affairs

http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/3312

The marriage of the Neoconservative Intellectuals and the Military Industrial Complex (aka Military Industrial Congressional Complex, as it had already infiltrated government) back in the late 60's and early 70's is proving to be a dire threat to our constitutional democracy.

[Captain Hilts]

4. They created OSP because they didn't trust CIA or State. nt

[Emit]

12. Didn't trust?

Or, wanted intelligence that fit with their own warmongering views? :shrug:

[Gabi Hayes]

6. excellent summarization of a pivotal point in US history.

let's get the tinfoil part out of the way from the beginning: why do you think Colby 'fell' out of his boat? how convenient that it opened the door for poppy to take over CIA and use OUTSIDE 'talent' to usurp the clearly defined duties of already extant government employees whose JOB it was to do what these warmonger did in their place. Team B was the original OSP...it's that simple.

BTW, see Liberty Under Seige, by Walter Karp, for the role the CFPD in destroying the Carter Presidency for the getgo. his very first nomination (Ted Sorenson, to DCIA), was not even allowed a FLOOR VOTE in the 61-39 Dem Senate because of the
'outrage' generated by the CFPD and transmitted through the Senate by the likes of DINO Scoop Jackson. Carter couldn't even get a VOTE for JFK coldwarrior Sorenson!

For a very good, succinct analysis of the way the intel agencies have become completely turned into either feckless appendages, or willing conduits to the DOD, see James Risen's State of War (for which the admin would like to seem him jailed), during which he clearly details Rumsfeld's number one goal (well, maybe invading Iraq was tops): putting ALL intel groups under the aegis of the DOD, allowing complete control/access to all their information AND operational capabilities.

His account of the relationship between Rumsfeld and Condi is most instructional: he just ignored her, when he wasn't actively making fun of her. She's described by one source as the WORST National Security Advisor, ever. Not a bad twofer, when you think of it: worst NSA ever, followed closely by becoming the worst Secretary of State ever. Lots of worst-ofs in this admin, though, right?

[Emit]

9. Thanks for the reminder of Risen's State of War

Keep forgetting about that one.

Also, your comments about Rumsfeld reminds me that Cheney was a protege of Rumsfeld's -- Cheney dodged the draft, left his grad studies and went to DC on a fellowship. His second job in DC was as a special assistant to Rumsfeld when Rumsfeld headed the Office of Economic Opportunity. He continued to work for Rumsfeld for seven years thereafter, in the Nixon and Ford administrations. Over three decades, the two have worked off and on, near, and or around each other.

And then there's this:

At least once a year during the 1980's, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld vanished. Cheney was still working diligently on Capital Hill, and Rumsfeld remained a hard-driving business executive in Chicago. Yet for three of four days at a time, no one in Congress knew where Cheney was, nor could anyone at Rumsfeld's offices locate him. Even their wives were in the dark; they were handed only a mysterious Washington phone number through which they might relay messages in case of emergencies... ...After leaving their day jobs, Cheney and Rumsfeld usually made their way to Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington. From there, in the middle of the night, each man, joined by a team of forty to sixty federal officials and a single member of Ronald Reagan's cabinet, separately slipped away to some remote location in the United States, such as a discarded military base or an underground bunker. A convoy of lead-lined trucks carrying sophisticated communications equipment and other gear made its way to the same location.

Rumsfeld and Cheney were principal figures in one of the most highly classified programs of the Reagan administration. Under it, the administration furtively carried out detailed planning exercise to establish a new American "president" and his staff, outside and beyond the specifications of the U.S. Constitution, in order to keep the federal government running during and after a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Over the years a few details about the existence of this Reagan-era effort have come to light, but not the way it worked or the central roles played by Cheney and Rumsfeld... ...This was not some abstract textbook plan but was practiced in concrete, thorough and elaborate detail. The Reagan administration assigned personnel to three teams...Each team included an experienced leader, who could operate as a new White House chief of staff. The obvious candidates were people who had already served at high level in the executive branch, preferably with experience in the national security apparatus. This was where Cheney and Rumsfeld came in since they had previously served as White House chief of staff in the Ford administration. Besides Cheney and Rumsfeld, who were regulars, other team leaders over the years included James Woolsey, later the director of Central Intelligence, and Kenneth Duberstein, who worked for a time as Reagan's real-life White House chief of staff.

~snip~

... Reagan's secret program set aside these constitutional and statutory requirements under some circumstances; it established its own process for creating a new American president, ignoring the hierarchy of presidential succession established by law... ...Reagan established his continuity of government program under a secret executive order. According to Robert McFarlane, who served for a time as Reagan's national security adviser, the president himself made the final decision on who would head each of the special teams, such as Cheney and Rumsfeld. Within Reagan's National Security Council, the "action officer" for the secret program was Oliver North...Vice President George H. W. Bush was given authority to supervise some of these efforts, which were run by a new government building in the Washington area...and a secret budget...used to buy advanced communications equipment (apparently, some of the info about this secret program came about because of allegations of waste and abuses in awarding these communications contracts to private companies--Emit)


...Cheney and Rumsfeld were familiar with the Armageddon exercises of the Reagan era. They themselves had practiced all the old drills... ...except for Rumsfeld's brief stint as Middle East envoy, neither he nor Cheney ever served in the Reagan administration. Nevertheless, as team leaders Cheney and Rumsfeld played important roles in this project...Moreover, their participation in these Reagan-era exercises demonstrated a broader underlying truth about Cheney and Rumsfeld: Over three decades, from the Ford administration onward, even when they were out of the executive branch of government, they were never too far away; they stayed in touch with its defense, military and intelligence officials and were regularly called upon by those officials. Cheney and Rumsfeld were, in a sense, a part of the permanent, though hidden, national security apparatus of the United States, inhabitants of a world in which presidents may come and go, but America always keeps on fighting.Rise of the Vulcans, James Mann, Ch. 19, pp. 138-145, excerpted

[Emit]

11. Also, on Warmonger Poppy Bush

You said it!!

Tinfoil hat time?

We have been interested in Kevin Phillips new book, American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush, and so we read several news items related to his book. From the links provided by cursor.org, we examined:

Kevin Phillips Op-Ed in the Los Angeles Times
A book review in the Washington Post (via Just a Bump in the Beltway)
The excerpt provided by Barnes & Noble
And an interview with Phillips on Democracy Now

There's a lot of information and it spans much time and space. Still, we tried to put together most of the moving parts (as Josh Marshall would say) into a single diagram.




NOTE: We might include more details about the Bush family connections to the Saudis/Middle-East-characters/offshore-oil-projects at a later date.

Our opinion? Too early to say. Lots of things look connected and conspiratorial, but in life there are lots of connections. However, Phillips does seem to be onto something when he posits a big sticky ball of spooks, oil-interests, foreign intrigue, and politics - with the Bush family well integrated into it.

We recommend you read the essays and interviews about the book so that you can form your own opinion. We hope this diagram will be an aid in understanding the elements and theories that Kevin Phillips has written about.

http://uggabugga.blogspot.com/2004_01_11_uggabugga_archive.html#107412832339714798

[Wilms]

8. K & R n/t

[truedelphi]

10. K & R'd n/t