[Mb-civic] It's Time to Bench 'Team B' Second-guessing the CIA has led the U.S. Astray.

[Michael Butler]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-korb8aug08,0,2656284.st
ory?coll=la-news-comment-opinions

COMMENTARY

It's Time to Bench 'Team B'

Second-guessing the CIA has led the U.S. astray.
 By Lawrence Korb

 August 8, 2004

 The reports of the Sept. 11 commission and the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence missed the real problem facing the intelligence community,
which is not organization or culture but something known as the "Team B"
concept. And the real villains are the hard-liners who created the concept
out of an unwillingness to accept the unbiased and balanced judgments of
intelligence professionals.

 The roots of the problem go back to May 6, 1976, when the director of
Central Intelligence, George H.W. Bush, created the first Team B to assess a
report his agency had done on Soviet strategic objectives. The report ‹ a
National Intelligence Estimate, or NIE, completed the previous year ‹ did
not endorse a worst-case scenario of Soviet capabilities and, as a result,
some outsiders demanded access to the same classified intelligence used by
the CIA in preparing it so that they could come to their own conclusions.

 The concept of a "competitive analysis" of the data done by an alternative
team had been opposed by William Colby, Bush's predecessor as CIA director
and a career professional. But Bush caved in, under pressure from President
Ford, who was facing a strong challenge from right-wing Republicans in that
year's presidential primary, as well as from then-Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon, which was trying to undermine support for Henry
Kissinger's detente with the Soviet Union.

 The outside experts on Team B were led by Harvard professor Richard Pipes
and included such well-known Cold War hawks as Paul Nitze, William Van
Cleave and Paul Wolfowitz. Not surprisingly, Team B concluded that the
intelligence specialists had badly underestimated the threat by relying too
heavily on hard data instead of extrapolating Soviet intentions from
ideology. 

 The Team B report was enthusiastically received by conservative groups such
as the Committee on the Present Danger. But it turned out to be grossly
inaccurate. For example, it said the Soviets would have 500 intercontinental
Backfire bombers capable of striking the United States by 1984. In reality,
only 235 were deployed by then. Team B also claimed that the Soviets were
working on a "stealthy" submarine, though it failed to find any evidence of
one. 

 Team B was right about one thing. The CIA estimate was indeed flawed. But
it was flawed in the other direction. In 1978, the Senate Select Committee
on Intelligence concluded that the selection of Team B members had yielded a
flawed composition of political views and biases. And a 1989 review
concluded that the Soviet threat had been substantially overestimated in the
CIA's annual intelligence estimates.

 Still, the failure of Team B in 1976 did not deter the hard-liners from
challenging the CIA's judgments for the next three decades. In 1981, after
the publication of Clare Sterling's book, "The Terror Network," which argued
that global terrorists were actually pawns of the Soviets, leading
hard-liners asked the CIA to look into the relationship between Soviets and
terrorist organizations. The agency concluded that although there was
evidence that the Soviets had assisted groups such as the Palestine
Liberation Organization with weapons and training, there was no evidence
that the Soviets encouraged or approved these groups' terrorist acts.
However, hard-liners like Secretary of State Alexander Haig, CIA Chief
William Casey and Policy Planning Director Wolfowitz rejected the draft as a
naive, exculpatory brief and had the draft retooled to assert that the
Soviets were heavily involved in supporting "revolutionary violence
worldwide." 

 During the Clinton years, the Team B hard-liners found themselves out of
power. But when the Republicans took control of the Congress in 1995, the
legislative branch became the favored vehicle for second-guessing the CIA.
When an NIE in the mid-1990s concluded that it would be at least 15 years
before a rogue nation could threaten the U.S. with an intercontinental
ballistic missile, it undercut the hard-liners' case for deploying a
national missile defense system. So the Republicans demanded that Congress
set up a commission headed by Rumsfeld to reassess the threat.

 It is no secret now that Douglas Feith, George W. Bush's undersecretary of
Defense for policy, set up his own intelligence operation in the Pentagon,
known as the Office of Special Plans. According to current and former
Pentagon officials, Feith believed that the CIA and other intelligence
agencies dangerously underestimated threats to U.S. interests.

 To be sure, the intelligence community has made misjudgments. That is to be
expected. But given all the second-guessing and political pressure and
public embarrassment it has faced in the past when it tried to present
unbiased objective assessments of threats from the Soviets, China, and rogue
nations, it is not surprising that the intelligence community ultimately
caved in on whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.



 Creating an intelligence czar, as recommended by the Sept. 11 commission,
may help. But unless we protect the professionalism of our analysts, not
much will change.


Lawrence Korb is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and
former assistant secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration.




If you want other stories on this topic, search the Archives at
latimes.com/archives.

Article licensing and reprint options




 Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times