Our concerns were validated when we learned that members of the competitive team, know as Team B, included certified hard-liners or neoconservatives such as Harvard Professor Pipes, a Polish immigrant with extremely hard-line views of the Soviet threat; William Van Cleave, who served on the SALT team in Vienna and was an obstreperous foe of disarmament; Paul Wolfowitz; General Danny Graham; and Seymour Weiss. This would be tantamount to selecting Dracula to run a blood bank. If Cheney and Rumsfeld had set out to recruit a predictable team of troglodytes on the Soviet Union, they could not have selected a more reliable squad to heighten anxiety about Moscow.
I weighed in with my former boss on the SALT team, Howard Stoertz, who was now the national intelligence officer responsible for intelligence estimates on Soviet strategic forces. Stoertz knew that the Team A/B exercise was an “ideological and political foray” and not a substantive or intellectual exercise, but he was unwilling to block it. The deputy director of the CIA, E. Henry Knoche, not one of the sharpest tools in the CIA shed, was in favor of the idea and totally unsympathetic to the possibility of a manipulated National Intelligence Estimate. The Team A/B exercise was an excellent example of the pressure on the CIA from neoconservatives trying to tailor intelligence. The neoconservatives triumphed in 1980, when the United States elected a president who wanted to confront the Soviet Union, and installed an ideologue as CIA director to ensure that intelligence documented the charge of the “evil empire.”
The deputy director for intelligence in the mid-1970s, Sayre Stevens, aggressively fought the idea of a right-wing team entering the CIA, but couldn’t persuade CIA director Bush to block the efforts of the Ford administration. Stevens was one of the finest analysts that the CIA ever produced, and I knew him well from my experience with the SALT talks. On a key technical issue involving the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 1972, Stevens stood up to the Pentagon to argue that the Soviet surface-to-air missile system could not be considered an anti-ballistic missile system. This debate was overtaken by events several years later when both sides accepted a total ban on anti-ballistic missiles, which became the cornerstone of strategic deterrence until another President Bush recklessly repudiated the ABM Treaty in 2001 in order to deploy an ineffective national missile defense system.
Stevens also fought the Pentagon on a key issue involving the SALT treaty in 1972. The Department of Defense and the Pentagon didn’t want a ban on MIRVs—weapons of mass destruction that launch as a single missile but separate into multiple bombs directed at multiple targets—and believed that a demand for on-site inspection of MIRV sites would ensure there would be no agreement. Stevens and our verification team, along with the Department of State and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, convinced President Nixon and Kissinger that satellite reconnaissance could monitor a ban on MIRV deployment. The military representatives didn’t want to give up deployment of MIRVs, and they chortled privately over confronting the Soviets with on-site inspection. Ironically, the Department of Defense eventually found on-site inspection a bitter pill to swallow when it was introduced into treaty provisions.
Sayre liked a good fight and knew we had to “deal with contentions that we are wrong.” I took the same approach to the challenges from the White House on our position regarding Moscow and international terrorism, and again it was Professor Pipes leading the charge against the CIA’s intelligence. Twenty years later, CIA analysts rolled over for Vice President Cheney and offered intelligence assessments that were tailored for a post-9/11 White House obsessed with conjuring reasons to invade Iraq, instead of marshaling its full attention to defeating the enemies that had attacked the Pentagon and World Trade Towers.
The results of the Team A/Team B exercise were predictable. Just as the Soviet Union was beginning to reduce the growth in defense spending and Brezhnev was signaling interest in détente and arms control, Pipes’s team persuaded the CIA to adopt more threatening estimates of the Soviet strategic threat. Pipes’s world-view was stamped on the Team B assessments, which labeled the Soviets an aggressive imperialistic power bent on world domination. According to Team B, the Soviet Union rejected nuclear parity, was bent on executing and surviving a nuclear war, and was radically increasing its military spending. Team B predicted a series of Soviet weapons developments that never took place, including directed-energy weapons, mobile anti-missile systems, and anti-satellite capabilities.
CIA deputy director Gates used Team B assessments in speeches and articles in the Washington Times to ingratiate himself with the Reagan administration and to garner increased defense spending. By pitching policy, Gates violated the CIA’s charter, which stipulated that there should be no policy advocacy from the agency. As CIA director in 1992, Gates exaggerated the threat from Iran and the threat of nuclear proliferation to stave off cuts in the intelligence budget.
The sad lesson in the political use of right-wing ideologues to craft hard-line assessments is the susceptibility of intelligence to political interference and corruption. Just as Vice President Dick Cheney’s relentless pressure on the CIA led to false reports on Iraq in 2002–2003, Team B’s pressure led to exaggerated estimates of Soviet military spending and the capabilities of Soviet military technology. It was nearly a decade before the CIA began to correct and lower its estimates of Soviet defense spending and the Soviet strategic threat. In the case of Team B, the next administration—President Carter’s—ignored its bogus findings just as President Eisenhower had ignored the trumped-up conclusions of the Gaither Report on Soviet air power in the 1950s. The Reagan administration in the early 1980s, however, used the estimates to double defense spending, garnering $1.5 trillion in additional spending against a Soviet Union in decline and a Soviet military threat that was exaggerated.
The U.S. intelligence community should neither indulge in worst-case analysis, which distorts the international picture for policymakers, nor play the role of devil’s advocate, which panders to decision makers. Casey and Gates played devil’s advocate in the 1980s to link the Soviets to the Papal assassination plot in order to derail Secretary of State George P. Shultz’s resumption of détente. Tenet and McLaughlin did the same in the run-up to the Iraq War in an attempt to link Iraq to al Qaeda in order to strengthen Bush Junior’s campaign for war. In his self-serving memoir, Michael Morell acknowledged that the deputy director for intelligence, Jami Miscik, directed the Counterterrorism Center to prepare a classified memorandum “to see how far the analysts could push the evidence” to link Saddam Hussein to al Qaeda. The paper generated the impression of a connection, and Morell blithely noted that “well-placed staffers in the Pentagon and the Office of the Vice President liked it.”22 Is there any wonder?
Inflated threat assessments have become an inherent part of the U.S. national security system, which is why the CIA was created in the first place—to prevent or at least counter such exaggerations. President Truman wanted the CIA to be the “quiet intelligence arm” of the White House, and the analytical successes of the Directorate of Intelligence from 1966 to 1981 were quiet ones. In the absence of effective oversight to assess the influence and impact of manipulated threat assessments on operations and diplomacy, we need whistleblowers to call attention to the misuse of an intelligence community shrouded in secrecy.
TWO
THE JOY OF INTELLIGENCE
“There were so many things that I did not know when I became president.”
—Harry S. Truman
“The truth that makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear.”
—Herbert Agar
The term “speaking truth to power” originated with the Quakers in an effort to expand the idea of anti-war pacifism. The term has special meaning in the field of intelligence, which requires giving information to policymakers who prefer not to listen. A key aspect of being an intelligence analyst was the opportunity to tell truth to power.
For