1 Boring Old Man

Team B was a competitive analysis exercise commissioned by the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1970s to analyze threats the Soviet Union posed to the security of the United States. Team B, approved by then Director of Central Intelligence George H. W. Bush, was comprised of "outside experts" who attempted to counter intelligence officials within the CIA known as Team A. Team B concluded 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 December 1976. 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 Ronald Reagan.

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.

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.

Team B’s members included:

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

In 1975 PFIAB members asked CIA Director 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." When George H. W. Bush became the Director of Central Intelligence in 1976 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.

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. 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 University professor Richard Pipes, that ultimately received considerable publicity and is most commonly referred to as Team B.

According to Dr. Anne Cahn (Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, 1977-1980), Team B’s analysis of weapons systems was later proven to be false. "I would say that all of it was fantasy… if you go through most of Team B’s specific allegations about weapons systems, and you just examine them one by one, they were all wrong." The CIA director at the time, George H. W. Bush, concluded that the Team B approach set "in motion a process that lends itself to manipulation for purposes other than estimative accuracy." Brookings Institute Scholar Raymond Garthoff concurs; he wrote that "In retrospect, and with the Team B report and records now largely declassified, it is possible to see that virtually all of Team B’s criticisms … proved to be wrong. On several important specific points it wrongly criticized and ‘corrected’ the official estimates, always in the direction of enlarging the impression of danger and threat."

Dr. Pipes is a Zionist and former longtime Professor at Harvard who opposed detente`. But my focus is not on Richard Pipes. It’s a bit on his son, Daniel Pipes, also a Harvard trained Ph.D.,  a Neoconservative and a Zionist. He founded himself his own Think Tank in Philadelphia called the Middle East Forum. He’s like William Kristol – transcending being a chip off the old block. Pipes and Kristol have raised the ante by taking their fathers’ ideas to the next level. But Daniel Pipes isn’t why I’m writing this either, though his campaign against academia [Campus Watch] is well worth delving into. And his idea of fomenting change in the Middle East through Islamic Dissidents is a good topic too. But, his former Assistant Director of The Middle East Forum is why I’m writing this. It’s Eleana Benador, the CEO of Benador Associates. In 2001, she left The Middle East Forum and reappeared in New York managing a speaker’s Bureau. She’s placed her speakers everywhere with tireless energy. They are the Neoconservatives and the very Arab Dissidents her former boss wanted to get on the map.

So, we have Daniel Pipes [The Middle East Forum, Campus Watch], son of Richard [Team B]; William Kristol [AEI, The Weekly Standard], son of Irving [AEI, Neoconservative Founder]; and Eleana Benador [Benador Associates], protege` of Daniel [Middle East Forum] – all working tirelessly for one thing, a Global war to destroy Islam [before it destroys us]. Just like their Dads worked on a Global War to destroy Communism [before it destroyed us]. They’re part of the modern Team B, along with plenty of others. And Eleana is the publicist. As I mentioned before, she doesn’t even care if she’s wrong, so long as she is on what she thinks is the right side:

The only problem is, this modern version of Team B controls the country’s foreign policy right now. And they don’t care if they’re wrong. All they care about is the direction we’re going in. Apocolyptic Crackpots are like that. Apocolypse or Bust! …