Team B - Creation

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 a perceived missile gap. Many conservatives then began a concerted attack on the CIA's annual assessment of the Soviet threat.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld began to make speeches arguing that the Soviets were ignoring Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s treaties and secretly building up their weapons, with the intention of attacking the United States. Rumsfeld used his position to persuade President Gerald Ford to set up an independent inquiry. Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz wanted to create a much more severe view of the Soviet Union, Soviet intentions, Soviet views about fighting and winning a nuclear war.

The organization chosen by the Ford administration to challenge the CIA's analysis was the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB).

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." Colby was removed from his position in the Halloween Massacre; Ford has stated that he, himself, made the decision alone, but the historiography of the "Halloween Massacre" appears to support the allegations that Rumsfeld had successfully lobbied for this.

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.