Team B

Team B
Formation	1976
Founder	George H. W. Bush
Interests	US/Nuclear weapons, USSR/Nuclear weapons
Membership	•  Richard Pipes •  William Van Cleave •  Daniel Graham •  Thomas Wolfe •  John Vogt Jr. •  Foy Kohler •  Paul Nitze •  Seymour Weiss •  Jasper Welch •  Paul Wolfowitz •  Roland Herbst •  John Brett •  John Kirk •  Chuck Stowe •  David Vaughn •  Larry D. Welch •  Charles Lerch •  James Drake •  Daniel Fink
A group of hawks to talk up the Soviet threat.

The Team B exercise was an alternative review of the CIA's National Intelligence Estimates commissioned by George H. W. Bush when he became CIA director in 1976, at the behest of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. It has been described by Tom Barry as a "classic case of threat escalation by hawks determined to increase military budgets and step up the U.S. offensive in the cold war".

Members

Strategic Objectives Panel

• Richard Pipes - team leader
• Prof. William Van Cleave
• Lt. Gen. Daniel Graham
• Dr. Thomas Wolfe
• Gen. John Vogt, Jr.

Advisory Panel

• Foy Kohler
• Paul Nitze
• Ambassador Seymour Weiss
• Maj. Gen. Jasper Welch
• Dr. Paul Wolfowitz

Missile Accuracy Panel

• Roland Herbst - team leader
• John Brett
• John Kirk
• Chuck Stowe
• David Vaughn
• Larry D. Welch

Air Defense Panel

• Charles Lerch - team leader
• James Drake
• Daniel Fink

External Resources

• Anne Hessing Cahn, Killing Detente: The Right Attacks the CIA, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998.
• Team B Strategic Objectives Panel Right Web profile.
• Team B Strategic Initiatives Panel Sourcewatch profile.
• Tom Barry, Remembering Team B, Right Web, 11 February 1984.

 

Related Quotation

Page

Quote

CIA

“[Bush] wielded this heightened power on behalf of the military industrial complex that president Eisenhower had so famously warned against. Politicising the process of intelligence analysis, he imposed a systematic bias that took a new, harder line towards the communist block. This was a direct reversal of the Nixon-Kissinger policy of detente. Under the guidance of Rumsfeld, Cheney, a young Paul Wolfowitz and others who had ascended in the Halloween massacre, Poppy began finding ways to get around the analysts who did not sufficiently hype the Soviet threat. To that end, he created a second analytical team which produced alarming estimates of Soviet military capabilities. The concept was known as Team A - Team B. In this way, Poppy was the father of the analytical gamesmanship his son would use to justify war with Iraq nearly three decades later, under the guidance of the same Rumseld, Cheney and Wolfowitz.”

 

Known members

7 of the 19 of the members already have pages here:

Member	Description
William Van Cleave	US academic member of the Committee on the Present Danger and of Team B
Daniel Graham	Iran-Contra connected CIA/DIA spook
Foy Kohler	US diplomat and cold warrior. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Committee on the Present Danger, Team B, Council on Foreign Relations.
Paul Nitze	US deep politician, hawkish United States Deputy Secretary of Defense.
Richard Pipes	Hawkish cold warrior historian
Seymour Weiss	A neoconservative, a hawk, and an anti-Soviet hard-liner.
Paul Wolfowitz	An "architect" of the invasion of Iraq, World Bank President

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