Introducing 'Team B', the successful effort made by Cold War hardliners to commandeer Carter's foreign policy:

Admiral Thomas Moorer (ret. ) was head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff [in the Nixon Administration, 1970-74] and a member of Team B, a group assembled in the mid-1970s by then-CIA director George Bush to study Soviet military capabilities and intentions. The Team B findings laid the foundation for the revitalization of the Committee on the Present Danger. [1]

In January 1976, in response to pressure from the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) to examine the way the CIA arrived at its National Intelligence Estimates, George Bush, then the newly appointed Director of Central Intelligence, agreed to a test in which both the CIA (called Team A) and a panel of non-CIA experts (called Team B) would independently analyze the same underlying material on three national security issues.

Team B members, all approved by the CIA, were hardly outsiders to the national security establishment. They included political scientist Richard Pipes, General Daniel Graham, who had headed the Defense Intelligence Agency, Paul Nitze, a former Deputy Secretary of Defense, General John Vogt, the former Air Force Chief of Staff, Thomas Wolfe, a top Rand Corporation executive, General Jasper Welsh, the head of the Air Force's system analysis and Paul Wolfowitz, who was at the Arms Control Agency. [2]

... President Ford granted permission to CIA Director George Bush to appoint an alternative team from outside the intelligence agencies to appraise the official estimates of Soviet capabilities and intentions. The stakes were high. ....If the hardline view [the Team-B view] were to prevail in the estimates and a new Soviet Threat were accepted within national security circles, then policy would be apt to return to the basic contours of Containment Militarism, albeit in an upbeat form in keeping with the modernization that had taken place over time in strategic and conventional forces.

... In June, 1976, Bush put into motion the adversary procedure, appointing a panel of seven outsiders to go over the same classified data as the regular CIA estimators and to develop their own independent judgments of Soviet capabilities and intentions. Pipes was chosen to chair what came to be known as the Team B panel. Nitze was among the seven, as were Foy Kohler and William Van Cleave [see also George W Bush/VanCleave and Reagan/VanCleave.] All four were members of the CPD (Committee on the Present Danger). The three remaining outside members making up Team B included Daniel Graham, Thomas Wolfe of the RAND Corporation, and John Vogt, Jr. a retired Air Force General. In addition, Team B included five officials still in government service at the time of the analysis - CIA archcritic Major General George Keegan, Air Force Brigadeer General Jaspar A. Welch, Paul D. Wolfowitz of the Arms Control and Disarmament Administration, and Seymour Weiss from the State Department... The charge that the intelligence community led by the CIA was 'soft' on the Russians was accepted as a given prior to even looking at the classified data. Herbert 'Pete' Scoville, a former CIA deputy director, charged that Team B was 'dedicated to proving that the Russians are twenty feet tall.'

... What the Team B panel had on its side were the arguments, as well as the architects, of a doctrine that had governed American foreign policy in the generation of its greatest influence on the world. - Jerry Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis: The Committee on the Present Danger and the Politics of Containment (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1983), page 199

The consequences?

High-ranking officials of the CIA referred to the new estimates of Soviet strategic objectives that would be waiting on Carter's desk when he arrived in Washington as the most 'somber' in more than a decade. A top level military intelligence office who read the estimate commented: "it was more than somber - it was grim. It flatly states the judgment that the Soviet Union is seeking superiority over the United States forces.

Somehow, as these things tend to happen, the bleak estimates and the Pipes Report - the undiluted Team B analysis - were leaked to the press at the end of December. This may have been precipitated by the nomination of Harold Brown as Secretary of Defense instead of the hardliner's choice, James Schlesinger. After all, Brown had gone on record as skeptical of claims [about Soviet intentions].

Donald Rumsfeld, in his swan song as Defense Secretary [under Ford], disagreed [with Kissinger]. Bolstering the Team B analysis, he argued that while 'absolute proof eludes us about the intentions of Soviet leaders... no doubt exists about the capabilities of the Soviet armed forces." Furthermore, those capabilities,according to Rumsfeld, 'indicate a tendency toward war fighting... rather than for the more modish Wetern models of deterrence through mutual vulnberability." (201)