As for this topic, please refer to my previous postings respectively （http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily2/20121231）（http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily2/20130103）(http://pub.ne.jp/itunalily/?search=20519&mode_find=word&keyword=Richard+Pipes). (Lily)
1. http://blog.muskingumarchives.org/?p=85
Muskingum University Archives Blog
Honoring the History of the Long Magenta Line
Richard Pipes’ first impressions of New Concord
3 March 3 2012
by Archives
Richard Pipes is a Professor Emeritus at Harvard, and one of the nation’s leading experts on Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. But in 1940 he was a young immigrant, a Jewish refugee, whose family had barely escaped Poland just as the Nazis invaded. The family managed to make it to Italy, then to the United States where a friend of a friend invited them to stay on their farm in upstate New York. This is the story of how he came to Muskingum College.
We spent the rest of the summer on the farm. In the hayloft where John and I slept, I chanced on a copy of the 1914-1915 Who’s Who in America. In the back were more than one hundred pages of advertisements for prep schools and colleges. It gave me what I needed: the names and addresses of institutions of higher learning. I purchased one hundred penny postcards and with the help of a friend typed identical requests to as many colleges telling them that I was a war refugee eager to enroll but my financial means were very limited and I required both a scholarship and assurance of gainful employment. I did not know the difference between Harvard and a small rural college. Most of the institutions did not respon; several responded negatively. But four offered me what I wanted: Butler College in Indianapolis, the university of Tennessee, Erskine College in South Carolina, and Muskingum college in Ohio. I had no criteria for distinguishing among them: what swayed me in favor of Muskingum was a map on its full-page advertisement in Who’s Who which contrived to make its seat in New Concord, Ohio, look like the geographic center of the United States.
Father was not happy about my leaving for college because he wanted me to help him out in his new business. I now understand him better than I did then, when any further delay in getting a higher education seemed to me perverse and unreasonable. I had grand if unfocused ambitions: I did not know at all what I wanted to do, but I knew with absolute certainty that it was not making money. I felt that God had saved me from the hell of German-ruled Poland for some higher purpose, for an existence beyond mere survival and self-gratification. This feeling has never left me. Had father taken me aside and explained that while he understood and approved of my desire to study, in our present economic situation my help was indispensable, at any rate, for a while, I might possibly have yielded for a year or so. But in our culture fathers did not treat teenage sons as adults.
On September 7, 1940, I left by bus for Ohio. I arrived in New Concord the following day, a Sunday morning. The campus was deserted because virtually all the denizens of the college as well as the village were in church. I checked in at the local hostelry and took a stroll. The buildings, all of red brick, some dating to the mid-nineteenth century, were situated on knolls in a hilly landscape. They made an agreeable impression although the rustic college in no way resembled the universities of Warsaw or Florence. My one shock came when I saw engraved over the entrance of a classroom building a passage from the book of Exodus where God addressed Moses: “Put off they shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.” It occurred to me that perhaps I had inadvertently landed in a theological seminary. But later in the afternoon, the vice president of the college picked me up and drove me around the campus, and all seemed well.
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Robert W. Hunter on the moral dangers of shooting marbles
2．http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/80739/trotsky-the-jew#comments
Trotsky the Jew
Joshua Rubenstein’s new biography obscures the Russian revolutionary’s violent extremism while overemphasizing his Jewishness
by Richard Pipes
17 October 2011
According to Amazon.com, there are presently in existence 199 biographies of Leon Trotsky—almost a quarter as many as there are of Marilyn Monroe (810). Joshua Rubenstein’s new work, Leon Trotsky: A Revolutionary’s Life, is a specialized one issued by a Yale series called “Jewish Lives,” which is “designed to illuminate the imprint of eminent Jewish figures” on culture, broadly defined. There is no question that genetically speaking, Trotsky was a Jew. But personally and culturally, he emphatically denied any connection with the Jewish people. Quoting from my book Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime:Trotsky—the satanic “Bronstein of Russian anti-Semites”—was deeply offended whenever anyone presumed to call him a Jew. When a visiting Jewish delegation appealed to him to help fellow Jews, he flew into a rage: “I am not a Jew but an internationalist.” He reacted similarly when requested by Rabbi Eisenstadt of Petrograd to allow special flour for Passover matzos, adding on this occasion that “he wanted to know no Jews.” At another time he said that the Jews interested him no more than the Bulgarians. According to one of his biographers [Baruch Knei-Paz], after 1917 Trotsky “shied away from Jewish matters” and “made light of the whole Jewish question.”
So, it is questionable whether Trotsky can be properly treated as an “eminent Jewish figure.” He certainly would have resented it. He had no idea what caused anti-Semitism, claiming it to be “one of the more malignant convulsions of capitalism’s death agony,” as if it had not existed in the Middle Ages, long before capitalism was born.
He was a renegade. This did not help him to make a successful career in the party. He was resented as a Jew as well as someone who during the decade preceding the Bolshevik power seizure relentlessly criticized Lenin and his followers. His prickly personality also was of no help, contrasting with Stalin’s joviality during the years the two struggled for power.
The situation for Jews in pre-1917 Russia, which shaped Trotsky’s personal and political trajectory, was very difficult. Except for rich merchants and those with a university degree, they were confined to the so-called Pale of Settlement. They were excluded from government posts and altogether treated as second-rate subjects. On occasion, they were victims of vicious pogroms in the course of which they were beaten and killed and their homes looted. This caused many of them to emigrate and the rest to turn to left-wing ideologies. The prevalent opinion was that the Bolsheviks were heavily supported by Jews, but the results of the only free elections held under Bolshevik rule, those to the Constituent Assembly in November 1917, revealed that the Bolshevik vote came not from the Pale of Settlement but mainly from the armed forces and the cities of Great Russia, where hardly any Jews lived. The census of the Communist Party conducted in 1922 showed that only 959 Jews had joined it before 1917. If subsequently the proportion of Jews in the Communist Party exceeded their proportion in the country’s population, so too was that the case in Italy under Fascism. It simply attests to the fact that the Jews are a very articulate and politically engaged people.
Rubenstein, the author of a life of the Soviet writer and journalist Ilya Ehrenburg, has written a competent summary biography of his protagonist. The book adds little that is new to the existing literature, and it has some strange omissions. Trotsky’s role in the Civil War during which he commanded the Red Army—arguably his main contribution to the Bolshevik cause—is disposed of in a few cursory pages. I also found strange the author’s offhand assertion that under the Bolsheviks “the proletariat had succeeded in gaining control of the government.” Where and when? The workers had next to no influence on the policies of the Soviet government, which were managed by intellectuals.
In view of the murderous paranoia of Stalin, it is tempting to gloss over Trotsky’s own ruthlessness and to depict him as a humane counterpart to his rival. This is quite unwarranted. Without a question, Trotsky was better-educated than Stalin and was altogether a more cultivated human being. But his radicalism was not much different than Stalin’s. Rubenstein cites a statement by Trotsky as the motto of his book: “Nothing great has been accomplished in history without fanaticism.” Really? In art, in science, in economics? In fact, fanaticism, which is uncritical belief in something, has always obstructed true accomplishment.
Let us scrutinize briefly Trotsky’s views on such key issues as forced labor, terror, and concentration camps—the outstanding features of the Stalinist regime. On forced labor, Trotsky had this to say in 1921:
It is said that compulsory labor is unproductive. This means that the whole socialist economy is doomed to be scrapped, because there is no other way of attaining socialism except through the command allocation of the entire labor force by the economic center, the allocation of that force in accord with the needs of a nation-wide economic plan.
I imagine that if Stalin was present at the Third All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions, at which Trotsky made these remarks, he must have nodded in agreement. In view of Trotsky’s own sentiments, it is likely that if he had succeeded Lenin, we would have witnessed in the Soviet Union much the same oppression of labor as he did under Stalin.
Trotsky had no qualms about introducing into Soviet Russia political terror. Barely two months after the Bolsheviks had seized power, he said:
There is nothing immoral in the proletariat finishing off the dying class. This is its right. You are indignant … at the petty terror which we direct at our class opponents. But be put on notice that in one month at most this terror will assume more frightful forms, on the model of the great revolutionaries of France. Our enemies will face not prison but the guillotine.
He defined the guillotine (plagiarizing the French revolutionary Jacques Hébert) as a device that “shortens a man by the length of a head.” This grisly remark, incidentally, is cited by Rubenstein.
Trotsky demonstrated that this was not empty rhetoric during the rebellion at the Kronshtadt naval base in February 1921. The sailors of Kronshtadt were early and prominent supporters of the Bolsheviks, helping them in October 1917 to seize power in Petrograd and later to defend that city from the Whites. But the sailors gradually became disenchanted with the new regime. In March 1921 they formed a Provisional Revolutionary Committee and refused to obey Moscow’s orders. Upon arriving in Petrograd, Trotsky demanded that the mutineers throw themselves on the mercy of the Soviet government and ordered that the families of the mutineers be taken hostage; one of the regime’s appeals to the rebels threatened that if they continued to resist they would “be shot like partridges.” Trotsky organized the military assault on the island where the base was located: When some of the Red Army soldiers defected to the rebels, he ordered the execution of every fifth soldier who disobeyed orders. The island eventually fell. Trotsky was not proud of his role in this event, as demonstrated by the fact that in his memoirs he hardly mentioned it.
Though the fact is little-known, it was Trotsky, not Stalin, who introduced into Soviet Russia the concentration camp, an institution that under Stalin developed into the monstrous Gulag empire. Trotsky did this in May 1918 in connection with a rebellion of Czech ex-prisoners of war who, en route to the Far East to sail to the western front, rebelled when an attempt was made to disarm them. In August of that year, to protect the railroad line running from Moscow to Kazan, Trotsky ordered a network of concentration camps to be constructed to isolate “sinister agitators, counterrevolutionary officers, saboteurs, parasites, and speculators” who were not executed or subjected to other penalties. Lenin fully agreed with these measures. By 1919, concentration camps were established in every provincial capital. In 1923, Russia had 315 concentration camps with 70,000 inmates.
These facts will not be found in Rubenstein’s book, which, without being an apologia, nevertheless tends to glide over the more savage features of Trotsky’s thought and behavior. My own judgment of Trotsky coincides with that of George Orwell, made in 1939 when Trotsky was still alive and cited in this book:
[Trotsky] is probably as much responsible for [the Russian dictatorship] as any man now living, and there is no certainty that as dictator he would be preferable to Stalin, though undoubtedly he has a much more interesting mind. The essential act is the rejection of democracy—that is of the underlying values of democracy; once you have decided upon that, Stalin—or any rate someone like Stalin—is already on the way.
・Richard Pipes is emeritus professor of history at Harvard University and the author of 22 books.
3．http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1027049/posts
A Hardliner's Life (Cold War Sovietologist Richard Pipes, Daniel Pipes' father)
Tech Central Station | Kenneth Silber
23 November 2003
by Freedom Poster
Richard Pipes is an historian who made, as well as studied, history. An expert on Soviet and Russian history, Pipes helped change the direction of U.S. foreign policy. In the 1970s, he headed a government panel of outside experts brought in to assess Soviet nuclear strategy; his "Team B" unit (as opposed to the CIA's "Team A") concluded that the Soviet posture was more threatening than U.S. policy had assumed.
In the early 1980s, Pipes worked in the Reagan administration, heading the East European and Soviet desk of the National Security Council. As such, he pushed for a hard line toward the Soviets, arguing that U.S. pressure could induce changes in the Communist system. This flew in the face of conventional analysis, and received considerable vindication in the years up to and through the Soviet Union's collapse.
Pipes' stint in Washington, notable as it was, is just one episode in a remarkable life, set forth in his new autobiography Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger (Yale University Press, $30.00). The book's title is Latin for "I have lived." The subtitle evokes his intellectual nonconformity and disagreements with other historians and Soviet experts. Pipes spent most of his career at Harvard, and Vixi contains interesting reflections on that institution and academic life more broadly.
But Pipes' early years make for particularly engrossing reading. Born in Poland in 1923, and Jewish, he was 16 when the Nazis invaded. Pipes and his parents survived the bombardment and initial occupation of Warsaw. Weeks later, using forged travel documents, they obtained passage to Italy (then under the Fascists but only beginning, under German pressure, to implement anti-Jewish laws). From there, they were able to get visas for the United States, arriving by ship in July 1940. Numerous relatives and friends who were left behind died in the Holocaust.
These experiences instilled in Pipes a loathing for not only Nazism but all totalitarianism, an attitude that helped shape his later thinking about the Soviet Union. Pipes attended a small college in Ohio, and then learned Russian while serving stateside in the Army. After the war, he married and began raising a family. He studied Russian history at Harvard, later joining the faculty. Over the years, his friendships included luminaries such as philosopher Isaiah Berlin, critic Edmund Wilson and diplomat George Kennan (but at one Pipes dinner party, these three had nothing interesting to say to each other).
Pipes wrote prolifically and traveled widely. He formed contacts with Russian dissidents, and was observed keenly by Soviet intelligence organs. At Harvard, he watched the campus unrest of the 1960s with revulsion. He found himself at odds with "revisionist" historians who used Marxist methodology and viewed the Soviets sympathetically. Visiting China in the late 1970s, Pipes met Communist officials who worried that the U.S. was too weak in its policies toward the USSR.
Now 80, Pipes has retired from teaching but maintains an active writing career; he writes poignantly in the book's final pages about retirement, aging, life and death. His intellectual interests include the philosophical and literary as well as the historical, and his erudition is formidable. In the late 1990s, he turned his attention more toward economics, writing a book on the relationship between property rights and freedom.
He seems to have relatively little affinity for science and technology, a disposition not uncommon among conservative intellectuals. It would be interesting to know what role he thinks technology (including not just missile defense but everyday gadgets like copiers and fax machines) played in the Soviet Union's downfall. Pipes is correct, though, in criticizing the naïveté displayed by some scientists (such as those who wrote for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists) regarding Soviet behavior during the Cold War.
The current struggles on the world scene are touched upon only glancingly in Vixi. Pipes observes that European, particularly German and French, resistance to U.S. efforts to counter the Soviet Union foreshadowed similar resistance to U.S. efforts against terrorism. Noting that many Polish Jews under German occupation failed initially to grasp the depth of Nazi hatred, Pipes thinks many Israelis were similarly deluded about Palestinian enmity in recent years. (His son, Daniel Pipes, is a noted and controversial expert on the Muslim world, known for advocating a hard line against terrorism.)
Altogether, Vixi tells the story of a life well lived, one in which thought and action combined to improve the world.
Let us hope that Victor Davis Hansen and this man's son, Daniel Pipes, have some effect on history as well.
4. http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=richard_pipes
Profile: Richard Pipes
Positions that Richard Pipes has held: Head of the Nationalities Working Group
Related Entities: Parent Daniel Pipes
Member Nationalities Working Group
Richard Pipes was a participant or observer in the following events:
Early 1970s: Neoconservatives Coalesce around Conservative Democratic Senator
The recently formed neoconservatives, bound together by magazine publisher Irving Kristol (see 1965), react with horror to the ascendancy of the “McGovern liberals” in the Democratic Party, and turn to conservative senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-WA) for leadership. Jackson calls himself a “muscular Democrat”; others call him “the Senator from Boeing” for his strong support of the US defense industry. Jackson merges a strong support of labor and civil rights groups with a harsh Cold War opposition to the Soviet Union. Jackson assembles a staff of bright, young, ideologically homogeneous staffers who will later become some of the most influential and powerful neoconservatives of their generation, including Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Elliott Abrams, Abram Shulsky, and Paul Wolfowitz. Jackson’s office—“the bunker,” to staffers—becomes a home for disaffected, ambitious young conservative ideologues with a missionary zeal for change. Jackson presides over the cadre in an almost fatherly fashion.
History of Two Dictators - Many of Jackson’s neoconservative disciples came of age either fighting two foreign dictators—Stalin and/or Hitler—or growing up with family members who fought against them. [UNGER, 2007, PP. 35-41] Wolfowitz’s father’s family perished in the Holocaust; he will later say that what happened to European Jews during World War II “shaped a lot of my views.” [NEW YORK TIMES, 4/22/2002] Feith will tell the New Yorker in 2005, “[My] family got wiped out by Hitler, and… all this stuff about working things out—well, talking to Hitler to resolve the problem didn’t make any sense.” Most neoconservatives like Feith and Wolfowitz tend to look to military solutions as a first, not a last, resort. To them, compromise means appeasement, just as Britain’s Neville Chamberlain tried to appease Hitler. Stefan Halper, a White House and State Department official in the Nixon, Ford, and Reagan administrations, will say of the neoconservatives, “It is use force first and diplomacy down the line.”
Former Trotskyites - On the other hand, many neoconservatives come to the movement from the hardline, socialist left, often from organizations that supported Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky (see Late 1930s - 1950s). Trotskyites accused Stalin of betraying the purity of the Communist vision as declaimed by Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. “I can see psychologically why it would not be difficult for them to become [conservative] hard-liners,” says Harvard Sovietologist Richard Pipes, himself a hardliner whose son, Daniel Pipes, will become an influential neoconservative. “It was in reaction to the betrayal.” Many neoconservatives like Stephen Schwartz, a writer for the Weekly Standard, still consider themselves to be loyal disciples of Trotsky. Richard Perle is a Trotskyite socialist when he joins Jackson’s staff, and will always practice what author Craig Unger calls “an insistent, uncompromising, hard-line Bolshevik style” of policy and politics. Like Trotsky, Unger writes, the neoconservatives pride themselves on being skilled bureaucratic infighters, and on trusting no one except a small cadre of like-minded believers. Disagreement is betrayal, and political struggles are always a matter of life and death. [UNGER, 2007, PP. 35-41]
Entity Tags: Stefan Halper, Stephen Schwartz, Richard Pipes, Richard Perle, Neville Chamberlain, Abram Shulsky, Douglas Feith, Daniel Pipes, Craig Unger, Paul Wolfowitz, Henry (“Scoop”) Jackson, Elliott Abrams, Leon Trotsky, Irving Kristol
Timeline Tags: Neoconservative Influence
1976: Neoconservatives, Cold Warriors Revive Committee on the Present Danger; Group Heralds Ideological Split in GOP
A group of hardline Cold Warriors and neoconservatives revive the once-influential Committee on the Present Danger (CPD) in order to promote their anti-Soviet, pro-military agenda. The CPD is an outgrowth of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM), itself a loose amalgamation of neoconservatives and Democratic hawks.
Confederation of Establishment Conservatives, Neoconservatives, and Hawkish Democrats - The CPD is led by Eugene Rostow, the head of the CDM’s foreign policy task force. Others include CIA spymaster William Casey; iconic Cold War figure and “Team B” member Paul Nitze (see January 1976 and Late November, 1976); established neoconservatives such as Norman Podhoretz and Team B leader Richard Pipes (see Early 1976); rising neoconservative stars like Jeane Kirkpatrick, Midge Decter, Donald Brennan, and Richard Perle; conservative Democrats such as Nitze and former Secretary of State Dean Rusk; established Republicans such as House representative Claire Booth Luce (R-CT), David Packard, Nixon’s deputy secretary of defense, Andrew Goodpaster, Eisenhower’s National Security Adviser, millionaire Richard Mellon Scaife; and famed military officers such as Admiral Elmo Zumwalt. [UNGER, 2007, PP. 58-59; SCOBLIC, 2008, PP. 99-100]
No 'Realists' - Author Craig Unger will write: “Ultimately, in the CPD, one could see the emerging fault lines in the Republican Party, the ideological divide that separated hardline neocons and Cold Warriors from the more moderate, pragmatic realists—i.e. practitioners of realpolitik such as Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, George H. W. Bush, and James Baker. All of the latter were conspicuously absent from the CPD roll call.” [UNGER, 2007, PP. 58-59]
Advocates US First Strike against USSR - Like the CDM and Team B, the CPD believes that the entire concept of detente with the Soviet Union is an abject failure, and the only way to deal with the ravenously hegemonical USSR is through armed confrontation. Like Team B (see November 1976), the CPD insists, without proof, that the USSR has made far greater strides in increasing the size and striking power of its nuclear arsenal; and like Team B, no amount of debunking using factual information stops the CPD from making its assertions (see November 1976). The US must drastically increase its stockpile of nuclear and conventional weapons, it maintains, and also be prepared to launch a nuclear first strike in order to stop the USSR from doing the same. In April 1977, the CPD evokes the familiar neoconservative specter of appeasement by writing, “The Soviet military build-up of all its armed forces over the past quarter century is, in part, reminiscent of Nazi Germany’s rearmament in the 1930s.” Author J. Peter Scoblic will observe, “The CPD saw itself as a collection of [Winston] Churchills facing a country of [Neville] Chamberlains.” In 1978, the CPD predicts, “The early 1980s threaten to be a period of Soviet strategic nuclear superiority in which America’s second-strike capability will become vulnerable to a Soviet pre-emptive attack without further improvements in US weapons.” [UNGER, 2007, PP. 58-59; SCOBLIC, 2008, PP. 99-100]
Spreading Propaganda - According to a 2004 BBC documentary, the CPD will produce documentaries, publications, and provide guests for national talk shows and news reports, all designed to spread fear and encourage increases in defense spending, especially, as author Thom Hartmann will write, “for sophisticated weapons systems offered by the defense contractors for whom neocons would later become lobbyists.” [COMMON DREAMS (.ORG), 12/7/2004; BBC, 1/14/2005]
Entity Tags: Nixon administration, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Midge Decter, Paul Nitze, Richard Pipes, Richard Perle, William Casey, Thomas Hartmann, James A. Baker, Richard Mellon Scaife, Norman Podhoretz, Henry A. Kissinger, Eugene V. Rostow, Central Intelligence Agency, Brent Scowcroft, George Herbert Walker Bush, Claire Booth Luce, Committee on the Present Danger, Coalition for a Democratic Majority, David Dean Rusk, Elmo Zumwalt, Craig Unger, Eisenhower administration, David Packard, Donald Brennan, Andrew Goodpaster
Timeline Tags: US International Relations, Neoconservative Influence
Early 1976: Neoconservative ‘Team B’ of Outside Intelligence Analysts Created
After George H. W. Bush becomes the head of the CIA (see November 4, 1975 and After), he decides to break with previous decisions and allow a coterie of neoconservative outsiders to pursue the allegations of Albert Wohlstetter that the CIA is seriously underestimating the threat the USSR poses to the US (see 1965), allegations pushed by hardliners on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.
Internal Opposition - Bush’s predecessor, William Colby, had steadfastly refused to countenance such a project, saying, “It is hard for me to envisage how an ad hoc ‘independent’ group of government and non-government analysts could prepare a more thorough, comprehensive assessment of Soviet strategic capabilities—even in two specific areas—than the intelligence community can prepare.” (Bush approves the experiment by notating on the authorization memo, “Let ‘er fly!”) The national intelligence officer in charge of the National Intelligence Estimate on the USSR, Howard Stoertz, will later recall: “Most of us were opposed to it because we saw it as an ideological, political foray, not an intelligence exercise. We knew the people who were pleading for it.” But Bush, on the advice of deputy national security adviser William Hyland, agrees to the exercise. Hyland says the CIA had been getting “too much flak for being too peacenik and detentish…. I encouraged [Bush] to undertake the experiment, largely because I thought a new director ought to be receptive to new views.” The neocon team of “analysts” becomes known as “Team B,” with “Team A” being the CIA’s own analytical team. It is unprecedented to allow outsiders to have so much access to highly classified CIA intelligence as Bush is granting the Team B neocons, so the entire project is conducted in secret. CIA analyst Melvin Goodman later says that President Ford’s chief of staff, Dick Cheney, is one of the driving forces behind Team B. The outside analysts “wanted to toughen up the agency’s estimates,” Goodman will say, but “Cheney wanted to drive [the CIA] so far to the right it would never say no to the generals.” [DUBOSE AND BERNSTEIN, 2006, PP. 208; UNGER, 2007, PP. 53-55]
Political Pressure - Ford’s political fortunes help push forward the Team B experiment. Ford has been a strong proponent of detente with the Soviet Union, but his poll numbers are sagging and he is facing a strong presidential primary challenger in Governor Ronald Reagan (R-CA), an avowed hardliner. Reagan is making hay challenging Ford’s foreign policy, claiming that the so-called “Ford-Kissinger” policies have allowed the Soviet Union to leap ahead of the US both militarily and geopolitically. In response, Ford has lurched to the right, banning the word “detente” from speeches and statements by White House officials, and has been responsive to calls for action from the newly reforming Committee on the Present Danger (CPD—see 1976). In combination, these political concerns give Bush the justification he wants to push forward with the Team B experiment.
Three B Teams - According to Carter administration arms control official Anne Cahn, there are actually three “B” teams. One studies Soviet low-altitude air defense capabilities, one examines Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) accuracy, and the third, chaired by Harvard Sovietologist Richard Pipes, examines Soviet strategic policy and objectives. It is Pipes’s team that becomes publicly known as “Team B.” [BULLETIN OF ATOMIC SCIENTISTS, 4/1993]
Assembling the Team - Pipes fits in well with his small group of ideological hardliners. He believes that the USSR is determined to fight and win a nuclear war with the US, and he is bent on putting together an analysis that proves his contention. He asks Cold War icon Paul Nitze, the former Secretary of the Navy, to join the team. Richard Perle, a core member, has Pipes bring in Paul Wolfowitz, one of Wohlstetter’s most devout disciples. Wolfowitz immediately begins arguing for the need to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Europe. The “incestuous closeness” of the members, as Cahn later calls it, ensures that the entire group is focused on the same goals as Wohlstetter and Pipes, with no dissension or counterarguments. Other key members include William von Cleave and Daniel Graham. The entire experiment, Cahn will write, “was concocted by conservative cold warriors determined to bury détente and the SALT process. Panel members were all hard-liners,” and many are members of the newly reconstituted “Committee on the Present Danger” (see 1976). The experiment is “leaked to the press in an unsuccessful attempt at an ‘October surprise’ [an attempt to damage the presidential hopes of Democrat Jimmy Carter—see Late November, 1976]. But most important, the Team B reports became the intellectual foundation of ‘the window of vulnerability’ and of the massive arms buildup that began toward the end of the Carter administration and accelerated under President Reagan.” Team B will formally debate its CIA adversaries, “Team A,” towards the end of the year (see November 1976). [BULLETIN OF ATOMIC SCIENTISTS, 4/1993; QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH, 5/2006 ; UNGER, 2007, PP. 53-55]
'Designed to be Prejudiced' - In 2008, author J. Peter Scoblic will note, “Team B was designed to be prejudiced.” Pipes, the Soviet experts, holds a corrosive hatred of the Soviet Union, in part stemming from his personal experiences as a young Jew in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, and his belief that the Soviet system is little different from the Nazis. When asked why his team is stacked with hardline opponents of arms negotiations and diplomacy of any kind with the USSR, Pipes replies, “There is no point in another, what you might call, optimistic view.” Scoblic will write, “Team B, in short, begged the question. Its members saw the Soviet threat not as an empirical problem but as a matter of faith.” He will add, “For three months, the members of Team B pored over the CIA’s raw intelligence data—and used them to reaffirm their beliefs.” [SCOBLIC, 2008, PP. 93-94]
Entity Tags: Richard Perle, Richard Pipes, William Hyland, Paul Nitze, William Colby, J. Peter Scoblic, Paul Wolfowitz, George Herbert Walker Bush, ’Team A’, ’Team B’, Anne Cahn, Albert Wohlstetter, Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, Central Intelligence Agency, Howard Stoertz
Timeline Tags: US International Relations, Neoconservative Influence
November 1976: Team B Chief Says Facts Don’t Matter, Understanding Soviet ‘Mindset’ Does Matter
The neoconservatives of the “Team B” intelligence analysis team (see Early 1976) are unconcerned with the heavy criticism being leveled at their findings about the Soviet threat (see November 1976). Richard Pipes, the head of Team B, says that just because their facts are all wrong, their conclusions from those erroneous “facts” are still correct. Those errors are “just details,” he says. “The important thing was reading the Soviet mindset,” he asserts. “We were saying they don’t want war, but if they do have war, they will resort immediately to nuclear weapons.” Regardless of the errors, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld will hail the findings (see Late November 1976). [UNGER, 2007, PP. 57]
Entity Tags: Richard Pipes, ’Team B’, Donald Rumsfeld
Timeline Tags: US International Relations, Neoconservative Influence
November 1976: Team B Browbeats CIA Analysts, ‘Proves’ Soviets Far Ahead of US in Military, Nuclear Capabilities
A team of young, mid-level CIA and DIA analysts, informally dubbed “Team A,” debates the neoconservative/hardline group of outside “analysts” known as “Team B” (see Early 1976) over the CIA’s estimates of Soviet military threats and intentions. The debate is a disaster for the CIA’s group. Team B uses its intellectual firepower and established reputations of members such as Richard Pipes and Paul Nitze to intimidate, overwhelm, and browbeat the younger, more inexperienced CIA analysts. “People like Nitze ate us for lunch,” recalls one member of Team A. “It was like putting Walt Whitman High versus the [NFL’s] Redskins. I watched poor GS-13s and GS-14s [middle-level analysts with modest experience and little real influence] subjected to ridicule by Pipes and Nitze. They were browbeating the poor analysts.” Howard Stoertz, the national intelligence officer who helped coordinate and guide Team A, will say in hindsight, “If I had appreciated the adversarial nature [of Team B], I would have wheeled up different guns.” Team A had prepared for a relatively congenial session of comparative analysis and lively discussion; Team B had prepared for war.
Ideology Trumps Facts - Neither Stoertz nor anyone else in the CIA appreciated how thoroughly Team B would let ideology and personalities override fact and real data. While CIA analysts are aware of how political considerations can influence the agency’s findings, the foundation of everything they do is factual—every conclusion they draw is based on whatever facts they can glean, and they are leery of extrapolating too much from a factual set. Team A is wholly unprepared for B’s assault on their reliance on facts, a line of attack the CIA analysts find incomprehensible. “In other words,” author Craig Unger will write in 2007, “facts didn’t matter.” Pipes, the leader of Team B, has argued for years that attempting to accurately assess Soviet military strength is irrelevant. Pipes says that because it is irrefutable that the USSR intends to obliterate the US, the US must immediately begin preparing for an all-out nuclear showdown, regardless of the intelligence or the diplomatic efforts of both sides. Team B is part of that preparation. [BULLETIN OF ATOMIC SCIENTISTS, 4/1993; UNGER, 2007, PP. 53-57] Intelligence expert John Prados, who will examine the contesting reports, later says that while the CIA analysts believe in “an objective discoverable truth,” the Team B analysts engaged in an “exercise of reasoning from conclusions” that they justify, not in factual, but in “moral and ideological terms.” According to Prados’s analysis, Team B had no real interest in finding the truth. Instead, they employed what he calls an adversarial process similar to that used in courts of law, where two sides present their arguments and a supposedly impartial judge chooses one over the other. Team B’s intent was, in essence, to present the two opposing arguments to Washington policy makers and have them, in author J. Peter Scoblic’s words, “choose whichever truth they found most convenient.” [SCOBLIC, 2008, PP. 98]
Attacking the Intelligence Community - The first sentence of Team B’s report is a frontal assault on the US intelligence community. That community, the report says, had “substantially misperceived the motivations behind Soviet strategic programs, and thereby tended consistently to underestimate their intensity, scope, and implicit threat.” Team B writes that the intelligence community has failed to see—or deliberately refused to see—that the entire schema of detente and arms limitations negotiations are merely elements of the Soviet push for global domination.
Fighting and Winning a Nuclear War - Team B writes that the Soviets have already achieved measurable superiority in nuclear weaponry and other military benchmarks, and will use those advantages to cow and coerce the West into doing its bidding. The Soviets worship military power “to an extent inconceivable to the average Westerner,” the report asserts. The entire Soviet plan, the report goes on to say, hinges on its willingness to fight a nuclear war, and its absolute belief that it can win such a war. Within ten years, Team B states, “the Soviets may well expect to achieve a degree of military superiority which would permit a dramatically more aggressive pursuit of their hegemonial objectives.” [SCOBLIC, 2008, PP. 94-95]
Lack of Facts Merely Proof of Soviets' Success - One example that comes up during the debate is B’s assertion that the USSR has a top-secret nonacoustic antisubmarine system. While the CIA analysts struggle to point out that absolutely no evidence of this system exists, B members conclude that not only does the USSR have such a system, it has probably “deployed some operation nonacoustic systems and will deploy more in the next few years.” The absence of evidence merely proves how secretive the Soviets are, they argue. [BULLETIN OF ATOMIC SCIENTISTS, 4/1993; UNGER, 2007, PP. 53-57] Anne Cahn, who will serve in the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in the Carter administration, later says of this assertion, “They couldn’t say that the Soviets had acoustic means of picking up American submarines, because they couldn’t find it. So they said, well maybe they have a non-acoustic means of making our submarine fleet vulnerable. But there was no evidence that they had a non-acoustic system. They’re saying, ‘we can’t find evidence that they’re doing it the way that everyone thinks they’re doing it, so they must be doing it a different way. We don’t know what that different way is, but they must be doing it.‘… [The fact that the weapon doesn’t exist] doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. It just means that we haven’t found it yet.” Cahn will give another example: “I mean, they looked at radars out in Krasnoyarsk and said, ‘This is a laser beam weapon,’ when in fact it was nothing of the sort.… And 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.… I don’t believe anything in Team B was really true.” [BULLETIN OF ATOMIC SCIENTISTS, 4/1993; COMMON DREAMS (.ORG), 12/7/2004; BBC, 1/14/2005]
Soviet Strike Capabilities Grossly Exaggerated - Team B also hammers home warnings about how dangerous the Soviets’ Backfire bomber is. Later—too late for Team A—the Team B contentions about the Backfire’s range and refueling capability are proven to be grossly overestimated; it is later shown that the USSR has less than half the number of Backfires that B members loudly assert exist (500 in Team B’s estimation, 235 in reality). B’s assertions of how effectively the Soviets could strike at US missile silos are similarly exaggerated, and based on flawed assessment techniques long rejected by the CIA. The only hard evidence Team B produces to back their assertions is the official Soviet training manual, which claims that their air-defense system is fully integrated and functions flawlessly. The B analysts even assert, without evidence, that the Soviets have successfully tested laser and charged particle beam (CPB) weapons. [BULLETIN OF ATOMIC SCIENTISTS, 4/1993; QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH, 5/2006 ] (The facility at Semipalatansk that is supposedly testing these laser weapons for deployment is in reality a test site for nuclear-powered rocket engines.) [SCOBLIC, 2008, PP. 96]
Fundamental Contradiction - One befuddling conclusion of Team B concerns the Soviets’ ability to continue building new and expensive weapons. While B acknowledges “that the Soviet Union is in severe decline,” paradoxically, its members argue that the threat from the USSR is imminent and will grow ever more so because it is a wealthy country with “a large and expanding Gross National Product.”
Allegations 'Complete Fiction' - Cahn will say of Team B’s arguments, “All of it was fantasy.… [I]f 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 lambasts Team B’s report as “complete fiction.” CIA director George H. W. Bush says that B’s approach “lends itself to manipulation for purposes other than estimative accuracy.” His successor, Admiral Stansfield Turner, will come to the same conclusion, saying, “Team B was composed of outsiders with a right-wing ideological bent. The intention was to promote competition by polarizing the teams. It failed. The CIA teams, knowing that the outsiders on B would take extreme views, tended to do the same in self-defense. When B felt frustrated over its inability to prevail, one of its members leaked much of the secret material of the proceedings to the press” (see Late November, 1976). Former CIA deputy director Ray Cline says Team B had subverted the National Intelligence Estimate on the USSR by employing “a kangaroo court of outside critics all picked from one point of view.” Secretary of State Henry Kissinger says that B’s only purpose is to subvert detente and sabotage a new arms limitation treaty between the US and the Soviet Union. [BULLETIN OF ATOMIC SCIENTISTS, 4/1993; COMMON DREAMS (.ORG), 12/7/2004; BBC, 1/14/2005; QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH, 5/2006 ; UNGER, 2007, PP. 53-57]
Costs of Rearmament - In 1993, after reviewing the original Team B documents, Cahn will reflect on the effect of the B exercise: “For more than a third of a century, assertions of Soviet superiority created calls for the United States to ‘rearm.’ In the 1980s, the call was heeded so thoroughly that the United States embarked on a trillion-dollar defense buildup. As a result, the country neglected its schools, cities, roads and bridges, and health care system. From the world’s greatest creditor nation, the United States became the world’s greatest debtor—in order to pay for arms to counter the threat of a nation that was collapsing.” [BULLETIN OF ATOMIC SCIENTISTS, 4/1993] Former Senator Gary Hart (D-CO) will agree: “The Pro-B Team leak and public attack on the conclusions of the NIE represent but one element in a series of leaks and other statements which have been aimed as fostering a ‘worst case’ view for the public of the Soviet threat. In turn, this view of the Soviet threat is used to justify new weapons systems.” [QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH, 5/2006 ]
Entity Tags: Howard Stoertz, Henry A. Kissinger, Stansfield Turner, Richard Pipes, J. Peter Scoblic, Ray Cline, George Herbert Walker Bush, Craig Unger, Defense Intelligence Agency, ’Team A’, Gary Hart, Anne Cahn, ’Team B’, Carter administration, Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Paul Nitze, Central Intelligence Agency
Timeline Tags: US International Relations, Neoconservative Influence
Late November, 1976: Team B Breaches Security to Successfully Whip up Fears of Soviet Threat
Although the entire “Team B” intelligence analysis experiment (see Early 1976, November 1976, and November 1976) is supposed to be classified and secret, the team’s neoconservatives launch what author Craig Unger will call “a massive campaign to inflame fears of the red menace in both the general population and throughout the [foreign] policy community—thanks to strategically placed leaks to the Boston Globe and later to the New York Times.” Times reporter David Binder later says that Team B leader Richard Pipes is “jubilant” over “pok[ing] holes at the [CIA]‘s analysis” of the Soviet threat. Team B member John Vogt calls the exercise “an opportunity to even up some scores with the CIA.” [UNGER, 2007, PP. 57] Team member George Keegan tells reporters, “I am unaware of a single important category in which the Soviets have not established a significant lead over the United States… [This] grave imbalance in favor of Soviet military capability had developed out of a failure over the last 15 years to adjust American strategic thinking to Soviet strategic thinking, and out of the failure of the leadership of the American intelligence community to ‘perceive the reality’ of the Soviet military buildup.” Keegan’s colleague William van Cleave agrees, saying that “overall strategic superiority exists today for the Soviet Union,” and adds, “I think it’s getting to the point that, if we can make a trade with the Soviet Union of defense establishments, I’d be heartily in favor of it.” [SCOBLIC, 2008, PP. 95]
Used to Escalate Defense Spending - The experiment is far more than a dry, intellectual exercise or a chance for academics to score points against the CIA. Melvin Goodman, who heads the CIA’s Office of Soviet Affairs, will observe in 2004: “[Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld won that very intense, intense political battle that was waged in Washington in 1975 and 1976. Now, as part of that battle, Rumsfeld and others, people such as Paul Wolfowitz, wanted to get into the CIA. And their mission was to create a much more severe view of the Soviet Union, Soviet intentions, Soviet views about fighting and winning a nuclear war.” Even though Wolfowitz’s and Rumsfeld’s assertions of powerful new Soviet WMD programs are completely wrong, they use the charges to successfully push for huge escalations in military spending, a process that continues through the Ford and Reagan administrations (see 1976) [COMMON DREAMS (.ORG), 12/7/2004; BBC, 1/14/2005] , and resurface in the two Bush administrations. “Finally,” Unger will write, “a band of Cold Warriors and neocon ideologues had successfully insinuated themselves in the nation’s multibillion-dollar intelligence apparatus and had managed to politicize intelligence in an effort to implement new foreign policy.” [UNGER, 2007, PP. 57-58]
Kicking Over the Chessboard - Former senior CIA official Richard Lehman later says that Team B members “were leaking all over the place… putting together this inflammatory document.” Author and university professor Gordon R. Mitchell will write that B’s practice of “strategically leaking incendiary bits of intelligence to journalists, before final judgments were reached in the competitive intelligence exercise,” was another method for Team B members to promulgate their arguments without actually proving any of their points. Instead of participating in the debate, they abandoned the strictures of the exercise and leaked their unsubstantiated findings to the press to “win” the argument. [QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH, 5/2006 ]
'One Long Air Raid Siren' - In 2002, defense policy reporter Fred Kaplan will sardonically label Team B the “Rumsfeld Intelligence Agency,” and write: “It was sold as an ‘exercise’ in intelligence analysis, an interesting competition—Team A (the CIA) and Team B (the critics). Yet once allowed the institutional footing, the Team B players presented their conclusions—and leaked them to friendly reporters—as the truth,” a truth, Team B alleges, the pro-detente Ford administration intends to conceal. Kaplan will continue, “The Team B report read like one long air-raid siren: The Soviets were spending practically all their GNP on the military; they were perfecting charged particle beams that could knock our warheads out of the sky; their express policy and practical goal was to fight and win a nuclear war.” Team B is flatly wrong across the board, but it still has a powerful impact on the foreign policy of the Ford administration, and gives the neoconservatives and hardliners who oppose arms control and detente a rallying point. Author Barry Werth will observe that Rumsfeld and his ideological and bureaucratic ally, White House chief of staff Dick Cheney “drove the SALT II negotiations into the sand at the Pentagon and the White House.” Ford’s primary opponent, Ronald Reagan, and the neocons’ public spokesman, Senator Henry Jackson, pillory Ford for being soft on Communism and the Soviet Union. Ford stops talking about detente with the Soviets, and breaks off discussions with the Soviets over limiting nuclear weapons. Through Team B, Rumsfeld and the neocons succeed in stalling the incipient thaw in US-Soviet relations and in weakening Ford as a presidential candidate. [WERTH, 2006, PP. 341]
Entity Tags: Melvin A. Goodman, New York Times, Paul Wolfowitz, Reagan administration, Ronald Reagan, Richard Lehman, William van Cleave, John Vogt, Richard Pipes, Richard (“Dick”) Cheney, Henry (“Scoop”) Jackson, Gordon R. Mitchell, Bush administration (43), Boston Globe, Barry Werth, Gerald Rudolph Ford, Jr, Bush administration (41), Central Intelligence Agency, ’Team B’, David Binder, Fred Kaplan, Craig Unger, Ford administration, George Keegan, Donald Rumsfeld
Timeline Tags: US International Relations, Neoconservative Influence
1977-1981: Nationalities Working Group Advocates Using Militant Islam Against Soviet Union
In 1977 Zbigniew Brzezinski, as President Carter’s National Security Adviser, forms the Nationalities Working Group (NWG) dedicated to the idea of weakening the Soviet Union by inflaming its ethnic tensions. The Islamic populations are regarded as prime targets. Richard Pipes, the father of Daniel Pipes, takes over the leadership of the NWG in 1981. Pipes predicts that with the right encouragement Soviet Muslims will “explode into genocidal fury” against Moscow. According to Richard Cottam, a former CIA official who advised the Carter administration at the time, after the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1978, Brzezinski favored a “de facto alliance with the forces of Islamic resurgence, and with the Republic of Iran.” [DREYFUSS, 2005, PP. 241, 251 - 256]
Entity Tags: Richard Pipes, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Nationalities Working Group
Timeline Tags: Complete 911 Timeline, US International Relations, Neoconservative Influence, War in Afghanistan
November 26, 2001: Defense Official Asks for ‘Team B’-Like Assessment of Terrorist Intelligence
Assistant Secretary of Defense Peter Rodham, who works in Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith’s office, asks Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to “[o]btain approval of creation of a Team B” (see Early 1976) which “[t]hrough independent analysis and evaluation… would determine what is known about al-Qaeda’s worldwide terror network, its suppliers, and relationship to states and other international terrorist organizations.” The 1976 Team B exercise was a deeply flawed effort by conservatives and neoconservatives to second-guess the US intelligence community’s findings about Soviet military and intelligence capabilities (see November 1976). Feith studied under Team B leader Richard Pipes at Harvard, and shares his fundamental distaste and mistrust of US intelligence capabilities. Feith and Wolfowitz believe that “Team B” showed just how limited and misguided the CIA’s intelligence reporting could be, and think that the same “Team B” approach could provide heretofore-unrevealed information about Islamist terrorism. Feith sets about producing a report “proving” a sinister relationship between al-Qaeda and Iraq (see July 25, 2002), while Wolfowitz begins work on what will become the Office of Special Plans (see September 2002). [SCOBLIC, 2008, PP. 218-220]
Entity Tags: Paul Wolfowitz, ’Team B’, Al-Qaeda, Central Intelligence Agency, Douglas Feith, Office of Special Plans, US Department of Defense, Richard Pipes, Peter Rodham
Timeline Tags: Complete 911 Timeline, US International Relations, Neoconservative Influence
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