Following Nixon’s ouster, conservatives set out to purge the intelligence community of CIA analysts who didn’t believe the Soviets were out to conquer the world. Led by Air Force Intelligence Chief Major General George Keegan, they convinced CIA Director George H. W. Bush to give a group of anti-Soviet hard-liners, labeled Team B, unprecedented access to the country’s most sensitive intelligence so that they could challenge the CIA’s findings about the Soviet Union. In the eyes of CIA analysts, Keegan had already discredited himself with fanciful reports of a Soviet-directed energy weapons program that would give the Soviet Union an enormous advantage over the United States. Rebuffed by military and intelligence experts, he went public with his outlandish theories when he retired. He convinced the editors of Aviation Week & Space Technology to write in May 1977, “The Soviet Union has achieved a technical breakthrough in high-energy physics applications that may soon provide it with a directed-energy beam weapon capable of neutralizing the entire United States ballistic missile force and checkmating this country’s strategic doctrine…. The race to perfect directed-energy weapons is a reality.”11 Despite the fact that no such Soviet project existed, the United States began its own space-based laser weapons program in 1978 under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). This eventually led to the much-ballyhooed and incredibly wasteful Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Keegan also incorrectly insisted that the Soviets were building a large-scale civil defense system designed to safeguard much of the Soviet population in the event of a nuclear war. Howard Stoertz, who oversaw the production of National Intelligence Estimates on the Soviet Union, explained why he and others at the CIA objected to this type of outside scrutiny: “Most of us were opposed to it because we saw it as an ideological, political foray, not an intellectual exercise. We knew the people who were pleading for it.”12
Harvard Russia historian Richard Pipes, a virulently anti-Soviet Polish immigrant, was put in charge of Team B. Pipes quickly recruited Paul Nitze and Paul Wolfowitz. According to Anne Cahn, who worked at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency under President Carter, Team B members shared an “apoplectic animosity toward the Soviet Union.”13 They greatly overestimated the USSR’s military spending and capabilities, predicting that the Soviets would have around five hundred Backfire bombers by early 1984, more than double the actual number. They put the most malign interpretation on the Soviets’ intentions, accusing them of using détente as a ruse to gain hegemony. They rejected the CIA assessment that Soviet nuclear capabilities were primarily defensive in nature, designed to deter and retaliate, not attack.
Pipes complained that the CIA assessments “happened to favor détente and to place the main burden for its success on the United States.” He attributed this to the fact that the CIA’s “analytic staff… shared the outlook of U.S. academe, with its penchant for philosophical positivism, cultural agnosticism, and political liberalism.” Actual Soviet behavior, Pipes argued, “indicated beyond reasonable doubt that the Soviet leadership… regarded nuclear weapons as tools of war whose proper employment… promised victory.”14
Pipes’s report found the Soviets far ahead in every strategic category. The CIA dismissed it as “complete fiction.” Cahn concluded, “if you go through most of Team B’s specific allegations about weapons systems,… they were all wrong.”15
On November 5, Team B members debated the CIA Soviet analysts, most of whom were younger and less experienced. One of the CIA participants recalled, “We were overmatched. People like Nitze ate us for lunch.” A CIA official reported, “It was like putting Walt Whitman High versus the Redskins.” The Agency had blundered, Pipes gloated, by pitting “a troop of young analysts, some of them barely out of graduate school” against “senior government officials, general officers, and university professors.” Pipes reported that when Team A’s “champion,” the young analyst Ted Cherry, began his criticism of Team B’s findings, Nitze “fired a question that reduced him to a state of catatonic immobility: we stared in embarrassment as he sat for what seemed an interminable time with an open mouth, unable to utter a sound.”16
Though Bush and his successor, Stansfield Turner, both joined Kissinger in dismissing Team B’s findings, Bush made sure that this harsher assessment of Soviet capabilities and intentions was incorporated into intelligence reports.
This ill-fated intervention in CIA affairs turned more ominous in September 1978 when a former high-level CIA official, John Paisley, went missing after sailing in the Chesapeake Bay. Paisley, who had been deputy director of strategic research, was an expert on Soviet nuclear and other weapons programs, with authority to request launching of spy satellites. He had been the CIA liaison with Team B. His son claimed that he had been responsible for leaking the story of Team B’s existence to the press.17
A week later a badly decomposed body was pulled from the bay and identified as Paisley’s by Maryland police. It had a gunshot wound in the head. The police quickly concluded that it was a case of suicide. But if so, it was a bizarre suicide indeed. The body found had two nineteen-pound diver’s belts strapped across its midsection. It was four inches shorter than the five-foot, eleven-inch Paisley. And, according to writer Nicholas Thompson, “If the body was his, and if he had done himself in, he had chosen an awkward method. Paisley was right-handed, but he would have had to have attached the weights, leaned over the side, and shot himself, execution style, through the left temple.”18
In addition to the investigation by the Maryland State Police, investigations were conducted by the CIA, the FBI, and the Senate Intelligence Committee. Meanwhile, the CIA put out various cover stories, which were quickly discredited. The CIA described Paisley, who had supposedly left the Agency in 1974, as a “part-time consultant with a very limited access to classified information,” a description that a former high-level staffer on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) found “shocking.” “There is no question that Paisley, at the time of his death, had access to highly classified intelligence information,” he informed the Baltimore Sun, which conducted its own three-month investigation.
One former PFIAB White House staffer revealed, “It was Paisley who developed the list of people who would serve on the B Team. It was his job to get these guys clearances… to discuss their backgrounds with us. Then, after the team had been selected, he would schedule the briefings. He shaped the entire process.” The Sun reported that at the time of his death, Paisley was writing a “retrospective analysis” of Team B for an in-house agency publication. Among the papers found on the boat were Paisley’s notes on the history of the project. Other highly classified documents relating to Soviet defense spending and the state of Soviet military readiness were also in his possession.19
Speculation abounded that something more nefarious had occurred. Some CIA insiders told reporters that they believed the KGB had murdered Paisley. Others contended that he was a KGB “mole,” who had been whacked by the CIA.20 Paisley’s wife charged that the body didn’t belong to her estranged husband and hired an attorney and investigator. “My feeling is that something very sinister is happening,” she said, accusing the CIA of telling “lies” about her husband. Two prominent insurance companies initially refused to pay benefits to Mrs. Paisley because of doubts that her husband was actually dead. After a lengthy investigation, the Senate Intelligence Committee decided to keep its report secret. The mystery has never been solved.21