Ever hear of "Team B?"

Edward Jay Epstein explains what it refers to:

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, included Harvard political scientist Richard Pipes; Gen. Daniel Graham, who had headed the Defense Intelligence Agency; Paul Nitze, a former deputy secretary of defense; Gen. John Vogt, the former Air Force chief of staff; Thomas Wolfe, a top Rand Corp. executive; Gen. Jasper Welsh, the head of the Air Force's system analysis; and Paul Wolfowitz, who was at the Arms Control Agency.

The three topics selected by the National Security Council were:

• Soviet missile accuracy
• The ability of low-flying U.S. bombers to penetrate Soviet defenses
• Overall Soviet strategic capabilities and intentions

A fourth proposed topic, the detectability of U.S. submarines, was rejected by the Navy. The exercise began in August 1976 and ended in December 1976, with both sides presenting their conclusion to PFIAB.

The same data produced two startlingly different results. On the issue of Soviet missile accuracy, for example, Team A concluded that Soviet missiles were relatively inaccurate (¼ of a nautical mile), and therefore did not pose a major threat to U.S. silos; whereas Team B concluded that Soviet missiles may have attained sufficient accuracy (1/15th of a nautical mile) to threaten these same silos. ( As Soviet missile testing later revealed. Team B turned out to be correct on this issue.)

The lesson of this extraordinary disputation was not that the Soviet Union had a greater or lesser capacity but that intelligence estimates, no matter how objective they may seem, are an inherently uncertain enterprise, based on questionable assumptions and selective exploitation of sources.

The facts of intelligence work are not like marbles that can be lined up, counted and weighed. They assume different meanings depending on who selects them and orders them into a mosaic. Intelligence estimates are at best, therefore, an incomplete product.

With this background we turn to the report of the interim inspector general of the Department of Defense who is not a fan of independent analysis of the intelligence community's work product by the Department of Defense. The Defense Department undertook just such an analysis in 2002 when the Bush administration wanted to know whether or not Iraq was cooperating with al Qaeda.

"It's healthy to criticize the CIA's intelligence," said former Pentagon policy chief Douglas Feith on "Fox News Sunday." "What the people in the Pentagon were doing was right. It was good government."

It was indeed "good government" to push for a Team B approach to the question of Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, and given the CIA's failure to understand the WMD situation in Iraq, or predict the civil unrest that has followed the overthrow of Saddam, or — going back to 1991 — the closeness to nuclear capacity that Saddam had achieved, skepticism about the reliability of CIA work product seems a very healthy thing indeed. Continued...