is implimentation of a cabinet level intelligence chief likely to remedy the major faults attributed  by the 911 commission to the cia?  its a question that cannot be answered with a simple yes or no.   a much more germane question--whether the commission focused sufficiently on faulty intelligence attributed to the cia but actually crafted by others--requires less speculation.  unfortunately, the answer is 'no'.  unless and until that changes, the first question is irrelevant because the 'official' intelligence agencies' input and influence have been superceded in the past and are likely to be superceded again by powerful  'challenge' or 'team b' shadow groups.

sound  like the rehashed plot of some cheesy conspiracy flick?  surely does.   in fact, its much worse for being real.

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the story officially begins in may 1976 when the current president's father was head of the cia and gerald ford was in the whitehouse. the cia had prepared a national intelligence estimate (nie) in 1975 that some--like then secretary of defense, donald rumsfeld, found wanting.  rumsfeld--a fierce opponent of detente ala kissinger--felt the cia grossly underestimated the soviet union's capabilities and incorrectly assessed soviet intentions.

during the 1976 primaries, reagan nearly beat ford by claiming  "ford-kissinger" detente was helping the soviets and hurting america.  ford stopped using the word 'detente' and convinced bush to provide cia classified intelligence to a group of outside experts to see if they'd arrive at the same conclusions as those expressed in the nie.  unlike previous cia heads, bush signed off on the project thusly  "Let her fly!! O.K. G.B".  the experts themselves were picked by the president's foreign intelligence advisory board (PFIAB). 

eventually three 'team b' groups were formed and met for the first time in september 1976.  the three areas of investigation were soviet low-altitude air defense capabilities, soviet intercontinental ballistic missile  accuracy and soviet strategic policy and objectives. the third team was chaired by richard pipes, william van cleave (both pipes and van cleave were also members of the committee on present danger), general daniel graham (whose high frontier missile defense system proposal would later inspire the reagan 'star wars' concept), paul nitze, seymour weiss and--soooprise soooprise--paul wolfowitz who was recommended by--soooprise soooprise--richard perle.  it was this last team that came to be known as the 'team b'

right from the beginning there were numerous leaks to the press--not of classified information but team members' conclusions.  given credibility by virtue of publication, the leaks provided a foundation for a decade of foreign policy based also on team b reports rather than the 'flawed' cia analysis they challenged. .  the final reports were finally obtained in 1992 by anne hessing cahn. 

guess what?  cia analysis was flawed but not in the way team b concluded.   the following is excerpted from an article published by ms cahn in an article entitled "the trillion dollar mistake"  Link

 Today, the Team B reports recall the stridency and militancy of the 1970s. Team B accused the CIA of consistently underestimating the "intensity, scope, and implicit threat" posed by the Soviet Union by relying on technical or "hard" data rather than "contemplating] Soviet strategic objectives in terms of the Soviet conception of 'strategy' as well as in light of Soviet history, the structure of Soviet society, and the pronouncements of Soviet leaders."

And when Team B looked at "hard" data, everywhere it saw the worst case. It reported, for instance, that the Backfire bomber "probably will be produced in substantial numbers, with perhaps 500 aircraft off the line by early 1984." (In fact, the Soviets had 235 in 1984.) Team B also regarded Soviet defenses with alarm. "Mobile ABM [anti-ballistic missiles] system components combined with the deployed SAM [surface-to-air missile] system could produce a significant ABM capability." But that never occurred.

Team B found the Soviet Union immune from Murphy's law. They examined ABM and directed energy research, and said, "Understanding that there are differing evaluations of the potentialities of laser and CPB [charged particle beam] for ABM, it is still clear that the Soviets have mounted ABM efforts in both areas of a magnitude that it is difficult to overestimate." (Emphasis in original.)

But overestimate they did. A facility at the Soviet Union's nuclear test range in Semipalatinsk was touted by Gen. George Keegan, Chief of Air Force Intelligence (and a Team B briefer), as a site for tests of Soviet nuclear-powered beam weapons. In fact, it was used to test nuclear-powered rocket engines. According to a Los Alamos physicist who recently toured Russian directed-energy facilities, "We had overestimated both their capability and their [technical] understanding."

Team B's failure to find a Soviet non-acoustic anti-submarine system was evidence that there could well be one. "The implication could be that the Soviets have, in fact, deployed some operational non-acoustic systems and will deploy more in the next few years." It wasn't a question of if the Russians were coming. They were here. (And probably working at the CIA!)

When Team B looked at the "soft" data concerning Soviet strategic concepts, they slanted the evidence to support their conclusions. In asserting that "Russian, and especially Soviet political and military theories are distinctly offensive in character," Team B claimed "their ideal is the 'science of conquest' (nauka pobezhdat) formulated by the eighteenth-century Russian commander, Field Marshal A.V. Suvorov in a treatise of the same name, which has been a standard text of Imperial as well as Soviet military science." Raymond Garthoff, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, has pointed out that the correct translation of nauka pobezhdat is "the science of winning" or the "science of victory." All military strategists strive for a winning strategy. Our own military writings are devoted to winning victories, but this is not commonly viewed as a policy of conquest.

Team B hurled another brickbat: the CIA consistently underestimated Soviet military expenditures. With the advantage of hindsight, we now know that Soviet military spending increases began to slow down precisely as Team B was writing about "an intense military buildup in nuclear as well as conventional forces of all sorts, not moderated either by the West's self-imposed restraints or by SALT." In 1983, then-deputy director of the CIA, Robert Gates, testified: "The rate of growth of overall defense costs is lower because procurement of military hardware-the largest category of defense spending-was almost flat in 1976-1981 . . . [and that trend] appears to have continued also in 1982 and 1983."

While Team B waxed eloquent about "conceptual failures," it was unable to grasp how the future might differ from the past. In 1976 mortality rates were rising for the entire Soviet population, and life expectancies, numbers of new labor entrants, and agricultural output were all declining. Yet Team B wrote confidently, "Within what is, after all, a large and expanding GNP . . . Soviet strategic forces have yet to reflect any constraining effect of civil economy competition, and are unlikely to do so in the foreseeable future." (Emphasis in original.) And When Ronald Reagan got elected, Team B became, in essence, the "A Team."

For more than a third of a century, perceptions about U.S. national security were colored by the view that the Soviet Union was on the road to military superiority over the United States. Neither Team B nor the multibillion dollar intelligence agencies could see that the Soviet Union was dissolving from within.

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

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so what's all this ancient history have to do with today's cia? 

when, in 1981, the cia reported the soviets had assisted the plo with weapons and training but there was no evidence of soviet encouragement or approval of terrorist acts, alexander haig, william casey and soooprise soooprise paul wolfowitz rejected the report as naive and rewrote it to assert the soviets were actively and heavily engaged in fomenting 'revolutionary violence worldwide."   

in 1995, the congress  began second guessing the cia after an nie concluded no rogue nation would be able to field an icbm for at least 15 years--thus undercutting the immediate need for a national missle defense system--a congressional commission was formed to reassess that report.  (the committee was headed by soooprise soooprise: donald rumsfeld).
 
 the latest manifestation involves--what else--the formation of the office of special plans by douglas feith (bush's undersecretary of defense) based on fieths belief the cia had dangerously underestimated iraq's threat to the us. 
 
 in a series of three articles ('rumsfeld's shop') published in 'the american conservative'  starting in december 2003, karen kwiatkowski, lt col. ret usaf--a former senior pentagon  foreign affairs analyst--describes how, in the buildup to the iraq invasion, feith and the neocon civilians set up shop in the pentagon, taking it upon themselves to 'correct' intelligence they felt was flawed because it didn't conform to the administration's preconceptions and craft the plan for war in iraq:  Link  Link   Link  
 
here's a short excerpt:
 
 About that same time, my education on the history and generation of the neoconservative movement had completed its first stage. I now understood that neoconservatism was both unhistorical and based on the organizing construct of “permanent revolution.” I had studied the role played by hawkish former Sen. Scoop Jackson (D-Wash.) and the neoconservative drift of formerly traditional magazines like National Review and think tanks like the Heritage Foundation. I had observed that many of the neoconservatives in the Pentagon not only had limited military experience, if any at all, but they also advocated theories of war that struck me as rejections of classical liberalism, natural law, and constitutional strictures. More than that, the pressure of the intelligence community to conform, the rejection of it when it failed to produce intelligence suitable for supporting the “Iraq is an imminent threat to the United States” agenda, and the amazing things I was hearing in both Bush and Cheney speeches told me that not only do neoconservatives hold a theory based on ideas not embraced by the American mainstream, but they also have a collective contempt for fact.
 
 By August, I was morally and intellectually frustrated by my powerlessness against what increasingly appeared to be a philosophical hijacking of the Pentagon. Indeed, I had sworn an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, but perhaps we were never really expected to take it all that seriously …   
 
 

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if you're looking for answers, i apologize.  all i have is more questions. how have wolfowitz, pearl and rumsfeld managed to hang on and exert their formidable influence on our nation's foreign policy for such a long time--especially in light of their very spotty track record.  is the team b approach (however it manifests itself) the root of problems for which the cia is being held responsible?    who the hell is really in charge in the whitehouse?