Team B vs. C.I.A.

By William Safire
The New York Times, 20 July 1998

Imagine you are the next U.S. President and this crisis arises:

The starving army of North Korea launches an attack on South Korea, imperiling our 30,000
troops. You threaten massive air assault; Pyongyang counterthreatens to put a nuclear missile into
Hawaii. You say that would cause you to obliterate North Korea; its undeterred leaders dare you
to make the trade. Decide.

Or this crisis: Saddam Hussein invades Saudi Arabia. You warn of Desert Storm II; he says
he has
a weapon of mass destruction on a ship near the U.S. and is ready to sacrifice Baghdad if you are
ready to lose New York. Decide.

Or this: China, not now a rogue state, goes into an internal convulsion and an irrational
warlord
attacks Taiwan. You threaten to intervene; within 10 minutes, ICBM’s are targeted on all major
U.S. cities. Decide.

Before you do, remember this: In 1998, the C.I.A. told your predecessor that it was highly
unlikely that any rogue state “except possibly North Korea” would have a nuclear weapon capable
of hitting any of the “contiguous 48 states” within 10 to 12 years. (That’s some exception;
apparently our strategic assessors are untroubled at the prospect of losing Pearl Harbor again.)

You have no missile defense in place. The C.I.A. assured your predecessor you would have
five
years’ warning about other nations’ weapons development before you would have to deploy a
missile defense.

But the C.I.A. record of prediction is poor. President Bush was assured that Saddam would
have
no nuclear capability for the next 10 years; when we went in after he invaded Kuwait, however,
we discovered Iraq to be less than a year away. And India, despite our expensive satellite
surveillance, surprised us with its recent explosion.

Six months ago, Congress decided to get a second opinion about our vulnerability. Donald
Rumsfeld, a former Defense Secretary, was named to lead a bipartisan Commission to Assess the
Ballistic Threat to the United States. Its nine members are former high Government officials,
military officers and scientists of unassailable credibility. Cleared for every national secret, these
men with command experience had the advantage denied to compartmented C.I.A. analysts.

The unclassified summary of this “Team B’s” 300-page report was released last week and is a
shocker. The direct threat to our population, it concluded, “is broader, more mature and evolving
more rapidly than has been reported in estimates and reports by the intelligence community.”

Not only are Iran and other terrorist states capable of producing a nuclear-tipped missile
within
five years of ordering it up; they are capable of skipping the testing and fine-tuning we have
depended on as our cushion to get defenses up. That means, the commission concluded, the
warning time the U.S. will have to develop and deploy a missile defense is near zero.

Let’s set aside our preoccupation with executive privileges and hospital lawsuits long enough
to
consider the consequences of Team B’s judgment. The United States no longer has the luxury of
several years to put up a missile defense, as we complacently believed. If we do not decide now to
deploy a rudimentary shield, we run the risk of Iran or North Korea or Libya building or buying
the weapon that will enable it to get the drop on us.

Rumsfeld’s commission was charged only with assessing the new threat and not about what
we
should do to meet the danger.

Nine serious men concluded unanimously that our intelligence agencies, on which we spend
$27
billion a year, are egregiously misleading us. Smiling wanly, the Director of Central Intelligence,
George Tenet, responded that “we need to keep challenging our assumptions.”

Wrong; we need to defend ourselves from the likely prospect of surprise nuclear blackmail. A
first
step is Aegis, a naval theater defense (named after the goatskin shield of Zeus). But that requires
this President to redefine a 1972 treaty with the Soviets that he thinks requires us to remain
forever naked to all our potential enemies.

The crisis is not likely to occur as Clinton’s sands run out. His successor will be the one to pay
—
in the coin of diplomatic paralysis caused by unconscionable unpreparedness — for this President’s
failure to heed Team B’s timely warning in 1998.