Team B

I needed something to take my mind off of the absolute gut-punching feeling I still have from the Patriots' Super Bowl loss, so I decided to write something. Anything. I get the feeling that hollow pit in my stomach isn't going away anytime before the start of the next NFL postseason, so the best I can do in the meantime is try to chase away the pain with good old-fashioned anger. LS's Philby post reminded me of this, which is one of the worst excesses in the history of American intelligence: Team B.

In 1974, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (sound familiar? Same guy. Don's pretty unique in American history in that he held the same job two decades apart and managed to be completely fucking wrong about the most important parts of his job both times) claimed that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, the Soviet Union was building up massive armies, missiles and atomic stores in preparation for an apocalyptic war with the United States, advocated by borderline-mad hardline party members and generals. Meanwhile, peaceniks and nearsighted analysts in the U.S. couldn't even see that this was happening!

Another person, professor Albert Wohlstetter said the same thing. Some people consider Wohlstetter one of the founding members of the neocon movement, since he taught at the University of Chicago at the same time that a lot of members of the movement were also teaching or attending school. It's also important to remember that this guy (along with Kissinger) was partly the inspiration for the character Dr. Strangelove. In political terms, that's like saying, "This guy was the inspiration for Dr. Lecter."

Anyway, like a lot of neoconservatives in 2002 and 2003, they managed to scare the everloving fuck out of enough Americans that Team B was created by then Director of the CIA George H. W. Bush. The point behind it was to establish a different evaluation of Russia's military actions, to test if what Rumsfeld and company said was true.

Their conclusions were an entire fabrication, counter to every CIA estimate that preceded them and every conclusion wrought by the end of the Cold War. Declassified documents prove that their assurances were panics and terrors aimed at the American people. I hate to quote Wikipedia, but it simplifies things:

The CIA and other agencies who watched the Soviet Union strongly disagreed with Rumsfeld, calling Rumsfeld's position a "complete fiction" and claiming that the Soviet Union was disintegrating from within, could barely afford to feed its own people, and would collapse within a decade or two if simply left alone.

If this sounds familiar, it's because it's exactly what happened. If it sounds unfamiliar, it's because you're someone who grew up biting hard on the line that the people in Team B, Ronald Reagan and neoconservatives have been feeding you: that Ronnie won the Cold War. Why, without massive tax cuts to the rich and a pointless and wasteful mass increase in defense spending and a concomitant MASS increase in the national debt, the Russians might have conquered us instead! We had to outspend them! Nevermind the fact that most of the generals on the Russian equivalent of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had to say about the last two decades of the Soviet Union: that they were always terrified, because they were always one large riot or two days of panic or mass desertion away from total collapse.

But that's getting ahead of ourselves. What about Team B and what does this have to do with Philby?

The most important thing here is a concept called "Confirmation Bias." It's a psychological term that you probably suffer from. Hell, I know I do. You think, "Geez, that guy's kind of a dick." So every time you hang out with him and he does something dickish, you say, "Yep, total dick." Then, when he does something nice, you don't notice. Why? Because you're too busy looking for when he's next going to be a dick. Or you rationalize it. You say, "That guy's only being nice now because he knows we think he's a dick, so he's buttering us up for the moment he can act like a dick again." In simple terms: that guy's acting nice because he's a dick.

Think of it another way. You want to find out what the best burger restaurant in town is. You, almost everyone you know, the two food reviewers for the town newspapers, the food reviewer from the local rag that prints News of the Weird, and a bunch of online reviews say that Sal's Burgers is the best burger joint. But you know ten people who think that Mort's Burger Shack is better. You give those ten people $10 each to buy a burger at both places and tell you which one's better. They all tell you it's Mort's Burger Shack. Big motherfucking surprise right there.

Here's the rub: this is exactly what happened with Team B. The people appointed to Team B were all people who already believed what Team B was supposed to investigate. We needed to know, "Is the Soviet Union secretly MUCH more powerful than we think and planning to attack us?" and to prove that we asked a bunch of people who already had that opinion whether it was true. That's like asking OJ if he thinks someone else murdered Nicole and then handing him the keys to the LAPD crime lab to figure it out.

You can Wikipedia Team B and find out a bunch of this stuff pretty quickly. It's absolutely nuts. The best example probably comes from Star Wars/SDI. The CIA and other analysts said that the USSR had too many economic problems and was too disorganized to be able to produce an effective missile defense system like Star Wars/SDI. Team B said, "HAHAHAHAHA! THAT'S WHAT THEY WANTED YOU TO THINK! THEY ALREADY HAVE IT!!!!"

Sound familiar? The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. In fact, it's proof of the opposite. If you want to go back to the OJ example, it'd be like saying, "Of course he killed Nicole! Because there's not a shred of evidence proving he did. Look how crafty he is. The best proof he did it is how perfectly he removed all proof he did it." Or pick any other example. If you read this post and disagree with it, that's just proof of how well you're hiding how true you think it is. The best proof that you're gay as hell is that you're married. The best proof you love Lifetime Original Movies is how you never seem to watch them. You must hate America because you go around not protesting it. What the fuck are you trying to hide???

This goes back to the Philby thing. Once he was outed as a double agent, people wanted (that's probably not the right word, but in some way they sort of needed) to believe there were tons of other double agents out there. The proof they were there was, in fact, all the proof that wasn't there. All the people who were squeaky clean — they must be the guilty ones. There's an old joke in intelligence history: "How can you tell someone's crooked? They've never done anything wrong." We tore our own intelligence networks apart and discredited dozens of loyal operatives because we wanted to find wrongdoing and were willing to believe the absence of it proved its existence. The absence of evidence is not....

Here's the rub again: we can do this with anything. Spies, Iraq, terrorists, Putin. Think about all those liberals you hear about who want to destroy and weaken America. What's the proof of that? That they devote their lives to being public servants by running for elected office in America. Ohmigod, that's so fucking spooky. They're like Manchurian candidates. Maybe you are.

And you.

And you.

And you.

Kim Philby

Cindy is really into British TV. I think I've seen more Britcoms in the last two years than American sitcoms. Come to think of it, maybe that's not so bad. Every time I see a new American sitcom these days, it either came from a Britcom or sucks. Except 30 Rock. That's amazing. Someone squeezed the finest juices out of their mind grapes to make that show.

The bad part is that she's started branching out into British drama series, usually movie miniseries, with names like, "Love in a Cold Climate" and "Acting Cross with Tea," and "Looking Like Wet Gray Asshole." B/C I'd never heard of John le Carre, I groaned when I opened up the Netflix and found out she'd gotten, "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy."

I admit it. I'm an idiot.

If you guys haven't seen it, rent it. It's amazing. Alec Guinness stars as George Smiley. He's the anti-Bond and 10x more authentic. He's this rumpled older spy who's trying to figure out who the mole is in British Intelligence. His boss, Control, has died or left the service (you REALLY have to pay attention in this series, b/c important info can come quietly and out of nowhere, and they really don't repeat it. It's also about 6 hours long and builds slowly, but believe me it's worth it), but Control knew there was a mole. Now a key defector and an agent have been shot.

Smiley has to piece it together. No guns (except a little at the end), no car chases. Just walking, talking, reading, listening. It's the classic chess game.

What's amazing is, it's real. Most of the story of TTSP comes from the story of Kim Philby and the Cambridge Five.

Now I don't know if any brits will wind up reading this, so sorry if you're reading it and saying, "WELL, DUH," but it's not like they teach British Intelligence History in high school over here. If they find intelligence in high school, someone drives it out with great force. Using them brain bits is, like the british would say, just not done. Same goes for gum chewing.

From 1941 to 1963, Kim Philby was probably the most important counter-espionage agent in Britain's MI6. He was a big swinging dick in a field where they say, "Your dick, do not let it swing. It draws attention. Put that away for crissakes. I said- oh, god. CHECK, please. I don't even care if that's your big beef and you're makin the cheddar- you, sir, have disgraced Arby's for the last time."

He not only handled their double agents within Russia and tried to find Russian double agents within Britain and other NATO nations, he also trained most of the counter-espionage personnel in Britain. He even trained James Jesus Angleton (should have changed his name officially to "James - JESUS! - Angleton"), who went on to become the CIA's chief counter-espionage agent for something like three decades. Angleton wrote the book on CIA counterintelligence and is probably the most legendary CIA agent ever.

The trouble is, Kim Philby had been a Russian agent since 1933, a member of a group of 5 Cambridge students recruited by the Russians in the 1920s and 30s.

So stop and think about this for a second. The guy in charge of rooting out Russian spies in Britain was a Russian spy himself. Instead of working to root them out, he worked to cover them up. He also worked to cover them up within the United States. It was probably Philby who worked with his pals Burgess and Maclean to pass American nuclear secrets to Moscow. And not only that, but he was in charge of turning Russian agents into double-agents for the West. Only he probably pretended to do this, creating fake agents and then passing on useless information while sending USEFUL information about the west to Moscow. On top of ALL this, he trained America's best counterintelligence agent.

When he defected in 1963, it's putting it mildly to say the shit hit the fan. It's like someone took all the manure runoff from every Tyson chicken farm in Arkansas and dumped it onto the spinning blade of 20 Apache helicopters while someone inside them played the old Circle Jerks song and screamed, "I love the smell of WAAAUUUUUUGHGHHHHHHH."

Angleton basically turned into a paranoid nutball. His mentor betrayed him, America and Britain. Angleton saw spies everywhere, double agents in the shadows and meaning where there wasn't any. The Americans became convinced that everything in MI6 was rotten. Angleton acted like he was trying to cut a tumor out of himself. He hacked the careers of other CIA agents to bits and basically destroyed british intelligence for about a decade by making their bosses throw out agents AND intel. He destroyed people. Philby proved he didn't have ANY perspective on counterespionage, and it's like he went so far in the opposite direction that he lost all perspective that way too.

I can guess what you're gooing to say. "Where are you going with this?" Well, think about it. Philby told one lie, but one lie was enough for the CIA and MI6 to almost destroy themselves, with their own hands.

What's amazing about Philby is that he could have done almost nothing for Russia. He could have just BEEN there and talked to other people, and he still would have torn the CIA/MI6 apart. He could have been rating playmate of the month. B/C if you have a bunch of people who believe themselves and their own judgment, then make them totally question everything about it, they'll implode.

They'll tear themselves apart just out of fear and anger at being wrong even once. If they find other double agents, that just proves they were right to start worrying, and they keep looking. If they don't find any other double agents, they must not be looking hard enough. They're still out there. They could be everywhere. As a matter of fact, the guy in charge of finding double agents hasn't found any. Maybe he's just like Philby. Maybe he doesn't find any b/c he doesn't WANT to find any. Maybe it's HIM. Let's get him.

What's totally amazing about Philby is that it's like playing the Kevin Bacon game. He's connected to everything, b/c intelligence is connected to everything. Our countries make decisions based on it every day. They trust the intelligence they get, and they talk to the people in intelligence. So once you start doubting one part of it, the doubt never stops. It spreads to everything.

I don't want to seem insensitive or anything, but when you look at Philby and then look at Angleton's paranoia about it after the fact, the really mindblowing thing is that the paranoia ever stopped. There's no reason to stop questioning, except at some point you have to.