Florida Task Force and related efforts that were billed as part of a "war on drugs." In 1975,
President Ford had ordered the CIA to collect intelligence on narcotics trafficking overseas, andalso to "covertly influence" foreign offocials to help US anti-drug activities. How well did Bush (^)
carry out this critical part of his responsibilities?
Poorly, according to a Justice Department "Report on Inquiry into CIA-Related Electronic
Surveillance Activities," which was compiled in 1976, butpublic domain. What emerges is a systematic pattern of coverup that recalls Lapham's spurious which has only partly come into the (^)
arguments in the Leletier case. Using the notorious stonewall that the first responsibility of the CIA
was to shield its own "methods and sources" from being exposed, the agency expressed fear "that
the confidentiality of CIA's overseas collection methods and sources would be in jeopardy should
discovery proceedings require disclosure of the CIA's electronic surveillance activities." [fn 52]This caused "several narcotics invesitgations and'or prosecutions...to be terminated."
It was during 1976 that Bush met the Panamanian leader Manuel Antonio Noriega. According to
Don Gregg, this meeting took place on the edges of a luncheon conference with several other
visiting Panamanian officials.
This all makes an impressive catalogue of debacles in the area of covert operations. But what about
the intelligence product of the CIA, in particular the National Intelligence Estimates that are the
centerpiece of the CIA's work. Here Bush was to oversee a maneuver markedly to enhance the
influence of the pro-Zionist wing of the intelligence community.
As we have already seen, the idea of new procedures allegedly designed to evaluate the CIA's track
record in intelligence analysis had been kicking around in Leo Cherne's PFIAB for some time. In
June, 1976, Bush accepted a proposal from Leo Cherne to carry out an experiment in "competitive
analysis" in the area of National Intelligence Estimates of Soviet air defenses, Soviet missleaccuracy, and overall Soviet strategic objectives. Bush and Cherne decided to conduct the
competitive analysis by commissioning two separate groups, each of which would present and
argue for its own conclusions. On the one, Team A would be the CIA's own National Intelligence
Officers and their staffs. But there would also be a separate Team B, a group of ostensibly
independent outside experts.
The group leader of Team B was Harvard history professor Richard Pipes, who was working in the
British Museum in London when he was appointed by Bush and Cherne. Pipes had enjoyed support
for his work from the office of Senator Henry Jackson, which had been one of the principal
incubators of a generation of whiz kids and think tankers whose entire strategic outlook revolvedaround the stated or unstated premiss of the absolute primacy of supporting Israel in every
imaginable excess or adventure, while frequently sacrificing vital US interests in the process.
The liason between Pipes' Team B and Team A, the official CIA, was provided by John Paisley,
who had earlier served as the liaison between Langley and the McCord-Hunt-Liddy Plumbers. Inthis sense Paisley served as the staff director of the Team A-Team B experiment. Pipes then began (^)
choosing the members of Team B. First he selected from a list provided by the CIA two military
men, Lieutenant General John Vogt and Brigadier General Jasper Welch, Jr., both of the Air Force.
Pipes the added seven additional members: Paul Nitze, Gen. Daniel Graham, the retiring head of the
Defense Intelligence Agency, Professor William van Cleave of the University of SouthernCalifornia, former US Ambassador to Moscow Foy Kohler, Paul Wolfowitz of the Arms Control (^)
and Disarmament Agency, Thomas Wolfe of the RAND Corporation, and Seymour Weiss, a former
top State Department official. Two other choices by Pipes were rejected by Bush.
Team B began meeting during late August of 1976. Paisley and Don Suda provided Team B with