"Crying Wolf" and accusing the Intelligence Community and especially the CIA of "underestimating" a threat, is a long-established gambit used by ideologically driven conservatives to drum up support for their jingoist policies. The current discussions about the famous 16 words in President Bush's State of the Union message resonates loudly with the attempts by right-wingers to alter the CIA's analyses of Soviet military strengths and objectives in the mid -1970s, the infamous Team B episode. Anne Hessing Cahn's richly documented account of that episode, Killing Détente; The Right Attacks the CIA, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998, makes clear how dangerous it is to tailor threat assessments to make political statements.

Two things tie the present situation and the earlier period together: people and methodology. In both cases, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle played key roles. They were instrumental in backing the bodies that could be used to dispute more nuanced views of threats facing the United States in both instances and they provided the intellectual methodology that distorted the available intelligence. By aggressively over-emphasizing worst-case scenarios, they argued for policies based on judgments that were later shown to be wrong.

As Dr. Cahn's book makes clear, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of its archives, it was shown that the CIA's estimates were more accurate than Team B's account of events which was wrong on almost every count. Today, we have likewise learned that reports of Iraqi attempts to acquire uranium from Niger were based on forgeries, recognized as such by the CIA.

Alternative threat assessments can be useful if they are as balanced and as objective as possible. But when they are ideologically driven, they can force the Intelligence Community to lean towards policy rather than rely on hard evidence. When that happens policy makers are depriving themselves of the best available information, misleading the American public, and endangering the lives of our fighting forces. Killing Détente, The Right Attacks the CIA provides a trenchant body of evidence outlining this process and the dangers that it conceals.

Killing Detente tells the story of a major episode of intelligence intervention in politics in the mid-1970s that led to the derailing of detente between the Soviet Union and the United States and to the resurgence of the Cold War in the following decade. Although the basic outlines of the story are already known, Anne Cahn succeeded in getting many previously declassified documents released and uses these, supplemented by seventy interviews with principal players, to add much greater depth and detail to our understanding of this troubling event in U.S. history.

In the mid-1970s a very controversial intelligence estimate was performed by people outside the government. They were given access to our most secret files and leaked their report to the press when Jimmy Carter was elected president. This study, which became known as "The Team B Report," became the intellectual forbearer of the "window of vulnerability" and led to the demise of detente between the Soviet Union and the United States. Team B was the fundamental turning point in renewing the Cold War in the 1980s. The debate over the leaked report moved the center of arms control policy strongly to the right from where it had been during the years of detente. Team B presaged the triumph of Ronald Reagan and a military buildup on a scale unprecedented in peacetime that left present and future generations with the most crippling debt in our nation's history.

This book is about attempts to destroy improved relations between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1970s. Those opposed to the easing of tensions between the two countries used every means available, including accusing the Central Intelligence Agency with understating the threat posed by the Soviets. Charging the CIA this way seems preposterous now.