In an editorial about new CIA director General Michael Hayden today, the Wall Street Journal editorial board slips in some revisionist history on “Team B,” the outside team brought in to provide an alternative analysis of the Soviet threat:

The CIA’s Iraq mistakes have been amply documented. But the agency’s career analysts also got their judgments of the Soviet Union’s condition badly wrong. The Ford Administration had the foresight to bring in outside experts to do a so-called Team B analysis of the Soviet threat in the 1970s, and they got it right.

“[T]hey got it right”? Here’s Fareed Zakaria’s assessment of Team B’s accuracy:

During the early 1970s, hard-line conservatives
pilloried the CIA for being soft on the Soviets. As a result, CIA Director
George Bush agreed to allow a team of outside experts to look at the intelligence
and come to their own conclusions. Team B–which included Paul Wolfowitz–produced
a scathing report, claiming that the Soviet threat had been badly underestimated.

In retrospect, Team
B’s conclusions were wildly off the mark. Describing the Soviet Union,
in 1976, as having “a large and expanding Gross National Product,” it
predicted that it would modernize and expand its military at an awesome
pace. For example, it predicted 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.

The reality was that
even the CIA’s own estimates–savaged as too low by Team B–were, in retrospect,
gross exaggerations. In 1989, the CIA published an internal review of
its threat assessments from 1974 to 1986 and came to the conclusion that
every year it had “substantially overestimated” the Soviet threat along
all dimensions. For example, in 1975 the CIA forecast that within 10 years
the Soviet Union would replace 90 percent of its long-range bombers and
missiles. In fact, by 1985, the Soviet Union had been able to replace
less than 60 percent of them.