Paul Wolfowitz

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Paul Wolfowitz : biography

December 22, 1943 –

Career

Arms Control and Disarmament Agency

In the 1970s Wolfowitz served as an aide to Democratic Senator Henry M. Jackson, who influenced several neoconservatives, including Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. Jackson was a Cold War liberal supporting higher military spending and a hard line against the Soviet Union, while also supporting social welfare programs, civil rights, and labor unions.Kit Oldham, , historylink.org (The Online Encyclopedia of Washington State History), August 19, 2003, accessed May 17, 2007.

In 1972 U.S. President Richard Nixon, under pressure from Senator Jackson, dismissed the head of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) and replaced him with Fred Ikle. Ikle brought in a new team including Wolfowitz. Wolfowitz wrote research papers and drafted testimony, as he had previously done at the Committee to Maintain a Prudent Defense Policy. He traveled with Ikle to strategic arms limitations talks in Paris and other European cities. He helped dissuade South Korea from reprocessing plutonium that could be diverted into a clandestine weapons program.

Under President Gerald Ford, the American intelligence agencies came under attack over their annually published National Intelligence Estimate. According to Mann: "The underlying issue was whether the C.I.A. and other agencies were underestimating the threat from the Soviet Union, either by intentionally tailoring intelligence to support Kissinger’s policy of détente or by simply failing to give enough weight to darker interpretations of Soviet intentions." Attempting to counter these claims, the new Director of Central Intelligence, George H.W. Bush formed a committee of anti-Communist experts, headed by Richard Pipes, to reassess the raw data. Based on the recommendation of Richard Perle, Pipes picked Wolfowitz for this committee, which was later called Team B.Sam Tanenhaus,

The team’s 1976 report, which was leaked to the press, stated that "All the evidence points to an undeviating Soviet commitment to what is euphemistically called the ‘worldwide triumph of socialism,’ but in fact connotes global Soviet hegemony," highlighting a number of key areas where they believed the government’s intelligence analysts had failed. According to Jack Davis, Wolfowitz observed later: The B-Team demonstrated that it was possible to construct a sharply different view of Soviet motivation from the consensus view of the [intelligence] analysts and one that provided a much closer fit to the Soviets’ observed behavior (and also provided a much better forecast of subsequent behavior up to and through the invasion of Afghanistan). The formal presentation of the competing views in a session out at [CIA headquarters in] Langley also made clear that the enormous experience and expertise of the B-Team as a group were formidable.Qtd. by Jack Davis, [https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/96unclass/davis.htm "The Challenge of Managing Uncertainty:] Paul Wolfowitz on Intelligence-Policy Relations", Studies in Intelligence 39.5 (1996): 35-42, accessed May 21, 2007. ("Jack Davis served in the Directorate of Intelligence.") [Corrected title.]

Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Regional Programs

In 1977, during the Carter administration, Wolfowitz moved to the Pentagon. He was U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Regional Programs for the U.S. Defense Department, under U.S. Secretary of Defense Harold Brown.

In 1980, Wolfowitz resigned from the Pentagon and became a visiting professor at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University. According to The Washington Post; "He said it was not he who changed his political philosophy so much as the Democratic Party, which abandoned the hard-headed internationalism of Harry Truman, Kennedy and Jackson."Michael Dobbs, , The Washington Post,April 7, 2003, accessed April 16, 2007.