Killing Detente

In the mid-1970s a group of people from outside government was handed access to America's most secret files and asked to produce its own estimate of Soviet power. Their conclusions, known as the Team B Report, were leaked to the press after Jimmy Carter's election, and the row that followed helped bring down detente and revive the Cold War. Anne Cahn traces how the report fed the idea of a window of vulnerability, pushed arms control policy sharply to the right and prepared the ground for Ronald Reagan's peacetime military buildup.

The broad outline of the story was already known. Cahn fills it in with documents she succeeded in getting released and seventy interviews with the principal players. It is a sober, pointed history for anyone curious about how intelligence can be bent to political ends.