Richard Pipes

Richard Pipes is Baird Professor of History, Emeritus, at Harvard University. In retirement, he still writes and speaks for the Heritage Foundation, Hudson Institute, and Freedom House; he is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. His son, Donald Pipes, He began teaching at Harvard in 1950, and was director of the Russian Research Center (1968-1973).

In 2004, while he agreed that the Beslan school capture was an atrocity, he distinguished between the motivation of al-Qaeda and that of the Chechens; he supported a Chechen homeland.

In 1981-82 he was a Reagan Administration National Security Council staff adviser on Soviet and East European affairs.

He participated in the 1970s incarnation of the Committee on the Present Danger, which went idle after the Cold War.

In 1976, he chaired the "Team B" alternate study of Soviet intentions for nuclear war, done as a cross-check on Central Intelligence Agency analysis. Some reports said its highly classified report dealt with missile strength, but he disagreed. "It did not deal with 'Soviet military strength' at all, but with Soviet nuclear strategy -- whether the Soviet Union shared the dominant American strategy of mutual assured destruction. Team B concluded on the theoretical and physical evidence that the Russians had instead adopted a war-fighting and war-winning doctrine, which was confirmed after the Soviet Union's collapse." Team B was a model of the approach to intelligence analysis that considers ideology as well as hard data. Pipes had been recommended for the job by Richard Perle, then a staffer to Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson (D-Washington), but, according to Pipes, Perle had no access to its findings.