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Richard Pipes, a historian of Russia and Communism at Harvard University, was a key anti-Soviet crusader in the 1970s and 1980s. He served as a consultant to Washington State Democratic Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson (an important early figure in the neoconservative pantheon) in the 1970s, was a member of the 1970s version of the Committee on the Present Danger, and chaired the Team B Strategic Objectives Panel, a controversial effort in the mid-1970s to reinterpret CIA intelligence on the Soviet threat.

In her book Killing Détente: The Right Attacks the CIA (1998), Anne Cahn writes: "The man finally selected to serve as chairman of the Team B Strategic Objectives Panel was Richard Pipes, a Polish immigrant and professor of Russian history at Harvard University. Pipes had consistently labeled the Soviets an aggressive imperialistic power bent on world domination. He had been 'discovered' by Richard Perle, who convinced his boss, Senator Henry Jackson, to hire Pipes as a consultant." Pipes also played an instrumental role in selecting other Team B participants, including Paul Wolfowitz. In an interview with Cahn, Pipes said: "I picked Paul Wolfowitz [who at the time was working as special assistant for the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, or SALT] because Richard Perle recommended him so highly."

As part of the Team B exercise, Pipes and his team of outside experts—which also included William Van Cleave and counted on the support of John S. Foster and Donald Rumsfeld in opposition to realpolitikers like Henry Kissinger, who saw the exercise as being hazardous to U.S.-Russian relations (see Jason Vest, "Darth Rumsfeld," American Prospect, February 26, 2001)—were charged by then-CIA head George H.W. Bush with assessing National Intelligence Estimates regarding Soviet strategic capabilities and intentions. Although the purported aim of the exercise was to come up with an unbiased analysis of the Soviet threat, according to Cahn, "The Team B experiment was concocted by conservative cold warriors determined to bury détente and the SALT process. Panel members were all hard-liners. The experiment was leaked to the press in an unsuccessful attempt at an 'October surprise.' But most important, the Team B reports became the intellectual foundation of 'the window of vulnerability' and of the massive arms buildup that began toward the end of the Carter administration and accelerated under President Reagan" (Anne Cahn, "Team B: The Trillion Dollar Experiment," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, April 1993).

One of the more curious claims made by the Team B experts, as recounted in Adam Curtis' BBC documentary The Power of Nightmares, was that the Soviets had developed a non-acoustic submarine detection device that was so sophisticated it couldn't be detected by outside intelligence agencies. The very fact that Team B was unable to find evidence of the Soviet project, according to Pipes, who was interviewed for the documentary, was used as proof that such a device existed. Said Pipes: "That's important, yes. If something is not there, that's significant. ... By its absence. If you believe that [the Soviets] share your view of strategic weapons, and they don't talk about it, then there's something missing. Something is wrong. And the CIA wasn't aware of that."

Commented Anne Cahn in the documentary: "They couldn't say that the Soviets had acoustic means of picking up American submarines, because they couldn't find it. So they said, well maybe they have a non-acoustic means of making our submarine fleet vulnerable. But there was no evidence that they had a non-acoustic system. They're saying, 'We can't find evidence that they're doing it the way that everyone thinks they're doing it, so they must be doing it a different way. We don't know what that different way is, but they must be doing it.'"

Pipes continues to provide commentary on Russian politics and culture, in part through his affiliations with a number of rightist and neoconservative-led policy institutes, including Freedom House, for which he serves as a member of the American Committee for Peace in the Caucasus, the Hudson Institute, and the Heritage Foundation. In June 2007 he took part in issuing a joint statement with the Hudson Institute that accused Russia of "reverting to patterns of behavior characteristic of the Soviet Union."

On June 12, 2007, he participated in a Heritage Foundation roundtable discussion on "The Victims and Crimes of Communism from 1917 to the Present." The discussion followed a dedication ceremony of a Washington, DC memorial commemorating "the 100 million people who have been killed by communist totalitarian regimes worldwide," held by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VCMF), on whose National Advisory Council Pipes serves. Other members of VCMF's National Advisory Council include Edwin Feulner, Carl Gershman, George Weigel, and Jack Kemp. Pipes had previously been a speaker at a December 2006 Heritage Foundation discussion on "Poland on the Eve of Martial Law: 25 Years On."

Pipes is also a contributor to major national newspapers and journals. In 2004, he wrote a piece for Foreign Affairs magazine in which he repeated some of his old boilerplate about Russia's cultural and historical tendency toward autocracy. " There is a good deal of evidence that the antidemocratic, antilibertarian actions of the current [Putin] administration are not being inflicted on the Russian people but are actually supported by them." In an interview with the Milan-based Corriere della Sera, Pipes warned that a "new Cold War" could be emerging as Russia resists missile defense plans in Eastern Europe and expands its influence in the former Soviet bloc.

Following the Beslan school hostage crisis in 2004, Pipes lamented the fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin "seems determined not to yield an inch [in Chechnya]. 'We showed weakness, and the weak are trampled upon,' he said on Saturday [following the massacre]. This may seem like a truism to Russians, but in this case it is wrong. Russia, the largest country on earth, can surely afford to let go of a tiny colonial dependency, and ought to do so without delay" ("Give the Chechens a Land of Their Own," New York Times, September 9, 2004).

In the same article, Pipes endeavored to distinguish between the Chechen rebels and the terrorists who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks in the United States. He wrote: "In his post-Beslan speech, Mr. Putin all but linked the attack to global Islam: 'We have to admit that we have failed to recognize the complexity and dangerous nature of the processes taking place in our own country and the world in general.' Reports that some of the terrorists were Arabs reinforce that line of thinking. But the fact is, the Chechen cause and that of al-Qaida are quite different, and demand very different approaches in combating them."

Because of his views on the Cold War, Pipes is occasionally looked to as a sort of "Ur-theorist of [the Bush administration's] bold foreign policy initiatives" (Sam Tanenhaus, "The Hard Liner," Boston Globe, November 2, 2003). But Pipes has voiced criticism of the Iraq War. In an interview with the Boston Globe, he said, " I think the war was correct—destroying this invasive evil. But beyond this I think they're too ambitious." Democracy-building efforts in Iraq, according to Pipes, are "impossible, a fantasy." Echoing the likes of other early neoconservatives like Irving Kristol, who have been equivocal on issues like democracy promotion as a grounds for military intervention, Pipes argued: "Democracy requires, among other things, individualism—the breakdown of old clannish, tribal organizations, the individual standing face-to-face with the state. You don't have that in the Middle East. Iraq is tribally run." Pipes attributes the administration's lack of foresight on a lack of hindsight: "Paul [Wolfowitz] didn't have much education in history. ... It's not his field. He was educated as a military specialist, a nuclear weapons specialist. Like most scientists, he doesn't have a particular understanding of other cultures."

Although no longer a key neoconservative player, Pipes' son is. Daniel Pipes is a controversial, hardline neoconservative commentator on Middle East affairs. In 2003, when George W. Bush chose Daniel to serve on the board of the U.S. Institute of Peace, the ensuing barrage of criticism prompted the president to bypass Congress and make Pipes a recess appointment to the institute.

Richard Pipes is the author of several books, including The Russian Revolution, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, and Property and Freedom. In 1992, Pipes served as an expert witness in the Russian Constitutional Court's trial against the Communist Party.