I know they hadn’t come up with it yet, but perhaps Colonel West was Section 31? In fact Section 31 could have been behind the whole plot to keep the Cold War going now that I think about it.

I don’t like to ascribe every shady thing to Section 31, but in this case I think it’s more a case that it started legitimately outside the org. There’s a possibility that when they learned of it they pushed nudged it along. But also if they saw the Federation security was threatened by these warmonger’s actions they might have tried to pump the breaks on it (How did Sulu, who had no involvement in the Kithomer Conference, know where it would be? Excelsior was the one cataloguing gaseous anomalies but Enterprise still had the equipment during their escort mission, a component that would prove vital to destroying Chang’s Bird of Prey? ). Or maybe they just wanted to weed out the bad elements within Starfleet and this was the most convoluted way to do it.