Evading the CKM Hierarchy

We show that the presence of intrinsic charm in the hadrons' light-cone wave functions, even at a few percent level, provides new, competitive decay mechanisms for B decays which are nominally CKM-suppressed. For example, the weak decays of the B-meson to two-body exclusive states consisting of strange plus light hadrons, such as B {yields} {pi} K, are expected to be dominated by penguin contributions since the tree-level b {yields} s u{bar u} decay is CKM suppressed However, higher Fock states in the B wave function containing charm quark pairs can mediate the decay via a CKM-favored b {yields} s c{bar c} tree-level transition. Such intrinsic charm contributions can be phenomenologically significant. Since they mimic the amplitude structure of ''charming'' penguin contributions, charming penguins need not be penguins at all.