The Cuban Missile Crisis @ 60
Nuclear Crisis Lasted 59 Days, Not Just 13

Washington, D.C., October 27, 2022 - The most dangerous 24 hours of the Cuban Missile Crisis came on Saturday, October 27, 1962, 60 years ago today, as the U.S. moved closer to attacking Cuba and nuclear-armed flashpoints erupted over Siberia, at the quarantine line, and in Cuba itself—a rapid escalation that convinced both John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev to strike the deal that would stop events from further spiraling out of control.

Seven hours ahead of Washington, the Kremlin had already received an urgent message (9 a.m., Moscow time) from the Soviet commander in Cuba that a U.S. attack, presaging an invasion, was imminent within 24-72 hours. The Soviet ambassador in Havana, Aleksandr Alekseyev, was closeted with Fidel Castro at the Soviet embassy through the wee hours of the morning, while Castro dictated and revised a message to Khrushchev. The Cuban leader assumed an American wipe-out of Cuba and recommended a Soviet preemptive strike on the U.S. before the U.S. could do the same to the USSR. Castro had already ordered his anti-aircraft crews to fire on U.S. low-level reconnaissance planes—a fateful order that would raise the nuclear stakes later on October 27.

The surviving notes of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff meeting on that day, October 27, provide a six-and-a-half-hour cascade of crises where human error, miscalculation, reckless deployment of nuclear weapons, and testosterone ruled the day.

Notes Taken from Transcripts of Meetings of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, October-November 1962, Dealing with the Cuban Missile Crisis, SECRET. Released to the National Security Archive through the Freedom of Information Act.

The JCS notes from October and November 1962 are all that survive after the Chiefs’ decision, in the 1970s, to destroy the tapes and transcripts from over two decades of JCS meetings. The catalyst was the Supreme Court decision, in 1974, that President Nixon had to turn over his tapes for the criminal prosecutions of his aides. A Joint Chiefs staffer thankfully made handwritten notes from the transcripts in 1976, before the records were destroyed. These notes were typed up in 1993 and later obtained by the National Security Archive through the Freedom of Information Act.

According to the notes, on October 27, 1962, at 1000 (10 a.m. Washington time), the Chiefs heard a briefing from their intelligence officers that should have cautioned them that “modern equipment” and “surface to surface missiles” were among the Soviet deployment. But Air Force chief of staff Curtis LeMay instead recommended “a simple paper taking the latest intelligence into account, and again recommending execution of full-scale OPLAN 312 [the air strikes] followed by OPLAN 316 [the invasion].”

The U.S. invasion plan OPLAN 316 for Cuba in October 1962.  Source: Dino Brugioni Collection.

At 1341 hours, as recorded in the notes, the Chiefs learned that a U-2 spy plane on an air-sampling mission over the North Pole (collecting residue from Soviet atomic tests) was “lost off Alaska,” prompting Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to rush out to inform Secretary of State Dean Rusk “at once.”

We now know, despite the Air Force keeping the documents classified for 60 years, that the U-2 pilot, Charles “Chuck” Maultsby, had gone off course by human error—blinded by the aurora borealis and hampered by a compass malfunction near the Pole—and that Soviet MIG fighters had scrambled to intercept the U-2 over Siberia. The detailed reconstruction of the Maultsby mission by Michael Dobbs in his book, One Minute to Midnight, shows how close to disaster this nuclear flashpoint came.

Captain Maultsby's U-2 plane, serial number 56-715

U.S. Air Force Captain Charles Maultsby.

Former SAC pilots and SAC headquarters staff told Dobbs that the U.S. was able to track both Maultsby and the Soviet MIGs attempting to shoot him down by intercepting Soviet air defense traffic. But they were unable to share this information with the pilot, as the U.S. eavesdropping capabilities were a closely guarded national secret. Navigators guided Maultsby out of Soviet air space by ordering him to turn left until he could see Orion's Belt off his right wingtip. With the constellation observable to his south, Maultsby would be flying westwards, back home toward Alaska.

Political scientist Scott Sagan was the first to report (in 1993) that the two Air Force fighters scrambled from Galena Air Base in Alaska to protect the Maultsby U-2 on October 27 each carried Falcon nuclear air-to-air missiles under their wings in lieu of their conventional arms. Alert levels had risen to DEFCON 2, and air-to-air nukes were meant for taking out incoming Soviet bombers. Thankfully, the F-102 Delta Daggers did not catch up to the MIGs before Maultsby glided his U-2, out of fuel, to a landing in Alaska.

President Kennedy famously remarked about the missing U-2, “there’s always some SOB who doesn’t get the word.” But there was no word for Maultsby to get—standard operating procedure sent his mission up, and only afterwards did Secretary of Defense McNamara cancel these air-sampling flights.

SOP also meant, on October 27, that both the U.S. and the USSR would go right ahead with their scheduled atmospheric nuclear tests. The U.S. test, codenamed Calamity in the Dominic series, airdropped an 800-kiloton device at Johnston Island in the Pacific. The Soviet test, codenamed 192 (where’s Pushkin when you need him?), dropped a 260-kiloton device at Novaya Zemlya. Neither White House nor Soviet Presidium records seem to notice.

The Bluestone test in the Dominic series of airdropped nuclear bombs, near Christmas Island, June 30, 1962.  Source: Nuclearweaponsarchive.org.

At 1403 in the Joint Chiefs notes, the top Pentagon reconnaissance analyst, Col. Ralph Steakley, came in to let them know the Rudolf Anderson U-2 flight was overdue. By 1800 in the notes, Steakley told the Chiefs that a signals intercept showed the Cubans had recovered Anderson’s body and the wreckage from the shootdown. Debriefing of the pilots from the low-level flights showed that all but two had been fired on over Cuba.

The Anderson shootdown stunned top officials in both the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Khrushchev quickly saw that his orders restraining any use of tactical or strategic nuclear weapons in conditions of perceived attack (like the U-2 overflight) were useless, since he couldn’t control local commanders. Generals Gorbuz and Grechko had decided to order the SAM installation at Banes, Cuba, to shoot down the U-2 after it overflew the latest Soviet deployments in eastern Cuba, including cruise missiles within 15 miles of Guantanamo.

U.S. Air Force reconnaissance planes overflew the Banes site on October 26, 1962, and photographed Soviet SAM missiles in launching position.

On the U.S. side, the ExComm mistakenly saw the U-2 shootdown as a clear escalation by Moscow. But the Joint Chiefs decided against any immediate retaliation, despite a reminder from Chairman Maxwell Taylor that they had earlier insisted on taking out a SAM site that shot at U.S. planes. Now, the Chiefs wanted to wait and launch a full invasion as soon as possible. Army chief of staff Earle Wheeler even remarked gloomily, “Khrushchev may loose one of his missiles on us.”

At 1830, the JCS Chairman, Gen. Taylor, briefed the Joint Chiefs on the White House discussions that day. “CJCS says President has been seized with the idea of trading Turkish for Cuban missiles: he seems to be the only one in favor of it.” The notes put quotation marks around Taylor’s phrase, “The President has a feeling that time is running out.”

Unknown to the Chiefs, from 1659 to 1733 hours the destroyer Beale and its anti-submarine cohort around the aircraft carrier Randolph were dropping hand grenades on a suspected Soviet submarine at the quarantine line. Unknown to the Beale or to the U.S. Navy, that submarine had a nuclear-tipped torpedo and the capacity to launch it when under attack.

The Beale’s deck officer, then-Lt. John W. Peterson, described the “signaling” process years later at the 2002 Havana conference on the Cuban Missile Crisis. Peterson said his crew was frustrated that dropping signal grenades above the sonar contacts amounted to just “firecrackers,” so the sailors wrapped the grenades in toilet paper tubes that only disintegrated hundreds of feet underwater, thus exploding right next to the targeted submarine.

Deck logs of the U.S. Navy destroyer Beale, signed by deck officer Lt. J.W. Peterson, listing the dropping of five hand grenades at 1659 hours, and the surfacing of the Soviet submarine at 2050 hours on October 27.

Also at the 2002 Havana conference, Soviet signals intelligence officer Vadim Orlov described what it was like to be on the receiving end of the signals. For those aboard the submarine B-59 on October 27, during the Beale’s grenade assault, Orlov said, it felt like being inside an oil drum being hit by sledgehammers. The submarine, built for the icy Arctic waters, and now in the much warmer Sargasso Sea, already suffered from awful conditions, equipment breakdowns, and high temperatures, and had to surface to recharge its exhausted batteries.

Interviews and documentary evidence compiled by the Archive’s Svetlana Savranskaya show the B-59 commander, Valentin Savitsky, thought he was under attack and panicked, ordering an emergency dive and readying the nuclear torpedo. But the submarine brigade chief of staff, Vasily Arkhipov, who happened to be on board, recognized the American forces were signaling and photographing, not attacking, and so managed to calm Savitsky down.

October 28, 1962: The U.S. Navy shadows the second Soviet F-class submarine to surface, after repeated rounds of signaling depth charges on 27 October (the sub features no conning tower number, but is Soviet fleet number B-59, commanded by Savitsky).

The nearest target for the B-59’s nuclear torpedo would have been the anti-submarine aircraft carrier Randolph, an Essex-class ship with a complement of 3,400 sailors and marines—a number greater than the casualties at Pearl Harbor or on 9/11. Nuclear depth charges were the standard operating procedure response to such an attack, and their components were close by, on the Essex and at Guantanamo.

Also unknown to the Joint Chiefs were the movements of Soviet nuclear warheads in Cuba. U.S. intelligence never detected those warheads during the crisis, only in retrospective analysis of the overhead photography. According to the Soviet documents, including the after-action report by the warheads’ commander, Col. Beloborodov, the warheads were transported to the missile sites and to the tactical launchers on October 26 and were ready for use on October 27.

According to the authoritative account by Michael Dobbs in One Minute to Midnight, one of those nuclear warheads tipped an FKR cruise missile that deployed just 15 miles away from Guantanamo naval base, which would have become a smoking radiating ruin if U.S. invasion plans had proceeded. Dobbs tracked down the Soviet veterans of that FKR deployment, and even the graves in Cuba of two Soviet soldiers who died in a truck crash on the way to Guantanamo.

Soviet FKR cruise missile deployed in Cuba.

The Joint Chiefs were also unaware of the human factor among their own forces that raised the risks considerably on that day. According to Scott Sagan’s account, at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, Strategic Air Command officers jerry-rigged the launch system on a Minuteman ICBM, bypassing normal procedure to give themselves independent launch authority on October 27.

The historian Martin Sherwin has reported even more human error. The 873rd Tactical Missile Squadron on Okinawa apparently received mistaken launch orders at 3 p.m., Washington time, on October 27, for their cruise missiles, each with a 1.1 megaton nuclear warhead; but an Air Force captain named William Bassett questioned the command, since DEFCON 1 had not been reached yet. When he opened the Top Secret envelope, three of his four targets were in China, which had nothing to do with the missile crisis, as far as he knew, so he pressed higher-ups to stand down.

At 1940 hours on October 27, the Joint Chiefs got their last intelligence briefing of the day, with chilling news. The “photyography [sic] from today’s missions show that the canvas is off the launchers, that the missiles are on the launchers, and that a reload capability is ready.” All of the Soviet medium-range ballistic missiles were operational.

Within 15 minutes of this briefing, President Kennedy’s brother Bobby, the Attorney General, was hosting Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin at the Justice Department to work out a negotiated solution to the missile crisis. The conversation, as recorded in Dobrynin’s detailed cable to Moscow, ranged from sticks to carrots. On the threat side was RFK’s warning that the sites in Cuba would be bombed, “there are many unreasonable heads among the generals, and not only among the generals, who are ‘itching for a fight.’” On the incentive side were assurances against any invasion of Cuba, and the removal of Jupiter missiles from Turkey within a few months. RFK told Dobrynin, “time is of the essence and we shouldn’t miss the chance.”

Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev made a show of business as usual after John F. Kennedy’s announcement on October 22 of the discovery of missiles in Cuba and the imposition of a quarantine. Khrushchev actually attended the Bolshoi Theater the next night for the opera Boris Godunov and raised a glass of champagne with the American bass singer Jerome Hines.

Meanwhile, in Cuba, Soviet crews were racing to make all the missile sites operational and to prepare for the expected American invasion, while U.S. Navy planes flew low-level flights just above the palm trees photographing all the activity. At the San Cristobal No. 1 site, where missiles were first identified, new low-level photos showed prefabricated concrete arches coming together into a “probable” nuclear warhead bunker.

On October 24, Khrushchev learned that a leading American capitalist, the head of Westinghouse Electric’s international division, was in Moscow negotiating potential trade arrangements with the Soviet Union. William E. Knox had organized Westinghouse deals with the Soviet Amtorg Trading Company 20 years before, when the U.S. and the USSR were allies against Hitler; but his knowledge of the Soviet Union was sufficiently limited that he didn’t recognize the bearded fellow in a portrait on Khrushchev’s office wall when the Soviet leader called Knox in to talk, on an hour’s notice. (Karl Marx would have termed Knox part of “the ruling circles” in the U.S., who pulled the strings of elected leaders.)

William Edward Knox (The New York Times, Oct 27, 1962)

According to Knox’s debriefing from the October 24 meeting with Khrushchev, which lasted for three hours (!), the Soviet leader said Kennedy’s speech must “stem from hysteria,” that the Soviet ships were unarmed, that the blockade was “illegal” verging on “piracy,” but also that the U.S. “is now unable to take over Cuba.” To Knox’s comment that the problem was the Soviets had lied to Kennedy, Khrushchev launched into a half-hour discussion of why the missiles were defensive, not offensive.

The first page of the document

“Khrushchev then stated specifically that the Soviet Union had an anti-aircraft missile [sic] in Cuba as well as ballistic missiles with both conventional and nuclear warheads…. They would never be fired except in defense of Cuba and then only on the personal instructions from Khrushchev.”

Knox reported, “Khrushchev added that if the United States did not believe this it should attack Cuba and it would find out the answer. Guantanamo would disappear the first day.” The author Michael Dobbs identified this warning as a direct allusion to the Soviet short-range cruise missiles that would be targeting the U.S. Navy base.

Knox’s Kremlin conversation made him a celebrity beyond the usual industrial circles. The New York Times headlined Knox as a “World Roving Salesman” in the October 27, 1962, paper, and later commissioned a magazine article from him about the dramatic meeting with Khrushchev.

The most iconic quote from the Cuban Missile Crisis appeared in a Saturday Evening Post retrospective weeks afterwards, describing a confrontation at the blockade line between U.S. warships and missile-carrying Soviet freighters in which the Soviet ships backed off. The article quoted Secretary of State Dean Rusk saying, on October 24, “We’re eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked.”

In fact, the confrontation never happened. Michael Dobbs, author of One Minute to Midnight, put together Soviet shipping records and U.S. intelligence reports, along with U.S. Navy charts obtained by the National Security Archive, to prove that the Soviet ships supposedly involved actually had turned around the day before (October 23) and were 500 miles away at the time of the Rusk quotation.

As Dobbs pointed out, the claim that Soviet missile-carrying ships turned back at the last moment after being confronted by American warships has appeared in many missile crisis books, including Robert F. Kennedy’s posthumous memoir Thirteen Days (1968), One Hell of a Gamble by Timothy Naftali and Aleksandr Fursenko (1997), and Essence of Decision by Graham Allison and Philip Zelikow (2nd edition, 1999). The image of a successful eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation was also the emotional centerpiece of a Hollywood movie on the missile crisis, Thirteen Days (2000), and continues to influence the conduct of American foreign policy.

But Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had ordered his missile-carrying ships to turn around more than 24 hours before, on the morning of October 23, soon after Kennedy went on nationwide television to announce the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba and the imposition of a U.S. quarantine line around the island. According to Soviet documents and shipping records reviewed by Dobbs, Khrushchev permitted five ships already close to Cuba to proceed. Since these ships were only a few hours’ sailing time from the closest Cuban port, there was little risk that they would be intercepted by U.S. warships.

The ships included the Aleksandrovsk, which was carrying nuclear warheads to Cuba, and its escort ship, the Almetyevsk, which arrived at the port of La Isabela at dawn on October 23. The three other ships were the Divnogorsk, the Dubno, and the Nikolaevsk. The Soviet leader also ordered four submarines armed with nuclear torpedoes to remain in the vicinity of the quarantine line. Ships and oil tankers carrying non-military equipment were authorized to proceed to Cuba.

According to Soviet records, the orders to 16 missile-carrying ships to reverse course went out early in the morning of October 23. A senior U.S. Navy officer, Captain Isaac Kidd, later noted, “the Russian ships turned around at 230800A.” The time group is equivalent to 3 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time in Washington or 10 a.m. Moscow time on October 23.

CIA summary of Soviet ships Kislovodsk, Poltava, and Kimovsk to/from Cuba, which reversed course on October 23 (Source: Michael Dobbs) 

The Soviet ships closest to the quarantine barrier were the Kimovsk (not the Komiles, as RFK incorrectly stated in his memoirs) and the Yuri Gagarin. According to Bobby Kennedy, the U.S. Navy was expecting to make contact with the Kimovsk between 10:30 a.m. and 11 a.m. Washington time on October 24. The National Security Agency had been receiving preliminary reports of Soviet ships turning around throughout the night, but the evidence was inconclusive, and the agency did not inform Navy Flag Plot of the development until 10:40 a.m.

When President Kennedy heard the news, he immediately ordered the aircraft carrier Essex not to engage the Soviet ships and to give them time to turn around. The Essex was contacted by sideband radio between 10:45 and 11 a.m.

In fact, both the Kimovsk and the Yuri Gagarin were already more than 500 nautical miles from the blockade line at this point, heading back toward the Soviet Union. One Minute to Midnight was the first book to plot the actual positions of Soviet and U.S. ships on October 23 and 24, and Dobbs published the relevant maps, charts, and intelligence intercepts on the National Security Archive website in 2008.

No equivalent of the Kennedy tapes exists on the Soviet side. But after the end of the Cold War, Russian archives released notes of Khrushchev’s Presidium (Politburo) sessions; and those for October 1962 remain particularly fascinating, even though they are summaries, almost bullet points, rather than verbatim. The notetakers were Vladimir Malin, head of the Party’s general department, and one of his subordinates, Aleksei Serov, who both contributed to the notes of the pivotal October 22-23 meeting of the Presidium.

On October 22, Soviet diplomats warned Moscow that Kennedy was about to deliver a prime-time speech at 7 p.m. Washington time, likely about Cuba. The seven-hour time difference between Moscow and Washington, D.C., meant that the Presidium actually convened at 10 p.m., before Kennedy started to speak, and did not have the text of Kennedy’s speech until the next morning’s session, starting at 10 a.m. on the 23rd.

Khrushchev’s first reaction, before reading the speech, was to assume an invasion was coming. He comments frankly, “The point is that we do not want to unleash a war, we wanted to intimidate and restrain the USA vis-à-vis Cuba. The difficult thing is that we did not concentrate everything that we wanted and did not publish the treaty. The tragic thing—they can attack, and we will respond. This could escalate into a large-scale war.” Publishing the Cuba-USSR defense treaty, which would have gone into effect as soon as the missiles were operational, was exactly what the Cubans had proposed in the summer, and Khrushchev had rejected, in favor of total secrecy and deception.

Nikita S. Khrushchev in 1962

Khrushchev was a mix of bluster and caution before learning that Kennedy had announced a blockade. As the Soviet leader outlines various scenarios for a U.S. attack on Cuba, the notes reflect his determination to “not yet use the strategic weapons, but use the tactical.” But the next morning (see the next page of the notes, just after defense minister Rodion Malinovsky’s comment about waiting until 1 a.m.), Khrushchev steps back from the brink. The Soviet ships that were close to Cuba would go ahead to port, including the Alexandrovsk, with all its nuclear warheads, but the others were to turn around and come back to the USSR.

The parallels between Kennedy and Khrushchev stand out in these notes from October 22 and 23. Just as JFK opts for a quarantine rather than the air attack that the majority of his advisers wanted, Khrushchev admits he was only “halfway successful” and decides to pull back further shipments: “we do not want to unleash a war.”

These two pages of Top Secret single-spaced notes, written and signed by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, detail the White House military briefing on October 21, the day before the President’s speech announcing the presence of the missiles in Cuba and the imposition of a quarantine—not an air strike, as so many of his advisers had recommended.

The meeting took place in the Oval Room of the residence, rather than the Cabinet Room, as a kind of disguise against the increasing media attention to all the high level officials coming and going. The downside for historians is that the meeting was therefore not taped; but the notes taken by McNamara, one of five people in the room, are succinct and telling.

The notes show the head of the Air Force Tactical Air Command, General Walter Sweeney, describing the hundreds of sorties that would hit Cuba on the first day, but also admitting that he couldn’t guarantee they’d take out all the missiles: “[H]e was certain the air strike would be ‘successful’; however, even under optimum conditions, it was not likely that all the known missiles would be destroyed.” In other words, a single one could very well survive the air strikes and be launched—in which case, boom goes Atlanta.

JFK had raised this possibility in the very first ExComm meeting, on October 16, and now the missile deployment was even more advanced. So the Sweeney briefing was a turning point for JFK, who then ordered Ted Sorensen to work up a quarantine speech, not one announcing air strikes.

Tactical Air Command Commander General Walter Sweeney Jr . (Source: screenshot from "Tactical Air Command Operations at Homestead Air Force Base during the Cuban Missile Crisis" film by U.S. Airforce)

Sweeney’s refusal to guarantee that air strikes would destroy all the Soviet missiles in Cuba was more than justified. In the intelligence retrospective produced after the missiles returned to the Soviet Union, the CIA had to admit that all the high-level and low-level spy plane flights had only identified 33 of the 42 medium-range ballistic missiles that the Soviets had deployed, meaning that the massive U.S. strikes contemplated would have left as many as nine nuclear weapons available for launch.

By the end, the discussion on October 21 turned to the President’s brother Bobby (speaking perhaps on behalf of JFK), who said he opposed the air strike for two reasons: the similarity to what the Japanese did at Pearl Harbor, and the “unpredictable” Soviet response that could “lead to general nuclear war.”

The next day, at a meeting captured on the ExComm tapes, Kennedy tells his advisers that “the idea of a quick strike was very tempting, and I really didn’t give up on that until yesterday morning” after hearing from General Sweeney.

As the U.S. military prepared to invade Cuba, officials at U.S. Atlantic Command, under Adm. Robert L. Dennison, drafted a proclamation of military occupation for the Cuban people. It falsely accused Cuba of “violating international law and the freedom and independence of nations,” and claimed the U. S. had been “required to enter into armed conflict with the [Cuban] forces.”

The proclamation vested “all powers of government, executive, legislative, and judicial and all jurisdiction in the occupied territory and over its inhabitants” in the hands of a U.S. military governor and directed that “all persons in the occupied territory will obey immediately and without question all enactments and orders of the military government.”

Once the “aggressive Castro regime has been completely destroyed” and arrangements for a democratic successor made, the proclamation concluded, “United States armed forces will depart and the traditional friendship of the United States and the government of Cuba will once more be assured.”

But on the same day that CINCLANT Dennison prepared this Proclamation, his boss, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, moved significantly in the ExComm discussions against the whole idea of an invasion. McNamara not only argued in favor of the blockade option, but also for trading the missiles in Turkey for the missiles in Cuba.

Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Nitze, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Maxwell Taylor leaving the White House after an ExComm meeting. (Source: Cecil Stoughton. White House Photographs. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)

According to Sheldon Stern’s account (p. 133), relying on the detailed notes taken by National Security Council staffer Bromley Smith, McNamara told Kennedy “there were differences among his advisers which had resulted in the drafting of alternative courses of action.” The defense secretary openly endorsed the “blockade route” as a first step toward the removal of the missiles—a step less likely to provoke a Soviet response “leading to general war”—plus negotiations for “the withdrawal of United States strategic missiles from Turkey and Italy.” Then McNamara went even further, suggesting an “agreement to limit our use of Guantanamo to a specified limited time.”

Probably the most contentious moment in the Kennedy White House tapes occurred on October 19, 1962. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, led by their most vocal member, Gen. Curtis LeMay of the Air Force, pressed Kennedy for a decision to invade Cuba and thousands of air sorties to prepare the way.

The historian Sheldon Stern, who first listened to the October 19 tape in 1981 (and later provided the most authoritative transcript), writes that he was shocked by Gen. LeMay’s aggressive tone and his argument, not just that “direct military action” was the only appropriate response to the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba, but that anything less would be “almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich.” (Stern, p. 123) Everyone in the room heard that remark as a personal attack on Kennedy, whose father Joseph Kennedy, then U.S. ambassador to London, had supported Neville Chamberlain’s policy towards Hitler in 1938.

But President Kennedy held his tongue. The Joint Chiefs pressed their case, and JFK kept reminding them that military action could lead to Soviet reactions in Berlin and elsewhere. General LeMay dismissed such concerns, claiming the Soviets would do nothing, even if hundreds or thousands of Soviets died in those air strikes on Cuba. Finally, LeMay condescendingly remarked, “In other words, you’re in a pretty bad fix at the present time.” Kennedy asked, “What’d you say?” LeMay: “I say, you’re in a pretty bad fix.” Kennedy quickly responded with an acerbic laugh, “You’re in with me, personally.” (Stern, p. 126)

Afterwards, Kennedy reportedly told his personal assistant David Powers: “These brass hats have one great advantage in their favor. If we listen to them and do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them that they were wrong.”

JFK meets with Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko, Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, and deputy foreign minister Vladimir Semenov, on October 18, 1962, in the Oval Office. Right to left: JFK, Gromyko, Dobrynin, Semenov. (Source: Cecil Stoughton. White House Photographs. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)

At the same time, Kennedy was getting no help from the Soviets on pursuing his cautious instincts. The day before the meeting with the Joint Chiefs, Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko came to the White House together with his deputy Vladimir Semenov and his ambassador in Washington, Anatoly Dobrynin. Kennedy did not tape the conversation, but both the U.S. memcon and the Gromyko cable back to Moscow (sent on October 20) agree that Gromyko kept to Moscow’s line that weapons in Cuba were only defensive, and that the real problem was U.S. aggression towards Cuba.

At least three times in the conversation, Kennedy repeated that it was the Soviet shipments since July that raised the danger: “I must say that really it became grave only this summer … [when] Mr. Khrushchev, without notifying me, began to increase at a brisk pace the supplies of armaments to Cuba.” Gromyko’s cable reproduces paragraph after paragraph of the Foreign Ministry talking points on U.S. aggression, but also remarkably quotes Kennedy as saying, “The present situation is, perhaps, the most dangerous since the end of the Second World War.” In his desk, Kennedy had actual U-2 photos of the Soviet missiles but chose not to confront Gromyko with them.

Sitting beside Gromyko on the Oval Office couch, Soviet ambassador Dobrynin did not know about the missiles, so he was sincere when he told Americans that only defensive equipment was going to Cuba. Many years later, in 1989, at the Moscow conference organized by James Blight and janet Lang, Dobrynin turned to Gromyko and challenged him, “You never told me!” Gromyko responded, “It must have been a very big secret then.”

Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric summarizes the options facing the U.S. in these two handwritten pages from October 18, 1962. Gilpatric’s notes list both political options, with certain advantages and disadvantages, and military options like air strikes and the blockade. But the bottom-line question is whether “to initiate use of force to settle issues between US & USSR.” Gilpatric inserts the word “major” above “use of force.”

National Security Council Executive Committee (EXCOMM) Meeting, 10:10 AM, October 29, 1962. (Source: Cecil Stoughton. White House Photographs. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)

Kennedy and McNamara highlighted the dangers of military escalation at the ExComm on October 18, attended by Gilpatric. According to the authoritative account of the White House tapes by Sheldon Stern (pp. 99-100), JFK said, “I would think you’d have to go on the assumption that they’re not gonna permit nuclear weapons to be used against the United States from Cuba unless they’re gonna be using them from everyplace.”

McNamara replied ominously, “I’m not sure they can stop it …. I don’t believe the Soviets would authorize their use against the U.S., but they might nonetheless be used,” either by accident, a rogue launch, or just the ability of the local commander to launch while under attack.

Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara (left), Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs Paul Nitze (partially hidden), and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Maxwell D. Taylor leave the White House after meeting with President John F. Kennedy and other members of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (EXCOMM) regarding the crisis in Cuba. West Wing Colonnade, White House, Washington, D.C. (Source: Cecil Stoughton. White House Photographs. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)

Most remarkably, it’s on October 18 that John F. Kennedy the dove really emerges. Not only is this when he first mentions the Adlai Stevenson idea of trading the Jupiter missiles in Turkey, but he also lectures the ExComm on how the allies would perceive an all-out invasion of Cuba. Most regarded Cuba “as a fixation of the United States and not a serious military threat …. An awful lot of conditioning would have to go in before they would accept and support our action against Cuba because they think that we’re … slightly demen… demented on this subject. … A lot of people would regard this as a mad act by the United States which is due to a loss of nerve because they will argue that taken at its worst the presence of these missiles doesn’t change” the nuclear balance of power.

Former Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson had been the Democratic nominee for president twice, in 1952 and 1956, and lost both times to Dwight Eisenhower. For the 1960 race, John F. Kennedy effectively shoved Stevenson aside, edged other contenders (like Hubert Humphrey) in the primaries, and narrowly defeated Eisenhower’s vice-president, Richard Nixon, in the general election. Afterwards, Stevenson expected a Cabinet post, but accepted the only Kennedy offer—the United Nations position in New York.

Late on October 16, 1962, the day the CIA briefed Kennedy on the existence of Soviet ballistic missiles in Cuba, the President met privately with Stevenson. Kennedy told Adlai that the initial consensus of his advisors, which the President supported, was to launch a series of airstrikes to take out the missiles. Stevenson advised the president to instead consider peaceful, diplomatic alternatives to convince Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to remove the missiles.

President John F. Kennedy with Adlai Stevenson, U.S. Representative to the United Nations. Oval Office, White House, Washington, D.C.(Abbie Rowe. White House Photographs. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)

In this memorandum, written the next morning to advance the argument for the use of diplomacy over the use of force, Stevenson cites the “incalculable consequences” of airstrikes in Cuba and urges Kennedy to make clear to his advisors that “the existence of nuclear missile bases anywhere is negotiable before we start anything.” Adlai expresses his “misgivings about the proposed course of action” and insists that “it should be clear as a pikestaff that the U.S. was, is, and will be ready to negotiate the elimination of bases and anything else,” before risking an escalation to nuclear war. Among his recommendations are that Kennedy open back channels of communication with both Khrushchev and Fidel Castro.

“Adlai’s strong and early advocacy of ‘exploring the possibilities of a peaceful solution’ provided Kennedy with a blueprint to do exactly that,” the late historian, Martin J. Sherwin, wrote in his comprehensive book, Gambling with Armageddon. “In fact, Stevenson’s suggestions of October 16 and 17 were congruent with nearly all the steps that the president followed in resolving the crisis.”

In the wake of the Saturday Evening Post controversy, Time Magazine published a cover story on Adlai Stevenson. It quoted him as stating: "We seem to be living in an era when anyone who is for war is a hero and anyone who is for peace is a bum." (Time Magazine)

Ultimately, Kennedy would agree with Khrushchev to trade U.S. Jupiter missiles based in Turkey for the withdrawal of the newly installed Soviet medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Cuba. But the part of the accord that ended the crisis was kept TOP SECRET for decades. Publicly, the Kennedy White House promoted the official narrative that the Soviets had backed down in the face of U.S. resolve and determination. Instead of receiving credit for his cogent advice, Ambassador Stevenson became the sacrificial lamb of the missile crisis, labeled an appeaser and an advocate of a “Munich” in the Caribbean.

Reading this memo, you are a fly on the wall of the first Cuban Missile Crisis meeting at the White House, on Tuesday, October 16, 1962. The CIA has written up what they know about the missiles detected in the U-2 photographs, and even produced a map of the U.S. showing the ranges and locations that the missiles could hit. The head of the National Photographic Interpretation Center, Arthur Lundahl, and his best “missile man,” Sidney Graybeal, presented this briefing to President Kennedy and 15 of his top advisers—the so-called ExComm (Executive Committee).

Audio file

A Cabinet Room recording from 11:50 A.M. on October 16 captures portions of Kennedy’s first briefing on the missile crisis from CIA imagery analysts on the results of the Oct. 14 U-2 overflight of Cuba. (Source: “Audio Clips from the Kennedy White House,” National Security Archive Cuban Missile Crisis collections.) 

The core conclusion is that the length of the missiles— “80-foot trailers” —means they are medium-range ballistic missiles, either SS-3s (700 nautical mile range) or SS-4’s (1,100 nautical mile range), which could reach Washington D.C. The proof comes from photographs of exactly such missiles on parade in Red Square (not so much the information from the CIA’s mole in Moscow, Col. Oleg Penkovsky). The U-2 photos showed eight more such trailers at the second site, just five miles away, along with missile erectors.

The CIA memo remarkably argued that “The Soviet leaders’ decision to deploy ballistic missiles to Cuba testifies to their determination to deter any active US intervention to weaken or overthrow the Castro regime, which they apparently regard as likely and imminent.” This motivation would be missing from most of the ExComm discussions, which hardly ever considered U.S. covert operations towards Cuba as playing any role in Soviet decisions.

The best narrative of the ExComm meetings comes from Sheldon Stern, the long-time Kennedy Library historian who first listened to the secret White House tapes in the 1980s and later produced the most thorough and accurate rendering of them in 2003 (Stern, Averting ‘The Final Failure’: John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings). The title comes from a Kennedy quote about what a nuclear exchange would represent, the final failure.

"Averting ‘The Final Failure’ John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings" by SHELDON M. STERN

[insert graphic of the cover of Sheldon Stern’s book]

The first ExComm meeting on the morning of October 16 focused on the necessity to get the missiles out of Cuba, and considered only military options, such as limited air attack, all out air attack, and full-scale invasion. Not yet on the table were either the blockade option or diplomacy. One fascinating moment occurred when Secretary of State Dean Rusk cited CIA director John McCone’s belief “that Khrushchev may feel that it’s important for us to learn about living under medium-range missiles and he’s doing that to sort of balance that uh … political, psychological flank.” (Stern p. 70)

National Security Council Executive Committee (EXCOMM) Meeting, 10:10AM (Source: Cecil Stoughton. White House Photographs. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)

In Stern’s account (p. 86) comes an extraordinary moment of truth in the second ExComm (6:30 p.m.) on October 16, 1962. President Kennedy asks: “Why does he put these in there though? … It’s just as if we suddenly began to put a major number of MRBMs in Turkey. Now, that’d be goddam dangerous, I would think.”

National security adviser McGeorge Bundy quickly responds: “Well we did it, Mr. President.” To which JFK (rather lamely) says: “Yeah, that was five years ago. But that was a different period then.”

The film from the October 14 U-2 mission that first photographed Soviet missiles in Cuba “took approximately 24 hours” to be returned, processed, delivered to the National Photographic Interpretation Center, and scanned by analysts, according to an after-action report written by the third-ranking CIA official, Ray Cline, at the request of the President.

Not until about 5:30 p.m. on October 15 did the photo interpreters conclude what they were seeing was Soviet missile bases, and take that information to Cline, who let his boss, Gen. Marshall Carter, know around 6:15 p.m. Carter expected to see the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Maxwell Taylor, at dinner, and likewise, the national security adviser McGeorge Bundy.

But around 9:30 p.m. the analysts called Cline to say (“cryptically” since it was an open line) the missiles were likely in the 700- or 1000-mile range. Cline called Bundy, who understood the alarm despite Cline’s “double-talk[]” over the phone, and his peer Roger Hilsman at the State Department, on whom “the light finally dawned.”

Cline took the finished intelligence to the White House on the morning of October 16, first briefing Bundy, then the Attorney General, Bobby Kennedy. Cline notes that "Bobby's initial comment was one four-letter word, off the record.”

Cline wrote this document much later, on October 27, after a direct request from President Kennedy on October 25, to address claims circulating in Washington that the missile information was available “for several days before it was called to the attention of the President.” Cline tells JFK that was “categorically” “untrue”; but JFK’s concern reflects the intense political pressures he felt.

October 15, 1962: U-2 photograph of IL-28 bomber crates at San Julian airfield. (Source: Dino Brugioni Collection at the National Security Archive)

The same October 14 U-2 mission also photographed Soviet bombers, the IL-28s, in crates at the San Julian airfield. The top of the photo says October 15 because that’s the day the film was processed and analyzed.

The first U-2 photographs of Soviet missiles in Cuba were taken on October 14 and include the one identified on October 15 by the National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) as showing Soviet medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBM) near Los Palacios at San Cristobal and another showing a second MRBM site nearby, subsequently named San Cristobal no. 1.

October 14, 1962: U-2 photograph of a truck convoy approaching a deployment of Soviet MRBMs near Los Palacios at San Cristobal. This photograph was the first one identified by NPIC on October 15 as showing Soviet medium-range ballistic missiles in Cuba.

October 14, 1962: U-2 photograph of MRBM site two nautical miles away from the Los Palacios deployment—the second set of MRBMs found in Cuba. This site was subsequently named San Cristobal no. 1 (the photo is labeled October 15 for the day it was analyzed and printed).

CIA reference photograph of Soviet medium-range ballistic missile (SS-4 in U.S. documents, R-12 in Soviet documents) in Red Square, Moscow.

U-2 pilot Richard Heyser (second from left), who flew the October 14 mission, waits to meet President Kennedy at the White House on October 30, 1962, with Col. Ralph Steakley (left), fellow U-2 pilot Joe O'Grady, and Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Curtis LeMay (right). (Source: JFK Library, White House Photographs, Robert Knudsen.)

U-2 photograph on September 29, 1962, of Soviet surface-to-surface cruise missile site (named “Kennel” by the U.S., FKR in Soviet plans) at Banes, Cuba. (Source: Dino Brugioni Collection at the National Security Archive)

In the middle of the Soviet military buildup in Cuba, just three days (we now know) after the freighter Poltava had brought the second shipment of medium range ballistic missiles, the top intelligence board in the U.S. told policymakers that no Soviet missiles were coming— a now legendary intelligence failure.

The Special National Intelligence Estimate on September 19, 1962, pronounced that installing ballistic missiles in Cuba “would be incompatible with Soviet practice to date and with Soviet policy as we presently estimate it. It would indicate a far greater willingness to increase the level of risk in US-Soviet relations than the USSR has displayed thus far…”

The CIA director, John McCone, disagreed, but he was on his honeymoon in France and all the other intelligence chiefs, including McCone’s deputy, Gen. Marshall Carter, voted in favor of the SNIE. McCone warned about missiles in his cables to Carter on September 7, 10, 13, 16, and finally in a rebuttal to the SNIE on September 20: “as an alternative I can see that an offensive Soviet base in Cuba will provide Soviets with most important and effective trading position in connection with all other critical areas and hence they might take unexpected risks in order to establish such a position.” McCone was thinking about Berlin, but ultimately the trade was for U.S. Jupiter missiles in Turkey and Italy.

McCone to Carter, Cable, 20 September 1962. (Source: Mary McAuliffe, ed., CIA Documents on the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, (CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence, October 1992), p. 95.)

One of the SNIE’s authors, Sherman Kent, then Assistant Director for National Estimates, later defended the SNIE, writing that “no estimating process can be expected to divine exactly when the enemy is about to make a dramatically wrong decision. We were not brought up to underestimate our enemies.” He then added, “We could not believe that Khrushchev could make such a mistake.” (See Michael Douglas Smith, “The Perils of Analysis,” Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 51, No.3, 2007).

More persuasively, former CIA analyst and U.S. ambassador Raymond Garthoff defends the SNIE by arguing that accurate eyewitness reports on the missiles were not yet in hand until after September 19, while false reports abounded. Similarly, in their edited volume on Intelligence and the Cuban Missile Crisis (Frank Cass, 1998), the scholars James Blight and David Welch criticize McCone as right for the wrong reasons: McCone had a bureaucratic reason to worry the SAMs would shut down his eyes over Cuba, plus the Soviets had deployed SAMs elsewhere without MRBMs, so Cuba was not unique. And McCone continued to think, after the missiles were withdrawn, that the SAMs in Cuba just meant the missiles would be coming back.

Perhaps because the SNIE was wrong about Soviet intentions, policymakers missed its more accurate conclusions about Soviet motivations. The SNIE rightfully emphasizes the strong Soviet commitment to defend the Cuban regime “against what the Cubans and the Soviets conceive to be a danger that the US may attempt by one means or another to overthrow it.” Yet it took several decades for Kennedy’s advisers to concede that their own policies, including the reckless Mongoose operations, had raised the sense of threat and the "level of risk."

Khrushchev’s motivations for sending nuclear missiles to Cuba in 1962 have generated enormous debate ever since. At the time, American policymakers assumed this was a ploy to bring pressure for a Berlin settlement in favor of the Soviets; but the now-available notes from the Soviet Presidium scarcely mention Berlin. Nor do those notes explain why the Presidium took up the issue of Cuba’s defense in March, April and May 1962, after doing nothing about a Cuban request for aid for the previous six months.

President Kennedy interviewed at his residence in Hyannis, Mass., by Alexei Adzhubei, editor of Izvestia and son-in-law of Nikita Khrushchev, on November 25, 1961 (no photo is available from the January 30, 1962, meetings). From left, JFK, his interpreter Alexander Akalovsky, and Georgi Bolshakov interpreting for Adzhubei on right). (Source: Cecil Stoughton, White House Photographs, JFK Library, ST-A1-1-61.)

One possible explanation is found in this remarkable document, a March 12, 1962, Top Secret write up by Khrushchev’s son-in-law, Alexei Adzhubei, of his conversations with President Kennedy weeks earlier, on January 30, 1962. Adzhubei had previously (November 25, 1961) interviewed Kennedy for Izvestia, but the January meetings were not for publication, just for communication.

The Russian historian Alexander Fursenko and the Canadian historian Timothy Naftali first wrote about this discussion in their One Hell of a Gamble volume in 1997, a book based on unique access to Soviet materials. But the full document was not available until a major declassification in Moscow in April 2002, after which it was translated and published by the National Security Archive in October 2002 for the 40th anniversary conference in Havana.

Adzhubei remarkably had two conversations with the President on January 30, one over breakfast at the White House with the First Lady, her sister, GRU officer Georgi Bolshakov (Adzhubei’s translator), and his wife; then one at the end of the day, courtesy of a car sent by the White House. A top editor at the Soviet newspaper Izvestia, Adzhubei is described by brother-in-law Sergei Khrushchev, in his 2000 book Nikita Khrushchev and the Making of a Superpower, as hard-drinking and ambitious, dependent on (but resentful of) his father-in-law, but also willing to publish Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s controversial poem about Stalin’s heirs.

Here, the bulk of Kennedy’s remarks focus on Germany, having earlier assured Adzhubei that “we will not meddle with events in Cuba” and “we are not planning an invasion of Cuba.” But Adzhubei was most struck by Kennedy’s comparison of Cuba to Hungary, where Khrushchev had presided over a violent crackdown in 1956. Adzhubei related this to his father-in-law orally, and later wrote up this record, in which the Hungary reference suggests to a Soviet audience that the next time the U.S. dealt with Cuba, it would be a full invasion. Both Cuban and Soviet intelligence were reporting in early 1962 an upswing in U.S. covert operations directed against Cuba as well.

Fursenko and Naftali conclude, “After Kennedy compared Cuba to Hungary in a private talk with Khrushchev’s son-in-law, whatever hope there might have been that this administration might tolerate a communist country off American shores evaporated.” Khrushchev himself in his dictated memoirs (Khrushchev Remembers, 1970, pp. 493-494) said, “The main thing was that the installation of our missiles in Cuba would, I thought, restrain the United States from precipitous military action against Castro’s government. In addition to protecting Cuba, our missiles would have equalized what the West likes to call ‘the balance of terror.’”

The Russian original first page, classified Top Secret, of Adzhubei's report to the Central Committee on his conversations with President Kennedy on January 30, 1962. Adzhubei had reported key parts orally to his father-in-law, Nikita Khrushchev, but only produced this write up on March 12, 1962. Forty years later, in April 2002, the Archive of the President of the Russian Federation declassified this text, and the National Security Archive translated and published the document for the 40th anniversary conference in Havana in October 2002.

So the Adzhubei memo becomes part of the incentive in March and April 1962 when the Soviet Presidium takes up the issue of helping Cuba’s defense, even though a Cuban request had been sitting there for months. The Presidium decides to send coastal cruise missiles and SAMS; then in May, signs off on Khrushchev’s plan to send ballistic missiles and a full group of forces. According to Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev expressed his core idea to defense minister Rodion Malinovsky, “why not throw a hedgehog at Uncle Sam’s pants?”

The Fursenko and Naftali account speculates about Khrushchev seeking a “meniscus”—pouring liquid up to the spilling point to raise the pressure and raise the stakes in foreign relations. As William Taubman relates in his gold-standard biography of Khrushchev, missile deployment in Cuba accomplished several things simultaneously. The Soviets came to the defense of Cuba, first of all, while at the same time giving the Americans a taste of their own medicine, just as they lived with the missiles in Turkey. The deployment also showed Khrushchev taking the offensive internationally—not least against claims from the Chinese Communists about Soviet weakness—and partially made up for the strategic imbalance, at that point about 4-1 in the U.S. favor (and as high as 17-1 by some measures).

U-2 photographs in August 1962 of Soviet SA-2 (SAM) anti-aircraft sites in Cuba convinced CIA director John McCone that the Soviets were trying to hide something else, most likely some kind of ballistic missile deployment to Cuba. Few in the U.S. intelligence community or the White House agreed with him, not least because this was a political issue (and McCone was a Republican). Republicans in Congress blasted Kennedy for allowing Cuba to remain Communist (for which JFK had attacked Eisenhower and Nixon in the 1960 campaign), hyped every story of Soviet aid to Cuba (there was plenty to hype in the summer of 1962), and asserted nuclear missiles were there already.

This U-2 photograph of a SAM site in Cuba on August 29 fed the flames, even though it was above Top Secret, codeword PSALM, a special compartment Kennedy had ordered to keep Soviet-Cuba deployment intelligence tightly controlled. But on August 31, 1962, a Republican senator from New York, Kenneth Keating, publicly accused the Kennedy administration of allowing a Soviet buildup in Cuba that included nuclear missiles.

Sen. Keating was ahead of the curve, since the first medium-range Soviet missiles had not yet reached Cuba. But political realities forced the Kennedy administration into a formal response—one that JFK later regretted. At that moment on August 31, the photography only showed surface-to-air missile sites in Cuba; and Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin (who was never informed about Anadyr) assured the President’s brother Bobby that nothing offensive was going to Cuba. So, on September 4, 1962, the White House issued a statement warning that the introduction of “offensive ground-to-ground missiles” in Cuba would raise “the gravest issues.”

U-2 spy plane coverage of Cuba on August 29, 1962, showed anti-aircraft (SAM) sites under construction but nothing at the site that would become the first medium-range ballistic missile location spotted in Cuba, at San Cristobal.

When Kennedy saw on October 16 the U-2 photographs of Soviet MRBMs installed at San Cristobal in Cuba, one of his reactions (captured on the White House tapes) actually conceded that his own rhetoric had helped create a situation in which he must act: “Last month” (he said in a jocular tone, according to Sheldon Stern’s account in Averting The ‘Final Failure’, p. 82) “I said we weren’t going to [accept offensive missiles in Cuba] and last month I should have said we’re… well, we don’t care.” After all, the Soviets were living with U.S. medium-range ballistic missiles in Turkey, right across the Black Sea from Khrushchev’s dacha.

“But when we said we’re not going to, and then they go ahead and do it, and then we do nothing” (Stern hears JFK becoming very somber) “then… I would think that our… risks increase.” Passively accepting the missiles at any point would likely have been untenable politically. JFK says gloomily, “They’ve got enough to blow us up now anyway. After all, this is a political struggle as much as military.”

Senator Keating would keep the struggle going long after the missiles left Cuba, alleging that some remained hidden in caves. Overstated yet prophetic beforehand, accurate during, and wrong afterwards, Keating’s sources on the Cuban Missile Crisis remain something of a mystery, partially unraveled by the historian Max Holland, who traces them to radical Cuban students refracted through two hard-core anti-Soviet former ambassadors, Claire Boothe Luce and William Pawley.

Decades later, Nikita Khrushchev’s son Sergei, himself a rocket scientist, mused aloud that the U.S. should just have let the rockets sit there in tropical Cuba; the steel would have rusted, the propellant dissipated; the warheads would have eaten all the food service ice Cuba could produce; and within months, certainly a year, the rockets wouldn’t fire. Why, Sergei wondered, did Kennedy precipitate the crisis? The answer, a caution to all modelers and theorists, was domestic politics.

Declassified spy plane photographs and briefing boards produced by the National Photographic Interpretation Center during 1962 walked U.S. decision makers through the Soviet buildup and the discovery of medium-range ballistic missiles in Cuba, while also missing a few key elements, specifically the tactical nuclear weapons dispersed across the island.

The super-secret NPIC resided in a somewhat decrepit former automobile dealership building in downtown Washington, D.C., but enjoyed all-source access to U.S. intelligence, including signals intercepts. The center also maintained a photographic archive of Soviet military equipment, much of it from parades in Moscow, that enabled NPIC analysts to make highly educated guesses about what weapon system was inside which crate on those Soviet freighters.

NPIC also deployed the latest imaging technology, including the Type 621 Mann Comparator that provided precise measurements for objects and features in the photographs (cited by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency in its tribute to the NPIC, one of the NGA’s predecessor entities).

Inside the National Photographic Interpretation Center, Washington, D.C., 1962.

“Crate-ology”: Photographs of crates assessed by NPIC as holding Komar guided-missile patrol boats on their way to Cuba, September 1962.

Briefing version of the crate photograph with an image of a Komar boat superimposed.

More crates:  Soviet ship Kasimov with IL-28 bomber fuselages on their way to Cuba, September 28, 1962.

Source: All photos from the Dino Brugioni Collection at the National Security Archive. Brugioni was in charge of applying all-source intelligence to the conclusions of the photo interpreters at NPIC. His own account of the Cuban Missile Crisis, based on a still-classified history of the NPIC, is Eyeball to Eyeball: The Inside Story of the Cuban Missile Crisis (Random House, 1991). 

This first item in a file of handwritten notes by Deputy Secretary of Defense Gilpatric covers a White House meeting on October 9, 1962, that approved U-2 reconnaissance flights over Cuba to verify reports that the Soviets were deploying missiles in an "area of concern" in western Cuba. Worried about a possible incident or shootdown by Soviet SA-2 anti-aircraft missiles seen in U-2 photographs from August, Secretary of State Dean Rusk and national security adviser McGeorge Bundy had barred U-2 flights directly over Cuban territory since September 10.

Completed Soviet SA-2 anti-aircraft site in Cuba 1962, photographed by U.S. U-2 overflight, showing the characteristic Star of David pattern. (Source: Dino Brugioni Collection at the National Security Archive)

However, reports from Cuban observers of Soviet missiles and indirect and direct pressure from CIA and DIA led to this White House decision to reverse the ban. The White House deferred a program of low-level flights, and plans to use drones and peripheral flights were in the works. The Gilpatric notes mention the “cover story” of an off-course “Caribbean peripheral reconnaissance flight” and the key fact that there was “no indication yet that SA-2 sites have reached operational stage although nearly 2 months since 1st installation.”

Weather conditions over Cuba would delay the first October U-2 flight until October 14, 1962. As Gilpatric writes, the U-2 would spend “only 12 minutes over Cuba at max alt 74,000 ft, coming ‘wrong way’ (south to north).” This is the flight that would take the first U.S. intelligence photographs of Soviet medium-range ballistic missiles in Cuba.

For detailed background on the decision to resume U-2 flights and the broader implications of the September photo gap, see the authoritative book by David Barrett and Max Holland, Blind Over Cuba: The Photo Gap and the Missile Crisis (College Station: 2012). For more revelations from the Gilpatric handwritten notes, and the other “Sensitive Records on Cuba” from Pentagon files, see William Burr, “Cuban Missile Crisis Day by Day: From the Pentagon’s ‘Sensitive Records,” National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 398, published October 19, 2012.

This contemporaneous after-action report, published by the Archive for the first time in English in 2013, provides invaluable detailed information on the deployment of the 51st missile division as part of the Soviet Group of Forces in Cuba. While the report describes the difficulties of the deployment, it also points to the many shortcomings of the General Staff planning for the deployment. For example, the plan missed key facts about Cuba—that dugouts were impractical as housing, that tents had to be erected instead, that local electric circuits were 60 Hz and couldn’t be used by the Soviets, that palm trees offered no camouflage for missiles—and the tropical storm season wasn’t taken into account at all. The Statsenko report also shows how, even in adverse circumstances, with part of the shipment of missiles and missile support troops interrupted by the U.S. quarantine, the 51st division deployed and assumed battle readiness ahead of schedule, and as the Cuban Missile Crisis reached its peak, "on October 27th, 1962, the division was able to deliver a strike from all 24 launchers."

U.S. intelligence photograph of the Soviet large-hatch freighter ‘Poltava,’ riding high in the water on September 15, 1962. Soviet documents show the ship was carrying 8 medium-range ballistic missiles and arrived at the port of Casilda the following day. (Source: Dino Brugioni Collection at the National Security Archive)

This document, only declassified decades after the Cuban Missile Crisis, illuminates one source of the rising sense of threat in Havana and in Moscow in the spring of 1962 that led to the Anadyr deployment of missiles to Cuba. Even after the debacle of the failed CIA-sponsored invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961, the U.S. maintained an extensive covert operation, called “Operation MONGOOSE,” aimed at the overthrow of Castro – even to the extent of enlisting the Mafia in assassination plots and launching sabotage operations in those dangerous days of October 1962.

This document, which bears the code word “Northwoods,” proposes pretexts that the U.S. could manufacture to justify the invasion of Cuba, such as the shootdown of a civilian airliner or the bombing of a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay.

Cubans call the missile crisis the “October Crisis” because U.S. covert operations produced practically a monthly crisis for the Castro regime. Afterwards, however, the most senior American accounts (by Robert Kennedy, Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, and others) treated the crisis as a bilateral U.S.-Soviet affair with Cuba more or less just a parking lot for Soviet missiles. It took decades and declassified documents like this one to put Cuba back in the Cuban Missile Crisis and to restore the defense of Cuba as the leading Soviet (and Cuban) motivation for the missile deployment.

The National Security Archive won declassification of some Operation Mongoose documents through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in 1988 and included them in the briefing book for a January 1989 conference in Moscow with McNamara, Bundy, and key Soviets like Andrei Gromyko and Anatoly Dobrynin (and a Cuban delegation, much to the Americans’ surprise).

McNamara had to admit that “with hindsight, if I had been a Cuban leader … I might have expected a U.S. invasion… [even though] we had absolutely no intention of invading Cuba … therefore, the Soviet action to install missiles … was, I think, based on a misconception – a clearly understandable one, and one that we, in part, were responsible for. I accept that.” This leap of empathy led to the invitation from the Cubans to come to Havana in January 1992.

Of all the Mongoose documents, this one from the Joint Chiefs with the code word “Northwoods” ranks as the most shocking, proposing pretexts like a fake shoot down of a civilian airliner that would justify a U.S. invasion of Cuba. Addressed to McNamara himself from the Joint Chiefs of Staff in March 1962, this document was not available in 1989, and only reached the public through the Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board that opened millions of pages in the 1990s, including on Cuban operations. Author James Bamford obtained a copy and shared it with the Archive, which published the document online in 2001.

General Lyman Louis Lemnitzer, United States Army. (Source: U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff

Here, the head of the covert Cuba project, Brig. Gen. Edward Lansdale, asks the Joint Chiefs for pretexts that would justify a U.S. invasion of Cuba; and Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer eagerly responds that the Chiefs should be in charge, not the CIA, with one caveat: “only as long as there can be reasonable certainty that US military intervention in Cuba would not directly involve the Soviet Union.” The pretexts would place the U.S. in the “apparent position of suffering defensible grievances from a rash and irresponsible government of Cuba” and would include a “Remember the Maine” incident, the “real or simulated” sinking of a boatload of Cuban refugees on the way to Florida, and more. The memo warns that if no internal Cuban revolt came about in 1962 the U.S. would have to develop such provocations to justify military action. (p. 12)

This remarkably detailed deployment plan for the extraordinary Soviet missile buildup in Cuba in 1962 only emerged from Soviet archives after the end of the Cold War. The lead author of this plan, General Anatoly Gribkov, described its components at the historic 1992 Havana conference, to the absolute shock of the American delegation, when Gribkov mentioned, in a matter-of-fact way, the 80 tactical nuclear weapons included in the plan from the beginning.

Fidel Castro reunites with Soviet veterans of 1962 at 40th anniversary conference in Havana. Castro is shaking hands with Gen. Anatoly Gribkov, operation planner. On the left, back to camera, is Marshall Dmitri Yazov, in 1962 the commander of a rifle regiment in Cuba. (Photo by Svetlana Savranskaya)

In 1994, Gribkov co-authored a book with retired U.S. general William Y. Smith, titled Operation Anadyr, that went into more detail (Anadyr is actually a river in Siberia, chosen as a code name to disguise the Cuban destination). Then, in 1998, Gribkov edited a volume of memoirs by Soviet veterans of 1962, providing quotations from this plan as developed by the Operations Directorate of the Soviet General Staff in May 1962, and from the Soviet Presidium (aka Politburo) as it approved the plan at meetings on May 26 and June 10, 1962.

This full copy comes from a Russian military historian, General Dmitri Volkogonov, who used his privileged position as an aide to Russian president Boris Yeltsin in the early 1990s to photocopy this plan in the General Staff Archive (and hundreds of other high-level documents). Volkogonov’s family ultimately donated his papers to the Library of Congress. The distinguished analyst Raymond Garthoff, former CIA and State Department official and retired U.S. ambassador to Bulgaria, translated this document for the Cold War International History Project in 1998. Garthoff’s expertise was especially useful in helping decode the many technical military terms included here.

The plan is laid out in a memorandum on May 24, 1962 from the Defense Minister, Marshall Rodion Malinovsky, and the head of the General Staff, Marshall Matvei Zakharov, to the chair of the Defense Council, Nikita Khrushchev. Most striking is the enormous scope of this logistical effort. Soviet ships would transport an entire Group of Soviet Forces to Cuba, with a whole ballistic missile division, coastal cruise missiles (Sopkas), 576 SAM missiles for anti-aircraft protection, a squadron of surface ships and a squadron of submarines, and much more. The level of detail includes three field hospitals, 120 dump trucks, 2000 tons of cement, and fuel and food for the entire effort.

Casually, apparently as a matter of standard operating procedure, item 6 of the plan lists the deployment most shocking to the American veterans 30 years later – the 80 tactical nuclear warheads for 16 FKR (front range cruise) missiles. With a range of 180 miles, these would have devastated any U.S. invasion force and turned the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo into another Hiroshima; yet U.S. intelligence at the time mistook the FKRs for the more conventionally armed Sopkas.

This CIA map of Cuba, with its stars, circles, anchors, squares and triangles, reveals how urgently the U.S. intelligence community was tracking the extensive Soviet military buildup in Cuba and how much of it CIA analysts had identified. For example, listed here with fairly precise locations are the coastal cruise missiles, the Soviet troop encampments, the anti-aircraft SAM missile sites, and some mysteries, such as the top item on the list: “unidentified – missiles.”

Oct. 5 map shows areas of Soviet deployments in 1962 and trapezoid for U-2 overflight

Thousands of false reports from refugees and agents about missiles in Cuba had already flooded CIA analysts, including 211 false reports even before January 1, 1962. As one retrospective review remarked, “CIA analysts had naturally come to view all such reports with a high degree of suspicion.” But two accurate reports came to CIA in September, the first from September 12 (disseminated on September 21 by CIA) about a convoy in Havana with large trucks and long canvas-covered objects the size of medium range ballistic missiles. The second, from September 17 (disseminated on September 27), placed such a convoy moving towards San Cristobal.

In quite a technical intelligence achievement, CIA analysts separated these accurate reports from the mass of false ones and created a “target card” for a high priority U-2 overflight to see what actually was on the ground. That target is the small trapezoid that appears on the western end of Cuba on this map from October 5, 1962. After weather delays and some resistance within the U.S. government because of the chance of an embarrassing shoot-down, a U-2 piloted by Richard Heyser would photograph the trapezoid on October 14, and on October 15 photo-interpreters would spot Soviet medium-range missiles on the film – starting the famous “13 days” of highest-level tensions.

At the same time, CIA analysts never figured out the full scope of the Soviet deployments, despite all the circles and stars on this reconnaissance map and thousands of frames of spy plane footage to come. Even as late as November 1962, U.S. intelligence estimated only 16,000 Soviet troops were in Cuba, when the actual number was over 40,000.

One of the most important and least appreciated documents from the Cuban Missile Crisis, this account by the Soviet commander of the nuclear warheads in Cuba was written by Nikolai Beloborodov in the 1990s, most likely based on his own contemporaneous after-action report. A colonel in 1962, Beloborodov later rose to lieutenant general, and this account was included in a 1998 volume published in Moscow of veterans’ memories from 1962. The Beloborodov report provides extraordinary details about the transportation, deployment and removal of nuclear warheads from Cuba, including the use of “food service ice, which is produced in great quantities in Cuba,” to keep the warheads cool in the tropical climate.

Commander of Soviet nuclear warheads in Cuba, then-Col. Nikolai Beloborodov here steers the ship ‘Indigirka’ during his trip to Cuba, where the weapons stayed for 59 days, from Oct. 4 to Dec. 1, 1962. (Photo courtesy of the Beloborodov family and Michael Dobbs)

Never detected by U.S. intelligence or overflights, the Soviet nuclear warheads stayed in Cuba, according to Beloborodov, “under the dependable protection of soldiers-internationalists of the USSR Armed Forces and the Revolutionary Forces of the Republic of Cuba for 59 days, from October 4th, 1962, when they arrived in the Port of Mariel on the diesel-electric ship ‘Indigirka,’ until December 1, 1962, when the motor ship ‘Arkhangelsk’ departed from Mariel to Severomorsk with all the nuclear warheads on board.” (See page 6)

Beloborodov confirms the dispersal of the warheads all over Cuba, even 1100 miles from Mariel. He emphasizes the danger (page 10): “It was clear that in the conditions of the existing balance of forces in conventional arms, which was ten to one against us, there was only one way we could repel a massive assault—by using tactical nuclear weapons against the invaders. In principle, this action would be consistent with international law on the protection of sovereignty and freedom. But that would be the beginning of the end. Only madmen could unleash a nuclear war.”