Intel Insights: Nuclear War Loomed 49-years-ago this Week

As we go about our daily routines it is hard to imagine how close the world came to the brink of nuclear war 49 years ago this week. Now known to history as the Cuban Missile Crisis, the events of October 1962 tested every element of national power, especially our nation’s intelligence community.

On Oct. 14, 1962 a U.S. Air Force U-2 reconnaissance aircraft overflew Cuba. The U-2’s mission was to help the US find out if the Soviet Union had deployed nuclear missiles to the island that were capable of targeting the U.S. The photographs the

U-2 took proved that the Soviets had indeed deployed Intermediate-Range and Medium-Range Ballistic Missiles in Cuba.

A few years earlier, Fidel Castro had overthrown a pro-American dictator and established a Communist government there that was friendly to the Soviet Union. The U.S. had tried and failed to get rid of Castro the year before.

The attempted invasion of Cuba using Cuban exiles and the CIA known as the Bay of Pigs had been an unmitigated disaster for the new Kennedy Administration, although initial planning for the invasion was actually a product of the Eisenhower Administration. The Soviets and their Cuban allies believed that stationing nuclear missiles in Cuba would prevent another U.S.-backed invasion of the island.

For its part, the U.S. could not accept Soviet nuclear missiles being based only 99 miles off the Florida coast. Stationing the missiles so close to the continental U.S. meant that a large portion of our country was in range of these nuclear weapons.

As happened so often during the Cold War, the leaders in Washington and Moscow engaged in a game of brinksmanship to see who would blink first. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev believed that President Kennedy would not react to this Soviet provocation. Since Kennedy had not reacted when East Germany built the Berlin Wall with Soviet support in 1961, Khrushchev reasoned he wouldn’t react this time either.

But this was an existential issue for the U.S. Kennedy had to show that he could stand up to Soviet provocations. The U.S. had some advance warning that the Soviet Union intended to deploy these missiles to Cuba, but the Soviets repeatedly assured us that they had not done so. They employed a massive deception campaign, the Russian term is “Maskirovka,” to keep the U.S. from finding out about the nuclear missile deployments.

The intelligence we gathered told a different story. Large trucks with long flatbeds carrying large cylindrical objects were seen traveling through Cuban towns at night. The descriptions did not match those for defensive weapons. Suspicions grew at the CIA that these were actually offensive weapons. The U-2 was sent to find out if, in fact, the Soviets had deployed the nuclear missiles. When the U-2’s photographs were analyzed the answer was that the weapons we feared most were now being installed on Cuban soil.

Kennedy had several options, ranging from doing nothing to ordering a full-scale invasion of Cuba. In the end, the President settled on a naval quarantine of Cuba, the idea being to prevent the Soviets from sending more missiles and other offensive weapons to the island nation.

In his address to the nation that first revealed the full extent of this crisis, President Kennedy called the Soviet action a “clear and present danger” to the security of the US and Latin America. He warned the Soviets that an attack on other Latin American countries would constitute an attack on the United States and, as such, would elicit a US retaliatory response. He also authorized further U-2 overflights as well as the deployment of Air Force, Navy, and Army units to forward staging areas.

The U.S. military was placed on a heightened state of readiness. The drumbeat of war was beating very loudly.

That drumbeat reached a crescendo when the Soviets shot down a U-2 and killed its pilot, Major Rudolf Anderson, who became the first recipient of the Air Force Cross. Meanwhile, secret negotiations conducted by the US Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the President’s brother, and Soviet Ambassador to the U.S. Anatoly Dobrynin began to bear fruit. Although these negotiations could have been derailed by the shoot-down of Major Anderson’s U-2, the Soviets made it clear that they were not planning to escalate the conflict. The Soviets agreed to remove the nuclear missiles from Cuba.

The U.S. secretly agreed to remove its Jupiter nuclear missiles from Turkey and Italy, without noting that these missiles were becoming obsolete. The U.S. also agreed not to invade Cuba and both nations agreed to set up the famous “hotline” between Washington and Moscow so future crises of this type could be defused before they brought us to the nuclear precipice.

In spite of its drawbacks, the agreement the U.S. and Soviet Union reached in the wake of this crisis did prevent a nuclear war. Accurate, reliable, and actionable intelligence served as the basis for that agreement and helped secure the lives of countless millions around the world.

Cedric Leighton lives in Lorton and is the Founder and President of Cedric Leighton Associates, a Washington area strategic risk and management consultancy.