Title Folder. Rights Copyright Status. Relation Container Digid. Rights Access Restrictions. Rights Access Restriction Note. Subseries Name. Series Name. Description Historical Note. Subject Organization.
Subject Person. End Date. Start Date. Subject Geog Full Text. Description Place Made. Provenance Gifter. Title Item Name. The risks of such a cave-in, Kennedy and his advisers held, were distinct but related. This approach to foreign policy was guided—and remains guided—by an elaborate theorizing rooted in a school-playground view of world politics rather than the cool appraisal of strategic realities.
It put—and still puts—America in the curious position of having to go to war to uphold the very credibility that is supposed to obviate war in the first place. Recall that the Kennedy administration discovered the missiles on October 16, but only announced its discovery to the American public and the Soviets and issued its ultimatum on the 22nd.
The administration, however, did not make such an overture to the Soviets. Instead, by publicly demanding a unilateral Soviet withdrawal and imposing a blockade on Cuba, it precipitated what remains to this day the most dangerous nuclear crisis in history. In the midst of that crisis, the sanest and most sensible observers—among them diplomats at the United Nations and in Europe, the editorial writers for the Manchester Guardian , Walter Lippmann, and Adlai Stevenson—saw a missile trade as a fairly simple solution.
In an effort to resolve the impasse, Khrushchev himself openly made this proposal on October Beginning in the late s, however, the opening of previously classified archives and the decision by a number of participants to finally tell the truth revealed that the crisis was indeed resolved by an explicit but concealed deal to remove both the Jupiter and the Cuban missiles.
Kennedy in fact threatened to abrogate if the Soviets disclosed it. A declassified Soviet cable reveals that Robert Kennedy—whom the president assigned to work out the secret swap with the U. Only a handful of administration officials knew about the trade; most members of the ExComm, including Vice President Lyndon Johnson, did not.
And in their effort to maintain the cover-up, a number of those who did, including McNamara and Rusk, lied to Congress. The patient spadework of Stern and other scholars has since led to further revelations. Many have mined the missile crisis for lessons regarding political decision-making , estimative intelligence , and critical thinking.
Yet intelligence collection remains a relatively unexplored angle of the case. What did we know, when, and by what means?
This essay considers just how the missiles were discovered and the enduring implications this holds for intelligence collection and its relationship with analysis and policy. Though a sizeable military operation — thousands of pieces of equipment and tens of thousands of personnel moving 8, miles, making trips beginning in June — ANADYR presented a series of challenges for U.
Corona photoreconnaissance satellites provided valuable but infrequent coverage and lacked the frequency and resolution to identify missile regiments departing garrisons or ANADYR cargos being loaded in Soviet ports. The USSR was, with one or two notable exceptions, a non-permissive environment for human intelligence HUMINT collection: the closed nature of Soviet society and extensive counterintelligence measures made traditional espionage extremely difficult. For these reasons, U. Moreover, ANADYR was one of those intelligence problems often found in movie scripts but rarely seen in real life: a secret plot.
Spy fiction frequently revolves around such plots : adversaries pursuing complex secret plans , many months in the making. Fictional intelligence officers uncover such plans by taking the right photograph , decrypting the right communication , stealing the right document , or interrogating the right person.
Yet real-world problems rarely take this form. As intelligence luminary Gregory Treverton famously describes , intelligence problems may be thought of as puzzles knowable secrets or mysteries future developments which can only be bounded or framed, never definitively known.
Typical intelligence collection is postured to address typical problems: small puzzles, like military operations masked by standard operational security or terrorist identities masked by false names , or big mysteries, such as the intentions of foreign leaders or major political developments. In the spring and summer of , there was no American embassy in Cuba and the few American HUMINT sources there were focused on regime stability, state security, and socioeconomic issues, as well as supporting covert efforts to topple Castro.
Secret plots also allow adversaries to employ extensive denial and deception. Operational knowledge was compartmentalized and tightly restricted. Soviet personnel took steps to avoid American SIGINT, minimizing sensitive communications and writing them down or passing them verbally when necessary. Crews camouflaged sensitive equipment while underway and loaded and offloaded only at night, behind secure perimeters with high walls.
To throw the Americans off the trail with false indicators, some crews were issued Arctic gear, and the very name of the mission was meant to convey some connection to the Anadyr region in the Soviet Far East. During the crisis, the Americans and Soviets had exchanged letters and other communications, and on October 26, Khrushchev sent a message to Kennedy in which he offered to remove the Cuban missiles in exchange for a promise by U. The following day, the Soviet leader sent a letter proposing that the USSR would dismantle its missiles in Cuba if the Americans removed their missile installations in Turkey.
Officially, the Kennedy administration decided to accept the terms of the first message and ignore the second Khrushchev letter entirely. Attorney General Robert Kennedy personally delivered the message to the Soviet ambassador in Washington , and on October 28, the crisis drew to a close. The Cold War was and the nuclear arms race was far from over, though. In fact, another legacy of the crisis was that it convinced the Soviets to increase their investment in an arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching the U.
Start your free trial today. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. In the Fall of the United States demanded that the Soviets halt construction of newly-discovered missile bases in The U-2 aerial photographs were analyzed inside a secret office above a used car dealership.
The critical photographs snapped by U-2 reconnaissance planes over Cuba were shipped for analysis to a top-secret CIA facility in a most unlikely location: a building above the Steuart The Suez Crisis began on October 29, , when Israeli armed forces pushed into Egypt toward the Suez Canal after Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the canal, a valuable waterway that controlled two-thirds of the oil used by Europe.
The Israelis were On August 5, , representatives of the United States, Soviet Union and Great Britain signed the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which prohibited the testing of nuclear weapons in outer space, underwater or in the atmosphere. The treaty, which President John F. Kennedy signed
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