Cuba 1962: Khrushchev's Miscalculated Risk (CIA staff study, 1964)

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khrushchev-miscalculated-risk-1964.pdf · 153 pages · 9.2 MB

Extract

Pages 1-46,48-66,68-72,74-85,87,89-158 of the 158-page original: the whole study except five pages whose photographs carry no credit and may be Soviet or press pictures: Soviet missiles at parades in Havana and Moscow, and MiG-21s in flight; the reconnaissance photographs, which are the government's, are all here, and the five pages' text is in the full release. The full release is at the link below.

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Read it page by page (our OCR of the scan, 30 redaction bars marked)

Original

CIA FOIA Electronic Reading Room

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26 October 2026, from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine copy of the government page (copy)

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1313f1a5a2a05298d5f1139cf5d8b23c337f31901e6ccf15eab3388eea785d53

Licence

Public domain: a work of the US federal government (17 U.S.C. § 105).

A year after the crisis, the CIA's Office of Research and Reports tried to answer a question the October drama had left open: how, and with what intent, had the Soviet Union built its base in Cuba? Its answer, dated 13 February 1964, runs to 156 pages and was issued under the code-word controls of the intelligence it drew on¹. The foreword credits help from the Office of Scientific Intelligence, the Office of Current Intelligence and the National Photographic Interpretation Center, and points readers to a companion study by the DD/I Research Staff, The Soviet Missile Base Venture in Cuba, which looked at the political side¹.

The evidence

Part One rests on aerial photography, which the authors treat as conclusive, and on photographs of Soviet ships at sea. Reports from agents, refugees and diplomats were used only where photography could check them, because so many had proved false¹. It counts about 150 Soviet dry-cargo voyages to Cuba between late July 1962 and the start of the quarantine on 24 October, all but about 25 of them carrying military cargo, and notes that Moscow had put all seven of its ships able to carry missiles below deck onto the Cuba run¹.

System by system it traces the build-up: surface-to-air missile sites from August, MiG-21 fighters, coastal cruise missiles, Komar patrol boats, four armored groups, 24 MRBM launch positions at six sites near San Cristobal and Sagua la Grande, and three IRBM sites, two near Guanajay and one near Remedios, none finished¹. It puts Soviet personnel at about 22,000, a figure it calls only the most common estimate¹. The 42 Il-28 bombers, it argues, were meant for the Cubans from the start¹. Of the withdrawal it records that all 42 MRBMs were at sea by 10 November, carried as deck cargo, and that the bombers left only in early December after Khrushchev's announcement of 20 November¹.

The argument

Part Two draws the inference in the title. The integrated air defense system did not begin operating until 27 October, more than a month after missiles reached the sites, and nothing was hidden from overhead cameras until low-level flights began. The Soviets had known what American photography could do since they recovered the U-2 downed near Sverdlovsk in May 1960, and the officer who had commanded their air defenses then, Marshal Biryuzov, had taken over the Strategic Rocket Forces in April 1962¹. The authors conclude that Moscow must have expected the United States to accept the missiles, or at least not to remove them by force¹. They place the final decision in the spring of 1962, perhaps April or May, and judge that Khrushchev wanted a quick cut in the strategic imbalance, an increase of more than 50 percent in Soviet missile strike capacity against the United States, and leverage over Berlin¹.

How to read it now

The study is a careful reading of American evidence, and its limits are those of that evidence. Later Soviet and Russian disclosures put the force at about 43,000 men, not 22,000, and in 1992 it was confirmed that tactical nuclear warheads had already reached Cuba, the point on which this study could reach no judgment³. Its account of the settlement says the United States rejected Khrushchev's offer of 27 October to trade Cuban bases for Turkish ones; it says nothing of the private undertaking to remove the Jupiter missiles from Turkey^1,3. It sits between the September 1962 estimate that judged missiles unlikely and the photographic discoveries described under Intelligence in the Cuban Missile Crisis. The CIA released it, with some passages, figures and photographs blacked out, in November 2016².