Intelligence in the Cuban Missile Crisis

The intelligence story of October 1962 is usually told as a triumph: a U-2, a light table, a photo interpreter saying "We've got MRBMs in Cuba." The declassified record shows something less tidy. The formal estimate was wrong, the most useful collection was switched off for five weeks, and the crucial photographs were taken barely in time³.

A buildup nobody read correctly

Moscow's deployment, Operation Anadyr, was hidden by elaborate deception. The plan approved in July 1962 called for moving 50,874 men. Units were told they were going somewhere cold, and missiles and warheads were shipped under false manifests; the CIA's own later study of the operation treats it as a case of deliberate maskirovka^5,6.

Signs of a buildup were plain by August. The second U-2 flight of the month, on 29 August, found SA-2 surface-to-air missile sites, the same type that had brought down Francis Gary Powers in 1960³. Director of Central Intelligence John McCone had already argued on 10 August that the Soviets might be preparing to put ballistic missiles in Cuba, and he pressed the point with Kennedy on 22 and 23 August before leaving for his wedding and a honeymoon on the French Riviera. From there he sent a stream of what became known as the "honeymoon cables"³.

Almost no one agreed with him. Special National Intelligence Estimate 85-3-62, issued on 19 September 1962, judged that the Soviets valued Cuba mainly for political reasons and that the buildup was meant to protect Castro's regime. On missiles it said:

The USSR could derive considerable military advantage from the establishment of Soviet medium and intermediate range ballistic missiles in Cuba, or from the establishment of a Soviet submarine base there. As between these two, the establishment of a submarine base would be the more likely. Either development, however, would be incompatible with Soviet practice to date and with Soviet policy as we presently estimate it.

That is conclusion D of the estimate¹. By then, according to the CIA's later reconstruction, recognizable missile equipment had already reached the San Cristóbal area, on 17–18 September³.

The photo gap

On 10 September, after the loss of a Taiwanese-flown U-2 over China and an Air Force U-2's brief stray into Soviet airspace, Secretary of State Dean Rusk and National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy pressed the CIA to stop flights deep over Cuba. The compromise replaced one overflight with four short missions, two of them only over international waters, that avoided known SAM sites. Combined with a rule against flying when more than a quarter of the sky was forecast to be overcast, this left western and central Cuba unphotographed from early September until mid-October³.

McCone, back in Washington on 24 September, pushed to lift the restrictions. At a Special Group (Augmented) meeting on 4 October he said there had been no coverage of the western end of the island "for over a month." Meanwhile a Cuban agent recruited under Operation Mongoose had reported, in secret writing, "very secret and important work" in the hills near San Cristóbal, and refugees described large missiles moving west from Havana. Officers of the CIA's Task Force W marked a trapezoid on the map and had the Defense Intelligence Agency request the flight³.

Fourteen October

On 9 October one flight over western Cuba was approved. Weather and the need to train an Air Force pilot on the CIA's U-2 held it until Sunday 14 October, when Major Richard D. Heyser flew south to north across Pinar del Río and took 928 photographs in about six minutes^2,3. The film reached the National Photographic Interpretation Center the next morning. Analysts found three medium-range ballistic missile sites near San Cristóbal, with eight large missile transporters and four erector-launchers. Two more U-2 flights on 15 October found a fourth MRBM site, two intermediate-range sites at Guanajay, and crates for Il-28 bombers².

The CIA's deputy director told Bundy at 8:30 that evening. Bundy chose to let the President sleep and briefed him on the morning of 16 October². At the first meeting of advisers that day, photo interpreters walked the group through the pictures before Rusk spoke of setting "in motion a chain of events that will eliminate this base"⁴.

The interpreters could identify the SS-4 partly because of Oleg Penkovsky, the GRU colonel run by the CIA and MI6 in IRONBARK. He had supplied technical manuals on Soviet missile systems; he gave no warning of the Cuban deployment itself, and the KGB arrested him on 22 October, the day Kennedy announced the quarantine^6,7.

Watching through the crisis

From 16 October the President authorized unrestricted U-2 flights³. From 23 October Navy RF-8A Crusaders and Air Force RF-101 Voodoos flew low-level photographic runs over the sites. On 27 October a U-2 flown by Major Rudolf Anderson was shot down over eastern Cuba by a Soviet SA-2, and he was killed⁶. Photography then tracked the dismantling of the sites and the loading of 42 missiles onto Soviet ships in November; US forces stood down on 20 November⁶.

What the photographs missed

Imagery showed missiles and launchers, not the warheads. According to a CIA study, the freighter Indigirka had already delivered the first nuclear warheads to Cuba in early October⁵. Nor did Washington know that Soviet forces had short-range tactical nuclear weapons for the defense of the island. That became public only in the 1990s, through Soviet participants at joint conferences and Russian sources⁶.

Read next

May – November 1962 Operation Anadyr The Soviet General Staff's 1962 plan to move nuclear missiles and some 42,000 troops to Cuba in secret, and the deception that hid it from US intelligence until a U-2 flight on 14 October. 24 November 1954 – 16 May 1960 The U-2 program and the 1960 shoot-down From 1956 the CIA's U-2 photographed the Soviet Union from 70,000 feet. On 1 May 1960 a missile brought down Francis Gary Powers near Sverdlovsk, the cover story collapsed and the Paris summit failed. 20 April 1961 – 22 October 1962 IRONBARK: the Penkovsky case How a disaffected GRU colonel, Oleg Penkovsky, fed the CIA and MI6 Soviet missile manuals in 1961–62, and how his IRONBARK material shaped US judgments in the Cuban Missile Crisis. 1919–1963 Oleg Penkovsky GRU colonel who spied for the CIA and MI6 in 1961–62, supplying the missile manuals behind the IRONBARK reporting of the Cuban crisis; arrested in October 1962 and shot in May 1963. 16 October 1962 16 October 1962: the first White House meeting on the missile sites The transcript of the meeting at which President Kennedy and his advisers first discussed U-2 photographs of Soviet medium-range missile sites in Cuba, and began weighing an air strike against a blockade. 30 November 1961 – October 1962 Operation Mongoose The Kennedy administration's 1961–62 covert program to overthrow Fidel Castro, run by Edward Lansdale under Robert Kennedy's eye, which aimed at a revolt in Cuba by October 1962.