-Caveat Lector-
~~for educational purposes only~~
[Title 17 U.S.C. section 107]
Thirteen Lies (and Perhaps a Single Truth)
by Servando Gonzalez
Some time ago I found on the Web a joker's site with
suggestions about deductions you can legally claim to
lower your taxes. One of them was, go watch a Kevin
Costner movie and deduct it as a charitable
contribution. Last week I followed the guy's advice
and saw Thirteen Days. Believe me, it was not worth
the effort. Next time I'll rather pay my taxes in
full.
Though we are used to Hollywood's freedoms in telling
history, I always watch a movie for entertainment. If
I want to know about history I read it in a good
book. Initially, film makers never made any claim
that what they were creating was nothing other than
fiction, and I never had a problem with that. Lately,
however, there is a growing trend to pass some of
Hollywood's fiction as history, and this is something
I don't like one bit.
As a card-carrying compassionate Liberal, Kevin
Costner feels a strong attraction for starring in
politically correct movies. When applied to history,
however, political correctness is equivalent to the
distortion of the past to justify the politics of
the present; that is, lying. Thirteen Days, Costner's
latest film about the Cuban missile crisis, is a
politically correct movie.
The Lies
Thirteen days is as full of lies as Robert Kennedy's
homonymous book in which the film is mostly based.
The rest of the lies come from some recent studies
about the crisis made by "serious" historians. Among
the most flagrant lies depicted in the film are:
1. In some scenes, soldiers jump from trucks to
ready intermediate range missiles.
Unless the Soviets had implemented affirmative action
at the time and had enlisted some Africans as privates,
one must assume that the soldiers manning the missiles
in the film are Cuban. It is true that some Cuban
troops had been authorized to work on the installation
of the SAM bases. But, with the exception of Fidel
Castro, Raúl Castro, and Ché Guevara (none of which
are black), the Cubans were strictly forbidden to
access the strategic missile bases, or even come
close to their perimeter guarded by seasoned Soviet
special troops.
2. Kennedy and his close associates were surprised
and shocked with the unexpected discovery of
strategic Soviet missiles in Cuban soil.
It seems that their surprised was faked, because as
early as August, 1962, the word was out in Washington
that the Soviets were building missile launchers for
weapons already in Cuba. Between August 31 and October
12, 1962, Senator Kenneth Keating made ten Senate
speeches and fourteen public statements about the
developments in Cuba. He was merely saying publicly
what the American intelligence community, apparently
his source of information, was muttering as loudly
as they could.
Cuban refugees, leaving the island in drones, had
been reporting sightings of Soviet army trucks carrying
extremely long cigar-shaped objects covered by
tarpaulins. Some of the refugees strongly suspected
that the cigar-shaped objects they had seen riding
on Soviet trucks on Cuban highways were not Siberian
Cohibas for Castro. But, instead of paying attention
to the growing concern, White House press secretary
Pierre Salinger criticized the television networks
for giving Keating the air time to express his concerns.
3. We were more close to the brink than ever before.
During the crisis President Kennedy ordered to defuse
the nuclear warheads of the American missiles in Turkey,
allegedly to avoid an accident. It was also reported
that, even during the most dangerous moments of the
crisis, Kennedy didn't alert the civil defense or show
any curiosity about learning how to use the secret
codes to unleash a nuclear attack. Strange behavior
indeed for the commander-in-chief of a country at the
brink of a nuclear attack.
But one of the most striking things of the Cuban
missile crisis is that the Soviets never placed their
troops, nor the civilian defense, under alert. This
astonishing fact is mentioned in most of the early
accounts of the crisis. Recently declassified top
secret CIA documents confirmed the fact. At 10:00 in
the morning of Tuesday the 23rd of October, CIA Director
John McCone reported a strange thing to the ExComm: no
signs of a general alert of Soviet forces in Cuba or
around the globe had been reported.
A top secret CIA memo of October 25 clearly states
that "We still see no signs of any crash procedure in
measures to increase the readiness of Soviet armed
forces." A top secret memo of October 26 gives the
first indications of a state of alert, but in some
european satellite countries, not in the Soviet Union.
As late as Friday, October 26, American intelligence
reported from Cuba, from Moscow, and from the United
Nations, that the Russians were not ready for war. It
is only on October 27 that a top secret CIA memo clearly
acknowledges that "No significant redeployment of Soviet
ground, air or naval forces have been noted. However,
there are continuing indications of increased readiness
among some units."
Surprisingly, even at that late date, the Soviets had
made no attempt to mobilize their civil defense nor to
prepare the population for the eventual use of fallout
shelters. This was quite significant, because the
Soviets had devoted considerable effort to instructing
their civilian population in civil defense and had
invested considerably in fallout shelters.
4. Now it can be told: we were even more closer
to the brink than most people may think.
During a three-day meeting that took place in Havana
with the presence of Cuban, Soviet, and American scholars
and officials, among them Robert S. McNamara, new
declassified documents of the crisis from the different
parties involved were made available to the scholars. It
was during this meeting that a Soviet official, Army
General Anatoly Gribkov, who allegedly was responsible
for planning the operation in 1962, dropped a bombshell
when he confirmed the presence of both strategic and
tactical nuclear warheads on Cuban soil. Gribkov
provided no evidence to support his claims.
However, notwithstanding Gribkov's unsubstantiated claims,
one has to be very naive to believe that the Soviet Union
could commit nuclear suicide in defense of a small island
lost in the Caribbean whose leader was an unstable, self
proclaimed "Marxist." That would have been a totally
foolish decision. But Nikita Sergueyevich Khrushchev a.k.a.
the "Butcher of Budapest," and the "Hangman of the
Ukraine" was anything but a fool.
5. The Soviets had deployed 32 nuclear warheads in
Cuba in 1962.
The American intelligence never confirmed the presence
of nuclear warheads on Cuban soil. They never found
evidence of nuclear warheads in Cuba and Kennedy gave
specific orders about not verifying the extraction of
nuclear warheads by boarding and inspecting
the Soviet ships leaving Cuba after the crisis.
Lately, perhaps enticed by juicy grants from American
foundations, some of the ex-Soviets have engaged in a
fierce competition to tell some Americans what they
love to hear. In 1989 Gen. Volkogonov revealed that
20 nuclear warheads were in Cuba. In 1992, Gen, Gribkov
raised the number of nuclear warheads in Cuba to 48.
In 1996 Lt. Col. Anatoly Dukuchaev raised the ante to
162 nuclear warheads in Cuban soil in 1962. Like rabbits,
the nuclear warheads in Cuba keep multiplying. If this
fierce competition keeps heating up fueled by American
money, one of these funny Russians may end up by
claiming that there were more nuclear warheads in
Cuba than the number the Soviets actually had at the
time.
The main force behind this concerted effort in proving
that nuclear warheads were in Cuba is Robert McNamara,
whose main goal has been to find justifications for
his absurd policies as Secretary of Defense during the
Kennedy administration. Recently McNamara found support
for his theories from none other than his former executive
action target, Fidel Castro, and from a group of Russians,
among them, Sergei Mikoyan, an old KGB hand. But McNamara,
Castro, and the ex-KGB operatives are very questionable
sources of intelligence.
6. The Soviet officers in the field in Cuba
had an open hand to use nuclear weapons
without further authorization from Moscow.
According to Gribkov, General Pliyev, the Soviet military
commander in Cuba, had been given authorization to fire
nuclear devices against an American invasion force if he
considered it necessary, without further authorization
from the Kremlin.
However, it is very difficult to believe, as some American
researchers and retired senior Soviet officers now claim,
that Russian field officers in Cuba had been authorized
to use tactical nuclear warheads without further
authorization from Moscow. Such an action would have been
tantamount to mass suicide, since a single nuclear warhead
fired by Russian troops in Cuba would had been equivalent
to a declaration of nuclear war between the United States
and the Soviet Union. One has to be very naive, or have
had as many vodka bottles as Gribkov, to believe that
the Kremlin, whose zeal over the control of nuclear
devices bordered paranoia, would have committed that act
of sheer madness.
7. The plan was Khrushchev's idea to protect
Castro from an American invasion.
In his memoirs Khrushchev claims that the main reason
for sending strategic missiles to Cuba was because Castro
feared an American invasion. But it is very difficult
to believe that Khrushchev planned to install missiles
in Cuba to protect Castro just a few days after Khrushchev
had tried to overthrow the Cuban leader by force. Actually,
in April of 1962, after Castro discovered and neutralized
the plot, he expelled from Cuba Soviet Ambassador
Kudryatvsev (who also moonlighted as a senior GRU
officer) and a group of his embassy thugs.
Moreover, simple logic dictates that no great power
is going to give missiles to any newcomer who just
asks for them. The USSR installed missiles where it
wanted, and nowhere else. When Mao asked for missiles
the Soviets turned him down flat. Neither before 1962,
nor after, did the Soviets deploy nuclear warheads
beyond their borders. It was not until many years
later, only after they had developed reliable devices
to control its arming, that the Soviets allowed a
limited number of nuclear warheads to cross their
borders, and always under strict control of KGB's
special troops. If the Soviets didn't trust their
own army, why, then, would they risk placing nuclear
missiles so close to the unstable, trigger-happy
Castro? If anything, what Khrushchev would have
loved was having the Americans doing the dirty job
he failed to accomplish, by invading Cuba and
helping him getting rid of the unreliable Fidel Castro.
The Soviet commitment in Cuba had proved to be a
calamitous failure. As seen from the Kremlin, Castro
was unpredictable, volatile, undisciplined, and often
nonsensical. His wholesale executions, mass arrests,
and terrorist adventures against his Latin American
neighbors, together with the sight of hundreds of
thousands of Cubans attempting to flee his rule,
raised the very Stalinist specter Khrushchev was
trying to dispel. Moreover, Castro was making a
shambles of the Cuban economy and neglected to pay
attention to "suggestions" coming from Moscow
In such circumstances the sensible course for Khrushchev
was to cut his losses and get out of the game,
particularly considering that the Soviet lines of
supply to Cuba were long and extremely vulnerable.
But to leave Cuba voluntarily would have been tantamount
to an admission of failure and would had involved
substantial loss of face. If, however, Castro could
be eliminated as a result of American "aggression,"
then Khrushchev and the USSR could retreat from Cuba,
their honor relatively untarnished. After an American
invasion of the island the failure of Communism in
Cuba could be blamed not on deficiencies in Soviet-style
communist management of Cuban affairs, but on "Yankee
Imperialism."
8. The Soviet had deployed the missiles with
cunning and stealth.
In shipping the missiles to Cuba, the USSR was accused
of stealth and deception. This accusation of deceit
runs throughout all official US statements. The evidence
indicates, however, that Soviet stealth and deception
were faked. The available record suggests that, in fact,
the Russians went to great pains to let the Americans
discover the missiles. There is evidence that the
Soviets sped up their pace of work and camouflaged the
missiles only after they were sure the Americans had
discovered them.
The plan to set up the missiles was carried out in
such a way that they would inevitably be discovered
by the Americans. If one assumes that the anti-aircraft
SAM's were intended to protect the installations of the
strategic missiles, then they should have been installed
and ready to shoot the US planes before the strategic
missiles arrived. Actually the SAM's and other associated
anti-aircraft nets only became operational when the
construction of the strategic missile sites was well
along, and the Soviets employed almost no camouflage
at all to hide either set of weapons. In any case,
since the SAM's could not shoot down planes flying
below 10,000 feet, these anti-aircraft missiles would
not have been useful in the event of an American invasion.
Both the MRBM's and the IRBM's were above ground and
located in soft terrain, very vulnerable to any type
of enemy attack. Although a single installation of
MRBM could be built in a matter of days, the Russians
were progressing very slowly in their installation.
They seemed to be in no great hurry, and worked only
during daylight hours.
The Cubans were concerned about the role of the American
intelligence surveillance, but the Russians dismissed
their concern and gave the matter no importance. The
Cuban intelligence services were also aware that the
CIA was interrogating Cuban refugees at the Opa Locka
military base in Florida. The large number of refugees
arriving in Miami was providing the CIA with a great
deal of information. Castro proposed to stop the
emigration flood by eliminating all available means
of escape from the island, but the Soviets proposed
to leave things unchanged. In that way, reasoned the
Russians, the CIA would obtain a lot of contradictory
information and soon stop relying on the credibility of
the refugees. Many of the departing refugees had seen
missiles, but, in most cases, these were just
antiaircraft SAMs. To the Cubans' dismay, the Soviets
even suggested that, instead of trying to hide evidence
of the missiles, it was better to let it be obvious.
For the first time the Cuban personnel working at the
antiaircraft missile sites were granted leaves.
The Cubans knew the quality of the American air
surveillance technology. On several occasions Castro
asked the Soviets to give him SAMs, and let his people
operate them, but the Russians were reluctant. Although
most of the Cubans assigned to the missile bases were
engineering students from Havana University, the Soviets
only allowed them to operate the radars.
By the beginning of August the Russians complained to
the Cuban government about the lack of discipline and
seditious demonstrations of the university students at
the missile bases. Apparently the Cubans were frustrated
by the Russians' inaction in the face of overflying
American U-2 planes. Fidel himself had to make an
inspection visit to the bases in order to calm down
the Cubans there. Apparently Fidel convinced everybody,
with one important exception: Ché Guevara. Major
Guevara said that he would only change his opinion
if somebody convinced him that the American spy planes
flying over Cuba were not jeopardizing the operation.
But he finally opted to accept Fidel's orders.
Contrary to the opinion of most American analysts,
almost all SAM antiaircraft sites in western Cuba had
reached operational status by the beginning of August,
1962. From that early date the Soviets could have
fired on the American spy planes if they had wanted to.
On the morning of October 14, 1962, a U-2 entered Cuban
air space and flew over the province of Pinar del Río.
The Cubans watched the plane on the radar screens,
appalled as the Russians did nothing. Later Castro
complained bitterly about the Russian inaction.
Why were the Soviets permitting the American planes
to discover the missiles? It was at the Excomm meeting
the morning of the 23rd of October that CIA Director
John McCone reported that the Russians were beginning
to camouflage the missile sites. Nobody could
explain why they had waited so long to do so.
9. Finally, the CIA smelled a rat, Kennedy approved
the U-2 flights, and Major Anderson photographed
the missiles.
According to most American analysts, what initiated
the crisis were the U-2 photographs of Soviet missile
sites in Cuba on October 14, 1962. US leaders might
have received information three weeks earlier if a
U-2 had flown over the western part of Cuba in the
last week of September. But, quite unexplainably,
the U-2s were prevented from flying over that part
of Cuba, precisely where intelligence reports indicated
that the missiles were most likely to be.
On August, 1962, a U-2 returned with photographs of
Russian SA-2 antiaircraft missiles being unloaded
at Cuban docks. More U-2s came back with fresh
pictures of more SA-2s. But President Kennedy
insisted there was no evidence that the Russians
were moving in offensive missiles that could threaten
the United States.
Though all evidence pointed to the province of Pinar
del Río in the western part of Cuba as the most
likely location for missile sites, a very strange
thing happened: after September 5 no U-2 flights
were directed over that part of the island. It was
not until October 14, that a U-2 plane, reportedly
by chance, took the now famous photographs of the
sites under construction. Yet, the word that there
were Russian missile sites in Cuba was so widespread
that even Time magazine ran an article on September
21 showing a map of Cuba clustered with Soviet
ground-to-air missiles, mainly in the western part of
the island, west and south of Havana.
In retrospect it is clear that both the Americans and
the Russians were playing a subtle cat-and-mouse game,
the Russians trying, by every means, to get the
Americans to discover the missiles, and the Americans
trying not to discover them.
10. An American invasion of Cuba would have
brought nuclear war with the Soviet Union.
The day after the Bay of Pigs invasion began,
Khrushchev sent President Kennedy a message appealing
to him to stop the aggression. The tone of the message,
however, was not in accordance to the man who some
months earlier had boasted with apocalyptic visions.
"As for the USSR, there must be no mistake about our
position. We will extend to the Cuban people and its
government all the necessary aid for the repulse of
the armed attack on Cuba. . . We are sincerely interested
in the relaxation of international tensions, but if others
go in for its aggravation, then we will answer then in
full measure." The fact is that when the invasion began
Castro wired Russia for help or at least for open
solidarity, but Khrushchev ignored him until the Cuban
militia had definitely beaten the invaders.
Khrushchev's "missile rattling" about Cuba was not
the first case of such bluffings. He had before
threatened with rockets over Suez, over the landings in
Lebanon and Jordan, and over Berlin. Khrushchev also
threatened Britain and France with long-range missiles
at the time of the Suez crisis, but not before he was
certain that the crisis was effectively over. When the
Matsu-Quemoy crisis of the fall of 1958 erupted, Soviet
support came in the form of two threatening letters from
Khrushchev to Eisenhower. But Khrushchev's guarantees
and promises of help to Communist China were extended
only after it had become clear that the United States
was not going to intervene in the affair and the threat
of war was gone. Therefore, it is safe to assume that,
at most, an American invasion of Cuba would have brought
a strong condemnation from the USSR delegate at the UN,
and a barrage of threats in the Soviet press for internal
consumption only, and nothing more.
11. After the crisis was over, Khrushchev and
Kennedy signed a secret pact guaranteeing
the non-invasion of Cuba.
In 1970 Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, disturbed
over the submarine base the Soviets were building in
Cienfuegos, a port on the Southern coast of Cuba, hunted
through the State Department's files looking for the
written agreement he was sure President Kennedy had
signed with Khrushchev. He found, to his utter amazement,
that there was none.
Moreover, if the agreement ever existed, it has the
dubious honor of having being applied retroactively,
because the American harassment of the anti-Castro
Cubans in the US began just after the Bay of Pigs
invasion, a year and a half before the Cuban missile
crisis. If American presidents from Kennedy on have
proved unwilling to get rid of Fidel Castro, it
is not because a non-existent pact forbids them to do
so, but because of some other secret reasons unknown
to us.
12. General LeMay was a mad warmonger out of
control.
General Curtiss LeMay, Air Force Chief, argued forcefully
with the President that a military attack was essential.
When the President questioned him about what the Soviet
response might be, General LeMay assured him that there
would be no reaction at all. Later the Kennedys and
their buddies, as usual, made derogatory comments of
General LeMay's statements behind his back.
But LeMay was not a mad warmonger as he is depicted in
the film, nor was he alone. Former Secretary of State
Dean Acheson made his arguments that an air attack and
invasion represented the only American alternative to
the US He added that the President of the United States
had the responsibility for the security of the American
people and of the whole world, that it was his duty to
take the only action which could protect that security,
and that this meant destroying the missiles in Cuba.
Shortly before his tv address to inform the nation of
his decision to impose a blockade on the Soviet ships
bound for Cuba, President Kennedy met with the members
of the Cabinet and informed them of the crisis for the
first time. Then, he met with leaders of Congress.
According to Robert Kennedy, this was the President's
most difficult meeting. Many congressional leaders were
sharp in their criticism. They complained that the
President should take a more forceful action --a military
attack or an invasion of Cuba--, and that the blockade
was far too weak a response.
When Senators Richard Russell and William Fulbright
were informed of the situation in Cuba and the
presidential decision to blockade the island, they
argued that a blockade could not be effective in the
short time remaining before the missile sites became
operational. In fact, if one assumed that the nuclear
warheads were already in Cuba, as it was logical to
suppose at the time, a blockade of the island seemed
to be a foolhardy decision.
Dean Acheson, one of the most notable critics of President
Kennedy's decisions during the crisis, wrote later that,
though the American strategy during the crisis was wrong,
it succeeded in obtaining the withdrawal of the missiles
simply by "dumb luck". Acheson's recommendation for
decisive military action, namely an air strike over
Cuba, was flatly rejected by Kennedy. And Acheson was
not the only one with little praise for Kennedy's
decision-making abilities. General Douglas McArthur,
though crediting Kennedy with political cunning, called
the President "just dumb when it comes to decision making."
13. On October 28, 1962, a missile battery
under Soviet command shot down Maj.
Rudolf Anderson's U-2.
Not so fast Louie! According to Seymour Hersh, there is
strong evidence that, on October 26, 1962, a Cuban army
unit attacked and overran a Soviet-manned SAM base at
Los Angeles, near Banes, in the Oriente province, killing
many Soviets and seizing control of the site. This was
the very base that later fired the SAMs which destroyed
Anderson's U-2. Hersh based his article on information
partly drawn from an interview with former Department
of Defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg, who was himself
citing classified material from a post-crisis study
of the event. The speculation is based on an intercepted
transmission from the Soviet base at Los Angeles
indicating heavy fighting and casualties. Adrián Montoro,
former director of Radio Havana Cuba, and Juan Antonio
Rodríguez Menier, a senior Cuban intelligence officer
who defected in 1987 and is now living in the
US, seem to confirm Ellsberg's thesis.
Though both Castro and the Russians have categorically
denied that the attack took place, Raymond L. Garthoff,
Special Assistant for Soviet bloc Political/Military
Affairs in the State Department during the Kennedy
administration, claims that, in fact, from October
28, the Cuban army did surround the Soviet missile
bases for three days. It is evident that, whatever
really happened, Castro was itching for a nuclear
shoot-out between the Soviet Union and the United States.
Messages exchanged between Castro and Khrushchev on
October 28, 1962, indicate that something very fishy
happened that day. In his message the Soviet premier
accused the Cuban leader of shooting down the American
plane. Then, Khrushchev warned Castro that such steps
"will be used by aggressors to their advantage, to
further their aims." In his answer to Khrushchev
Castro explained that he had mobilized his antiaircraft
batteries "to support the position of the Soviet forces."
Then, Castro added this cryptic remark: "The
Soviet Forces Command can give you further detail
on what happened with the plane that was shot down."
The Single Truth
The missiles we see in the movie are Hollywoodian
contraptions made out of plywood covered by thin
aluminum sheet. Well, perhaps not everything in the
movie is wrong. There is the possibility that, like
the missiles in Costner's film, the Soviet strategic
missiles in Cuba had been dummies.
The official story, advanced by the Kennedy administration,
accepted at face value by most scholars of the Crisis
and later popularized by the American mainstream media,
is that, though rumors about the presence of strategic
missiles in Cuba were widespread among Cuban exiles in
Florida since mid-1962, the American intelligence
community was never fooled by them. To American
intelligence analysts, "only direct evidence, such as
aerial photographs, could be convincing." It was not
until 14 October, however, that a U-2, authorized at
last to fly over the Western part of Cuba, brought
the first high-altitude photographs of what seemed
to be Soviet strategic missile sites, in different
stages of completion, deployed on Cuban soil.
Once the photographs were evaluated by experts at
the National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC),
they were brought to President Kennedy who, after a
little prompting by a photo-interpreter who attended
the meeting (even with help and good will it is not
easy to see the missiles in the photographs), accepted
as a fact the NPIC's conclusion that Soviet Premier
Nikita S. Khrushchev had taken a fateful, aggressive step
against the U.S. This meeting is considered by most
scholars the beginning of the Cuban missile crisis.
Save for a few skeptics at the United Nations (a little
more than a year before, Adlai Stevenson had shown the
very same delegates "hard" photographic evidence of Cuban
planes, allegedly piloted by Castro's defectors, which
had attacked positions on the island previous to the
Bay of Pigs landing), most people, including the members
of the American press, unquestionably accepted the U-2
photographs as evidence of Khrushchev's treachery. The
photographic "evidence," however, was received abroad
with mixed feelings.
Sherman Kent recorded in detail the story about how
the U-2 photographs were brought to some American allies,
and what their reactions were. British Prime Minister
Harold Macmillan, for example, just spent a few seconds
examining the photographs, and accepted the proof on
belief. The Prime Minister's Private Secretary, however,
"expressed serious concern about the reception any
strong Government statement in support of the U.S.
decision would have in the absence of incontrovertible
proof of the missile buildup."
German Chancellor Adenauer accepted the photographic
evidence, and apparently was impressed with it. General
de Gaulle accepted President Kennedy's word initially
on faith, though later he inspected the photographs
in great detail, and was impressed with the quality
of them. However, when the photographs were shown to
French journalists, one of them, André Fontaine, an
important senior writer of Le Monde, strongly expressed
his doubts. Only circumstantial evidence he received
later, not the photographs themselves, made him change
his opinion. Canada's Prime Minister Diefenbaker
questioned the credibility of the evidence of Soviet
strategic missiles in Cuba.
According to Kent, notwithstanding some of the viewers'
past experience in looking at similar photographs, "All
viewers, however, took on faith or on the say-so of the
purveyors that the pictures were what they claimed to
be: scenes from Cuba taken a few days past." Nevertheless,
beginning with Robert Kennedy's classic analysis of the
crisis, the acceptance of the U-2's photographs as hard
evidence of the presence of Soviet strategic missiles
deployed on Cuban soil has rarely been contested.
In the case of the U-2 photographs, the NPIC photo
interpreters correctly decoded the objects appearing in
them as images of strategic missiles. But accepting the
images of missiles as the ultimate proof of the presence
of strategic missiles in Cuba was a big jump of their
imagination, as well as a semantic mistake. A more
truthful interpretation of the things whose images
appeared in the U-2's photographs would have been to
call them "objects whose photographic image highly
resemble Soviet strategic missiles." But, like the man
who mistook his wife for a hat, the photointerpreters at
the NPIC confused the photographs of missiles with the
actual missiles. Afterwards, like mesmerized children,
the media and the scholarly community blindly followed
the Pied Piper of photographic evidence. But, as in
Magritte's famous painting The Treachery of Images,
a picture of a pipe is not a pipe, and a picture of a
missile in not a missile.
With the advent of the new surveillance technologies
pioneered with the U-2 plane and now extensively used
by satellites, there has been a growing trend in the
US intelligence community to rely more and more on
imaging intelligence (imint) and less and less on
agents in the field (humint). But, as any intelligence
specialist can testify, photography alone, though a
very useful surveillance component, should never be
considered hard evidence. Photographs, at best, are
just indicators pointing to a possibility which has
to be physically confirmed by other means, preferably
by trained, qualified agents working in the field.
Moreover, even disregarding the fact that photographs
can be faked and doctored, nothing is so misleading as
a photograph. According to the information available
up to this moment, the photographic evidence of Soviet
strategic missiles on Cuban soil was never confirmed
by American agents working in the field. The missiles
were never touched, smelled, weighed. Their metal,
electronic components, and fuel were never tested;
the radiation from their nuclear warheads was never
recorded; their heat signature was never verified.
One of the golden rules of intelligence work is to
treat with caution all information not independently
corroborated or supported by reliable documentary or
physical evidence. Yet, recently declassified Soviet
documents, and questionable oral reports from Soviet
officials who allegedly participated directly in the
event, have lately been accepted as sufficient evidence
of the presence of strategic missiles and their nuclear
warheads in Cuba in 1962. But one can hardly accept as
hard evidence non-corroborated, non-evaluated
information coming from a former adversary who has
yet to prove he has turned into a friend.
Despite all recent claims on the contrary, CIA reports
at the time consistently denied the presence of nuclear
warheads in Cuba. Also, American planes, flying low
over the missile sites and the Soviets ships, never
detected any of the radiation that would be expected
from nuclear warheads. The technology to detect
radiation existed at the time. In the 1960s the NEDS
900 series of radiation detectors had been developed
and deployed in the Dardanelles as a way to monitor
the presence of nuclear weapons aboard Soviet
warships transiting the strait from the Black Sea.
Gen. William Y. Smith, who was a Major and an assistant
to Gen. Maxwell Taylor in the White House at the time
of the crisis, reported a very interesting detail.
While reviewing message traffic from US intelligence
sources on Soviet military activity, Gen. Smith found
out a report that a US Navy ship had picked up suspicious
levels of radioactivity emitted by a Soviet freighter,
the Poltava. He suggested to Gen. Taylor that he ask
Admiral Anderson if the emanations meant the ship was
carrying nuclear warheads. At the next Joint Chief's
meeting, Taylor posed the question to Anderson, who
replied, somewhat embarrased, that he had not seen the
message. Later that morning, Anderson's office informed
Smith that the report had little significance, that
Smith had misread it.
It makes sense to believe, therefore, that the
Americans had the means to detect radiation from
nuclear warheads leaving Cuba, without having to board
the Soviet ships. But, again, no mention is made of
this important fact in any of the declassified documents
on the Cuban missile crisis. Also, Admiral Anderson's
behavior, as described by Gen. Smith, is strange, to
say the least, because that report was extremely important.
Therefore, either the Americans detected no radiation
from the Soviet ships, and they kept the fact secret,
or they simply forgot that they had the means to check
indirectly the presence of nuclear warheads. But there
is a third possibility: that they never tried to
detect the radiation from nuclear warheads in Cuba
because they were pretty sure there were no nuclear
devices in the island. As a matter of fact, this third
possibility is the only one that fully explains President
Kennedy's strange behavior of not enforcing on the
defeated Soviets the physical inspection of their outbound
ships who allegedly were bringing the missiles and their
nuclear warheads back to the Soviet Union.
The Soviets were masters of deception and disinformation,
and maskivovka was an important part of the Soviet military
tactic and strategic doctrine. Some western intelligence
analysts suspected that, as late as 1960, not only most
of the missiles parading in Red Square were dummies, but
even some units of the newly created Soviet Strategic
Rocket Forces were not getting real missiles. The Russians
have a long tradition in the deception business. One must
bear in mind that it was count Grigori Aleksandrovich
Potemkim who created the first Hollywood-style film sets.
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