INTRODUCTION
At midday, and
again in the early evening of October 16, 1962, John F.
Kennedy called together a group of his closest advisers
at the White House. Late the night before, the CIA had produced
detailed photo intelligence identifying Soviet nuclear missile
installations under construction on the island of Cuba,
some ninety miles off the Florida coast; now the president
and his men confronted the dangerous decision of how the
United States should respond.
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara outlined
three possible courses of action for the president: "the
political course of action" of openly approaching Castro,
Khrushchev, and U.S. allies in a gambit to resolve the crisis
diplomatically, an option that McNamara and others considered
unlikely to succeed; "a course of action that would involve
declaration of open surveillance" coupled with "a blockade
against offensive weapons entering Cuba"; and "military
action directed against Cuba, starting with an air attack
against the missiles." Much of the conversation that day
centered on the military option and the hazardous unknowns
of Soviet retaliation, including the possibility of nuclear
escalation. "I don't believe we have considered the
consequences," McNamara told the president. "I don't know
quite what kind of a world we live in after we've struck
Cuba, and we, we've started it.... How, how do we stop at
that point?"(1)
Thankfully, the Kennedy administration never
had to answer that extraordinary question. Ultimately, President
Kennedy chose to initiate a naval blockade against Soviet
ships carrying missile equipment. His strategy proved successful;
the Soviets withdrew the missiles end nuclear war was averted.
Three decades later, however, Soviets, Cubans,
and Americans learned how close the world had come to a
nuclear conflagration. At a unique conference held in Havana,
Cuba, in January 1992—attended by former Kennedy administration
members, Soviet participants in the crisis, and a Cuban
delegation led by President Fidel Castro—Soviet General
Anatoly Gribkov informed participants that, in addition
to their intermediate-range ballistic missiles, the Soviets
had deployed nine tactical missiles in Cuba to be used against
any U.S. invasion force. Even more significant, General
Gribkov stated that Soviet field commanders in Cuba had
the authority to fire those tactical nuclear weapons without
further direction from the Kremlin!(2)
What might have happened had the United States
invaded Cuba, as some advisers had recommended to President
Kennedy throughout the missile crisis? "We can predict the
results with certainty," former secretary of defense McNamara
answers in his Foreword to this book: "no one should believe
that had United States troops been attacked with tactical
nuclear warheads, the United States would have refrained
from responding with nuclear warheads. And where would it
have ended? In utter disaster."
LEARNING ABOUT THE MISSILE CRISIS
Thirty-six years after the respective actions
of the United States, the Soviet Union, and Cuba brought
the world to the brink of the unthinkable, new and important
information about the Cuban missile crisis continues to
emerge. No event during the Cold War has generated more
popular and scholarly attention; indeed, with hundreds of
articles, books, and essays already written on this episode,
it has become perhaps the most studied international confrontation
of the twentieth century. And so it should be, for the missile
crisis represents the one time that world leaders and the
international community stared down what Kennedy speechwriter
Theodore Sorensen called "the gun barrel of nuclear war,"
the death of history as we know it. Despite the end of the
Cold War, the process of exploration and discovery remains
necessary to understand more fully what caused this crisis
and, more important, to learn how to avoid such potentially
cataclysmic events in the future. "Having come so close
to the edge," observes Kennedy's national security adviser,
McGeorge Bundy, "we must make it our business not to pass
this way again."(3)
Toward that goal, the National Security Archive
began a concerted campaign in 1987 to advance the historical
record on the missile crisis. The objective was to build
a major collection of declassified U.S. government documents,
through the systematic use of the Freedom of Information
Act (FOIA), and to make them available to scholars, students,
journalists, and concerned citizens in order to enhance
the public discussion over what actually happened in 1962
and why. In the early 1970s, many key internal documents
had been made public at the John F. Kennedy Presidential
Library. But thousands of other secret documents remained
beyond the access of the public at large. Despite the passage
of time, the U.S. government refused to declassify these
documents, citing reasons of national security.
In the aftermath of the missile crisis, the
papers from all the national security agencies involved
were scattered throughout the executive branch. Some important
records, for example, were found in a shopping cart in the
basement of the State Department. Other documents, however,
were gathered together and centralized. Researchers at the
National Security Archive discovered, through interviews
with former U.S. officials, that in 1965 the Johnson administration
had retrieved some seventy-five files from various agencies
and stored them in Room 7512 on the seventh floor of the
State Department. This mini-archive of approximately three
thousand records, totaling ten thousand pages in all, included
contingency plans, military scenarios, minutes of Kennedy's
Executive Committee, intelligence reports, analyses, chronologies,
cables, and a wide variety of other highly sensitive State
Department, Defense Department, National Security Council,
and Central Intelligence Agency documents on the missile
crisis.
In April 1987, the National Security Archive
filed a series of FOIA requests for these files.(4)
When the State Department proved unresponsive, the Archive
filed a FOIA lawsuit nine months later seeking to compel
the release of all requested documents. Pursuant to that
suit, by mid 1989 the State Department had declassified
two thousand documents in full or in part. These documents,
supplemented by hundreds of additional declassified records
obtained through other FOIA requests by Archive analysts
and other scholars of the missile crisis, or from presidential
and military libraries, were published in the National Security
Archive's microfiche documents collection, The Cuban
Missile Crisis, 1962: The Making of U. S. Policy. Since
the publication of that collection in 1990, the Archive
has continued to pursue and obtain the declassification
of hundreds of important State, Defense, CIA, and NSC documents
relating to the Cuban missile crisis.
REVISING THE HISTORY OF THE CRISIS
The availability of previously classified
material has enabled scholars both to challenge the conventional
wisdom and to revise long-standing historical interpretations
of the events that took place before, during, and after
October 1962. Despite the wealth of books and articles published
on this subject, until only a few years ago the historiography
of the crisis was built around the memoirs of former Kennedy
administration officials, in particular Robert Kennedy's
Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Similarly, scholarly works on the crisis were dominated
by Graham Allison's seminal book, Essence of Decision,
which drew heavily on the official memoirs to cast the episode
as the "classic" model of crisis management.
The declassified U.S. records have allowed
scholars to highlight the inevitable distortions, limitations,
and inaccuracies in the narratives of former Kennedy administration
officials, and to augment and supplement these officials'
memories. The most striking example of this dynamic occurred
between 1987 and 1992, during a series of retrospective
conferences sponsored by Harvard and Brown universities
and organized by professor James G. Blight, which brought
together former policymakers and scholars from the United
States, the Soviet Union, and Cuba to reconstruct the perilous
events of 1962 and to reevaluate why they happened.(5)
Applying a research technique that he calls "critical oral
history," Blight used the documents to supply facts and
details that the former policymakers had distorted or forgotten
while the participants supplied the missing context of the
documents.(6) The result was a new body
of information that provides a much fuller picture of events
and fundamentally alters how the scope and meaning of the
missile crisis has been and will be considered.
The very definition of the missile crisis
has changed. Rather than a sudden episode, the crisis now
emerges as the culmination of deteriorating relations between
the United States and the Soviet Union, and between the
United States and Cuba. Moreover, no longer can the confrontation
be understood as confined to Robert Kennedy's "thirteen
days," beginning with the discovery of Soviet missiles in
Cuba on October 16 and ending with Khrushchev's decision
to withdraw the missiles on October 28. A series of letters
between Kennedy and Khrushchev, declassified and released
to the National Security Archive in January 1992, demonstrates
that the crisis lasted through late November of 1962, at
the very least.
New revelations about the missile crisis have
also undermined its image as a paradigm of successful crisis
management. For years Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s description
of President Kennedy's decision-making as "so brilliantly
controlled, so matchlessly calibrated" reflected a mythology
that the successful outcome of the missile crisis derived
from Kennedy's masterful management of both the making and
implementation of U.S. policy.(7) In reality,
as Robert McNamara notes, the decision-making process in
Washington, as well as in Moscow and Havana, was characterized
by "misinformation, miscalculation, and misjudgment." Despite
management efforts, according to Theodore Sorensen, the
crisis "came close to spinning out of control before it
was ended."(8)
For example, during the crisis, U.S. officials
mistook a number of Soviet political and military actions
as deliberate "signals" from the Kremlin when, in fact,
they had not been cleared by Khrushchev. Unbeknownst to
the White House, officials of the CIA and the U.S. military
undertook, in the midst of tense negotiations, a number
of threatening operations— among them the dispatch of covert
sabotage teams into Cuba—which were similarly misunderstood
by the Soviets and Cubans. There were also dangerous accidents,
such as the straying of a U.S. aircraft into Soviet airspace
at the height of the crisis. This combination of unauthorized
military and covert actions, misinterpreted military and
political signals, and significant failures in intelligence—all
of which threatened to set a war in motion—not only challenges
earlier depictions of this event as a model of a "controlled
crisis" but calls into question the fundamental assumption
that severe international crises can, in fact, be "managed"
at all.
The new documentation, combined with recent
testimony by Soviet and Cuban officials, also sheds light
on what is perhaps the most important puzzle of the missile
crisis, namely, what motivated the Soviets to deploy nuclear
weapons in Cuba. The declassified record shows that U.S.
officials were well aware that their deployment of Jupiter
missiles near Soviet borders in Turkey and Italy in 1959
would be deeply resented by Soviet officials; even President
Eisenhower noted that it would be a "provocative" step analogous
to the deployment of Soviet missiles in "Mexico or Cuba.(9)
A declassified military history of the Jupiter system reveals
that the rockets became operational in April 1962—an event
that may have contributed to Khrushchev's proposal, made
the very same month, to deploy similar weapons in Cuba.(10)
In addition, the documents lend credence to
Khrushchev's claim that a primary Soviet motivation was
the defense of Cuba against a U.S. invasion. For years,
U.S. analysts have dismissed this as a face-saving, after-the-fact
rationale that enabled the Soviets to declare victory in
the confrontation rather than admit defeat. But formerly
top-secret documents, released to the National Security
Archive in January 1989, provide a detailed description
of a 1962 U.S. covert action program known as OPERATION
MONGOOSE, which combined sabotage, infiltration, and psychological
warfare activities with military exercises and contingency
operations for a possible invasion to overthrow the Castro
government. Guidelines for OPERATION MONGOOSE, tacitly approved
by President Kennedy in March 1962, noted that the "final
success" of the program would "require decisive U.S. military
intervention." Although Kennedy never formally authorized
an invasion, former administration officials acknowledge
that Cuban intelligence had infiltrated the CIA's exile
groups and learned of plans for a potential invasion—which,
ironically, was scheduled for October 1962.
If the new documents illuminate how the crisis
began, they also clarify how it ended. For years, conservative
analysts have alleged that, in return for the Soviet withdrawal
of the missiles, Kennedy made a secret deal with Khrushchev
not to invade Cuba. The recently declassified Kennedy-Khrushchev
correspondence published here, reveals that no such U.S.
commitment was made. Khrushchev repeatedly urged Kennedy
to "formalize through the U.N." a noninvasion pledge to
end the crisis. The letters show Kennedy repeatedly refused,
citing the Soviets' inability to meet U.S. inspection and
verification demands. Highly classified State Department
memoranda, released in April 1992 to the National Security
Archive, reveal the Kennedy administration's internal arguments
against finalizing an agreement on the crisis: a settlement
would limit the United States in its ongoing efforts to
overthrow Fidel Castro. In the end, U.S. officials preferred
free rein to intervene in Cuba over an international accord
that would settle the Cuban missile crisis.
USING THIS DOCUMENTS READER
This book is an effort to tell the story of
the Cuban missile crisis through a selection from the many
documents that were generated by these extraordinary events.
Not every interested person has the time or resources to
sift through the vast quantity of secondary and primary
materials available; this book is designed, then, to provide
access to some of the most important declassified documentation,
thereby permitting the broader public to explore, understand,
and discuss this critical episode. Those who want to study
the crisis further are urged to consult the comprehensive
bibliography included in this volume, and to make use of
the National Security Archive's holdings of over four thousand
documents, totaling some eighteen thousand pages.
The records in this documents reader are drawn
from the Archive's indexed microfiche collection, The Cuban
Missile Crisis, 1962: The Making of U. S. Policy, and from
hundreds of other documents subsequently obtained through
the Freedom of Information Act. Most of these documents
are original photoreproductions; a few have been transcribed—for
example, Khrushchev's letters to Kennedy—for reasons of
legibility or length. Almost all of the selected documents
were once highly classified internal U.S. government records;
however, important public communiqués or speeches
have been included to render as complete an account of events
as possible. Important documents generated by the Soviet
and Cuban governments are also included.
The documents are divided into four sections,
each of which is prefaced by a contextual introduction,
in which the documents are cited by number. Generally, the
records are organized chronologically, although in a few
cases, materials on one specific aspect of the missile crisis
have been gathered together for continuity. Those readers
who prefer to start with a comprehensive overview of events
are urged to read the chronology at the back of the book
in order to place the individual documents in the broader
context of events.
Admittedly, the documents reproduced here
do not present a complete picture of the extraordinary events
surrounding the missile crisis. For reasons of space limitations,
we were forced to select records that, in our judgment,
represented important aspects of the crisis, and in some
cases to edit them for length. Even more important, the
vast majority of these documents are U.S. government records
that reflect only the view from Washington. The recent conferences
in Moscow and Havana have contributed critically needed
Soviet and Cuban information and perspectives to the history
of the crisis. To date, though, few Soviet or Cuban documents
have been released. Until these nations' archives are opened
to the public, U.S., Soviet, and Cuban historians will be
unable to present anything approximating a full account
of the crisis, and books on the crisis will necessarily
remain incomplete.
Public discourse on the Cuban missile crisis,
however, need not wait, for there is more than enough accessible
information to advance our collective education and sustain
an ongoing discussion on how to prevent similar confrontations
in the future. In his memoir, Thirteen Days, Robert
Kennedy ascribed the successful outcome of the crisis to
the ability of the president and his aides to discuss, consider,
and reconsider the most prudent U.S. approach: "The fact
that we were able to talk, debate, argue, disagree, and
then debate some more was essential in choosing our ultimate
course."(11) A broader public discussion
of issues such as intervention, nuclear weapons, and the
use of military power is similarly essential to chart the
future foreign policy course of the nation. We hope this
volume will contribute to just such a debate.
Peter Kornbluh Laurence Chang October 1,
1998
Notes
1. Transcript of the ExComm
meeting on the evening of October 16, 1962.
2. "Small Missiles Heightened
Peril in 1962 Cuban Crisis," Washington Post, Jan.
14, 1992.
3. McGeorge Bundy, Danger
and Survival: Choices about the Bomb in the First Fifty
Years (New York: Random House, 1989), p. 462.
4. The requests were filed
in the name of Professor Philip Brenner, a Cuba specialist
and member of the Archive advisory board.
5. These conferences have
resulted in three major books and numerous articles by Blight
and his colleagues. See James G. Blight and David A. Welch,
On the Brink: Americans and Soviets Reexamine the Cuban
Missile Crisis (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989); James
G. Blight, The Shattered Crystal Ball: Fear and Learning
in the Cuban Missile Crisis (Savage, Md.: Rowman and
Littlefield, 1ggo); Bruce J. Allyn, James G. Blight, and
David A. Welch, Back to the Brink: The Moscow Conference
on the Cuban Missile Crisis (Lanham, Md.: University
Press of America, 1991), and Cuba On the Brink: Fidel
Castro, the Missile Crisis and the collapse of Communism
(New York: Pantheon; 1993). Among their many articles,
see Allyn, Blight, and Welch, "Essence of Revision: Moscow,
Havana and the Cuban Missile Crisis," International Security
14, no.3 (1989/1990), pp. 136-172.
6. For a discussion of using
the documents and critical oral history, see Blight and
Welch, On the Brink, pp. 5, 6.
7. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.,
A Thousand Days: JFK in the White House (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1965), p.841.
8. Quoted in Blight, On
the Brink, p. 3 1 5.
9. "Memorandum of Conference
with the President," June 6, 1959. Available in the National
Security Archive's microfiche collection, The Cuban Missile
Crisis, 1962: The Making of U. S. Policy.
10. James N. Grimwood and
Francis Strowd, "History of the Jupiter Missile System,"
July 27,1962. Available in the National Security Archive's
microfiche collection, The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962:
The Making of U. S. Policy.
11. Robert Kennedy, Thirteen
Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1969), p.111.