The Cuban Missile Crisis Intelligence

Audio readout of this entry.

Background

The Soviet decision to deploy nuclear-armed ballistic missiles to Cuba was taken by the Presidium of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in late May 1962, following a sequence of Soviet-Cuban consultations conducted across April and May of that year. The deployment plan was assigned the cover name Operation Anadyr and called for the dispatch to Cuba of four motorised rifle regiments, one anti-aircraft division, one Air Force light-bomber unit and a separate Navy mine-torpedo aviation regiment (both equipped with Il-28 aircraft), one MiG-21 fighter aviation regiment (the 32nd Guards), three Soviet Navy units, three R-12 (NATO designation SS-4 Sandal) medium-range ballistic missile regiments, and two R-14 (NATO designation SS-5 Skean) intermediate-range ballistic missile regiments — the missile component to be installed in fixed-position launching sites on the island, equipped with nuclear warheads, and operationally ready by November 1962.¹

The Soviet rationale for the deployment combined a stated commitment to the defence of Cuba (in the wake of the United States–sponsored Bay of Pigs operation of April 1961 and against what the Soviet leadership assessed as continued United States preparation for direct military intervention) with a strategic interest in establishing a counterweight to the United States Jupiter intermediate-range ballistic missile deployment in Turkey and Italy that had become operational in 1961–1962. Khrushchev's account, given in his post-resignation memoirs and corroborated in the subsequently released Presidium minutes, frames both rationales as operative.²

The United States intelligence assessment of Soviet activity in Cuba across the summer of 1962 was conducted on the basis of a combination of refugee reports, low-altitude photographic reconnaissance, communications intercepts, and U-2 high-altitude photographic reconnaissance over the island, the latter conducted under the operational control of the United States Air Force Strategic Air Command but with target-selection authority residing in the Committee on Overhead Reconnaissance and the United States Intelligence Board. The Special National Intelligence Estimate 85-3-62 of 19 September 1962 — drafted under the direction of the Office of National Estimates — assessed that the Soviet Union was unlikely to deploy offensive nuclear weapons systems to Cuba, the assessment being grounded in the absence of any precedent for Soviet deployment of strategic weapons systems outside its own territory and in the assessed Soviet awareness of the United States response such a deployment would provoke. The Director of Central Intelligence, John A. McCone, dissented from that assessment in a series of memoranda from August onward, in which he argued that the pattern of observed Soviet shipping activity, the construction of surface-to-air missile sites, and the deployment of MiG-21 aircraft were consistent with preparation for the deployment of an offensive strategic system.³

The Operation

Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky was a colonel of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Soviet General Staff (GRU), serving in the period of his cooperation with Western services as deputy head of the foreign-relations department of the State Committee for the Coordination of Scientific Research Work — a cover position that gave him sustained access to the GRU's foreign-intelligence operations and to the Soviet strategic-rocket forces' technical documentation. Penkovsky's recruitment was the product of a sequence of approaches he initiated himself across 1960 and early 1961 — first to Western tourists in Moscow, subsequently to British businessmen — and was formalised in April 1961 by a joint CIA–SIS handling team, comprising the SIS officers Janet Chisholm (in Moscow) and Ruari Chisholm and the CIA officer George Kisevalter, with case-officer responsibility on the British side resting with Harold Shergold of SIS Soviet Bloc Operations.⁴

Across the period from April 1961 through August 1962 — when his contact with the joint handling team was suspended in response to mounting indications of Soviet counterintelligence interest — Penkovsky supplied the joint team with a substantial body of Soviet technical, doctrinal, and order-of-battle documentation, including the GRU table of organisation, the substantial body of Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces technical and operating manuals (covering principally the R-12 medium-range and R-14 intermediate-range ballistic missile systems), and an extensive set of training and doctrinal publications relating to Soviet nuclear-weapons employment policy. The Penkovsky material was processed in Washington and London under the cryptonyms IRONBARK (for the documentary product) and CHICKADEE (for Penkovsky's verbal reporting).⁵

The U-2 reconnaissance overflight of San Cristóbal in western Cuba on 14 October 1962, flown by Major Richard S. Heyser of the United States Air Force from a launch base at Edwards Air Force Base and recovered at McCoy Air Force Base in Florida, returned imagery of an in-construction R-12 medium-range ballistic missile site at San Cristóbal, with the missile transporters, launch erectors, and oxidiser vehicles in characteristic emplaced configuration. The film was processed at the National Photographic Interpretation Center in Washington under the direction of Arthur C. Lundahl across the night of 14–15 October. The interpretation team's identification of the photographed equipment as components of a Soviet R-12 medium-range ballistic missile system was made in the course of that single night and was made on the basis of direct comparison of the photographed equipment with the Soviet manuals previously supplied by Penkovsky.⁶

The interpretation was briefed to McGeorge Bundy (National Security Adviser) on the evening of 15 October, to President John F. Kennedy on the morning of 16 October, and to the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (the ExComm), convened that morning at the President's direction. The thirteen-day period from the briefing of the President on 16 October to the Soviet announcement of withdrawal on 28 October — which framed the public crisis from the President's address to the nation on 22 October through the imposition of the United States naval quarantine of Cuba and the exchange of correspondence between Khrushchev and Kennedy on 26–28 October — was conducted on the basis of the intelligence picture supplied initially by the Heyser overflight and confirmed and elaborated by the further U-2 and low-altitude RF-101 Voodoo reconnaissance missions flown across the period.⁷

Aftermath

The Soviet announcement of the withdrawal of the missiles from Cuba was made by Khrushchev in a public broadcast on the morning of 28 October 1962, in response to the Kennedy Administration's combination of the public quarantine, the public ultimatum on 27 October, and the private communication of 27 October — delivered by Robert Kennedy to Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin — that included a private United States undertaking to withdraw the Jupiter intermediate-range ballistic missiles from Turkey within a defined period after the Cuban withdrawal. The R-12 missiles were withdrawn from Cuba over the period from 28 October through 9 November 1962; the Il-28 bombers were withdrawn over the period from late November through early December 1962. The Jupiter missiles in Turkey and Italy were withdrawn — under public attribution to ordinary obsolescence rather than to the private undertaking — over the period from January through April 1963.⁸

Oleg Penkovsky was arrested by the KGB in Moscow on 22 October 1962, the day of President Kennedy's public address. The arrest reflected a sequence of Soviet counterintelligence observations of his contacts with the British handling officers in Moscow that had developed across the summer of 1962. Penkovsky and the British businessman Greville Wynne — who had served as one of his principal couriers — were tried in Moscow in May 1963; Penkovsky was convicted of treason and was executed on 16 May 1963. Wynne was convicted of espionage and was sentenced to eight years' imprisonment, of which he served eighteen months before his exchange in April 1964 for the convicted Soviet illegal Konon Molody (Gordon Lonsdale).⁹

Legacy

The October 1962 case is the principal documented exemplar in the post-war Western intelligence literature of the integration of national-technical reconnaissance with sustained human-source reporting against a strategic adversary, and the principal documented exemplar of an intelligence community supplying the strategic-warning interval that allowed a national-security decision to be made in advance of an opposing military system reaching operational status. The CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence has produced a substantial monographic literature on the case across the post-1992 declassification period, including the institutional history CIA Documents on the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962 (1992) and the Watching the Bear series on Soviet-target reporting.¹⁰

The substantial declassification of the underlying United States Government records — the CIA's operational and analytical product on the case, the State Department records published in the Foreign Relations of the United States series, the Joint Chiefs of Staff records, the Kennedy Library presidential papers, and the National Security Archive's parallel documentary collection at the George Washington University — was conducted across the late 1980s and the 1990s and provides the primary-source basis for the contemporary scholarly account. The Soviet-side record was opened in part across the same period and substantively in 2002, when the Presidium minutes for the May 1962 deployment-decision sessions were declassified and translated.¹¹

Penkovsky's documentary product on the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces remains, in the assessment of the principal scholarly accounts, the largest single-source body of HUMINT material on Soviet strategic-nuclear systems acquired by Western services in the early Cold War. The CIA's institutional account of the Penkovsky case, Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games by Tennent H. Bagley (2007) and the joint CIA–SIS-derived account The Spy Who Saved the World by Jerrold L. Schecter and Peter S. Deriabin (1992), provide the principal Western treatments; the Soviet-side accounts have been published in part by the Russian intelligence services across the post-1991 period.¹²

Related dossiers and agencies

This dossier is the principal documented case of Cold War strategic-warning success and is the foundational case in the institutional history of imagery–HUMINT integration. The agency-level entries are the Central Intelligence Agency, the Secret Intelligence Service (which jointly handled Penkovsky), and the GRU (Penkovsky's parent service). The country-level context is on the pages for the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia.

Sources & Further Reading

1. Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958–1964 (W. W. Norton, 1997), chs. 6–7; National Security Archive, Cuban Missile Crisis briefing book.
2. Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, ed. Strobe Talbott (Little, Brown, 1970), pp. 488–505; Fursenko and Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble, ch. 7; CPSU Presidium Protocol of 21 May 1962, in Wilson Center Digital Archive.
3. Special National Intelligence Estimate 85-3-62, "The Military Buildup in Cuba," 19 September 1962, in CIA Records Search Tool; Mary S. McAuliffe (ed.), CIA Documents on the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962 (Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1992), introduction.
4. Jerrold L. Schecter and Peter S. Deriabin, The Spy Who Saved the World: How a Soviet Colonel Changed the Course of the Cold War (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1992), chs. 4–8; Tennent H. Bagley, Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games (Yale University Press, 2007), ch. 4.
5. McAuliffe (ed.), CIA Documents on the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962; CIA Records Search Tool, Penkovsky collection; Schecter and Deriabin, The Spy Who Saved the World, chs. 9–14.
6. Dino A. Brugioni, Eyeball to Eyeball: The Inside Story of the Cuban Missile Crisis (Random House, 1991), chs. 9–11; Robert M. Hopkins III, Spyflights and Overflights: US Strategic Aerial Reconnaissance, 1945–1960; McAuliffe (ed.), CIA Documents, doc. 24.
7. FRUS, 1961–1963, Volume XI, Cuban Missile Crisis and Aftermath (Department of State, Office of the Historian); Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow (eds.), The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis (Belknap Press, 1997).
8. Fursenko and Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble, chs. 11–12; Sheldon M. Stern, Averting "The Final Failure": John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings (Stanford University Press, 2003), chs. 6–8; FRUS Vol. XI, doc. 95 (Robert Kennedy memorandum on the Dobrynin meeting).
9. Schecter and Deriabin, The Spy Who Saved the World, chs. 19–22; Greville Wynne, Contact on Gorky Street (Hutchinson, 1967); Bagley, Spy Wars, ch. 4.
10. McAuliffe (ed.), CIA Documents on the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962; Watching the Bear: Essays on CIA's Analysis of the Soviet Union (Center for the Study of Intelligence, 2003).
11. National Security Archive, Cuban Missile Crisis Project; Wilson Center, Cuban Missile Crisis collection (Soviet documents).
12. Bagley, Spy Wars, ch. 4; Schecter and Deriabin, The Spy Who Saved the World; Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (Basic Books, 1999), ch. 12.