National Security Archive:
It was a complicated crisis that was a long-time a building. We got lucky.
Dunno that I'd go along with the "uniformly defensive" nature of the Soviets, though. People in Hungary and lots of other places would, no doubt, disagree.
Cheers,
Scott.
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.
It was a complicated crisis that was a long-time a building. We got lucky.
Dunno that I'd go along with the "uniformly defensive" nature of the Soviets, though. People in Hungary and lots of other places would, no doubt, disagree.
Cheers,
Scott.