Us, Soviet, and Cuban Intelligence During the Cuban Missile Crisis

HLS 320

Intelligence and Homeland Security

US, Soviet, and Cuban Intelligence

During the Cuban Missile Crisis

By Marcia Coelho

Student # 4107948

Professor John Coale

25 January 2010

US, Soviet, and Cuban Intelligence

During the Cuban Missile Crisis

The Cuban Missile Crisis was the single most important event of the Cold War.    As well as one of the most intensively studied events of all time. For thirteen days, the United States and the Soviet Union went "eyeball to eyeball" in struggle that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.   It is difficult to critically examine the role of intelligence in the perspective of international crisis without realizing that one government’s intelligence success is the other’s failure. The primary objective of an intelligence service is to provide policy makers with the highest level of situational awareness.  This means not only being aware of the adversary’s actions, but being able to see through their deception operations as well.    It is unfortunate that there are limited confirmed sources on the Soviet and Cuban intelligence performance during the crisis.  As a result it has been difficult to examine the role that these intelligence services played during the crisis.  Intelligence operations are measured as a success or failure by public standard.  The focus of this paper will be the analysis and assessment of the US intelligence, Soviet intelligence, and Cuban intelligence during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

        Cuba had seen nearly 60 years of revolutions and coups, this instability cumulated in the overthrow of the Batista regime by Fidel Castro in 1959. Initially Castro’s regime was an improvement over the former Cuban leader, with Castro in power the United States suspended their support for his regime. Castro’s Communist Government and close relationship with the Soviet Union alarmed American leadership; Cuba was the first Communist country in the western hemisphere to convert to Communism. The United States feared that acceptance of the Cuban Communism would enable Soviet influence to spread to other vulnerable nations within the hemisphere. Furthermore, a failure to limit Communism within the western hemisphere would challenge America’s ability to prevent the spread of Soviet influence over smaller nations, especially within America’s western hemisphere. [Persons, 1990]

In 1960 Cuba established close political, economic, and military relationships with the Sino-Soviet Bloc, while increasing the pace and intensity of its measures and attacks against the United States. [Weldes, 1999] As a result, US banned Cuban sugar imports; with no imports or exports with the US, the Cuban government had no choice but to turn to the soviets for support.

The missile crisis in particular, was not only understood to threaten the Western Hemisphere, the American family, and the U.S. role in the region, but was also understood to challenge the status of the United States as a global superpower. The missiles that the Soviets deployed in Cuba, then, added insult to injury by publicly exposing the threat that the Soviet Union, international communism, and the Cuban problem posed to U.S. claims to hemispheric leadership, to its leadership of the free world, and to its superpower status. [Weldes, 1999]

U.S. Intelligence:

During the Cuban missile crisis US intelligence provided great support to policy makers. The deployment of medium-range missiles in Cuba had been detected and identified early enough for the administration to react to the missile threat. The nature, location, scale and operational status of the missile deployment were accurately determined despite some Soviet camouflage and deception [Raymond].  However, one cannot expect Intelligence to always be perfect.  Even though US intelligence performed well, there were shortfalls.

US intelligence was caught by surprise by the presence of Soviet offensive missiles in Cuba. The US government had a flood of intelligence coming in prior to the crisis concerning Soviet military developments in Cuba, which they chose to ignore. When the photographic evidence was presented, it should not have been a surprise, when it revealed the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba. However, despite the initial intelligence failure, the Cuban Missile Crisis was ultimately an intelligence success.  Thus, intelligence became the driving force behind the policy discussions during the crisis.  

 US intelligence used 3 forms of intelligence gathering during the Cuban missile crisis; Image Intelligence (IMINT), Human Intelligence (HUMINT) and Signals Intelligence (SIGINT).  All three forms played a critical role during the crisis.

In September 1962, the administration was provided with credible photographic evidence of Soviet nuclear missile weapon systems in Cuba. This photographic evidence forced the administration to deal with long range nuclear missiles staged within ninety miles of the US Southern Coast.

Detailed analysis showed the weapons to be ballistic missiles of two distinct types:     medium-range and intermediate-range. The medium-range missiles were capable of carrying a nuclear warhead a distance of more than 1,100 nautical miles, placing Washington, DC, Mexico City or any other city in the south-eastern United States, Central America, and the Caribbean area at risk. The intermediate-range missiles were capable of targeting most of the major cities in the Western Hemisphere, from Hudson Bay, Canada in the north to Lima, Peru in the south.[CIA, 1994]        

During the crisis Image intelligence (IMINT) was extremely crucial. IMINT was able to accurately identify the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba and was also used to get the support of the international community in favour of the United States [CIA, 1994]. On October 15th, 1962, imagery analysts who were examining the photographs taken from Richard Heyser’s October 14th U-2 flight were able to identify the presence of Soviet offensive missiles in Cuba.  Image intelligence was the primary form of Intelligence used by the US Intelligence service during the crisis.

Human Intelligence (HUMINT) efforts provided information about transiting nuclear missiles during the crisis, further narrowed down the destination to the Caribbean, providing independent confirmation of the imagery. HUMINT also provided plans, diagrams, and stages of Soviet missile installations, making the job of imagery analysts much easier.  

HUMINT information was virtually ignored due to common intelligence analysis bias referred to as “undermining”. Terrorism analyst, Sundri Khulsa, [2004] explains the theory of undermining as, “[discounting] a source that does not support [the analyst’s] conclusion by questioning the validity of the source.” This undermining of HUMINT is systemic throughout the intelligence analysis field even to present day. HUMINT has always been a difficult intelligence product to validate. Of the 200 HUMINT source reports on Cuban missile sightings, only 6 were later proved to be correct [Johnson & Wirtz, 2004]. This is partially due to analyst’s discounting bias as well as HUMINT sources having a natural tendency to justify their pay by providing information they believe their handler wants to hear, regardless of the facts.