A Bombshell Hits the White House: August 31, 1962

Fifty-second Chapter in a Series Chronicling the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962

The Soviet SA-2 surface-to-air missile (SAM) became a “game-changer” on May 1, 1960, the day one or more of them shot down a CIA U-2 over Russia.

That shoot-down

• forced President Eisenhower to ban further over-flights of the Soviet Union by U.S. aircraft;
• led to the cancellation of a U.S.-USSR summit meeting later that year; and
• allowed Soviet propagandists to paint the United States and the CIA as unscrupulous “imperialist” spies; in the Soviet propagandists’ hands the U-2 became an evil instrument of “imperialist” skullduggery, the internationally condemned “spy plane.”

The Implications of SAM Sites in Cuba

On Friday, August 31st, 1962, the CIA told President Kennedy that eight Soviet SAM sites were under construction in Cuba. For how those sites were discovered, see the 50th chapter in this series ().

The mere news that the U-2 slayers were coming to Cuba began to steer events in Washington.

That afternoon the President told CIA Deputy Director General Carter to put this unwelcome news “back in the box and nail it tight.”

The White House badly needed to keep this discovery from the public until policy-planners decided how to release it. Those SAM sites threatened the Kennedy administration on three important fronts.

1. The Military-Intelligence Threat

On August 31st McGeorge Bundy, President Kennedy’s National Security Advisor, wrote the President, “Extensive deployment of SA-2s would make reconnaissance overflight and other clandestine air operations difficult and dangerous and would substantially increase the problem of neutralizing air defense capabilities in the event of open conflict.…”

Once those new SAM sites were operational, in other words, CIA U-2 pilots and aircraft flying over Cuba would be at risk. While suspending U-2 flights would protect pilots and planes, it would also force the U.S. intelligence community to rely once again on HUMINT (human intelligence) about events inside Cuba which the National Security Agency (NSA) could not derive from its electronic intercepts.

2. The Foreign Policy Threat

The Kennedy Administration knew very well that deliberately sending a U.S. aircraft into a sovereign nation’s airspace without permission is an act of war. American U-2s repeatedly violated Soviet air space in the 1950s because a) the need for intelligence outweighed legal scruples and morality; and b) the high-flying U-2 could not be shot down by plane or missile.

Those flights stopped only when the U.S. discovered, abruptly, that the U-2 could be shot down.

Castro had every right to shoot down foreign aircraft flying in Cuban airspace without permission—if he could. At the end of August, he—or his Soviet patrons—would soon have the means to do so.

Alarming questions now loomed:

• Would the Cuban-Soviet alliance fire those SA-2s when they became operational?
• If it did, what criteria would govern their use?
• How would the U.S. react if the alliance shot down an American U-2 over Cuba? Cuba was admittedly a sovereign nation, but it was in the Western Hemisphere, which the United States has considered an American sphere of influence since President James Monroe proclaimed his Doctrine in 1823.

3. The Political Threat

Also on August 31st: Senator Kenneth Keating, R-New York, told the Senate that he had been “reliably informed” that many Russians who landed in Cuba in recent weeks were wearing Soviet Army fatigues.

This was the first in a series of increasingly strong statements from Republicans that the Kennedy administration was hiding from the public what Republicans had managed to discover on their own: that the Soviets were deploying combat forces in Cuba, not just the military, technical, and agricultural assistance they claimed they were providing. To make matters worse, according to Republican statements, the Kennedy administration was doing nothing to confront this mounting danger.

Since 1946, Republicans had repeatedly charged Democrats with being “soft on Communism.” Here again was the old charge—an especially dangerous one in a mid-term election year.

Kennedy’s Political Dilemma

Kennedy was caught in a “lose-lose” trap. If he told the public that the Soviets were deploying SAMs in Cuba, he would validate Republican charges that he had been hiding—and dodging—a serious threat to national security. He would also be telling the Soviets that the U.S. intelligence community knew what they were up to.

If he said nothing, his silence might very well persuade the public that his Republican challengers were right—with mid-term elections just nine weeks away.

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Sources and Notes

The “bombshell” metaphor comes from Norman Polmar and John D. Gresham, DEFCON-2: Standing on the Brink of Nuclear War during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Hoboken: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2006, at 77.

As of 1962, the USSR had no fighter planes that could reach the U-2’s altitude.

The information about the President’s phone call to Carter comes from document 395 in Foreign Relations of the United States, Volume X, Cuba (http://www.state.gov/www/about_state/history/frusX/391_405.html).

Bundy’s Aug. 31 memorandum to the President is document 401 in the same FRUS sub-volume.

Keating’s charges against the Kennedy administration appeared at the bottom of a Sept. 1 New York Times article by Arthur J. Olsen headlined “Boats off Cuba Fire at US Navy Plane; Havana Cautioned,” p. 1.

Dino Brugioni, citing the Congressional Record, also discusses Keating’s August 31 charges on the floor of the Senate in his Eyeball to Eyeball: The Inside Story of The Cuban Missile Crisis (Robert F. McCort, ed.). New York: Random House, 1991, 112-113. Brugioni writes that when he and his NPIC colleagues were ordered to verify Keating’s statements, they found that much of his information was consistent with their photographic evidence and that the convoys he described “were consistent with the known equipment and mode of transport and deployment of the SA-2.”

Keating apparently took the identity of his sources to his grave. For more on where Keating got information about Soviet activities in Cuba that the CIA and the White House did not have, see Max Holland, “A Luce Connection.” Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 1, No. 3, Fall 1999, pp. 139-167.