Reports from Cuba During the August ’62 Photo Gap

Forty-third Chapter in a Series Chronicling the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962

Missiles in Cuba? The CIA’s View

Bad weather forecasts prevented the CIA from flying U-2 reconnaissance missions over Cuba between August 5th and August 29th. For these 23 days, the intelligence community received only reports from refugees and U.S. agents about events Cuba.

Dino Brugioni, of the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center near Washington, writes that the reports described “sizes and shapes resembling the SA-2,” the deadly Soviet antiaircraft missile discussed in the thirty-third chapter in this series ( ).

According to Brugioni, “the consensus of intelligence analysts was that the United States should anticipate SA-2 defensive-missile deployment. This pattern was consistent with what had been seen previously in Egypt, Syria, and Indonesia,” all recipients of Soviet military aid.

The intelligence community’s consensus meant that the only missile in the world capable of destroying the high-flying U-2 would soon become an actor in the developing crisis.

Brugioni also said that reports of Russian troops on the island “began to increase.” When NPIC’s library of photographs were rechecked, they revealed “Soviet-style tents and construction equipment.”

The Strategic Air Command’s View

A declassified SECRET report on the role of Strategic Air Command intelligence in the Cuban Missile Crisis agrees with Brugioni: “Reports from refugees and clandestine agents within Cuba made it abundantly clear [to SAC intelligence analysts and officers] by mid-August that something extraordinary was going on.” This is the gist of these “extraordinary” events according to the SAC report:

• Cubans had been evacuated from the vicinity of Mariel, the seaport near Havana.
• Trucks were being lowered into the holds of Soviet ships docked in Cuban ports, then hoisted out again loaded but with their contents shrouded by tarpaulins.
• Crew-cut Soviet “technicians” disembarking from passenger ships dressed in slacks and sports shirts were fallen into ranks, marched to trucks, and driven away.
• Soviet ships unloaded many prefabricated concrete forms whose general configuration “suggested possible association with missiles.”
• So many reports of “rockets” were received that the intelligence community began to conclude, by the end of August, that SAMs were being introduced into Cuba.

The Clarity of Hindsight

We learned in Chapter 33 (URL above) that in early July Khrushchev decided to change the ANADYR order of deployment and send 144 SA-2 launchers, missiles, and warheads to Cuba before the strategic missiles even left the USSR. Khrushchev apparently reasoned that if the SA-2 sites were built first, they would protect the strategic missile’s sites from discovery once their construction began.

Verifying the Humans’ Reports

In mid-August 1962, however, no one in the U.S. intelligence community knew about Khrushchev’s decision. They knew only what refugees and agents were telling them.

The U.S. intelligence community also believed that human intelligence, or HUMINT, must be validated by objective evidence. For example, a “missile” glimpsed briefly at night, perhaps through a rain-streaked windshield, might turn out to be a cylindrical fuel tank when a U-2’s camera caught it in the harsh light of day.

Until the Cuban skies cleared, however, there would be no new photographs

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Sources and Notes

Brugioni’s account of these events appears on p. 99 of his Eyeball to Eyeball: The Inside Story of The Cuban Missile Crisis (Robert F. McCort, ed.). New York: Random House, 1991.

The Strategic Air Command report was written by Captain Sanders A. Laubenthal, USAF: “The Missiles in Cuba, 1962: The Role of SAC Intelligence.” SAC Intelligence Quarterly Project Warrior Study.  May 1984. SECRET NOFORN, declassified 27 October 1999. The passage referred to and quoted from above appears on p. 7. I am indebted to Robb Hoover, historian of SAC’s 55th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing, for a copy of Capt. Laubenthal’s report.

Regarding Khrushchev’s apparent belief that the SA-2s would shield the Soviet missile sites from the CIA’s U-2s: One wonders if the Soviet Premier ever stopped to consider how the United States might react if a Soviet surface-to-air missile brought down a U.S. U-2 over Cuba, rather than over Russia as had happened on May 1, 1960.