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Incomplete Intelligence: What ExComm Didn't Know Could Have Ended the World
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
ExComm debated air strikes and invasion while working from a fatally incomplete picture — 140 Soviet nuclear warheads already inside Cuba, invisible to U-2 cameras. This chapter traces how the Cuban Missile Crisis unfolded from the first U-2 photographs to Khrushchev's two contradictory letters, and why the margin for catastrophe was far wider than anyone in that room understood.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
The closest the world has ever come to nuclear war wasn't a single moment. It was thirteen days of compounding decisions, missed intelligence, secret negotiations, and individual human choices that could have gone the other way at any point.
On October fourteenth, nineteen sixty-two, an American U-2 reconnaissance aircraft flew over western Cuba. The pilot, Major Richard Heyser, completed his pass without incident.
That same day, Kennedy quietly assembled what became known as the Executive Committee of the National Security Council. ExComm.
On October twenty-second, Kennedy went on national television and told the American public what had been hidden from them for six days. Soviet missiles in Cuba.
Here's a fact that reframes everything about how ExComm was making decisions. U.S. intelligence knew about the SS-4 missiles.
By October twenty-sixth, the pressure was building toward a crisis point. Khrushchev sent Kennedy a long, somewhat rambling letter.
On the evening of October twenty-seventh, Robert Kennedy met with Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. The meeting was secret.
October twenty-seventh was the worst day. It's sometimes called Black Saturday, and the name fits.
The U.S. Navy had been hunting Soviet submarines in the waters near Cuba. On October twenty-seventh, they located one.
The formal resolution came on October twenty-eighth. Khrushchev announced that Soviet missiles would be withdrawn from Cuba in exchange for Kennedy's public pledge not to invade.
The crisis reshaped how the two superpowers thought about direct communication. A direct hotline between Washington and Moscow was established the following year specifically because of what nearly went wrong in October nineteen sixty-two.
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