Area 51_ An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base - Annie Jacobsen [93]
“I did not have much to do at night so I started reading clandestine reports, which I’d never seen before,” Wheelon says. Although he found many uninteresting, one in particular caught his eye. “It made me concerned. At the time, there was a very serious National Intelligence Estimate under way for President Kennedy, one that would address the question: Will the Russians put nuclear missiles in Cuba? I had been briefed that the estimate was coming down on the side that the Russians would not do such a thing. The Pentagon had decided that putting missiles in Cuba was too reckless a move for the Russians and that they would not do such a reckless thing.”
The Pentagon was dead wrong. As Wheelon read dozens of intelligence reports, one rose up like a red flag. “One thing you have to worry about with anyone informing against a person or a state is fabrication,” Wheelon explains. “There were a lot of Cubans in Miami [at the time] whose sugar plantations had been taken away from them by Castro and they wanted action taken. But there was one report that caught my eye. The informant said that he’d seen very long trailers, big trucks, led by jeeps with Soviet security people inside. As these trucks made their way through certain villages, Cubans were directing traffic so the long trailers could get by. In South America, often on the street corners, you will find post-office boxes. They are not squat boxes with a level opening like you find in the States. Instead, they are more of a traditional letterbox attached at the top of a long pole. The informant witnessed one of these very long trailer trucks coming up to an intersection and not being able to make the curb. There was a letterbox blocking the way. Some of the Soviet security people got out of the truck. They grabbed an acetylene torch from the back and cut the letterbox right down. They didn’t waste any time or give it a second thought. When I read that, I thought, Whoever reported this is no fabricator. This is not a detail you could make up. Whatever was in those trailers was too important to let a letterbox stand in the way.”
Wheelon believed there were missiles inside the trailers. Missiles with nuclear warheads. Unknown to Wheelon at the time, his new boss, CIA director John McCone, also believed this was true. Except McCone wasn’t around Washington, DC; he was in Paris, on his honeymoon. This left Wheelon in charge of more than was usual for a newcomer to the CIA. Concerned by the intelligence report, Wheelon asked to meet with the head of the board of the National Intelligence Council, Sherman Kent. “I went to him and I said, ‘Sherm, I am new around here so you should discount a lot of what I say. I am not a professional intelligence person, but it looks to me like the evidence is overwhelming that they have missiles down there.’” Sherman Kent thanked Wheelon for his advice but explained that the board was going to present President Kennedy with the opposite conclusion—that there were no Soviet missiles in Cuba.
The Cuban missile crisis is a story of conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the drama that culminated in a ten-day standoff between two superpowers on the brink of thermonuclear war. But it is also the story of two powerful rivals within the American services, the CIA and the U.S. Air Force, and how they set aside historical differences to work together to save the world from near nuclear annihilation. Like so many international crises of the Cold War, the Cuban missile crisis had its link to Area 51—through the U-2.
During the crisis, the CIA and the Air Force worked together to conduct the U-2 spy mission that