Area 51_ An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base - Annie Jacobsen [94]
On the afternoon of August 29, 1962, a U-2 spy plane flying over Cuba spotted eight surface-to-air missile sites in the western part of Cuba, the same SA-2 missile systems that had shot down Gary Powers two years before. The following week, three more missile sites were discovered on the island, as well as a Soviet MiG-21 parked on the Santa Clara airfield nearby. For two months, the Agency had been analyzing reports that said between 4,000 and 6,000 individuals from the Soviet bloc had arrived in Cuba, including 1,700 Soviet military technicians. Cuban citizens were being kept from entering port areas where the Soviet-bloc ships were unloading unusually large crates, ones big enough to “contain airplane fuselage or missile components.” The implications were threefold: that Russia was building up the Cuban armed forces, that they were establishing multiple missile sites, and that they were establishing electronic jamming facilities against Cape Canaveral in Florida as well as other important U.S. installations. The director of the CIA, John McCone, had already told the president’s military advisers that he believed the Soviets were laying a deadly trap involving nuclear missiles. But there was no hard evidence of the missiles themselves, the military argued, and their position on that fact was firm. (The Pentagon did not doubt that the Soviets wanted to put nuclear missiles on Cuba; officials just didn’t think they’d accomplished that yet.) McCone left for his honeymoon in Paris.
In the following month, September, bad weather got in the way of good photographic intelligence. Day after day it rained over Cuba or the island was shrouded in heavy cloud cover. Finally, on September 29, a CIA U-2 mission over the Isle of Pines and the Bay of Pigs revealed yet another previously unknown missile site. President Kennedy’s top advisers were convened. The CIA warned the advisers of more unknown dangers in Cuba and pushed for additional overflights so as to gain better intelligence on military installations there. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk were opposed to the idea. Not another Gary Powers incident, they said. But on October 5 and 7, the CIA got presidential approval to run two additional missions of its own. The resultant news was hard to ignore: there were now a total of nineteen surface-to-air missile sites on the island of Cuba, meaning there was something very important that the Soviets were intent on defending there. The Pentagon held firm. There was still no hard data revealing actual missiles, McNamara and Rusk said. Making matters even more complicated, JFK’s Air Force chief of staff, General Curtis LeMay, was pushing for preemptive strikes against Cuba. It was a volatile and incredibly dangerous situation. If the CIA was correct and there already were nuclear missiles in Cuba, then LeMay’s so-called preemptive strikes would actually initiate a nuclear war, not prevent one.
What the Agency needed desperately was a wizard of diplomacy, someone who could help the rival agencies see eye to eye so they could all work together to get the Soviets to back down. The Agency and the Air Force had decidedly different ideas on imminent missions; the CIA wanted to gather more intelligence with the U-2; the Air Force wanted to prepare for war. An individual who could wear both hats with relative objectivity was needed, someone who could see both sides of the debate. In a rare moment of accord, both sides agreed that the man for the job was Brigadier General Jack Ledford. Just a few weeks earlier, Ledford had been asked by McCone to serve as the director of the Office of Special Activities