The Cuban Missile Crisis, also known as the October Crisis of 1962, the Caribbean Crisis, or the Missile Scare, was a 35-day confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, which escalated into an international crisis when American deployments of missiles in Italy and Turkey were matched by Soviet deployments of similar ballistic missiles in Cuba. Despite the short time frame, the Cuban Missile Crisis remains a defining moment in US national security and nuclear war preparation. The confrontation is often considered the closest the Cold War came to escalating into a full-scale nuclear war.
Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky, codenamed HERO, was a Soviet military intelligence (GRU) colonel during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Penkovsky informed the United States and the United Kingdom about Soviet military secrets, most importantly, the appearance and footprint of Soviet intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) installations and the weakness of the Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) program. This information was decisive in allowing the US to recognize that the Soviets were placing IRBMs in Cuba before most of the missiles were operational. It also gave US President John F. Kennedy, during the Cuban Missile Crisis that followed, valuable information about Soviet weakness that allowed him to face down Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and resolve the crisis without a nuclear war.
John Alexander McCone was an American businessman and politician who served as Director of Central Intelligence from 1961 to 1965, during the height of the Cold War.
Thirteen Days is a 2000 American historical political thriller film directed by Roger Donaldson. It dramatizes the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, seen from the perspective of the US political leadership. Kevin Costner stars as top White House assistant Kenneth P. O'Donnell, with Bruce Greenwood featured as President John F. Kennedy, Steven Culp as Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, and Dylan Baker as Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.
The National Security Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-governmental, non-profit research and archival institution located on the campus of the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Founded in 1985 to check rising government secrecy, the National Security Archive is an investigative journalism center, open government advocate, international affairs research institute, and the largest repository of declassified U.S. documents outside the federal government. The National Security Archive has spurred the declassification of more than 10 million pages of government documents by being the leading non-profit user of the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), filing a total of more than 50,000 FOIA and declassification requests in its over 30 years of history.
The Cuban Project, also known as Operation Mongoose, was an extensive campaign of terrorist attacks against civilians, and covert operations, carried out by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in Cuba. It was officially authorized on November 30, 1961 by US President John F. Kennedy. The name Operation Mongoose had been agreed at a prior White House meeting on November 4, 1961. The operation was run out of JM/WAVE, a major secret United States covert operations and intelligence gathering station established a year earlier in Miami, Florida, and led by United States Air Force General Edward Lansdale on the military side and William King Harvey at the CIA and went into effect after the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion.
Rudolf Anderson Jr. was an American and United States Air Force major and pilot. He was the first recipient of the Air Force Cross, the U.S. military's and Air Force's second-highest award and decoration for valor. The only U.S fatality by enemy fire during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Anderson died when his U-2 reconnaissance aircraft was shot down over Cuba. He had previously served in Korea after the Korean War ended.
Harlot's Ghost (1991) is a fictional chronicle of the Central Intelligence Agency by Norman Mailer. The characters are a mixture of real people and fictional figures. At over 1,300 pages, the book is Mailer's longest.
Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis is Robert F. Kennedy's account of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The book was released in 1969, the year after his assassination.
The Executive Committee of the National Security Council was a body of United States government officials that convened to advise President John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. It was composed of the regular members of the National Security Council, along with other men whose advice the President deemed useful during the crisis. EXCOMM was formally established by National Security Action Memorandum 196 on October 22, 1962. It was made up of twelve full members in addition to the president. Advisers frequently sat in on the meetings, which were held in the Cabinet Room of the White House's West Wing and secretly recorded by tape machines activated by Kennedy. None of the other committee members knew the meetings were being recorded, save probably the president's brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.
Tomás Diez Acosta is a Cuban revolutionary soldier and a teacher and writer of history.
The Missiles of October is a 1974 docudrama made-for-television play about the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. The title evokes the 1962 book The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman about the missteps amongst the great powers and the failed chances to give an opponent a graceful way out, which led to World War I.
David M. Barrett is a professor of political science at Villanova University and author of "Blind Over Cuba: The Photo Gap and the Missile Crisis" (2012), "The CIA and Congress: The Untold Story from Truman to Kennedy" (2005), Lyndon B. Johnson's Vietnam Papers (1997), and Uncertain Warriors: Lyndon Johnson and His Vietnam Advisers (1993). The CIA and Congress: The Untold Story from Truman to Kennedy won the D. B. Hardeman Prize in 2005. A former radio and television journalist, Barrett unsuccessfully sought election in Indiana to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1984.
Dino Antonio Brugioni was a former senior official at the CIA's National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC). He was an imagery analyst and also served as NPIC's Chief of Information. During his 35-year career, Brugioni helped establish imagery intelligence (IMINT) as a national asset to solve intelligence problems. Even after retirement, Brugioni was considered to be the world's foremost imagery intelligence analyst.
National technical means of verification (NTM) are monitoring techniques, such as satellite photography, used to verify adherence to international treaties. The phrase first appeared, but was not detailed, in the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) between the US and USSR. At first, the phrase reflected a concern that the "Soviet Union could be particularly disturbed by public recognition of this capability [satellite photography]...which it has veiled.". In modern usage, the term covers a variety of monitoring technologies, including others used at the time of SALT I.
Arthur Charles Lundahl KBE was a forerunner of American Cold War imagery intelligence (IMINT) and aerial reconnaissance known for his discovery of Soviet missile installations in Cuba in 1962 which led to the Cuban Missile Crisis. He was responsible for establishing the Central Intelligence Agency's National Photographic Interpretation Center, a forerunner of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and led the photointerpretation section of the U-2 reconnaissance program. Analyzing reconnaissance films, he briefed presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy as well as the nation's top military and diplomatic officials. Lundahl provided critical intelligence on the arms race and many other international crises, including the Suez Crisis; Quemoy and Matsu, islands controlled by Taiwan; Tibet; Lebanon, and Laos.
The Cuban Revolutionary Council (CRC) was a group formed, with CIA assistance, three weeks before the April 17, 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion to "coordinate and direct" the activities of another group known as the Cuban Democratic Revolutionary Front. Both groups were composed of Cuban exiles dedicated to overthrowing Fidel Castro's communist government in Cuba. José Miró Cardona, former Prime Minister of Cuba, was chairman of the Cuban Revolutionary Council. On its board of directors were: Antonio de Varona, Justo Carrillo, Carlos Hevia, Antonio Maceo, Manuel Ray, and Manuel Artime.
Mongoose R.I.P. is a 1988 Blackford Oakes novel by William F. Buckley, Jr. It is the eighth of 11 novels in the series.
Roots of the Cuban Missile Crisis is a 48-minute 2001 Cold War documentary by New Line Home Video with "film footage from the era [and] newly created interviews covering U.S./Soviet relations from post-WWII Europe through the end of the crisis". The documentary is a "Beyond the Movie feature" on the infinifilm DVD for the movie Thirteen Days and synthesizes archival footage and still photography, interviews, Trinity and Beyond documentary scenes, and Thirteen Days movie scenes and sequences.
Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil was a Cuban student activist group which in opposition to Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista from 1954 to 1957 played a role in the Cuban Revolution, which came to power in 1959. In 1960, the Directorio was relaunched in opposition to Fidel Castro and moved its base to the United States, where it soon developed links with the Central Intelligence Agency. In August 1962 it carried out an attack on a beachfront Havana hotel. As of 1963, it was the largest anti-Castro student group in Miami; it also had a chapter in New Orleans, where it had contact with Lee Harvey Oswald in mid-1963. Immediately after the 22 November 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy, it launched a campaign asserting that Lee Harvey Oswald had been acting on behalf of the Cuban government. The group lost its CIA support in December 1966.
