Michael Dobbs - One Minute to Midnight

While the accounts of missile crisis veterans were very important to my research, I checked all such testimony against the written record. Memory can play tricks on even the most meticulous eyewitnesses four decades after the event, and it is easy to make mistakes, conflate different incidents, and confuse dates. Archival records are also frequently incomplete and sometimes inaccurate. Even ExComm members sometimes received incorrect information that has turned up in various accounts of the missile crisis. I will mention just two examples. First, on October 24, CIA director John McCone noted in his diary that a Soviet ship headed for Cuba turned around after been confronted by a U.S. destroyer. This incident never happened. Second, on Black Saturday, McNamara reported to President Kennedy that U.S. reconnaissance planes overflying Cuba had been hit by anti-aircraft fire, which later turned out to be incorrect. The most sensible approach for the researcher is to find multiple sources, and use documentary evidence to corroborate oral history, and vice versa.

The starting point for my archival research was the extensive Cuban missile crisis documentation assembled by the National Security Archive, an indispensable reference source for contemporary historians. The Archive, under the direction of Tom Blanton, has taken the lead in aggressively using the Freedom of Information Act to pry historical documents out of a frequently recalcitrant U.S. bureaucracy. In the case of the Cuban missile crisis, it fought a landmark court battle in 1988 to obtain access to a collection compiled by the State Department historian. In cooperation with academic researchers, the NSA has also helped organize a series of important conferences on the missile crisis, including one in Moscow in 1992 and others in Havana in 1992 and 2002. I am indebted to various NSA staff members, including Blanton, Svetlana Savranskaya, Peter Kornbluh, Malcolm Byrne, and William Burr for providing documents and generally steering me in the right direction. In recognition of this debt, I am making my own missile crisis records available to other researchers via the Archive.

Transcripts of the missile crisis conferences are available in the series of “On the Brink” books by James Blight, Bruce Allyn, David Welch, and others, which I refer to in individual source notes. Until the Cuban government opens its own archives to researchers, these conference materials constitute the best available source for the Cuban point of view. For transcripts of ExComm meetings, I have primarily relied on the work of the Miller Center at the University of Virginia. The transcripts are a work in progress and have been updated to take into account the objections of other scholars, notably Sheldon Stern, a former historian at the JFK library, who pointed out various errors. Nevertheless, they remain the most comprehensive source on what took place at the ExComm meetings and are conveniently available online via the Miller Center Web site, along with the original audio recordings.

Soviet documentation on the missile crisis is more accessible in the United States than in Russia. The best source of Soviet material is the Dmitrii Volkogonov collection at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Many of the documents collected by Volkogonov, a Soviet military historian, have been translated by the Cold War International History Project and have been published in their bulletins. Other Soviet documents were provided to me by Svetlana Savranskaya of the National Security Archive and Mark Kramer, director of the Cold War studies project at Harvard University. Kramer has done extensive research in Soviet and Eastern European archives and has written authoritatively about the Soviet military. Savranskaya is the leading expert in the United States on the role played by Soviet submarines during the missile crisis. She has personally interviewed many of the key Soviet players in the crisis, including the four submarine skippers. She introduced me to Vadim Orlov, a member of the crew of B-59, and provided me the gripping diary of Anatoly Andreev, a submariner aboard B-36. The media center for the Russian foreign intelligence agency, the SVR, gave me copies of Soviet intelligence reports on the missile crisis.

Leading American archival collections on the Cuban missile crisis include the JFK library in Boston, the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, and the Naval History Center in Washington, D.C. Each has its strengths and weaknesses. The national security files at the JFK library are a comprehensive and easily accessible source of documentation on the crisis, as viewed from the White House. Unfortunately, the Kennedy family still imposes restrictions on parts of the collection. The personal records of Robert F. Kennedy, including many that deal with the failed Operation Mongoose, are largely closed to independent researchers. The family also insists that researchers examining the president’s medical records be accompanied by a “qualified” medical expert. Robert Horsburgh, a professor of epidemiology at Boston University, generously agreed to give up an afternoon of his valuable time and go through the medical records with me. I would like to thank the former director of the JFK library, Deborah Leff, for her help and advice.

The missile crisis records at the National Archives are scattered among many different collections, with varying degrees of public access. Curiously enough, one of the richest and most accessible collections is that of the CIA, an agency frequently criticized for its lack of openness. A large number of CIA records on the missile crisis, including daily photographic interpretation reports and updates on the status of the Soviet missile systems in Cuba, are available in digital form at the Archives through the CREST computer system. Detailed documentation on Operation Mongoose is available through the JFK Assassination Records Collection, with an online finding aid at the National Archives Web site. This invaluable collection includes many documents that are only tangentially related to the assassination, such as the U.S. marine invasion plan for Cuba in October 1962 and reports from American agents inside Cuba during the missile crisis.

By contrast, Pentagon records on the missile crisis are very sparse. At my request, the National Archives began the process of declassifying the crisis records of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, but hundreds of important documents have been withheld for further “screening.” As I noted above, the raw intelligence film gathered by the DIA has been largely declassified, but finding aids are virtually nonexistent, making most of the collection inaccessible. Most State Department records on the crisis are available for research. For help in declassifying and accessing Cuban missile crisis records at the National Archives, I would like to thank the following: Allen Weinstein, Michael Kurtz, Larry MacDonald, Tim Nenninger, David Mengel, Herbert Rawlings-Milton, and James Mathis. I am grateful to Tim Brown, of GlobalSecurity.org, for helping me make sense of the DIA imagery.

Together with the Marines, the U.S. Navy has done the best job of the four armed services in making its missile crisis records available to the public, despite the fact that its budget for historical research is only a fraction of the amount available to the Air Force. I spent a couple of weeks combing through the records at the Naval Historical Center, which include minute-by-minute reports from the quarantine line around Cuba, office logs of the Chief of Naval Operations, and daily intelligence summaries. I would like to thank Tim Petit of the Historical Center and Curtis A. Utz of the Naval Aviation History Branch.

In contrast to the Navy, the U.S. Air Force has done a very poor job of documenting its role in the crisis in a way that is accessible to outside scholars. Most of the Air Force records so far declassified are unit histories rather than original source materials in the form of orders, telegrams, and reports. The value of these histories varies. In many cases, they were designed to make the Air Force look good rather than provide an accurate account of what took place during the missile crisis. The Maultsby affair is just one example of an embarrassing incident censored from the official Air Force record. The Air Force responded to repeated requests for missile crisis records by releasing some more unit histories, but very little underlying documentation. I am grateful to Linda Smith and Michael Binder for doing what they could to assist me within the constraints imposed by their agency. Toni Petito was also helpful during a visit I made to the Air Force Historical Research Agency at Maxwell AFB. Louie Alley of the Air Force Safety Center at Kirtland AFB responded promptly to my requests for information about specific accidents.