The Secret Sentry (10 page)

But it was not until the U-2 reconnaissance overflight of Cuba conducted on August 29 that the U.S. intelligence community
received confirmation of the presence of Soviet-made SAMs in Cuba. The U-2 found a total of eight SA-2 Guideline SAM sites
in various stages of construction throughout western Cuba, as well as five MiG-21 crates being unpacked at San Antonio de
los Baños Air Base outside Havana, guided missile patrol boats, and the construction site of a coastal defense cruise missile
basenear the port of Banes in eastern Cuba. A report sent to McCone noted ominously that more Russian-made military equipment
was on its way to Cuba, with SIGINT confirming that sixteen Russian freighters were then en route, ten of which were definitely
carry-ing military equipment.
⁴⁴

At this critical juncture, disaster struck. NSA’s ability to generate intelligence about the cargoes being carried by Soviet
shipping to and from Cuba was publicly revealed by the State Department, in an effort to generate negative publicity about
the increasing volume of Soviet weapons shipments to third world countries, such as Indonesia and Cuba. The CIA complained
in a memo that State had released information “covered by this classification [Top Secret Codeword]. Said material appeared
in part in the
Washington Post
within 12 hours of the time we gave it to State.” The result of the unauthorized release was devastating. By mid-September,
NSA had lost its ability to provide the U.S. intelligence community with details concerning what weapons Soviet merchant ships
were carrying to these countries.
⁴⁵

The September Buildup

The U-2’s discovery of SA-2 SAMs in Cuba on August 29 shocked the White House and set off alarm bells throughout the entire
U.S. intelligence community.

The subsequent discovery of the Soviet surface-to-surface coastal defense missile site at Banes marked the beginning of a
concerted effort by the entire U.S. intelligence community, including NSA, to try to find any indications that the Russians
had deployed, or intended to deploy, offensive nuclear weapons to Cuba. But an NSA study of the Cuban Missile Crisis states
unequivocally that “signals intelligence did
not
provide any direct information about the Soviet introduction of offensive missiles into Cuba.”
⁴⁶
The comprehensive security mea sures that the Soviets used to hide the shipment and placement of offensive ballistic missiles
worked completely. An NSA history ruefully admits, “Soviet communications security was almost perfect.”
⁴⁷

Across the Straits of Florida in Cuba, Major General Igor Dem’yanovich Statsenko, the commander of the Soviet missile forces
there, was busy trying to get his nuclear-armed missiles operational. Construction of the missile launch sites had begun in
August 1962, but it was not until mid-September that the Soviet merchant ships
Poltava
and
Omsk
arrived in Cuba carry ing in their holds thirty-six SS-4 medium-range ballistic missiles and their launchers. After their
arrival, Soviet personnel moved sixteen of the missile launchers to four sites around the town of San Cristóbal, while eight
more were deployed to two sites around the town of Sagua la Grande, in central Cuba.
⁴⁸
The Soviet military went to extraordinary lengths to deny NSA access to any form of communications traffic that might have
given away the deployment of Soviet troops and missiles to Cuba. Communications between Moscow and the Russian merchant ships
at sea and Soviet troops in Cuba were handled by the Soviet merchant marine, with each ship reporting every morning to Moscow
on its location and status using a special one-time cipher system that NSA could not crack. During the early phase of the
Russian deployment to Cuba, all communications between Russian field units and the Soviet headquarters at Managua, outside
Havana, were oral and delivered personally— never by radio or telephone. Other than a few start-up tests of their communications
equipment, the Russian troops in Cuba maintained strict radio silence until October in order to defeat the American listening
posts located seventy miles away in southern Florida.
⁴⁹

Having found no sign whatsoever of Soviet offensive weapons in Cuba, by late September CIA intelligence analysts had concluded,
on the basis of the SIGINT they were getting from Juanita Moody’s B1 shop at Fort Meade, plus collateral material from other
intelligence sources outside of NSA, that the Soviets were only engaged in an effort to establish, on a crash basis, modern
Soviet-style air defense and coastal defense systems in Cuba.
⁵⁰

On these subjects, NSA was continuing to produce plentiful amounts of high-quality intelligence, almost entirely based on
intercepts of Cuban radio traffic and telephone calls, the most useful dealing with Cuban air force activity, including MiG
training flights.
⁵¹
SIGINT reporting coming out of NSA took on an ominous tone when the agency reported that on September 8 two Cuban MiG fighters
had attempted to intercept two U.S. Navy patrol aircraft flying in international airspace off the coast of Cuba.
⁵²
In late September, NSA reported that Cuban MiG fighters were now routinely challenging American reconnaissance aircraft flying
off the coast of Cuba, and that multiple intercepts clearly showed that the ground controllers directing the Cuban fighters
to their targets were Russians.
⁵³

NSA was also producing a fair amount of intelligence reporting on the operational readiness of Soviet SA-2 SAMs in Cuba and
the overall readiness of the Cuban air defense system. The first radar signal, from an SA-2 SAM site three miles west of the
port of Mariel, was intercepted on September 15, 1962, although NSA’s intercept operators could not find any radio traffic
servicing the SAM sites. Five days later, a Fan Song radar tracking signal from another SA-2 SAM site in the Havana-Mariel
area was intercepted, indicating that at least one of the twelve SAM sites in Cuba had become operational.
⁵⁴

NSA was also continuing to maintain a close watch on Russian merchant shipping traffic between the Soviet Union and Cuba.
On September 13, CIA director McCone reported to the White House that according to COMINT and collateral maritime surveillance
data, there were at least twenty-six Russian merchant ships on the high seas headed for Cuba.
⁵⁵
On September 17, the CIA reported that since late July, Russian passenger ships had made nine unscheduled and unpublicized
round-trips to Cuba, and that two more Russian passenger ships were then en route there. The CIA estimated that these ships
carried some forty-two hundred Russian military technicians.
⁵⁶
On September 25, NSA reported that another thirteen Soviet merchant ships had been confirmed by COMINT as being en route to
Cuba.
⁵⁷

Then in late September, the first indications began to appear in NSA’s intelligence reporting that there were Soviet military
personnel in Cuba above and beyond the trainers and military advisers that the Russians had maintained in Cuba since 1960.
A declassified study of the Cuban Missile Crisis notes, “An intercept of the Soviet Air Force link in Hungary on 14 September
stated that ‘volunteers for the defense of Cuba’ ” were expected to “hand in applications [to volunteer].” Another message
on the same link requested the number of volunteers who had applied. Similar intercepted calls for volunteers went out to
Soviet military units stationed in Eastern Eu rope.
⁵⁸

The Missiles of October

On Thursday, October 4, 1962, Attorney General Robert Kennedy convened a special meeting of the team of CIA and other U.S.
government officials who were running Operation Mongoose. Bobby Kennedy lit into the assembled officials, telling them that
he had just discussed the efforts to unseat Castro with his brother, President Kennedy, who was “dissatisfied with [the] lack
of action in the sabotage field” inside Cuba. The attorney general was angry that “nothing was moving forward” and demanded
that the CIA redouble its efforts to cause havoc inside Cuba.
⁵⁹

Against this backdrop, NSA continued to plug away at what it could hear inside Cuba. On October 8, General Blake told Secretary
McNamara that NSA was making excellent progress in its efforts to exploit Soviet and Cuban communications traffic inside Cuba.
⁶⁰
The next day, an air force radio intercept unit in southern Florida intercepted the first Cuban radar tracking broadcasts,
which indicated that the Cuban radar network and air surveillance system was now operational.
⁶¹
On October 10, NSA reported that Cuban radar stations had just begun passing radar tracking data to higher headquarters and
to the various MiG air bases in Cuba in exactly the same manner as the Soviet air defense system.
⁶²
And on October 11, NSA reported that thirteen more Soviet cargo ships were en route to Cuba.
⁶³

But on October 14, everything changed literally overnight. A CIA U-2 reconnaissance aircraft conducted a high-altitude overflight
of Cuba and brought back the first clear pictures of six Russian SS-4 medium-range ballistic missiles at a launch site outside
the town of San Cristóbal.
⁶⁴
NSA played no part in launching this recon mission. Declassified documents show that it was a combination of CIA agent sources
inside Cuba and interrogations of refugees in Florida that triggered the flight.
⁶⁵
As incredible as it may sound, on October 16, the same day that President Kennedy and his top policy advisers were briefed
on the presence of Soviet ballistic missiles in Cuba, Attorney General Kennedy, in a meeting at the Justice Department, again
lambasted the men running Operation Mongoose. Opening the meeting by telling them of the “general dissatisfaction of the President”
with their progress (or lack thereof ), he announced that he was taking personal command of Mongoose to ensure that operations
against Cuba were stepped up dramatically.
⁶⁶

At Fort Meade, the discovery of the SS-4 missiles in Cuba led to a week of unadulterated hell for the intelligence analysts.
Every one of the agency’s consumers was screaming for more information on the missiles in Cuba. “I could not believe all the
demands for information that were coming in from everywhere,” a former manager who worked in Juanita Moody’s office recalled.
“The U-2 had just discovered the damned missiles inside Cuba, and everyone expected us to have somewhere in our filing cabinets
the answers to why they were there, what their targets were, how were they protected . . . But we had nothing in our files,
zip, which was very hard for us to admit.”
⁶⁷

To handle the massive new workload, on October 19 the head of NSA’s Production Directorate, Major General John Davis, transferred
over one hundred veteran Russian linguists and intelligence analysts from Herbert Conley’s A Group, which handled the “Soviet
problem,” to Moody’s office. Among them was Lieutenant Colonel Paul Odonovich, the deputy chief of the Office of Soviet Ground
Forces Problems, who was ordered to take charge of Moody’s Latin American Division, which was responsible for Cuba. Odonovich
was not happy about his new job because, as he later admitted, he “didn’t know [Cuba] from scratch.” After the arrival of
Odonovich and the dozens of analysts sent down from A Group’s offices on the third floor of the NSA operations building, all
of the elder ly ladies who had run the Cuban shop since the end of World War II “kind of disappeared and went off to the side,”
recalled Harold Parish, one of the newly arrived A Group analysts.
⁶⁸

The
Oxford
was ordered to remain on station, monitoring Cuban internal telephone traffic around the clock. The USAF was ordered to increase
the number of airborne reconnaissance missions it was flying off the coast of Cuba to monitor the rising volume of Soviet
and Cuban air force and air defense radio traffic.
⁶⁹

But despite the added staff and increased collection resources at their disposal, Odonovich’s analysts were still unable to
find any communications links coming from inside Cuba that could be clearly identified as supporting the Russian ballistic
missiles, which was what U.S. war planners desperately needed if they were ordered by the White House to destroy the Soviet
missile launchers. This lack of success meant that the U.S. Intelligence Board’s Guided Missile and Astronautics Intelligence
Committee was compelled to report to President Kennedy and his advisers on October 18 and 19 that the command-and-control
communications links for the Soviet ballistic missiles in Cuba had “not yet been found.”
⁷⁰

Senior U.S. military commanders, who were preparing air strikes against military targets inside Cuba, were also asking NSA
for any information about whether the air defense system in Cuba had become operational. When Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman
General Taylor asked CIA director McCone at a White House meeting on October 18 whether NSA had detected any electronic emissions
from the Soviet SA-2 SAM radars in Cuba, the answer he got was a qualified no, although the CIA’s analysts believed that some
of the SAMs in Cuba would become operational in a week. Unfortunately, this guesstimate was wrong. The very next day, an American
reconnaissance aircraft orbiting off the northern coast of Cuba intercepted emissions from a Russian Fan Song radar associated
with the SA-2 SAM— the first of the Soviet SAM air defense sites was now operational. General Taylor had to bring the bad
news to President Kennedy.
⁷¹

On October 21, the day before Kennedy publicly announced the presence of Soviet ballistic missiles in Cuba, NSA’s General
Davis declared a formal SIGINT alert, SIGINT Readiness Condition BRAVO, the equivalent of the U.S. military’s DEFCON-2 . Moody
and Odonovich shifted immediately to a sleepless 24-7 work schedule. For the next several weeks, nobody went home except to
shower or occasionally catch a meal before heading back to their office in the Ops 1 building at Fort Meade. Even that was
a rarity. Odonovich recalled, “For six weeks I never had supper at home, everything was sent up here.” Moody said that she
managed to catch a few hours of sleep every day on a cot that was set up in her office. When General Blake came to her and
asked if he could help, she requested some additional staff to bear the crushing workload. The next thing she heard was Blake
on the telephone talking to off-duty employees: “This is Gordon Blake calling for Mrs. Moody. Could you come in to work now?”
⁷²