The crisis ended on October 28th. Khrushchev blinked—that was the narrative. The young President had stared down the Soviets and saved the world from nuclear war. The newspapers called it Kennedy's finest hour. Time magazine was already planning the Man of the Year cover.
At Langley, men who had spent their careers fighting communism read the secret cables and understood what had actually happened. And what had happened was surrender dressed in a victory suit.
PREPARED BY: Directorate of Plans, Special Activities Division
DATE: 15 November 1962
DISTRIBUTION: Limited to officers with MONGOOSE clearance
The resolution of the October 1962 Caribbean crisis represents a significant strategic setback for United States interests, despite favorable media coverage. This assessment examines the implications of Executive decisions made during the crisis period and their long-term consequences for Agency operations and national security.
A. United States has provided formal guarantee against invasion of Cuba. This guarantee effectively terminates all Agency paramilitary planning for regime change, rendering eighteen months of MONGOOSE preparation operationally void.
B. United States has agreed to remove Jupiter IRBM installations from Turkey and Italy. This concession was not disclosed to Congress, the Joint Chiefs, or NATO allies during the crisis period. Soviet negotiators received private assurance through Attorney General's back-channel to Ambassador Dobrynin.
C. Castro regime remains in power with explicit superpower protection. Soviet military and intelligence presence in Cuba will continue. Estimated 17,000 Soviet military personnel will remain on island indefinitely.
The men at Langley had watched the ExComm meetings through their own sources. They knew that Curtis LeMay had begged for airstrikes. They knew the Joint Chiefs had unanimously recommended invasion. They knew that Kennedy had overruled his own military—and then cut a secret deal with Moscow that he hid from everyone except his brother and a handful of Harvard advisors.
A. Crisis management was concentrated in an ad hoc Executive Committee bypassing established National Security Council structures. Agency representation was limited and frequently excluded from key deliberations.
B. The Attorney General assumed primary role in secret negotiations with Soviet representatives, operating outside normal diplomatic and intelligence channels. AG met privately with Ambassador Dobrynin on at least six occasions without State Department knowledge.
C. Critical intelligence assessments were disregarded when they conflicted with Executive preferences. DCI McCone's warning regarding Soviet MRBM deployment (August 1962) was dismissed as "alarmist" by National Security Advisor. McCone was excluded from three ExComm sessions during crisis peak.
A. OPERATION MONGOOSE is effectively terminated. All paramilitary, sabotage, and executive action planning against Cuban target must be suspended pending policy review.
B. Cuban exile assets are profoundly demoralized. Brigade 2506 veterans and JMWAVE-affiliated personnel view no-invasion guarantee as "second betrayal." Station reports indicate significant anger directed at White House, not merely Soviet adversary.
C. Agency credibility with allied intelligence services has been damaged. British and French services have expressed private concern regarding American "reliability" and "resolve."
"Resolve." That's the word. The boy had a chance to finish Castro and end the Soviet presence ninety miles from Miami. He had the military option. He had the justification. The whole world would have understood.
Instead he made a secret deal and called it victory. He traded Turkey for a photograph in Life magazine.
The Soviets got everything they wanted. Castro stays. The missiles in Turkey come out. And we're supposed to pretend we won because Khrushchev sent a letter.
— W.K.H.
William Harvey was pulled from MONGOOSE two weeks after the crisis ended. The official reason was "reassignment." The actual reason was that he had sent sabotage teams into Cuba during the negotiations without authorization—a rogue operation that could have derailed Kennedy's secret diplomacy. Bobby Kennedy demanded his head.
Harvey was transferred to Rome. A demotion disguised as a promotion. He packed his pearl-handled revolvers and his grudges and his knowledge of every black operation the Agency had ever run. And he waited.
The real damage wasn't operational. It was institutional. The men who had built the Agency—who had fought the Cold War in the shadows while politicians took credit and gave speeches—now understood something fundamental about the Kennedy brothers.
They could not be trusted.
A. Current Executive leadership has demonstrated pattern of excluding intelligence community from critical decisions while simultaneously assigning blame for policy failures (ref: Bay of Pigs post-action).
B. Attorney General's role in national security matters represents unprecedented concentration of influence outside established structures. RFK maintains parallel relationships with Soviet, Cuban exile, and organized crime figures that are not coordinated with or reported to DCI.
C. Executive statements regarding "splinter[ing] the CIA into a thousand pieces" (ref: NYT background interview, October 1961) combined with current reorganization initiatives suggest fundamental hostility to clandestine service independence.
A. Maintain maximum compartmentation of sensitive operations from Executive oversight pending clarification of policy environment.
B. Preserve institutional relationships with GPFLOOR assets and allied services independent of current policy constraints.
C. [SECTION REMOVED — CLASSIFICATION REVIEW 1978]
PREPARED BY: J.J. Angleton / CI Staff
REVIEWED BY: R. Helms / DD/P
DISTRIBUTION: Director's Safe Only
The removed section. Always the removed section. The author of this manuscript claimed to have seen the original, before the 1978 review. He described a single paragraph outlining "contingency planning for leadership transition scenarios." The language was bureaucratic. The implications were not.
In Georgetown, Allen Dulles read his own copy—hand-delivered by a former subordinate who still made Sunday visits. He set it down and stared at the fire.
His visitor—the manuscript identifies him only as "a senior counterintelligence officer"—asked what should be done.
He paused. Relit his pipe.
One year later, John Fitzgerald Kennedy would ride in an open motorcade through Dallas—a city where he was deeply unpopular, where right-wing handbills called him a traitor, where the Secret Service had warned against the route. His brother had wanted him to skip Texas entirely.
The President overruled him. There was an election to win. There were fences to mend. There was politics to be done.
In the end, it wasn't the Agency or the Mafia or the Cubans or the Soviets who killed him. It was the belief—shared by so many powerful men—that he could be killed. That he should be killed. That his death would solve problems that his life had created.
The bullet that found him in Dealey Plaza came from somewhere. The investigation that followed was led, in part, by Allen Welsh Dulles—the man Kennedy had fired, the man who knew where all the bodies were buried, the man who understood that some questions are asked precisely so they won't be answered.
But that is the next chapter.
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