Fifty-three years ago, on October 16th, 1962, the CIA informed President Kennedy that the Soviet Union was secretly installing nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles in Cuba, and that they were only days away from being operational. Thus began the Cuban Missile Crisis, which brought the world the closest it has ever come to all-out nuclear war. After a tense 13 days, however, the US President managed to negotiate a Russian climb-down and the USSR removed its missiles. Since then, the Cuban Missile Crisis has been the epitome of crisis management by a US President at the top of his game.
A Puzzle
Yet a puzzle remains: how could the US have been blindsided about such a massive logistical operation, underway for the previous six months less than 150 miles from American soil?
The near-miss with Armageddon is all the more puzzling when we consider that the CIA possessed the ultimate spy machine, the U2 photo-reconnaissance plane. A marvel of technology, the U2 was able to take high-resolution pictures while flying at 70,000 feet, about twice the height of today’s commercial airlines. There was not much that could escape its cameras, which is why Sherman Kent, the founding father of the CIA’s analytical arm, once called the U2 a “holy miracle”.
After the Crisis, it was determined that recognizable Soviet missile equipment reached launch sites in Cuba on 17–18 September, yet in October 1962, and indeed during five crucial weeks of the Russian nuclear build up, the U2 did not fly. In a tense Cold War world, how could that be?
Hero or Villain
Though the U-2 is often the ‘hero of the piece,’ prior to the Crisis Soviet propaganda had managed to turn U2 into a kind of dirty word, as one columnist later put it. International opinion regarded the overflights of other nations’ sovereign airspace as “illegal and immoral”, and even some of Washington’s staunchest allies found these flights unpalatable. In this general climate, a series of mishaps in the months preceding the Crisis created conditions that made overflights of Cuba particularly controversial. In early September, the official Soviet daily Pravda made an accidental nine-minute overflight of Sakhalin Island by a U2 a front-page issue. Then about a week, later, a Taiwan-based U2 flown by a Chinese Nationalist pilot was lost over mainland China. Both of these incidents gave the CIA pause about increased U2 flights, and led to a sharp reaction from the State Department: at a meeting called for the purpose of deciding if the U2 should be flown over Cuba, Secretary of State Rusk asked CIA Deputy Director Pat Carter: “How do you expect me to negotiate on Berlin with all these incidents?” After all, the Berlin Wall had been erected just the year before, and Europe, not Cuba, was the Stated Department’s top priority. Following the two incidents above (and in the shadow of the failed CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion the year before), even senior members of the Kennedy White House opposed additional U2 flights (a fact airbrushed out of most histories). At the same time, of course, other parts of the Intelligence Community assumed that the flights were taking place, and that “No news was good news” as far as Cuba was concerned.
Moreover, because analysts within the CIA itself had repeatedly dismissed the possibility of the USSR doing something so “reckless” (in their view) as placing nuclear missiles in Cuba, the Agency as a whole wasn’t pushing very hard to fly missions..
Prudent Risk Management
Put another way, from the standpoint of many in the US government in October 1962, not flying the U2 over Cuba was prudent risk management. It was the result of a rational assessment made by rational executives weighing the pros and the cons of a decision. There was the known positive risk of the CIA flying the U2 and definitely annoying many national security stakeholders, and there was the negative risk of not flying and missing a key strategic development. Of course, the unknown risk, if realized, would lead to a catastrophic reversal of the strategic balance between the US and its main enemy. Like an insurance policy, flying the U2 was a question of accepting a small, known loss to forestall a possible large, even catastrophic loss, but most the the US national security bureaucracy balked at the cost of the policy.
Thank goodness – as other intelligence reports about strange happenings on Cuba began to filter through to the CIA - a compromise solution (oblique camera shots from the coast, and plus a U2 skipping in and out of Cuban airspace) was found. After a few extra days’ delays for bad weather, on 14 October a U2 spent six minutes over an area of Cuba that had not been photographed for 45 days, and the Soviet missiles were spotted.
The Moral of the Story
At first glance, one can see here a simple parable about a lack of leadership: Nobody within the CIA stood up and decided to fly the U2 despite the objections of critics. Yet such leadership can only be reasonably expected if there had been sufficient conviction that something untoward was going on in Cuba. But that was not the case. Prisoner of its mindset, and confident it understood the precedents and drivers of the USSR’s strategic behavior, the CIA held to the opinion that the Russians would never install nuclear missiles in Cuba. As a result, it didn’t push the “insurance policy” of U2 flights as hard as it might have.
In other words, the story of the U2 shows that having the best technical tools – the 1960s equivalent of today’s Big Data - is of not much use in itself. Most of the complex risks organizations deal with today cannot be addressed by technology alone. Tools are only as good as the hypotheses that underlie, circumscribe and facilitate their use.
For today’s executives, the question is: where or what is your U2? Are you aware of its flight plans?
