NSA’s SIGINT production on Cuba quickly dwarfed the reporting coming from all other agencies. During the six-month period from April 1962 to October 1962, NSA provided fifty-seven hundred reports on what was going on inside Cuba.24Intercepts in April and May confirmed that the Cubans were receiving new Soviet-made radars, part of the rapid construction of a modern air defense system. In June, NSA reported that MiG-21 fighters, the most modern Soviet-made jets, were in Cuba. At the same time, American radio intercept operators in southern Florida caught Russians talking in heavily accented Spanish on Cuban air force radio frequencies, teaching Cuban pilots and ground controllers fighter interception tactics. By July 1962, SIGINT showed that the Cuban MiG fighters were now routinely conducting ground-controlled intercept (GCI) air defense exercises, and on two occasions NSA intercept operators in southern Florida detected Cuban MiG fighters intercepting intruding aircraft, probably CIA resupply planes, clear evidence that the Cuban air force was fast becoming combat ready.25
By mid-July 1962, Secretary McNamara had become quite concerned about these capabilities, as well as about intelligence reports indicating the presence of Soviet military advisers on the island. NSA concurred and once again requested permission from the Pentagon to divert collection resources from other targets in order to augment its SIGINT coverage of Cuba. In his response, on July 16, McNamara ordered NSA to dramatically increase its coverage as “a matter of the highest urgency.”26
NSA had one hugely important asset, which allowed it to listen in on what was happening inside Cuba—it could tap right into the Cuban national telephone system. This was possible because the American telecommunications giant RCA International had built the system in 1957, and it used a vulnerable micro wave relay system rather than invulnerable landlines to carry virtually all telephone traffic between Havana and all major towns and cities in Cuba.27
Miffed by the seizure of its Cuban holdings by Castro’s government in 1959, RCA willingly provided the CIA and NSA with the schematics of the Cuban communications system as well as details about the operating parame ters of the equipment. But in 1960, the Soviets began to replace the American-made equipment with Russian communications and cryptographic equipment as part of their military aid program to Cuba. NSA estimated that it would take the Cuban government about two years to phase out the American equipment and replace it with the Russian equipment, by which time, it was believed, the lack of spare parts and poor maintenance would take its toll on the latter, forcing the Cubans to continue to use the American-built communications network for the foreseeable future. They were right.28
To intercept the Cuban telephone traffic, NSA needed to park a ship equipped with special intercept equipment off the Cuban coast. So on July 19, 1962, the USS Oxford was diverted from a scheduled cruise around Latin America and ordered to proceed at flank speed to undertake another intelligence-gathering cruise around Cuba.29The Oxford arrived off the northern coast of Cuba on July 21 and began to cruise at a leisurely five knots within its assigned operations area in international waters twelve miles off Havana and the port of Mariel, monitoring Cuban communications traffic and radar emissions. The Oxford’s most productive target was the easily intercepted message traffic sent over the Cuban microwave telephone network.30
On July 31, a Cuban navy patrol boat circled the Oxford while crewmen photographed the ship. Electronic intelligence (ELINT) operators aboard the Oxford nervous ly watched as the Cubans used their shore-based surveillance radars to continuously track the ship’s movements and no doubt associated its position relative to the sites of contemporaneous CIA Operation Mongoose commando raids along the Cuban coastline. On August 30, Cuban newspapers prominently reported on the presence of the Oxford off the Cuban coast. Observersstanding on the Malecón seawall around Havana harbor could, once again, clearly see the spy ship as it slowly cruised back and forth just outside Cuban territorial waters.31
Change in Command
After its disastrous experience with Admiral Laurence Frost, the Pentagon selected a fifty-two-year-old U.S. Air Force communications officer with little intelligence experience named Lieutenant General Gordon Blake to head up NSA. But his past experience might well have sold him on the importance of SIGINT. On the morning of December 7, 1941, Blake was serving as the base operations officer at Hickham Field, in Hawaii, when the Japa nese attacked Pearl Harbor. He was awarded the Silver Star for gallantry for his actions during the attack. After World War II, Blake held a series of command positions on the air staff in Washington, where he helped plan the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line radar network across Alaska and Canada. In 1961, he was named commander of the Continental Air Defense Command, attaining the rank of lieutenant general on October 1, 1961, and he remained there until being named NSA director on July 1, 1962.32
It was a precarious time for NSA. The agency was still battered by the bad feelings generated by Frost’s contentious relationship with Robert McNamara’s Pentagon. Frost and Blake had been friends since World War II, which helped ease the transition somewhat, but Blake later confessed that he “felt badly about coming in over [Frost’s] prostrate form.”33
Blake was to serve as the director of NSA for three years, until May 31, 1965. His impact on the agency, though little publicized, was important and far-reaching. He was at the helm during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and he managed the agency during a period of dramatic expansion brought on by the war in Vietnam. NSA’s personnel numbers and bud get figures reached record highs under his command, and he was instrumental in getting funding for an intensified research and development program needed to develop new SIGINT collection and computerized processing systems. Personable and easygoing, Blake went out of his way to try to forge closer links between NSA and the Pentagon, developing a close working relationship with Frost’s archnemesis, Assistant Secretary of Defense John Rubel, and his successor (and a future secretary of state during the Carter administration), Cyrus Vance. Blake also restored a more harmonious relationship with the CIA and patched up NSA’s virtually non existent relationship with the National Reconnaissance Office, which Frost had left in tatters because of a fight over NSA’s lack of control over SIGINT satellite collection. By the time Blake departed, NSA had eclipsed all other agencies comprising the U.S. intelligence community, with SIGINT becoming the “predominant source” used by American intelligence analysts and policy makers. 34 But the outcome of the struggle for control of future increasingly sensitive SIGINT satellites and amazingly high-resolution reconnaissance satellites would be crucial to NSA’s maintaining intelligence primacy.
Monitoring the Russian Surge
It was not until the first in a new flow of Soviet cargo and passenger ships headed for Cuba in mid-July 1962 that NSA intelligence analysts concluded that something unusual was happening. NSA routinely intercepted all Soviet naval and commercial shipping radio traffic in the North Atlantic in conjunction with GCHQ in Britain and the Canadian SIGINT agency, the Communications Branch of the National Research Council (CBNRC). As a result, virtually everything that the U.S. intelligence community knew about Soviet shipments of men, weapons, and material to Cuba came from SIGINT. The importance of this NSA coverage to the CIA was so high that, as a report prepared by the CIA notes, “SIGINT provided information on daily positions, tonnages, destinations, and cargoes, as well as Soviet attempts to deny or falsify this information. On sailings from the Baltic, SIGINT often provided the initial information.”35
The first indication that something untoward was occurring resulted from the analysis of the manifests for these ships, which NSA was routinely intercepting. Beginning on July 15, fully laden Soviet cargo ships began sailing for Cuba from Russian ports in the Black Sea. As they passed through the Dar-danelles strait, the captains of these merchant ships gave false declarations to Turkish authorities in Istanbul as to their destinations and the cargoes they were carry ing. They also lied about the cargoes’ weight, which was well below what the ships were capable of carry ing. NS
A analysts at Fort Meade quickly figured out that the false declarations indicated that the ships were secretly carry ing military cargoes.36
Declassified intelligence reports show that in July 1962, NSA detected twenty-one Russian merchant ships docking in Cuba, including four passenger ships, which was a single-month record for Soviet ships docking in Cuba. Among the passenger ships detected by NSA as soon as they left Russian ports were the Maria Ulyanova and the Latvia, which brought key staff components of the Soviet Group of Forces to Cuba. In August, NSA detected thirty-seven Soviet merchant ships, eleven tankers, and six passenger ships docking in Cuba. Little intelligence was available about what exactly the Russians were shipping there until mid-August, when imagery analysts at ONI identified crates for Komar missile patrol boats sitting on the deck of a Soviet merchant ship on its way to Cuba. In September, forty-six Soviet merchant ships were detected docking in Cuba by SIGINT, along with thirteen tankers and four passenger ships.37
These ships secretly carried thousands of Russian air defense troops and construction workers to Cuba. Despite attempts to disguise the newly arrived Russian troops in Cuba as civilian “agricultural technicians,” refugees and defectors who found their way to Miami told their CIA interrogators that these “agricultural technicians” were young, wore matching civilian clothing, had military haircuts, marched in formation, and carried themselves like soldiers. In late July, the Russian military construction personnel had begun building launch sites for six SA-2 Guideline surface-to-air missile (SAM) regiments, whose 144 missile launchers were to be deployed throughout Cuba. The first SA-2 SAM sites were concentrated in the San Cristóbal area, in western Cuba. By the end of August, construction on the first SA-2 SAM site had been completed. 38
Recently declassified documents reveal that despite the preponderance of evidence from SIGINT that these Soviet cargo ships were carrying weapons to Cuba, the Pentagon and its intelligence arm, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), refused to accept this interpretation of the intelligence material. DIA’s performance during the Cuban Missile Crisis was, according to the CIA, disgraceful. For instance, DIA blocked an attempt by the CIA to insert an item in the August 3, 1962, edition of the Central Intelligence Bulletin noting that “an unusual number of suspected arms carriers were enroute to Cuba.” A watered-down version of this report was carried the next day, but in the month that followed, DIA blocked four more attempts by CIA analysts to publish reports that the Russians were shipping weapons to Cuba, with DIA analysts taking the following position: “The high volume of shipping probably reflects planned increases in trade between the USSR and Cuba.” As late as the end of August, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Maxwell Taylor, was telling President Kennedy that the surge in Soviet shipping traffic to Cuba “reflected an increased flow of economic aid” rather than weapons. DIA did not acknowledge that the Soviets were sending large quantities of weapons until September 6, a week after a U-2 reconnaissance mission confirmed that Russian-made SA-2 SAMs were operational in Cuba.39
On August 20, 1962, CIA director John McCone wrote a memorandum to President Kennedy reporting that a significant and worrisome surge in the number of Soviet merchant ships docking in Cuba had been detected and that an accumulation of human intelligence (HUMINT) reports strongly indicated that a contingent of about five thousand Russian troops was now in Cuba. The memo incorporated intelligence that had been received from the French intelligence service’s chief of station in Washington, Thyraud de Vosjoli, who had just returned from a visit to Havana. According to de Vosjoli, between four thousand and six thousand Soviet military personnel had arrived in Cuba since July 1, 1962, although no Russian military units per se were included in this group.40
Intelligence information regarding the shipments was passed to the Special Group at a meeting at the State Department on August 21, and President Kennedy was briefed at the White House the following day. Confirmation of these reports by U-2 aerial reconnaissance was immediately ordered.41On August 23, NSA reported that nineteen Soviet freighters or passenger ships were then en route to Cuba, most of which appeared to be carry ing weapons.42The next day, the CIA issued another intelligence report based on HUMINT, noting that on August 5–6 large numbers of Soviet personnel and equipment had arrived at the Cuban ports of Trinidad and Casilda, and that the Soviet personnel and equipment had departed from the ports in large convoys in the direction of the town of Sancti Spíritus.43
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.”46The 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— ne
ver 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.51SIGINT 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.52In 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
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