The Cuban missile crisis and intelligence performance

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Downloaded by [Harvard College] at 08:23 18 September 2012 The Cuban Missile Crisis and Intelligence Performance JAMES G. BLIGHT and DAVID A. WELCH The foregoing essays collectively raise important questions, not only about what happened in the Cuban missile crisis (and why), but also about intelligence assessment more broadly. 1 As we stated in our introduction, we see them as the beginning of a more extended conversation between scholars, intelligence professionals, and (we would hope) policy makers, rather than as the final word on any topic in particular. A proper synthesis is clearly premature. But given the Sisyphean nature of missile crisis scholarship, it may be doubted whether the time will ever be ripe for a true synthesis. Hence in this essay we make so bold as to offer an interpretation of the collective import of the preceding pages, knowing full well that some of it must later stand to be corrected. We would like to try to grapple with deep and abstract questions having to do with the evaluation of intelligence performance, and the theory and practice of intelligence assessment — though we shall evince some skepticism about the possibility of a 'theory' of intelligence assessment per se. While not everything we will have to say on this score will be entirely novel, we hope that the perspective in which we will attempt to put it will be unfamiliar and fresh. These are our chief aims. However, we believe it would be fruitful to ease our way into these topics by first having a closer look at some of the nuts and bolts of intelligence assessment in the missile crisis, both to provide some real-world purchase on more abstract issues, and to flag items that require further exploration. We begin with unresolved or puzzling empirical questions that arise from the preceding essays - questions first about what actually happened, and then about why certain things happened and others did not - and then proceed to examine and evaluate certain important perceptions, judgments, and inferences. This will help us frame and anchor the more abstract discussion to follow.
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The Cuban missile crisis and intelligence performance

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