The Cuban missile crisis and intelligence performance

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198 INTELLIGENCE AND THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS
Failures Consequential and Otherwise: How Should we Evaluate
Intelligence Performance?
It is ironic that the US intelligence community made such an intense effort
to look for something that they did not expect to see. And while it is possible
that the United States might have discovered the Soviet nuclear deployment,
and detected the true size and nature of the Soviet conventional deployment,
somewhat earlier than it did, had it relaxed its expectations, its standards of
proof, or both, it is worth recalling - as Garthoff puts it - that 'intelligence
did identify the missiles in sufficient time to allow successful American
initiative and action to compel their withdrawal'. 81 'Discovery a week or
two earlier in October,' Garthoff writes, '... would not have changed the
situation faced by the President and his advisers'. 82
In what sense, then, did the CIA 'fail'? It certainly failed to make a clear
prediction that the Soviet Union would attempt to deploy nuclear missiles
to Cuba. But it did not fail American policy makers who deeply dreaded the
prospect. The CIA was vigilant, and told the President all that he really
needed to know. Certain things the CIA did not know, and could not tell the
President, even though he would have preferred knowing them: for
example, exactly when the Soviet MRBMs in Cuba would become
operational; whether or not nuclear warheads had yet arrived in Cuba, and
if so, where they were stored, and whether they had been issued to missile
units; and exactly how many Soviet troops were on the ground. We can call
these failures if we like; but we are not certain that we see the point of doing
so. Only the last was something the CIA could have been, able to divine
given its existing capabilities, and given the information at its disposal. The
others are very difficult tasks, and the CIA could only have known these had
it been lucky in data collection. 83 But in any case, none had a negative policy
consequence. As Garthoff notes, the White House, the Pentagon, and the
CIA all assumed in prudence that the Soviet missiles were operational and
that warheads were present, and given the nature of US contingency plans
for military operations against Cuba, it is unlikely that the underestimate of
the number of Soviet soldiers there would have materially affected the
outcome of an invasion. 84
The only significant lacuna that we can identify concerns the presence
of tactical nuclear weapons. American officials did not presume that Soviet
forces in Cuba would be equipped with tactical nuclear weapons, and had
Kennedy sent American forces into Cuba, they would not have been
equipped with similar weapons themselves. But while this was certainly a
lacuna, it is unclear that the CIA should have been expected to discover that
the Soviet Union had equipped its forces with tactical nuclear weapons, and
it is possible to argue that the CIA had furnished Kennedy with ample