The phone call came at an inconvenient time for McGeorge Bundy. The forty-three-year-old national security advisor was hosting a send-off dinner for the new U.S. ambassador to France, Charles “Chip” Bohlen. Bundy excused himself to take the call. On the other end of the line was Ray Cline, the CIA’s deputy director for intelligence. He was delivering bad news: “Those things we’ve been worrying about,” he told Bundy, “it looks as though we’ve really got something.” It was just after 9:00 p.m. on Monday, October 15, 1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis was about to begin.
A Nagging Fear
Fidel Castro’s seizure of power in Cuba in January 1959 and his growing dependence on the Soviet Union had raised the specter that the Soviets would challenge the United States in the Western Hemisphere. President John F. Kennedy and his senior advisers had been worrying for months that the Soviets might install weapons in Cuba aimed at the United States.
On September 4, 1962, Kennedy issued a statement that “the gravest issues would arise” if the Soviets based weapons in Cuba that could threaten the United States. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev accused Kennedy of unnecessarily inflaming tensions, and Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko used a speech at the United Nations in late September to deny that the Soviet Union had any intention of basing offensive weapons in Cuba.
The Soviet reassurances did not persuade U.S. officials. The day before Bundy’s dinner was interrupted, a U-2 spy plane piloted by Major Richard S. Heyser of the U.S. Air Force had flown a surveillance mission over Cuba. The U-2 landed at McCoy Air Force Base near Orlando, Florida, on Sunday morning October 14. A courier plane then flew the raw film to the Naval Photographic Interpretation Center in Suitland, Maryland. Center technicians worked through the night to develop the film and make special, clear prints on acetate that trained photo analysts could study over a light table.
A Fear Realized
The first photographs reached the National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) in Washington, DC, around 10:00 a.m. on Monday morning. Photo analysts immediately went to work. Six hours later, they reached a preliminary conclusion: the photographs showed SS-4 medium-range ballistic missiles, presumably equipped (or ready to be equipped) with nuclear warheads.
NPIC’s initial was based in part on comparing the photographs Heyser had taken with those that a Soviet intelligence officer, Lt. Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, had previously passed along to U.S. intelligence. The Soviets arrested Penkovsky one week after the NPIC’s analysts reached their conclusion. He was executed for treason in 1963.
When the analysts’ findings came in, NPIC director Arthur Lundahl said, “You know, boys, we could be sitting on the biggest story of our time.” He was right.
The Word Goes Out
Fearful of the costs of being wrong, Lundahl pushed his analysts to double-check their findings. By 9:00 p.m. they were certain their initial analysis was correct. Lundahl called Cline. He in turn began informing other government officials of the news.
Secretary of State Dean Rusk was pulled away from a dinner he was hosting for the West German Foreign Minister Gerhard Schröder and learned of NPIC’s conclusions while standing in the pantry outside the State Department’s State Dining Room. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara received the news of the Soviet missiles while hosting a discussion with other senior administration officials at his house on Soviet communications systems. General Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was hosting a dinner at his house, with the deputy secretary of defense, the deputy director of the CIA, and the deputy under secretary of state among the guests, when a team from the Defense Intelligence Agency arrived to brief him on the photos. CIA director John McCone had left Washington hours earlier to fly to Los Angeles to accompany the body of his stepson, who had been killed in a car crash, to Seattle for burial.
The Last to Know
One person who was not briefed on the night of October 15 about what Heyser’s U-2 had discovered was Kennedy. He had just wrapped up a five-state campaign tour to promote Democratic candidates in the upcoming midterm elections the day before. He had returned to the White House well after midnight because of an unscheduled stopover in New York City to discuss the situation in Congo with the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Adlai Stevenson. Despite the short night’s sleep, Kennedy hosted Algerian Prime Minister Mohamed Ahmed Ben Bella at the White House. Later in the day, the two leaders issued a joint statement hoping for friendship between the two countries.
Bundy’s reason for not informing the president immediately was simple: “I decided that a quiet evening and a night of sleep were the best preparation” that Kennedy could have for the crisis that he now confronted.
Other Post in This Series
Oscar Berry and Jack Patton assisted in the preparation of this article.
The United States celebrates its 250th anniversary in 2026. To mark that milestone, I am resurfacing essays I have written over the years about major events in U.S. foreign policy. A version of this essay was published on October 15, 2012.