The Real Story of the Missile Crisis

[Jim DiEugenio]

http://consortiumnews.com/2012/11/30/how...ent-148014

Blight and Yang score another good book on the Kennedy presidency.

This time in the participants own words.

[Greg Burnham]

deleted

[Anthony Thorne]

Good article, looks like another worthwhile book. The website http://www.armageddonletters.com has a lot of additional material including podcasts and the like, and the nifty gimmick of JFK, Khrushchev and Castro 'blogging' like it's 1962 and you can send them messages and questions. Honestly, they should continue that into the following year so a few of us can pipe up during October of '63 and give JFK a few words of direct, cautionary advice.

I think that younger readers will find the poll - and what it directly and indirectly suggests about the historians who participated - to be of interest. Not disputing NSAM 263 but the fact that many historians have been stubbornly determined to argue that it doesn't matter, or pretend that it doesn't exist, is worth noting.

[Phil Dragoo]

Jim, your review How the World Was Saved of Blight & Yang The Armageddon Letters/Virtual JFK is a hologram of deep political profundity.

I had recently read The Kennedy Tapes by May & Zelikow and followed the comparatively tame proceedings.

The latest in-depth appraisal is rich in the potential for a cascade of errors leading to desolation.

At the close of The Tapes it became clear that Kennedy's apparent tedious recalcitrance was the sole stake-and-chain holding the world back from its end.

With each revelation the vista of the set trap is more chilling, LeMay's bluster to the contrary notwithstanding.

How reckless was Khrushchev's gambit. That it is followed by a secret correspondence with Kennedy lights them both up with their hardline shadow states.

It is posited NSA monitoring of the process led to Dallas. Surely in Douglass' Unspeakable, Kennedy in his own words commented upon Seven Days in May as possible if a young president made only two or three such overtures contrary to the geostrategic construct.

Lane comments on Lisa Howard in Last Word: My Indictment of the CIA in the Murder of JFK. That it became personal for him with events like her suspicious death.

Send in the hawks: Johnson and Brezhnev. This is the game played for maximum profit and power.

Peace? It could not compete in such a market.

And Castro, he senses his mortality and at the last calls for no nuclear weapons--

--when as a younger man was all too ready for a "pre-emptive strike to prevent an invasion"--

LeMay would control the autopsy (a most likely scenario) after Op 40 players pumped their umbrella

and Johnson lied, "Let us continue."

[Jim DiEugenio]

Thanks.

I thought the revelation by the Russian commander was really something. That all the missiles were in Cuba BEFORE the blockade went up. That clearly stunned McNamara. That means the whole thing about the ships stopping at the blockade line was anti climactic. The first strike was already in place.

And I agree Phil, it was JFK's determination not to provoke anything, especially after Anderson was shot down that was key. Because if he had done the hawks bidding, the dozens of tactical nukes would have been fired. And that would have been it.

It is not easy for established and accepted professors to do things like this. Especaily with the coda about how the peaceful resolution to the Missile Crisis very likely led to the end of both JFK and Nikita K. And how RFK and Jackie understood that the American University ideal was now gone with LBJ in the White House.

How risky is it? THey both were at Ivy League Brown University. THey aren't there today.

THey are at a university in Canada.

[Charles Drago]

That means the whole thing about the ships stopping at the blockade line was anti climactic.

Or theater.

How risky is it? THey both were at Ivy League Brown University. THey aren't there today.

But Sergei Khrushchev is.


Which leads us to speculate about the identities of the "masters" of this scenario who were "above Cold War differences."

Who ultimately benefited from the maintenance of heightened but controlled Cold War tensions -- the ultimate example of which was the Missile Crisis? Who was fatally threatened by the prospect of an end to the Cold War?

Were there three factions involved: the for-public-consumption East and West/communist and capitalist adversaries; the witting producers, directors, writers and actors of "The Cold War" passion play; and the political visionaries -- chief among them JFK and NSK, plus RFK -- who were writing the sequel that opened in October, 1962, received deadly notices in November, 1963, and permanently closed as a revival in June, 1968?

The "real story" of the Missile Crisis?

Says who?

[David Josephs]

That means the whole thing about the ships stopping at the blockade line was anti climactic.

Or theater.

How risky is it? THey both were at Ivy League Brown University. THey aren't there today.

But Sergei Khrushchev is.


Which leads us to speculate about the identities of the "masters" of this scenario who were "above Cold War differences."

Who ultimately benefited from the maintenance of heightened but controlled Cold War tensions -- the ultimate example of which was the Missile Crisis? Who was fatally threatened by the prospect of an end to the Cold War?

Were there three factions involved: the for-public-consumption East and West/communist and capitalist adversaries; the witting producers, directors, writers and actors of "The Cold War" passion play; and the political visionaries -- chief among them JFK and NSK, plus RFK -- who were writing the sequel that opened in October, 1962, received deadly notices in November, 1963, and permanently closed as a revival in June, 1968?

The "real story" of the Missile Crisis?

Says who?

Ever since Golitsyn I've taken EVERYTHING SIGNIFICANT from the Russians with great skepticism. Kinda like trying to believe someone from the MAFIA... you listen to Lansky's late interviews..
Makes you nauseous...

So IDK... does the USSR believe the CIA documentation? the DoD, ONI? as to what happened and why?

As CD eludes... the CFR masters LOSE TOO if the world blows up.... you wanna bet none of the Cuban/Russian equipment would have even worked? 1962 was a year of deception, part of an ongoing plan to DECEIVE the US into thinking the USSR was much more powerful than imagined... CFRMIT goes along as this means MORE spending to keep up with a non existent cold war.... where DID all that money go?

I gotta believe even McHale's Navy could have turned those Russian ships around... a big game of poker... creating a BRINK that served to keep the fires burning...
I am seeing history from new and interesting vantage points as I put this to paper.... Win/Lose/Draw the CFR crowd benefits.... but at levels of play the mere mortal darn near refuses to comprehend or even allow to exist... one thing to kill thousands... but enslave millions, billions... buy pitting one against the other and calling it the NATURE OF MAN.

DJ


http://www.nytimes.com/1992/11/02/opinio...70092.html
Is General Gribkov's claim valid?

The Russian Defense Ministry recently declassified documents from the "Anadyr" file (the code name for the Cuban missile operation). The following quotation is from Defense Minister Rodion Malinovsky's order delivered late September-early October 1962 to Gen. Issa Pliyev, commander of Soviet forces in Cuba (General Staff Archives "Anadyr" File 6, Volume 2, page 144):

"Only in the event of a landing of the opponent's forces on the island of Cuba and if there is a concentration of enemy ships with landing forces near the coast of Cuba, in its territorial waters . . . and there is no possibility to receive directives from the U.S.S.R. Ministry of Defense, you are personally allowed as an exception to take the decision to apply the tactical nuclear Luna missiles as a means of local war for the destruction of the opponent on land and on the coast with the aim of a full crushing defeat of troops on the territory of Cuba and the defense of the Cuban Revolution." (my emphasis)

[Phil Dragoo]

Acheson had inadvertently invited Kim Il-Sung's adventure into the quadrilateral. A mobilization to a stalemate existing today.

Cuba as the portal, indispensible--to this day.

Kennedy playing in earnest, overcome by those with fewer scruples, greater appetites--in the reptilian sense.

The war which had to be fought for a host of reasons was fought--but victory was never one of those reasons.

What a curiosity that the Attorney General arms foreign drug cartels, while the President and Secretary of State use CIA and NATO to arm Muslim Brotherhood.

The links of this son of Malik al-Shabazz to those world-shattering prophecies and their sponsor the Saudis, the Saudis to the MB, the MB to Huma Abedin, her mother, father, brother, sister, her principal the SecState bad-dogging Israel.

The chorus raised against Assad is that raised against Qaddafi yet Putin backs Assad, as does Iran sending convoys of arms across a compliant Iraq to the embattled regime.

The 2004 CFR paper "Iran: Time for a New Approach" by Gates-Brzezinski advises the more profitable step is not war.

The development of the MOAB and the MOP may be good for the MIC, but we're not having a jackass kicking down a barn.

Erdogan can roll, can be a buyer and a player. We've got to move these S-400s, we've got to move these color tv's.

Petraeus was going to be Murdock's pawn until Bicep Girl USMA '95 brought him down and chilled the Benghazi compromise.

Oil, arms, drugs.

USSR rebranded but Putin pines for the purges. The half-life of a critical journalist there is less than a moth's. Ditto Eastasia, but in Oceania one may praise the regime; that freedom is safeguarded.

China is in everyone's backyard moving the fence since Dick and Henry and Mao and Chou had their chat.

Hugo is in Bolivia with IRGC, NATO is for Muslim outreach, POTUS bows to the keeper of the holy sites and together they roll out the Arab Spring.

The gameboard remains; the game remains the global chessboard, with red, and black, and green.

Kennan was prescriptive or descriptive, but while analyzing that, looking for the first domino, the trilateral world is playing in OB's quadrilateral.

While we mourn the SkyNet-like menace of CIA grown beyond the 1947 coordination of intelligence to the 2012 satellite, drone, NSA data center, Homeland Security in RoboCop cars are the centurions of the new empire.

All of which elevates John F. Kennedy who dared to be an intelligent and bold defender of the peace at the dawn of eternal war.

Probably we begin with his refusal to grant monolithic status to what he perceived as a series of nationalistic post-colonial movements and individual men as leaders rather than phallanxes of faceless automata.

In that day our poli sci department head with experience in the State Department noted international relations relied upon those observing a concept of limits.

President Kennedy found it difficult enough to have the nations admit to consequence of actions.

Op 40 would've insured against democracy in Cuba. It is not on the agenda for Iran. Nor China: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40yCLXhAKd0