Washington D.C., October 16, 2017 – The U.S. military drew up plans to occupy Cuba and establish a temporary government headed by a U.S. “commander and military governor” during the 1962 missile crisis, according to the recently declassified “Military Government Proclamation No. 1” posted today by the National Security Archive at The George Washington University.  

“All persons in the occupied territory will obey immediately and without question all enactments and orders of the military government,” stated the proclamation. “Resistance of the United States Armed Forces will be forcefully stamped out. Serious offenders will be dealt with severely,” it warned. “So long as you remain peaceable and comply with my orders, you will be subjected to no greater interference than may be required by military exigencies.”

Once the “aggressive Castro regime has been completely destroyed,” and the U.S. installed a new government “responsive to the needs of the people of Cuba,” the proclamation concluded, the U.S. armed forces would “depart and the traditional friendship of the United States and the government of Cuba will once more be assured.”

To prepare the Cuban populace for the invasion, the U.S. military planned to airdrop thousands of leaflets over Cuban cities and the countryside. The leaflets would warn Cuban citizens to “remain at home” because “everything that moves is a target.” “Within the next few days,” the leaflets stated, “U.S. armed forces will take temporary charge of your country.”

Final preparations for the U.S. invasion and occupation of Cuba were halted on October 28, when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev announced he was withdrawing the missiles from the island. His decision was the result of a secret, back-channel agreement to remove the Soviet missiles from Cuba in exchange for Kennedy’s commitment to pull out U.S. Jupiter missiles positioned in Turkey.

“The resolution of the missile crisis averted what would have assuredly become the bloodiest military confrontation in the history of Latin America, between the ‘Colossus of the North’ and a revolutionary Caribbean nation” according to Peter Kornbluh, who directs the Archive’s Cuba Documentation Project. Unbeknownst to the U.S. intelligence community, Kornbluh noted, in addition to the intercontinental ballistic missiles the Soviets had brought tactical battlefield nuclear weapons to Cuba—and planned to deploy them against a U.S. invasion force.

The occupation documents were recently obtained by Archive analyst William Burr through a series of Mandatory Declassification Review (MDR) requests to the U.S. Navy. 

From MDR requests to the CIA, Dr. Burr also obtained two substantive post-mortems on missile crisis-related intelligence gathering, posted here today. The CIA Inspector General’s report focused on “handling of raw intelligence information” between mid-July and mid-October 1962; it covered efforts to gather field reports and other intelligence on the arrival of Soviet equipment to Cuba, disagreements with the Defense Department on interpretations of intelligence and the constraints on distributing reports through the intelligence community “which may have diluted the impact of this information on the community at large.”

A second post-mortem, “CIA Handling of the Soviet Build-up in Cuba,” drafted by a senior officer in the Office of Current Intelligence, Richard Lehman, noted that as early as September 27, 1962, the CIA had intelligence on the arrival of surface-to-surface missiles in Cuba, but was restricted from circulating that information without corroborating photographic evidence, which could only be obtained from U-2 reconnaissance.  

The Lehman report described a September 10, 1962, White House meeting that included Attorney General Robert Kennedy, Secretary of State Dean Rusk and National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, after a U-2 plane had been shot down over China, and the Soviets had protested a reconnaissance mission over Sakhalin Island. “As a result, most of the participants were – to varying degrees – reluctant to chance another U-2 incident at this time. This meant that they were naturally hesitant to authorize any flights over areas [in Cuba] where SA-2s [anti-aircraft batteries] might be operational.”  Rusk, according to the Lehman report, vetoed a CIA proposal for two extended U-2 flights over Cuba that might have detected construction of the ICBM missile sites. Indeed, U-2 flights over the Cuban interior did not resume until October 14, when reconnaissance photography captured concrete evidence of the missile sites.

This lengthy hiatus of reconnaissance flights over mainland Cuba, according to Burr, resulted in the famous “photo-gap”—as described by David Barrett and Max Holland in their book, Blind Over Cuba: The Photo Gap and the Missile Crisis.  “The CIA post-mortem helps us to understand the lag between earlier intelligence collection from agents and refugees on Soviet missile activities and the October 14, 1962, U-2 flight that detected them weeks after those initial reports,” said Burr. “Under the ground rules set at the highest levels of the Kennedy administration, none of this information reached the President until the U-2s detected the missile sites weeks after the Soviets had begun work on them.”

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