Cuban missile crisis question

[jaydeehess]

I recall that on a TV documentary about the Cuban Missile Crisis that at one point a missile was detected over Florida. It took several minutes to determine the missile's trajectory and during those minutes JFK had to decide whether to launch all out against Cuba and the USSR or wait and see were this missile was headed. It turned out to be a US missile test from a Fla. base and the commander of the test facility was reamed out severely for almost causing WW3.

Does anyone else recall this anecdote and if so do you have a web or book reference that describes this specific event?

[Count Zero]

Strictly speaking, the story is false. It seems to be cobbled together from several other events that went on at that time:

- Missiles were being tested at Cape Canaveral during the Crisis. Space probes were also being launched (notably Ranger V and Explorer 15).
- Sounding Rockets were also being tested over in Eglin, Florida, which is in the extreme western part of the state, hundreds of miles away.
- A Soviet Mars probe broke-up on October 24, and pieces went into orbit. Radar detection of these pieces at first gave the imression of a Soviet attack until the courses were plotted.
- On October 26, the US launched an Atlas D ICBM from Vandenburg as part of the "Bluegill Triple-Prime" high-altitude nuclear test conducted over Johnston Island a half-our before. This launch was significant because Vandenburg was an active ICBM base at the time. This caused some consternation in Washington, but I can't find any record of it provoking the Soviets. There was a lot of missile & weapons testing going on at the time.

I just assembled an integrated chronology of the Crisis, rocket launches, and US & Soviet weapons testing from October 14 - 28, 1962. If you want me to e-mail this .doc file to you, e-mail me with the subject line "Timeline".

[orumdude]

The CIA put Castro in power (according to the US ambassador to Cuba in 1959 they funded both sides). It allowed the military industrial complex to start the cold war and steal trillions of dollars for useless weapons that couldn't be used (as predicted by Eisenhower). The Bay of Pigs made Kennedy look dumb and he promised to smash the CIA into a thousand pieces. He's dead.

[gillianren]

Yet despite their many known attempts on him, Castro isn't.

Oh, and no, Kennedy had no intention of "smashing the CIA into a thousand pieces."

[Count Zero]

All of which is irrelevant to the question about missile testing during the Cuban Missile Crisis, which is the subject of this thread. If you like, you can start another other threads on Castro's rise to power (in which you had better list exactly where the former ambassador said or wrote that the CIA funded both sides) and/or JFK vs. the CIA (where you should provide the source for Kennedy's promise that he would "smash the CIA into a thousand pieces."

Welcome to the board. We prefer verifiable facts over speculation and innuendo.

[orumdude]

It is highly relevant to Kennedy and the Cuban Missile crisis and not speculation or innuendo. It's a reasonable assumption that anyone with even a very basic knowledge of political history would know these facts.

“We put Castro in power,” flatly stated former U.S. Ambassador to Cuba Earl T. Smith during congressional testimony in 1960. He was referring to the U.S. State Department and CIA’s role in aiding the Castro rebels, also to the U.S. arms embargo on Batista, also to the official U.S. order that Batista vacate Cuba. Ambassador Smith knew something about these events because he had personally delivered the messages to Batista. Castro’s “defiance” of the U.S. at the time also involved his group pocketing a check for $50,000 from the CIA operative in Santiago, Robert Weicha. “Me and my staff were all Fidelistas,” boasted Robert Reynolds, the CIA’s Caribbean Desk “specialist on the Cuban Revolution” from 1957 to 1960.

www.brookesnews.com/062108fontova.html


From Publishers Weekly
Prouty, who was a Washington insider for nearly 20 years--in the last few of them as Chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Kennedy--has a highly unusual perspective to offer on the assassination and the events that led up to it. Familiar to moviegoers as the original of the anonymous Washington figure, played by Donald Sutherland in the Oliver Stone's movie JFK , who asks hero Jim Garrison to ponder why Kennedy was killed, Prouty leaves no doubt where he stands. The president, he claims, had angered the military-industrial establishment with his procurement policies and his determination to withdraw from Vietnam, and had threatened to break the CIA into "a thousand pieces" after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. His death was in effect a coup d'etat that placed in the White House a very different man with a very different approach--one much more acceptable to what Prouty consistently calls "the power elite." Although he declares that such an elite has operated, supranationally, throughout history, and is all-powerful, he never satisfactorily explains who its members are and how it functions--or how it has allowed the current East-West rapprochement to take place. Still, this behind-the-scenes look at how the CIA has shaped postwar U.S. foreign policy is fascinating, as are Prouty's telling questions about the security arrangements in Dallas, his knowledge of the extraordinary government movements at that time (every member of the Cabinet was out of the country when Kennedy was shot) and his perception that most of the press has joined in the cover-up ever since. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.


www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0806517727?v=glance

[gillianren]

Can I give you a piece of advice? JFK is an embarrassment even to most JFK conspiracy theorists. If you're citing Oliver Stone, the best advice is "don't."