The Agency: Inside the CIA Page #5

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established the fact

that a series of

offensive missile sites

is now in preparation on

that imprisoned island.

The purpose of these

bases can be none other

than to provide a nuclear

strike capapility

against the western hemisphere.

President Kennedy

then delivered a swift message

to Soviet Premier Khrushchev.

"You shoot down

another airplane,

or even attempt to do

it, you're finished.

We will, we will wipe out all

of your missiles and crews

in Cuba. We'll bomb them. "

At 6:
30 on October

18th, Kennedy met

with the National Security

Council in a committee named:

With the advice of

Excomm, Kennedy ordered

a full naval quarantine of Cuba

in an effort to stem the flow

of Soviet weapons

into the country.

Khrushchev wrote a letter to

Kennedy condemning the action

and said the quarantine

constitutes an act

of aggression,

propelling mankind

into the abyss of a world

nuclear missile war.

This urgent

transformation of Cuba

into an important strategic base

by the presence of these large,

long-range, and clearly

offensive weapons

of sudden mass destruction,

constitutes an explicit threat

to the peace and security

of all the Americas.

Our unswerving objective,

therefore, must be to prevent

the use of these

missiles against this

or any other country, and

to secure their withdrawal

or elimination. The

massive military buildup

around the island of Cuba

continued as the Soviet Union

refused to back down. But

the CIA was one step ahead.

The CIA had an ace

up its sleeve.

The CIA had a spy inside

the Soviet Union,

Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, who was

a Soviet intelligence colonel

that had access to

all of their missile

technology. And

that's how we knew

that we were 13 days away from

those missiles being ready

to be launched against

the United Statete

Khrushchev had no choice

but to agree to remove

his missiles because

he knew and we knew

we still had the Soviet

Union ououunned.

The US had nuclear

military superiority.

President Kennedy

wawaable to say,

"You take those missiles out,

or we will take 'em out. "

That meant that Khrushchev

had no choice but to yield,

back down, and move 'em out.

He struck a deal.

After some negotiation,

the Soviet Union agreed

to withdraw.

However, in trade,

Khrushchev demanded that

Kennedy would remove

his missile launchers

from Turkey and Italy.

And Kennedy said,

"Of course, yeah,

whatever you say. " We

always try to be nice

once we defeat 'em, you know,

that's the American way.

But Khrushchev asked

for one more assurance

from Kennedy. Then he said,

"I want you to promise to

keep hands off of Castro. "

And Kennedy agreed. By

that one... agreement

that Kennedy made, created

the longest-living dictator

in the history of the world.

Couple of things that we learned

about the Cuban missile crisis

later, we had no

idea how dangerous

and how close we came to

a nuclear holocaustst

the principle players in

the crisis met and found

out a startling fact.

Americans involved

in the Cuban missile crisis,

and the Russians involved

in the crisis met in Havana

to have an open discussion

about what really went on.

And we were stunned at

what Russians told us.

They said, "We had authority,

without communicating

with Moscow,

to launch those nuclear weapons

against the United States,

if we felt we were

being attacked. "

Despite the danger, the

CIA had correctly guessed

Soviet intentions and blocked

what might have become

a tipping point in the Cold War.

From the earliest years

of the CIA, the agency

has always employed

cutting-edge technology to

succeed at its mission,

giving it an advantage

in the battle of wits

against the Soviet Union.

The high technology

that came out of

these early days,

went on to become the

most advanced technology

the world had ever seen.

Intelligence gathering

and technology

has gone hand in hand

since the early days

of espionage. Cryptology

has always played

a central role in America's

intelligence gathering efforts.

Cryptology is the practice and

study of hiding information,

and nowhere was this practice

more valuable than in wartime.

During World War II, British

intelligence officers

cracked German codes created

on a machine called:

allowing the Allies to intercept

and read communications

coming out of Axis Europe.

Cryptology plays

such an important role in

keeping the CIA's secrets

that there's a monument

on the CIA campus

in Virginia devoted to it.

One with a puzzle

that even the agency

hasn't been able to solve.

which was developed in

19... late 1980's, uh,

wanted to, uh, to

put works of art

in the various public buildings

and one of them was CIA,

and a gentleman named Sanborn,

uh, came up with the idea

of a sculpture with a... with

a cryptogram in it,

and they hired him and

he accessed the talent

of uh, a then-recently retired

cryptographer from CIA,

who helped him

develop the statue,

and they developed, uh,

a four part, uh, puzzle

that... that's in the statue.

Uh, subsequently, uh,

a gentleman from CIA had

studied it, uh, using uh,

a hand, uh, you know,

paper and pencil method,

and indeed solved three

of the four parts out of,

I think it's 845 letters or so,

uh, there are 97 which remain

secret. And, uh,

that's the challenge,

uh, if anyone wants to

take that challenge up,

it's available. In

the early decades

of the Cold War,

the United States

made up for the lack of

spies in the Soviet Union

by using their

technological advantage.

An advantage called...

Mounted wiwi advanced cameras,

it gave the US knowledge

of Soviet military strength, but

it was capable of much more.

We had onboard the U-2

more than cameras.

We had signal intercept

here, we could listen

to the Russian communications,

, as the plane flew over.

We could tell when their

fighters are trying

to intercept it.

They never could,

but they were trying.

We knew their missiles

are being readied to launch,

uh, against the airplane,

which is flying

around 70,000 feet.

The U-2 was the first high

altitude recon aircraft

operated against

the Soviet Union.

It was used during the

Cuban missile crisis

and during overflights of

Russia until one was shot down

in May of 1960.

But they finally,

they finally got it

in May Day 1960.

But even before that,

the CIA realized

that they needed an

airplane better,

that could not only fly higher

above the... what the missiles

could fire, but

it could outfly

the missiles.

The A-12 Oxcart was designed

as the perfect spy plane,

capable of flying

out of the reach

of Soviet missiles

and even radar.

However, there was a problem

with the construction

of the A-12, although

the CIA had a plan.

The US didn't have

enough titanium

to use to build the

airplane, so the CIA

set up a special operation, we

actually bought the titanium,

it was called titanium

sponge, that's the raw form,

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