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Appendix A Historiography of the Photo Gap, 1963–2011 S peculation about an “intelligence” or “photo” gap began to mount as soon as the acute phase of the crisis peaked in October. Chapter 1 addressed media coverage of this issue for the remaining months of 1962. This historiography traces the presentation and interpretation of key facts in the public and classified literature, and the varying interpretations given the collection deficit, beginning in 1963 and thereafter. As will be seen, the deficit remained a matter of great confusion in the public literature for decades and even, to some degree, in the classified literature. The first partly accurate explanation appeared as early as March 1963 in a story by Jules Witcover, the Pentagon beat reporter for the Newhouse Newspapers ’ Washington bureau. The account as published in the Washington Star missed some important details. Still, Witcover managed to convey the genuine reason for the intelligence deficit.1 The major omission in the story was that it made no mention of the pivotal meeting in McGeorge Bundy’s office on September 10, 1962, that resulted in attenuation of U-2 surveillance. Despite its accuracy, Witcover’s account had little impact.2 Other reporters and columnists continued to put forward the administration’s proffered explanation or simply muddled the issue, which served the same end. More importantly, two months later the Senate Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee , chaired by John Stennis, released its report, which flatly declared that allegations about a photo gap were “unfounded.”3 This influential finding became the dominant one. As a consequence, it would not be understood for at least a decade that the run-up to the missile crisis was, in fact, a near failure of the first magnitude.4 The Kennedy administration’s initial obfuscation of the issue remained so successful that scholarly consensus on this point never achieved unanimity. 118 appendix The First Publications: 1960s The first book published about the missile crisis appeared in August 1963, written by Henry M. Pachter, a German émigré and professor of history. He had sent dispatches to European papers the previous October, writing stories about the crisis from the perspective of the United Nations Security Council. He relied upon public documents, interviews with diplomatic sources “who prefer[red] to remain anonymous,” and government information officers. According to Pachter, McCone “ordered weekly surveillance” of Cuba after the SA-2s were discovered, and U-2 sorties were planned for September 5, 17, 26, and 29 and October 7. But U-2 incidents over Soviet and Chinese airspace thwarted McCone’s plans, and all U-2 flights were canceled on September 4. At the end of September U-2 surveillance resumed, Pachter wrote, “since the risk of an incident now seemed of lesser consequence than the risk of ignoring what was going on.” The missiles were not discovered until October 14 because unfavorable weather conditions forced a delay.5 In an intriguing footnote, Pachter wrote that administration sources “have vaguely hinted that . . . reconnaissance flights during September were limited to ‘sideways approaches’ outside territorial waters or may not have involved U-2 planes. Another story says that the pilots did not find the places indicated by underground informants, or that the flights had been directed to the wrong end of the island.”6 Yet Pachter also wrote, without seeming to worry about the contradictions, that the Stennis report bore out both “Senator Keating’s contention that information was available but evaluation inadequate” and the administration’s argument that “no ‘hard evidence’ was available until October 14.”7 Ultimately, Pachter’s explanation was very muddled, although he had some elements of the story right. Nor was he very concerned about deconstructing the issue since the clear emphasis of his book was on great-power coexistence in the nuclear age. A 1964 article in World Politics by Klaus Knorr, a political science professor at Princeton University, purported to examine the performance of the intelligence community prior to the missiles’ discovery and precisely why the US government was “surprised” by the deployment.8 Knorr’s analysis was based on a close reading of the Stennis report, but he concentrated almost exclusively on the estimative deficit, that is, the failure to predict the deployment either before or in the midst of the Soviet build-up. In the same World Politics issue an article by Arnold Horelick, a RAND Corporation analyst, also adhered to the line of reasoning presented in the Stennis report. Horelick subscribed to the view that the deployment had...

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