In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Chapter 3 The Struggle over the Postmortems W hile the administration was still busy influencing public perceptions of the crisis, the battle over its history began in earnest. For the most part, it would be in the form of the efforts to influence the secret postmortems conducted by various entities in the government. In all, four intelligence investigations would be conducted in 1962 and 1963 at various altitudes of the government. For the most part, these analyses, along with the documentation necessary to evaluate them in context, have been declassified only recently, some forty years after the event.1 The postmortems would be essentially unanimous in their praise of the intelligence community’s work after the discovery of the Soviet missiles on October 15. But they would vary greatly in their findings regarding its performance in the run-up to the crisis. The postmortems were all subject to extraneous influences that distorted their findings and even the presentation of facts. Their key conclusions depended inordinately on who wrote the postmortem , when it was written, and for whom, and represented nothing less than a struggle to control the history of the crisis. The Lehman Report Richard Lehman, a thirteen-year veteran of the CIA, was the assistant for special projects in the Office of Current Intelligence (OCI) in 1962.2 On Saturday, October 27—the day that would be the turning point in the crisis —the OCI director, Russell Jack Smith, called Lehman into his office and told him that McCone wanted an analysis of the agency’s performance to date. Although the end of the crisis was seemingly not yet in sight, “McCone wanted to know how we had got[ten] there,” Lehman later recalled, “what we [had done] right, what we [had done] wrong, and so on.” McCone was likely anticipating the day, perhaps well in the future, when congressional hearings on the Soviet missiles would begin, akin to the 1946 investigation 41 The Struggle over the Postmortems that Congress launched into Japan’s surprise attack. Indeed, on one copy of the Lehman Report the words would be scrawled, “Save for the Pearl Harbor hearings—if some, or any.”3 Lehman was greatly aided by McCone’s habit of “keeping meticulous memoranda for the record” of actions, meetings, and conversations.4 Within four days, Lehman had worked up a manuscript of nearly one hundred pages on the events leading up to the missiles’ detection. Two weeks later, on November 14, he presented his findings to McCone. Overall the Lehman Report was accurate and careful, if in some places understated. Although it was not exhaustive—it was only thirty-three pages long—it did reflect the gist of what had happened in the weeks leading up to the discovery of the missile sites.5 With respect to the operational deficit, Lehman correctly zeroed in on the events of September 10 as being absolutely “crucial to the record.”6 In 2003, during a telephone interview, Lehman recalled his findings in blunt terms: President Kennedy, he said, had “shot himself in the foot” by attenuating U-2 coverage over Cuba.7 However, in the report itself Lehman was much more circumspect. He deemed that the U-2 overflights permitted after September 10 were successful inasmuch as they had established new facets of the Soviet build-up. Yet they “did not—and since they were designed to avoid SAM-defended areas, could not—detect the ballistic missile deployments then under way.”8 Lehman astutely observed that responsibility for the cautious overflight policy might appear murkier than it in fact was. Coming away from the September 10 meeting, the CIA had understood in no uncertain terms that any intrusive overflights it proposed would be declined by the NSC’s Special Group Augmented for submission to the president; the agency had therefore made no such requests. Thus, the record showed that the president authorized everything the SGA requested (as Bundy would soon claim) and that the SGA had not turned down any written requests or oral appeals from the CIA for intrusive overflights.9 In other words, a critical limitation imposed on the overflight regime for five weeks had not been captured on paper—a fact that would assume ever-larger significance in the three postmortems that followed. The Inspector General’s Survey Several days before Lehman completed his report, Jack Earman, the CIA’s inspector general (IG) since May, took up virtually the same task, also at McCone’s request (McCone’s reasons for...

Share