Interviews:

Brugioni,
Dino

Walter,
Cronkite

Halpern,
Samuel

McNamara,
Robert

Smith,
William

Sorenson,
Theodore

Troyanovski,
Oleg


     
   


INTERVIEW WITH DINO BRUGIONI

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INT: Let me take you back to the fifteenth of October. Can you just describe roughly what happened that morning?

DB: Right. Right? OK. Well, we're looking at the photography and we spot objects that are foreign to the environment. This was ranch country. And preliminary measurements indicating that the tents were about a hundred feet long and that the objects on the ground on trailers were about sixty-five feet. We had what was known as collateral support hand books, we had information from Penkowski and many others and we kept looking and we said, oh-oh, this is an SS4 and the SS4 was shown in the Moscow parade and we had those photographs. So working with the photo interpreters, we became convinced that this was it. But still we wanted to make sure, so we passed the film off to a photogramatrist and with precise measurement equipment, he said, they're sixty-five feet long. So we called Mr. Lundahl - it was just about quitting time - and Mr. Lundahl said, stay with it and by nine o'clock we were convinced that these were SS 4s. So Mr. Lundahl calls Mr. Klein. Now it so happened there was a conference going on between all of the Commonwealth countries on intelligence, so Mr. Klein broke out of the meeting and Lundahl said,, sir, he said, I'm sorry to report to you, but we have MRBM missiles in Cuba. And so there was a party going on at Bowlene air field by... it was supposed for Mr. McCone and his fiancée, 'cos Mr. McCone was getting married. Well Misses Piggot, the future Misses McCone, her son was killed in an automobile accident and so he had to go to California. So... Klein gets in touch with General Carter, the deputy director of CIA, and he tells the people assembled that we'd got missiles in Cuba. Klein calls McGeorge Bundy and McGeorge Bundy said, well, what shape is it in? He said, well, he said, they're working on it now. He said, do you have anything at hand? Do you have information at hand? And Klein said, no we don't. And the reason he asked, President Kennedy was out campaigning, he was in upper staup state New York and he wasn't going to get back until about midnight. So McGeorge Bundy took it on his own to say, go ahead and continue working, be here the first thing in the morning. And so we worked all through the night and then the next morning, Mr. Lundahl along with Ray Klein goes over to brief the President. When the President is shown these two briefing boards, he turns around to Lundahl and he said, are you sure? And Mr. Lundahl replied, sir, I'm as sure of this as a photo interpreter can be sure of anything and you must agree that we have not led you astray on anything that we've reported to you. So with that, the President, they held a meeting in terms of, well, what do we do now? Well, the first thing that we wanted was full coverage of Cuba and then Mr. Lundahl asked for low altitude coverage. So the next morning, there was six missions flown, Cuba was covered completely. Now this was the seventeenth. The eighteenth, Kennedy was scheduled to go on a campaign trip to Springfield, Illinois, to Chicago and then to Seattle. We're now looking at the photography and we find the slash marks and the slash marks indicate that in addition to the medium range ballistic missiles, the SS4, SS5s are being deployed. This meant that from Cuba, they could hit every target in the United States, except the extreme north west. When the military heard this, especially the air force and especially General LeMay, they just couldn't contain themselves, that something had to be done and done in a hurry. Bobby and McNamara came over to the centre to determine whether we indeed were seeing intermediate range ballistic missile sites and that was fairly easy, because we had U-2 coverage of Russia and so we put the two prints side by side and the slash marks were very evident and Bobby and McNamara were convinced. And Bobby goes back and then he calls the President and tells the President, I think you better come back, we've got a real crisis in the making. Well, the President comes back and now there was a gr