Transcripts For CSPAN3 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis Intelligence 20221204

we are so grateful to have this opportunity to explore the cuban missile crisis and how its resonate with contemporary challenges 60 years later. well, i was not alive during the cuban missile crisis. i have been at the kennedy library long enough to have marked the 50th anniversary of the cuban missile crisis. as a member of staff at the time, i had recently given birth to my first child. i remember feeling a sense of relief that the peril of the cuban missile crisis felt like a distant history and gratitude that president kennedy had secured the new nuclear test ban treaty. perhaps his greatest contribution towards the ideal of genuine peace that he spoke of so movingly in commencement address at american university. relief and gratitude that my child's future was more secure for. today. just one decade later, as we mark 60 years since the world teetered on the brink of the end of civilization as we know it, we find ourselves once again faced with the threat of nuclear aggression. over the past few months and especially weeks, there has been much debate about how how relevant or not the cuban missile crisis is to the situation with russia and the ukraine. and while consensus seems elusive, i think we can all agree that the lessons of the cuban missile crisis are more valuable than ever. to understand today. i'm now honored to introduce briefly this session's distinguished speakers who will bring their ways, wisdom and expertise to this topic. i'm so delighted to extend a warm welcome to the kennedy library to alexis albion the curator for special projects at the international spy museum. she previously served as lead curator during the moves the museum's move to a new location, developing all content for the permanent exhibits. she has also served as assistant to the president of the world bank group strategist in the office of the coordinator for counterterrorism at the u.s. state department and director for policy for the 911 public discourse project. and as a professional staff member on the 911 commission. it is also a pleasure to welcome sean shane harris to the library, a staff writer, the with the washington post covering intelligence and u.s. national security. he was part of the team that won the 2021 pulitzer prize for public service for stories about the january 6th attack on the capitol and efforts to overturn the presidential election. his most recent book is at war the rise of the military internet complex. he is also a co-host of the weekly podcast chatter. i'm also delighted to welcome tom tom nichols back to the. he is a staff writer at the atlantic and the author of the atlantic newsletter. he recently completed 25 years of teaching at the u.s. naval war college and is most recent. his most recent book is our own worst enemy the assault from within on modern democracy. and i am also glad to welcome timothy naftali back to the library and back to the stage with more more friends on stage. this time. a clinical associate professor of public service and a clinical associate professor of history at nyu, as well as a cnn presidential historian. he writes on national security and intelligence policy, international history and presidential history. he previously served as the founding director of the richard nixon library and museum and and yorba linda, california. tim, thank you for serving as both panelist and moderator this session. and thank you again for all of your contributions to put together this today's conversations. please join me, all of you, for thank for welcoming our special guests. thank you. thank you for coming. oh thank you, rachel. it's a pleasure to be here. thank you. to the jfk library. thank you to the jfk foundation. and thank you to my three fellow panelists. you're in for a treat. this is all about secrecy and learning about secrecy and how secrecy matters or doesn't matter in good ways and bad. and we're going to be talking about the cuban missile crisis. and then we're going to pivot, talk about today to set the stage for the element of secrecy. i want you to listen to ted sorensen, who was a close advisor to president kennedy and his most important speechwriter. talk about how the president wanted to be able to make his decision as to how to respond to the fact that there are nuclear missiles in cuba. how you wanted to be able to have that period of discussion be kept to seek it in washington, d.c.. and here is ted explaining, how the president sought to achieve it and what ted thought about the outcome. let's go to the first clip, please. president kennedy wisely in my opinion, told bob and me and all the others gathering around that ex-con table on the first morning of the 13 days that he didn't not want limousines piling up in front of the white house. he did not want people canceling their dinners and their speaking engagements. he did not want washington to know that there were crisis meetings going on because then the soviets would know that we knew about their missiles. and he felt that if we had time to formulate an answer before panic and pressure from the public and the congress poured in on us or the soviets took some preemptive act that we would be a much better off. secrecy defines the beginning of this crisis, but the soviets were the first to engage in secrecy and alexis, please help us understand the soviet approach to disinformation and deception at the beginning of this crisis. thank you very much, tim. and thanks to the kennedy library and the kennedy foundation for bringing me here today. yes. you know, i think a way we often talk about intelligence in the cuban missile crisis. of course, you know, any film, any documentary on the crisis always starts out with the u-2 flights and imagery intelligence, american side. but, you know, the soviets had, a major intelligence operation there as well. let's just think about it for a moment. back in the spring of 1962, khrushchev has this idea about bringing strategic missiles to cuba. what does that involve? well, first of all, he you know, he like let's bring strategic missiles, you know, they're going to have the medium, medium range, long range. you know, it's 25 of those 16 of that or whatever. but in order to support that, you need infantry, right. and we know now that that ended up being over 40,000 soviet russian soldiers. so now when you've actually got to support and protect those soldiers as well. so that starts to involve anti aircraft batteries example. and then you have then you've got artillery, then you've got tanks. well, then you've got to have that see bombers to support them. you know what, if there's a land war. right. you've bombers. you've got mig and, then you end up having as well. we know short range missiles as well. these tactics on missiles. and then, by the way, a nuclear sub submarines as well. so now it's become this just giant operation to bring these men weapons, materials, equipment, thousands of miles from the soviet union to cuba and do you need for that. a giant operation. and oh, by the way, we're going to do it all in secret now that is a major intelligence operation. and the soviets know how do that? very well. and this is a great example of something that the soviets have done well for for a long time. and it's a in the business we call it. indeed, it's a denial deception operation. and the russians call it mass record. yeah. right. moscow and very bad at my russians. but moscow and i hope these gentlemen will be talking about that today. but we'll give you a few elements. this this operation, which is called operation unadilla or unadilla, might give us an idea. russian, again, had all the elements of this denial and deception operation. so, first of all, let's talk about the of the operation itself. operation that was deliberately given that all these operations are given code names on a dare is the name of a a river that goes into the bering. and in russia and that area around it. it's way up in the northeast. now course you give you operation a name that has nothing to do with the actual substance of that operation. and that was very deliberate. it was to put off anybody. so they would think that this operation maybe had something to do with, you know, up in the northeast. and in fact you go further with the soldiers who were told they were part of this operation and were even actually equipped with a cold weather gear, skis, boots, fleece lined jackets. again, to emphasize this idea that they were there, that the operation was going to go on in a cold place place. i wonder what they did with those in tropical cuba if got that far. so that was sort of just one very basic element deception. so that people either who was part of the plan and certainly any spies or anybody trying to out information would be would be off on the wrong track just to begin with. now, the whole operation was very, very close, held compartmented, very, very few people knew about it at the very top. and of communications of any kind were extremely and so much so that they actually everything all communications to do with this operation happened in person. that to be no risk any interception signals signals intelligence from phone calls teletypes and on. and the easiest way to do that is for things to be written on paper and hand written. in fact, the plan that was presented to khrushchev in the summer of 1962 was hand written. they did not want to rely on secretaries for typewriting. they really relied on a colonel who was known to have very, very good penmanship and and, and he handwrote all the plans to do with the operation. now, actually getting all these people equipment across the atlantic, that had to be done in secret as well. and it involved secretly moving everything and everybody on trains in the middle of the night to different ports in russia and also loading them on to cargo ships, again, secretly in the dead of night. and in fact, a lot of camouflage was involved as so that nobody would know what on these ships in case of surveillance, imagery, intelligence. so they actually went so far, everything that was on top of on the top of the ship had some kind of an explanation. the cover story, of course, was that they were shipping equipment out to cuba for reasons that the soviet union and cuba have agreements that were to help cuba economically, that were shipping agricultural machinery, fertilizer. and so on and all equipment that would be visible fit in with that cover story. but below decks was everything else. now, some things had to go on top and. in that case, they might be. and they would build structures. so that they couldn't be seen. they put metal plates on top of some structures that wouldn't be able to be by infrared ed as well. so you couldn't tell what was underneath there. so there's a whole lot of camouflage that was going on as well. now, one of my favorite parts of the deception is that the captains of these ships were not told where they were going. they were given a big envelope. and inside the and told that there were coordinates in the atlantic ocean where they should go. at that point, they could open the envelope. there was a smaller envelope inside that told them where they could go. when i told this to my husband, he said, it's just like red october, the hunt for red october, which i hadn't noticed before. but, you know, fact is, stranger than fiction and and then of course on board each of these ships there were there would be files with information about many, many different. and when the captain finally found out where they were going. aha the cuba file we can pull that one. but there was no, no hint before that as to which location they were going to. so lots of secrecy and camouflage going on. of course, the soldiers didn't know they had to stay below decks. they were allowed to come up again at night only for a small amount of. it was an absolutely horrible voyage for these people. it was summertime. it was incredibly hot. they were below decks. i believe the temperatures were something like over 100 degrees. i'd like to think that they were wearing their fleece lined parkas, but i'm guessing that they were dumped back in the soviet union. but when they arrived, of course, lots of other deception. other similar measures were taken in order to conceal what was arriving what was being loaded, the ports and so on. so all these measures were being taken. i would love talk about some of the disinfo mention, but maybe we can talk about that later or i'll continue. let's say that, alexis, for a little later. thank you. i want to talk about the the problems of secrecy at home. and we are, of course, we're experiencing a the 60th anniversary and if you go 62 years ago, it's. 1960 and in 1960, the united had a census. we always do every ten years. and after a census, what happens? we have redistricting and and 1962 was a midterm election. president kennedy had had a hard time getting his legislative agenda passed, even though the democrats were in the majority in both houses. he didn't have a working majority. conservatives had a working majority where southern conservatives, many of whom were segregationists and conservative republicans, were a majority. and it made it very hard for president kennedy. 1962 was a key year for him. he needed more of his kind of democrat to be elected. the republicans were looking for an issue, and cuba was a very good issue for the republicans. there were there were rumors that the soviets were going to put nuclear missiles in cuba. it was very hard to keep secret the fact that the soviets had mounted that summer the largest flotilla of military assistance to cuba in the history of their relationship with cuba. the soviets knew that couldn't be hidden. the fact that there were all these merchants ships out there, but what they were carrying was going to be a secret. at the end of august. 1962, an american u-2 spy plane photograph surface to air missiles. surface to air missiles are conventional, just their name. you get a sense of what they're supposed to do. they're supposed to hit something in the air. they're used against aircraft. the soviets, after the u.s. developed u-2, were able to develop to air missiles that could hit the u-2 spy plane. u-2 spy plane flew at 70,000 feet. a missile is a missile is a missile sort of. at the same time that the u.s. the president learned that these missiles were in cuba. i'm talking about conventional defensive surface to air missiles. there was talk in congress particular by a new york senator, kenneth keating, that the soviets were putting nuclear missiles in cuba, thus making cuba an more important issue in the midterm election. the president was convinced that nikita khrushchev would not be so stupid as to threaten the united states from the caribbean. he was worried, however, that these reports which were coming in from cuba, low level reports, were being used politically by his adversaries in congress to undermine his party's ability to do well in the midterm election of 1962. and so he ordered a clampdown on the district fusion of material about missiles in cuba by the intelligence community unless. it could be corroborated. president kennedy did not know the unintended consequences of this decision. the intelligence was getting human intelligence that spies reporting from cuba in september. the appearance of long missiles, not these surface to air missiles, were shorter but longer. they were reporting that sections of the country were being sealed off and europeans likely soviets, people not speaking spanish, were controlling these areas. the president clamp put a clamp down on this information. he didn't realize that the intelligence community would in interpret this as a way of not publishing it for him. so the president the unintended consequence of john kennedy saying i don't want intelligence flowing around the intelligence community missiles in cuba meant that he didn't get it. john kennedy not receive the raw material about missiles in cuba in his what was called then the presidential checklist. it's now called the president's daily brief. the cia figured this out later. and their histories that have been declassified quite recently, actually, that show the cia realized they had actually denied president the kind of material he needed. now, why does this matter? it matters because something else had happened in the world. and one of the joys of studying international politics is that nothing that it's it's a multi platform or multi scene story. while all this is going on in cuba, a u.s. u-2, u.s. spy plane has crossed soviet airspace. mistake. the soviets don't shut it down. they don't shoot it down. but they complain about it. meanwhile, from taiwan, a u.s. u-2 piloted by taiwanese pilots gets shot down over china. the state department is worried about u-2 is over cuba. president is worried he doesn't want a a international crisis over cuba in the middle of a midterm election. and so he says the intelligence, no more overflights, cuba. now that decision would have been very difficult and very different for him if he had known that there were intelligence was intelligence coming from cuba, that there might be missiles. but he wasn't getting that intelligence. he thought that what he was doing was preventing a crisis. cuba, which was so politically sensitive to americans because he didn't expect one, he expected a crisis in germany. so the unintended consequence of president kennedy's approach to secrecy in a midterm election was that the bureaucracy had to fight for a u-2 flight. and what you see is incredible effort by people in the pentagon and people in the cia, lower levels who didn't have access to the to the raw material, saying, we've got to fly over cuba, got to change the president's mind. and they put together this packet of information and they go to called the special group, which was the group that would that propose and approve on behalf of the president covert operations and. u-2s were considered covert operations. they put this together and they made the pitch and they made the pitch to robert kennedy, who was the president. i they were all the president's advisers and representatives. it was robert kennedy who mattered the most. and they made the pitch. he got to take the trip. you've got to convince your brother, the president ought to take a risk, a flying a plane over cuba, even though with the surface to air missiles, that plane might be shot down. it's the most incredible story of of a bullseye because it turns out that the area and if you look at the map of where flew the area that they were to take a chance at had overflying. was exactly one of the areas where the soviets put missiles. so so this story which begins about, if you will, a misuse of intelligence, this turns into one of the classic cases of the correct use of intelligence. so you see secrecy in the case of the cuban missile crisis, which mr. sorensen recalled, i think rightly was helpful to decision making in the early part of story, actually delayed the time at which john kennedy was faced with this great challenge. he might have learned earlier about the missiles in cuba had the system better, and had he not made the decision and the call made about how raw material regarding missiles in cuba would be used in the intelligence community in early in, late in late august and early to late september 1962. i wanted to tell story, throw it in as contemplate the use of intelligence these days and how the biden administration and others have used it. so, shane, please. that's such a great setup, tim, to compare the extraordinary restrictions on intelligence that exist within the kennedy administration to the point the president himself is not even seeing kind of the tactical information that he needs to the example of ukraine in the run up to the russian invasion of ukraine, where in so many respects big and small, the situation is opposite, is the inverse of that. i've i've been a journalist covering intelligence community now 21 years. i have never seen what you might call a practice of radical transparency and disclosure, which what we saw with u.s. intelligence, we saw in the run up to the invasion february. and i play a role in that both as a journalist and as somebody who was the recipient of, some of these selective disclosures, as they're sometimes deemed or what the administration likes to call downgraded, which sounds very demeaning, but it just means that they take something that very select, very secretive, and they downgraded its classification level so they can give it to people like me who do not have security clearances. but i'll tell a story about this kind of how this all gets rolling and you'll see along the way all the ways that this is so different from the pictures that are the story that tim was telling. i guess it's a mideast of this last last december, i was working at home because we saw we're not back in the office yet. i got a phone call from a senior administration official i knew well and interacted with on a regular basis who said we have some information that we want to share with you, which your ears always perk up as a journalist like that's great. please share as much as you like. well, what's it about and say, well, we have some intelligence that we're prepared to declassify, lie about russian troop build up along the border of ukraine. and you would think my first reaction would be exciting. my first reaction was actually dread. my stomach kind of dropped a little bit because i thought, wait a second, why does the white house, the administration, want to give classified intelligence to a reporter about troop build ups in ukraine? and of course, my mind is immediately flashing back to the experiences my colleagues had in 2002 in 2003, with weapons of mass destruction in iraq, when an administration comes giving you handouts of classified information, be very skeptical and be slightly worried. and that experience, you know, ruined some people's careers, has been a permanent blemish on many of them. and so i said, well, what is that? what is the exactly what is it that you want to show us? and the answer was, we want to show you satellite photographs. and we also have we have some satellite photographs that show buildups of troops, their positions. we can put them on a map. we can give you estimates on how many troops we think are coming. the number turn out to be 175,000. if you add it up, all the reserves that were going to poland. and we will layer on to that commentary. us officials who've been analyzing this and you know, implicitly they've been the beneficiaries of more than just pictures or obviously layering and other intelligence which. they're not disclosing. so they give us this basically this sheet which we actually then you can look on the website when we wrote the story, you can see the actual document that they gave us, which is just that it's just satellite imagery. it's not unlike in some respects what we're used to seeing in the stories about the cuban missile crisis of these, you know, these satellite images only they're a little more clear than they were back then. they're not so fuzzy. notably, by the way, they're also commercial images. they are not taken from a us spy satellite. they are commercial imagery that the administration drops into this and of course they have their own probably much better images, but they they put this out there for public consumption along with their analysis. this what was so interesting to me about this aside from and i will get in a second is the extraordinary fact that this was even happening was in the first instance my my dread immediately was sort of eased because you could go look at these pictures on the internet, you could see them for yourself. in fact, we been writing about the russian troop buildup along the border of ukraine using commercial imagery. my colleague paul soni had done a piece about this six weeks ago that said it looks like the russians are massing troops who is furious about that story, by the way? vigilance, key government was very upset that we published that story, basically saying you're scaring people. this is not really this is not really what's happening. what we could see with our own now, we had the coming from the government and importantly what we understood to be us intelligence analysis saying here's what we think is going to happen in the coming weeks. this is some of our forecast. that in and of itself too is extraordinary to get that level of detail absent a kind of a briefing where maybe they bring a bunch of reporters at once and they brief you on something and they maybe give you information. you go out and corroborate this. we can corroborate it. but they were also giving it to us exclusively. and when you give information to a public action exclusively, you do that because you know that it's going to have a bigger splash, it's going to get more attention. we're going to treat it as a scoop, which it was for us, and it became very clear that what the administration wanted to do was immediately the public's attention with this intelligence. they wanted to start telling a story about russia what russia was doing, and they were going to do it using declassify that information, and they were going to do it in the press and in the public. very, very unusual. we come to understand much later what this sort of mechanics are behind the scenes, which i'll get to, but just to kind of you, that sense of where we are in the moment, you have this story that comes out in we later understand that the president had received a briefing some days earlier from his top officials basically laying out much of what would eventually be out. you start seeing these stories coming in the press. there's a drumbeat of them right there. there is some weeks after we publish story, the new york times gets hold of some information which we found out through our own channels, too, by the way. so we raise them to the finish line on that, that russia was to launch a false flag operation to go back to this idea of denial and deception. what were they going to do? they were going to stage an attack, according to us intelligence and, make it look like it was the result of a ukrainian attack to include footage of burned out vehicles. were supposedly going to be corpses playing the roles of victims that were going to be paid mourners and this seemed like right out of a russian playbook of but again this is information that gets pushed out through the press. there is credibility behind it. and to be clear, when we get this information, we then going and reporting and corroborating it as best we can. we're not just saying, well, thank you very much. now let's feed it right into the word processor. we go out and report it and they know we're going to do that. that's another reason why it's important that the administration gives it to journalists. the journalists will go out and stress test it as best as best that we can. there's another story that comes out about how and this one isn't even actually via the press but rather by a press statement coming from the british government which comes late on a saturday evening, washington time just in time for the sunday papers in london, which is a big deal. that's a big splash, saying we have come into information that the kremlin is plotting to install pro-kremlin lawmakers from ukraine into the government in, kiev, in other words, they're plotting a coup. and these are the people who are going to run the puppet government. extraordinary about that, that it's coming from the british government, which does not engage traditionally in these kinds selective disclosures right there until their foreign intelligence service is so secretive that the only available member of service is the chief of the service. one person. the statement also a corroborating, amplifying comments from the then foreign minister, a woman named liz truss, who is somewhat in the news today. as a funny aside, actually asked a source of mine in the british government. i said, why is liz truss doing? why is she putting her name on a statement with all this declassified information? and she said, well, you know, the information is true. and also liz truss wants to be prime minister. so you had this kind of extraordinary just rush of information that's coming out all building towards this this of russia is about to launch unwarranted war of aggression on its neighbor. what does this effectively effect of doing once it starts to galvanize public opinion in the united states and in the united states government against russia and in favor of it starts to galvanize in the private sector the kind of the boycotts in russia that occurred after the invasion did come as a surprise to some people in the intelligence. they were kind of in a way i think, patting themselves on the back thinking, wow, we built a bigger public base than we thought we might have. it got people prepared for what seemed was in an inevitability. and you'll remember there was still lot of debate running to the war of whether this was actually going happen and where was a lot of that skepticism mostly coming from. it was coming from kiev, right? there was a lot of skepticism within the zelensky government. but the brits and the americans were persuaded of the intelligence and of the information, not because i think that had some super secret insight into the mind of vladimir putin. in fact, they always repeat it whenever they would talk about this information. we do not know the decision he is made. we are not reading his mind. what they did was they basically the intelligence. they read the data. they said, why are you putting 175,000 troops here if your intention is not invade? we subsequently learned that on top of the satellite imagery, they had a profound penetration of the russian intelligence and military apparatus to the point where they were basically intercepting the war, planning the level of discipline and control over information by the soviet government and the cuban context apparently does not exist. and the russian contacts where they're just talking on cell phones about some of this stuff, including on the battlefield where in the initial phases of the war, troops were tweeting selfies themselves with rockets going off, which had geologic ocean tagging data on it. i mean, it's astonishing. but, you know, it was just such a kind of a baffling sequence of events that by the time the war starts in february three, two, those of us who are covering it was not a surprise. i mean, i was having arguments still, even with my editor saying, no, they're not going to do it. i'm like, well, i'm telling you, the people i talked to say they have 70% confidence and it's only going up that he's going to do this mean 70% in intelligence parlance is basically saying, like, i'm not going to tell you it's to happen because i can't say that. but it's going to happen. and the fact that we were to this information in real time and that it was being used to make a public case, i've never seen anything like it. there's a lot of talk of whether this will become a model for future conflicts. might i could see lots of reasons why an administration might never want to operate this, but it is in so many respects the inverse of what happened with cuba. it's absolutely fascinating. that does not get us to the profound misjudgments and bad calls on the strength of the russian military by the us intelligence community, which we we talk about another time or later, like the cuban missile crisis. it's a, you know, it's a mixed bag. it's just one before before tom starts. i wanted to to to put on the table for discussion later the role that our intelligence that intelligence played, not just in preparing the public, but in preparing our allies. because in cuban missile crisis, the u.s. was not keeping the british and the germans and the french a apprized of changes in american assumptions. and once the president made his decision what he was going to do in response. he had the cia go and meet privately with the foreign leaders, with at an hour and de gaulle and mcmillan. and they were each brought a photograph. they brought actually a few u-2 photographs to make the case to them, this is why we're doing it. de gaulle famously said to the cia man came to see him, we've actually was a historian of france and was about to say, i would like to press the united states, would like me to show you these photographs took all said i do not need to see them. i trust the president of the united states. it's actually not true. but in that moment and that moment he wanted he made this grand gesture. you do not have to show me. by the way, he looked at them later. the point is that the u.s. understood that it had to repair its allies. the question i want to get to is how the u.s., while it's doing this this work via all of you, was also talking to its allies because it's allies were responding the same way ukraine was responding, which is, oh, come on, we remember iraq. tom. actually, shane, tim set me up to talk about something that i think important. and it's also counterintuitive for most americans, and that is the importance of secrecy in foreign policy. we, especially in a transparent information age, i think we have come to expect we i would even say a sense of entitlement that we expect to be told every single day exactly what's going on. we understand the president's daily brief is classified, but we'd like a peek, please. you know, when the president's done reading it posted on the white house website and i'm going to i'm going to argue that, first of all, there was a third audience here in the stories, tim and shane and, i've been telling about the bidens release that audience. the kremlin. it was a way of saying, we see you. we know, this is going to happen. we are we are preemptively burying any ridiculous that you are going to put forward. we are not only that, but that now that you know that we know that you know that we know you have to expect that there are other things in the works because you know how we are and you know, that was a warning releasing all of that stuff. was a warning to the kremlin that that that we knew what was going on. and i think this is where it's really important to understand that secrecy at foreign policy by its nature requires secrecy and a small circle of decision making you simply. and i think you see in the cuban crisis and i'm you guys have had some great stories i'm going to tell one from a different year, which is from 1983, which i is actually the better analogy to where we are now than than the cuban missile crisis. in some ways. but the cuban crisis really showed that at a moment of ultimate danger, being able to control the narrative, being able to filter out a lot of the noise, getting a lot of the the supporting structures kind of out of the way, even though at one point it's ten points out that they said, oh, you don't want us to tell us anything and tell anything anymore. but that, you know, this new kind of that we've had, i would say not maybe not since the end of the cold war, but over last ten or 15 years that crises and military operations should be crowd sourced for solutions. i think has been growing. and i think it's crazy now in part and sure, we'll talk about this in part. it's because earlier administrations 20 years ago said just trust us, know what we're doing. and we ended up invading two countries, one of them that i think afghanistan was the right thing to do. and then we sort of said, well, okay, you know, we're just not going to talk about it anymore, which i think falls on us as voters. but i'll get to that later. but the story i want to tell you is that i think the more transparent world is in some ways more dangerous. 1962 had a forcing function. there was a clock running that when they saw the sam sites, the surface, their missiles, they said those are going to go hot. and whatever they're protecting, we won't able to get to. so the clock that was running was not when did the missiles you know get fueled the clock that was running is when's the last day we can get there to take out the thing those things are going to protect today we would call that preventive war. and make no mistake john f kennedy was if not not in of it. but he was actively a preventive. i teach a class on this and i use a quote without telling the students who it is, where i said this is a president saying, you know, the moment of ultimate peril is no longer in the actual firing of weapons. it's that their existence and of course, everybody starts yelling george bush and cheney and rumsfeld. it's like, no, it's john f kennedy. i mean, we live in that kind of world now. in 19, i would argue that 1983 is what this feels like to me, that 2022 feels like 1983. not that there's a forcing function and a clock running and the sands are running out, but this kind of growing tension that feels like an inevitability of conflict somewhere along the line over something we're not sure of yet. if you back to 1983 and just look at that one year, early 1983, ronald reagan announces the strategic defense initiative, which drives the kremlin nuts. the kremlin already decided at the end of jimmy. this is going to for those of you that think there's a big difference between jimmy carter and ronald reagan in this period in history, the kremlin had already decided at the end of carter's administration that the americans had lost their mind and were spoiling for nuclear war. the former soviet ambassador in his memoirs said, we were actually kind of rooting for reagan to win and i'm quoting here, because we could not imagine anything worse than jimmy carter, which you that, you know, even professionals get things wrong but but they certainly as reagan comes into office and he's not nixon he's not let's make a deal. you know i know i said a lot of things out there, but now we're going to, you know, trade you know, trade chips there like this is to happen. this is just getting worse and worse. reagan announces sdi that summer, the soviet and let's not open the question of accidentally on purpose. for whatever reason, the soviets blow a 747 out of the sky, a civilian airliner. the selective release intelligence happens that gene kirkpatrick goes to the united nations and says, hey, here's all the classified intercepts. here's the pilot saying the target is destroyed. i mean, that that's selective and strategic use intelligence. it says, look, we know what you did and we're going to show the world what you did and declassify documents later. this is the moment where you're andropov, the leader of the soviet and other soviet leaders decide there probably isn't any chance, eventual long term peace with the west because the outpouring of rage i this was my i want just as a personal note that was my first day of school at the averil harriman institute for the advanced study of the soviet union. and i thought, well, this is going to be a pretty short degree program and. so this pouring, this outpouring of just white hot, raging, the soviets really takes the kremlin because like what? it's an airliner, 269 people we killed that many people, you know, at lunch and they just didn't get it. and i think in that there's a link to gorbachev, one putin here who just doesn't get what's happening. the world. and then there's something that happens where secrecy is very important. and i'll be quick and then wrap this up. the united states and, nato's decide this is a great time to have a big exercise to test communications for the emergency for the release of nuclear weapons. because you why not? but you also have to do those things right. you have to test channels. you have to make sure they work it's part of effective deterrence and they're sending they're basically playing a war game that is meant to go nuclear. the exercise is called able archer, and they're sending everything coded. but with code that we know the soviets can see saying exercise, exercise, exercise. that there is still disagreement among all soviet colleges like me and others, how seriously, the soviets reacted, but they had been so primed to believe that the united states was going to launch a new oh, the thing i left out. we overthrew a marxist regime in grenada. the kremlin now declassified kremlin reactions general staff was saying this is the first domino they're going to start and they're going to nicaragua. they're going to cuba, they're coming to eastern europe. and so the soviets start putting retaliatory forces in the theater on alert for a regional nuclear conflict. the british see this and say this isn't good, and the cia says, oh, you know, we don't. that means very much. six months later, cia director casey goes to ronald reagan. he says this was bad. the intelligence community to this day says we're not sure. casey said this was bad. they were gates, his memoirs, bob gates in his memoirs. we couldn't believe we were looking at that they were going to take this seriously now, replay cuba, replay, replay cuba, 62 and replay able archer, 83 with twitter and facebook and open source satellite is saying why isn't the white we see something going on what are these things in cuba? why isn't jack out front? why did ronald wires? why are these channels, you know, buzzing and humming, which would have taken what is already a short time to react down to just no time to react. and i think there are times and that's why i was really glad that at the very beginning in the first session, you had that that note from was it mcnamara who said wisely choosing not release this instantly because these decision makers need time to catch their breath and so you know, what i'm hoping is that that somehow this confer act ends without, you know, further horror. but those they're there. i think we're running a very high risk of a crisis around some kind of black swan event that then is going to get overtaken by kind of a global peanut gallery, you know, banging, you know, hammers and torches and i think that could be extraordinarily dangerous. so, tom is not close to being old enough to, have met john f kennedy, but we have f kennedy in this next clip talking about unintended the unintended consequences of of of us decision making and. the clip starts with him talking about the soviet reaction to the quarantine or blockade. the soviets reacted in a way the americans hadn't expected and so president kennedy, at least when talking to the in the cbs tv interview that he did in december 1962, was well aware that that leaders have to antis repeat the unanticipated. can we listen the second clip, please. in addition that had much more power than we first started there because. i think the soviet union was very reluctant to have a stopped ships which carried with them a good of their highly secret and sensitive material. another one of the reasons i think that the soviet union withdrew the io 28 was because we were carrying very intensive, low level photography. now, no one would have guessed, probably, that that would have been such a harassment. mr. castro could not permit us to indefinitely continue widespread flights over his island 200 feet every day. and yet he knew if he shot down one of our planes that then it would bring a much more serious reprisal on him. so it's very difficult to always make judgments here about what the effect will be of our decisions on other countries in this case, it seemed to me that we did pick the right one in cuba of 1961. we picked the wrong, i think i'd like to open this to general questions and general discussion. alexis, one of the things tom was talking about was sort of certainty and shane, to but certainty of information, why was john kennedy certain, when he looked at the pictures at the cia gave him in 1962 that he was actually seeing what the cia told him he should be saying. right well, that goes back to intelligence collection. and one thing i just want to put in there before we get to that is that i think it's important mention that intelligence analysis actually had been quite consistently giving a message that there was that it was very, very unlikely that the soviets would be sending strategic missiles to cuba. i mean, that was the analysis that he was getting. and this isn't low level. this is at the highest level these are the national intelligence. and it's been pretty very consistent. throughout 1962, even after this giant build up that's in that that is just coming in that all these intelligence that he's apparently not getting right is is reporting and and the message. there is. yes we can see that there are fluted like scale across the atlantic bringing, bringing lots of equipment. yes, we know there are reports that there are russians there, but the russians the soviets, they just wouldn't do that. right? they wouldn't do because the risks would. so the benefits of, having strategic weapons in cuba that they just wouldn't do that. we wouldn't do that. they wouldn't do that. and that is the analysis that's coming in. so i think that i think that's an important part to come in. there were a lots of reviews after the mission missile crisis. why do we get it so wrong there? and that's a whole other story. but, you know, there is support there for that point of view that coming from the highest levels of intelligence analysis, which i'm sure kendis is is reading again, and you know that the the the principal oversaw the analytical the great sherman the great sherman. he writes it's declassified now. he writes an article about the famous cuba assessment and his conclusion is we didn't get it wrong. khrushchev got it wrong. it was stupid of him to put missiles in cuba. and we were right. that was the community's answer to, the mistake. it made it so that he had some certainty there. but i guess it's another thing when a photograph is put front of you as it was was brought kennedy in his in his bedroom, i believe, which shows, you know, overhead intelligence. and it showed it it it so the imagery was taken october 14th and i believe delivered to kennedy the 16th. what happens in between? right. is that right on the 15th. well what what what what happens is it takes a while for mpic, which is the group that analyzes these pictures to determined. and then decided to let the president sleep the night of october 15. but but it takes some time to figure out what they're actually looking at and an additional source helps them figure out. and that's what i wanted to say. so and this is because is human intelligence that is incredibly helpful to them. and this is a gentleman named, oleg pincus ski. he was a colonel in military intelligence that grew who had volunteered his services. in fact, he tried several times in 1960 to volunteer his services to the british and to the americans. the americans were a bit uncertain here. this was in moscow. they eventually take him on and find out that is an incredible source of intelligence on soviet military war plans, equipment, missiles and all that. he over the course of a year or so is photograph thing documents and they also are able to do oral debriefings they are to bring him to london and to paris. he's quite a senior chinese part of some trade delegations and they are able to take him off and spend debriefing him. so they've got lot of information here. they didn't how useful it would be at the time actually, and it's only in the context of the cuban missile crisis that they recognize that these military manuals and instructions and war plans help them to identify fly. what these installations are what weapons are being installed. and they are able to tell kennedy absolute certainty based on this intelligence from pen carves what they are looking at and what kind of missiles these are. and so that's a really extraordinary of the story. it's worth saying what happens to pen koski because it's a sad and tragic. it's actually right in the midst of the cuban missile crisis. i think is arrested on october 22nd, right in the midst of the of the of the crisis. there's some uncertainty, still a little bit about who betrayed him, but he is arrested and and eventually executed actually as a traitor but he is one of the great heroes of this story. let's pick up on tom's comment about transparency transparency. are there instances we can imagine transparency could the situation in the current context in the in the international situations, in the international system that we just have at the moment, i wonder if. we talk a lot now. we all are and we're all thinking about it, about whether not putin would use a tactical nuclear weapon. and it's important to to cabinet is a discussion about a low yield nuclear weapon in the theater of ukraine. we're not talking, i think, here about putin launching at the united states and the kind of armageddon scenario, which is why i thought it was very strange that. president biden chose to use that word in some ways, but that's another discussion. but of course, it could escalate to that very quickly. i don't mean to be dismissive of that possible. i think that was maybe what he was going. but and, you know, i am of the opinion and don't know this for a fact because i haven't queried intelligence officials on this. and by the way, read on this still is we still don't believe that vladimir putin would resort to the use of those weapons in less than there were some he was facing existential threat to his position which potentially could be you know within the they would give us community thinks that possibly losing in ukraine he might actually regard but then query you know what does losing mean but point being still think it's fairly remote but that they have a fairly good sense that they would see the kind of precursor movements happening, the movement of possession of material and personnel towards lighting all of these things off. all that's to say that i think if they had that intelligence, they would start publicizing it with the hope that what they would do is somehow deter him from taking those steps and that would be different than why they released the intelligence before invaded ukraine, sending it sometimes gets that gets lost they were not the united states and to some degree the i don't think we're releasing that information to deter putin from invading their confidence levels that he was going to invade, kept going up all the while that these disclosures were made, it was as as tom was was describing it earlier to deprive putin of any justification, any false justification for launching this war in the first place. it was to to borrow, from our current parlance to control the narrative. that's really why administration did it. i do think can imagine to your question, that if they thought he was moving to launch a tactical nuclear weapon, that there would be some thinking of maybe we could prevent him from doing that, either through international or maybe some people with cooler heads in his own administration say this is the moment, you know, take putin out. i could imagine that. but it would have would be the most fraught set of deliberations and discussions, i mean, it would be extraordinary. here's how transparency could work, both for and again, i think on a daily basis, the interconnected world actually makes the world a little more peaceful in that sense, that we can always kind of look down from, you know, space and say everybody behaving themselves, you know? i mean, remember that at the time of the cuban missile crisis, we practically we knew more about the dark side of the moon than we knew about certain areas of the soviet. they just didn't exist in terms of ability to perceive it. i want to talk about shane's example, but i also want to take you back to 1973 and the yom kipper alert. the soviet union says to us. long, long story. the israelis are about to strike. the egyptian third army. the soviets say to the americans, don't let them do that. they send classified. they sent a private to us saying, let's intervene jointly in the middle, to which the americans say, no, we won't be doing that with you. and then the soviets sent us a message back saying, fine, we'll do it without you and the americans rather again. you know, there were now there still arguments in the declassified stuff about whether they were bluffing or not? there is some evidence there were warming of transports and hungary that they actually were going to move toward doing this. what the the white house did was to raise our defense condition, our nuclear alertness, start moving some. and we did it in the open to say we're not going to answer you, but we're, you know, putting on our holster and we're kind of checking our and the soviets without having to back down basically said so anyway what else are we talking about today? and the whole thing kind of goes away. the americans wind down their alert some weeks later. now, again, replay that in a completely transparent world where there's somebody saying you're saying, well, sure. looks to me and, you know, here and you know that now we've got to and suddenly the americans the soviets same thing with with the tactical thing we know where they are we know what it's going to like if they start moving that stuff. what you don't want to have happen is to have somebody else saying that and getting it wrong for one thing, which i think, you know, it's like by the way, i think a lot of the open intelligence guys do great work. they they they're they're a lot of them are very professional. but there's a lot amateurs out there who well, i i'm watching and i can tell you and they can't. and then this is the controlling the narrative part. you don't want this to get so spun and out of control that both the white house and the kremlin now are saying, well, what is real? what really happening, and how do we have to respond? and i think sometimes being able to do this in kind of that i think the superpowers during the cold war had this kind of secret language of twins. the way that twins understand each, you know, that they could communicate to each other without rushing this into a giant public public confrontation. i'm glad you mentioned 1973, not just because i like talking about the nixon administration every so, but that is a perfect example of where our national security institute often remembers, because when the united states altered its defcon level in the cuban missile crisis, as we learned later that the soviets reacted. now we would take decades to learn this. but when we looked at the soviet the minutes of the soviet presidium, the politburo, a khrushchev begins to say to his colleagues, we've got to we've got to end this crisis after the us moves, it's defcon level, which the americans did in a way that they knew the soviets could could detect, which is of course raising raises. the question of signaling, you know, signaling is a way of having transparency. interesting. in a relationship, but not necessarily having transparency everywhere. you signal the soviets, you don't necessarily signal absolutely to everyone. so it's something something to be kept in mind. i have a question. yes, go ahead. and it's just something i've been about. why did president biden make that comment about the cuban missile crisis. oh, i and i'd be very curious. you know, i. i haven't he is a president who remembers the cuban price of cuban missile crisis. he was 20, 19, 20 years old. so it something very much to him. and i know he says things sometimes without necessarily thinking about it very much. but let's just say that was a very deliberate message. and i'd be curious, what does the cuban missile what does that what does making that reference, what might that mean to to the russians? i well, i was i was disappointed that the president used the format he used because when you are signaling in crisis, you want your signals to. be clear. and what we got were people's recollections of what he said at a new york fundraising event. now, i don't know how many of you have ever been to a new york fundraising event, but i suspect there was some alcohol there. i mean, i'm not i'm not if i wanted to send a signal to the to the russians, i would want it to be crystal clear. so and i've read various versions, what was said, it depends on which newspaper and i'm not sure that any president would have. i'm not sure that that's the way the national security council would have wanted to send a signal. now, having said that, what it showed was that he was asking some of the right questions. he was asking, what's putin's off ramp? he wasn't saying, what should we do to get him on and off ramp? because that's a bad question to ask in this case, in my view, eyeball to eyeball is zelinsky and putin, not biden. and putin. secondly, he was talking about the fact that the united states has to take that putin might use tactical nukes. i think the united states should taking seriously that he might what i'm interested in is the probability of him doing that. but all of that was actually sensible. that was not, i would argue, the right way to signal it. and i'm afraid it it fed into a narrative that some sometimes president biden, just like senator biden, says things off the cuff that he shouldn't say. now, i think that the united states has to be very careful about how it draws a red line regarding the use of nuclear weapons. not that anyone should doubt that we don't him to do it, but i think one of the lessons of the cuban missile crisis, if you draw a red line, you have to be ready. if the other side crosses it. and so and i don't and i would love to hear what tom, you and any of you feel about what kind red line we could draw. but my my concern is we we will draw red line. and if he decides, cross it for whatever reason, we might have to do something. we really don't want to do. and it reminds me of a very sad story, and it actually often can't tell this story without feeling very emotional. but in not a lot of people know this. but in 1944, the leaders of the american jewish community went to the joint chiefs of staff and said to the joint chiefs of staff, please, please threaten to use chemical weapons against germany if they continue to kill the -- and and the joy and that was a very powerful meeting. and the joint chiefs of staff met discussed it. you can the records are obviously i can talk about it declassified and the joint chiefs staff said we think the best way to save -- is to end this war fast and we can't anticipate hitler but we know he's committed to killing -- and he might just he might he'll just continue killing --. and then do we have to do we have to use chemical weapons? we don't want to use chemical weapons against germany because they have a lot of chemical weapons and they'll use them against allied soldiers. so we're not going to threaten to do something we don't want to do. and so the jewish leaders were we're going to just end this war as fast as possible. but there was a discussion about how do you deter a criminal, foreign leader from engaging in brutality and in this case, genocide. and so question i think we have to consider is what exactly would we threaten to do if? putin used it. it's okay not to say stuff. yeah, i mean, this is, i think, part of this is part of the problem of transparency that, you know, one of the reasons i used to love watching biden on the shows is because he he has no inner monologue. you know, he thinks he says it, which is bad. and president, i actually wrote a piece about the armageddon comment. i don't think it was as bad as it was reported. but, you know, it stipulated that you don't want the president saying this kind of stuff off the cuff on the other hand, you do want the president looking across the atlantic and saying, i'm thinking about this stuff because i know you are. and let's you know, keep a cool head. but there's another way to approach this, which is to draw red lines and simply to say, you know, we've had a long strategic relationship ship. i don't have to drive right now. this isn't like having to tell assad. assad, okay. you know, because like, you know, you we've never really had a conflict with you. you don't really know where. and then, of course, we ended up backing ourselves into a corner. i think rather you know, when we say to them, look, dealt with us for a long time, you know, there will be serious consequences from already from what you're doing and don't even think about taking those next steps. and no, we're not going to draw a red line we're going to be very quiet about that because that's how you know, when we're really serious. and i'll just add one thing. i was in i traveled to london and to moscow right after 911 in a very roomy airplane. and what really struck people was not that. bush you know, we can talk about the wisdom, the reaction. 911 i'll just say it's a signaling. what really struck people about bush and the white house is they weren't saying and that scared are like in a good way like, you know, my my british colleagues. and even back then we had very friendly relations. a lot of my russian colleagues are like you guys, what are you guys doing? you know, and i said, i was teaching at the wirklich. i don't know. but it's not it's not going to be pretty. and you could almost see that that was there was more gravitas in just saying, okay, we've been attacked. we'll get right back to you and we're not going to shoot our mouths off that. i think a bigger influence than simply than saying, you know lines that it's interesting there has been i mean it's reported there have been at least some quite deliberate efforts. i don't know how explicit they are by the administration convey to putin if do the following these things might happen. one is, you know, before the war begins, bill burns goes to moscow. right. he visits with his counterparts there. he talks to putin, who is in sochi actually because it's during a covid. so he's fled moscow. so he goes to the kremlin to speak on a phone to putin, who's in sochi. it is torture, but it's in that meeting that he basically lays out like. there's going to be a response. now, i don't know how explicit the director got with that, but it's made clear that, you know, we're not just going to sit here and take this, things are going to happen. and we've reported at the post, too, that there's been a similar communication on the question of tactical nuclear weapons. and i almost wonder if they if we have to say anything because not that there's a doctrine for, this that's well understood. if you use a tactical nuclear weapon, here's how we're going to respond. but there's a body of thinking about it. there's a really great piece that eric schlosser in the atlantic and tom's publication recently, where he kind of polled people who had been sort of the sam nunn generation of people thinking through this. and what was fascinating was that there was i won't say it was a consensus, but many people raised the point which putin must understand and certainly i would think is generals do or maybe they don't cause they're not giving advice, but, you know, basically hypothesizing, if you use a tactical nuclear weapon in ukraine, that the response could be overwhelming. conventional force. other words is like you use a tactical nuclear weapon fine, we destroy your entire military in ukraine. we, being the united states, enters. and i don't mean to suggest that to be flippant about that. i mean, we presumably then be at war with russia. and i think he gets that. but i think there's a universe in which putin understands that if he does this thing the response will be overwhelming and potentially given the russian military's performance on the battlefield over very quickly number of things, it's always a more i shouldn't say always. it is often a more effective deterrence. say there is whole range of bad things that happen and that's for you to worry about. we're not going to tell you what they are there there's a whole bunch of things that could happen and we're not picking from one of the if we're criticizing about the armageddon comment, the smartest he made somebody suffuses a tactical you know what are you going to do what's and biden said look that's going to depend on situation which was exactly the right thing for a president to say. i'm not i'm not going to lay out hypotheticals. i'm going to say if if this then that. it's simply to say this happens. bad things can happen. and i don't have to tell you what they are. that, again, the whole point of a deterrence is to leave you about that. and i think people who keep saying, where are the red lines? tell me, does it which thing i just don't i don't think that's wise. i and i think i personally am a great admirer of the way the biden administration has handling this whole situation from the get go. just as one postscript, even, i mean, there was still after the war began over which sanctions impose, it wasn't as i mean, the way we knew there would be sanctions, but the brits and the americans, those were debating which ones even as it was happening. so they don't decide these things in advance. i believe we have some great this is a great conversation. i know we have equally interesting questions. i want to say that one of the great consequence, i believe, of the way the biden administration information and intelligence before was that the europeans were ready to lead in sanctions. it was so for nato's that germany be the one to announce that nord stream two wasn't happening. it was so important that this not be viewed as the united states imposing a worldview on europe that europe except that this was an attack on european sovereignty. and i don't think that would have been possible if the united states and to some extent the brits had not been sharing all this intelligence with these countries in advancing. we this is what's going to happen. many of these countries, we don't agree. it wasn't just ukraine the germans didn't agree, but and but when it happened they were ready so i think that the alliance management is an important of the story. two questions, please. and if you have them, please go up to the microphones. there are two microphones. we'll start with you. we have a question from online. we know jfk spoke with general eisenhower and sought his opinion during crisis. is there any more to eisenhower, his involvement behind the the public is not aware of. oh, may i second part that the public is not. oh, may i take this this is a great story. again, it's not secret. it's just in weeds, but very important. john kennedy, president kennedy did not feel he had a mandate when he was elected. it was a very close election. we can debate forever. you know, whether well, he won. there's no question john kennedy chose republicans for important parts of his administration. his secretary of defense as a republican, his national security advisor was a republican. his. he kept on the same director of central intelligence, allen dulles, a republican. he kept j. edgar hoover neanderthal at the fbi. so and and so this is this is an important, important part of the part of the story. so that that the president understood landing of of of decisions that would get and would sort of be accepted to all americans, certainly his approach. who was the most famous, most popular, most beloved republican in the united states in 1962? it was dwight eisenhower and dwight eisenhower wasn't actually just a beloved republicans, a beloved american. he had enormous prestige. so many americans had fought under him. world war two, all american of a certain age, remember him as of the great victors of that terrible. john kennedy needed dwight eisenhower to be on his side. and john kennedy's to to eisenhower is a is a beautiful story because involves his brother and his brother's relationship with john mccone republican the second director of central intelligence for, the kennedy administration, who was also republican. and it was important the for john kennedy to know that mckone was board with the decision to go with a quarantine and it was important for mckone to be the representative of the administration to, old man eisenhower, so that eisenhower would approve. and so the kennedy brothers president bobby friendship with mckone prepared mckone to go and talk to eisenhower. all the options in the hope that eisenhower would come to conclude they'd chosen the right one. and he does so eisenhower's is very important. and so as maclean's had, eisenhower thought that the decision was wrong, not sure how things would have played out, but it would have been a real complication for kennedy. but then the management of eisenhower was a part of the cuban missile crisis that a great detail the story because it's something we've lost over the years and it showed how these two men really understood their roles. when you listen the tape, it's so wonderful. this guy is old enough, exiled enough to be jfk's dad, basically. and he is, as you say, beloved the war hero, former president, when they're. eisenhower refers to jack, not as jack or, you know, says, well, mr. president, here's what i think. and kennedy says, well, general, what do you think? you know they they go back to the i mean, they are in that moment out of whatever they were at the jack kennedy is the president dwight eisenhower. he gets to keep the title of general because there was a general and i just it just struck me we don't do that as well anymore. i was really moved listening to all men saying, well, mr. president and the man saying, well, general. but the other part of the question, was there anybody that happening out of the public? i know i don't know. i don't know who biden talks to. but i'm sure after, you know, 400 years in the senate that, he has a lot of friends and other people throughout washington that. i say that i actually like that we elected a senate foreign relations chairman, you know, and i answered that made me happy as president. but i'm there are people he talks to. i, i don't i don't know him, but i'm sure he talks to mitch mcconnell about and and and i and i would would be shocked if he hadn't actually talked to george h.w. bush. i mean, certainly he's talking to barack obama. right. but i bet he's talking to george w bush. another question i was going to ask about the jfk secret negotiations after, the cuban missile crisis. so he apparently had a journalist meeting with castro in october of 1963. and actually the journalist daniel was with on november 22nd, 1963. so this was like a back channel, a an attempt at a rapprochement, apparently, that going on that i don't know. i haven't heard a lot it there was a discovery channel doc back 19 back in 23 and i don't know if you anyone would want to talk about those. i'm i'm writing a book about president kennedy and his because i'm very interested in his use of back channels. president the president liked backchannels. he used them with the russians, with the soviets. he he used with segregationist southern governors. he used and he was more than willing to use whatever tools were at his disposal. so as was ratcheting up the operations, the covert operations, cuba in the summer of 63, he supported this effort to see if something could happen with castro. it was completely consistent with john f kennedy who was a problem solver. he wanted to work a problem. so, yes, he did one, but he was also approving cia operations that some pinprick sabotage. and if you're interested in learning more about this, there are our conversations from november 1963 that were taped. i seem to remember john f kennedy talking to mcgeorge bundy about not necessarily about daniel, but but about this outreach cuba to castro but was very consistent of the man he liked to have lots of options. hi. i've got a question about. bobby kennedy. broaching with khrushchev's representative. oh about removing the missiles in turkey in italy which actually he gave khrushchev a way to save face in those crises. and arguably was why the crisis was averted in the first place. and what can we learn from that in the current situation that perhaps the west can with putin so he's it feels like he's saving face what i'm trying to say is even as heinous as someone is sometimes you need to provide a way just to save lives. i'm going to cut that's a great quote. going to cut your important question in half. i'll deal with the first half. okay. and throw the other half to the panel. here. those of us who read who study soviet history are, debating the extent to which the turkish offer really was decisive. okay, khrushchev gave khrushchev had already gathered members of his government to discuss accepting kennedy's offer not to invade cuba before the news came in from soviet dobrynin that he had been meeting with bobby kennedy. we'll never know if if he if khrushchev would have gone ahead with accepting the no invasion plate pledge, which was a way saving face. we'll never for sure. but one thing that we do know is that we shouldn't put too much emphasis on the turkish offer as an explanation for khrushchev's decision to end the crisis. and why do i say that? because khrushchev never, never mentioned that offer. and even as in memoirs, he made a promise to the united states, he'd never go public with it. but there was nothing preventing him from talking about it in his memoirs. so it he was much of the no invasion pledge. plus we might call it my russia colleague and i discovered the soviet leadership had already been that naito was going to deploy polaris submarines in the mediterranean. and submarines are really great way of delivering a nuclear weapon. you don't need these which are static. so the soviets knew that the united states were going to increase the amount of nuclear power in the mediterranean. of course, the symbolic importance of the turkish missiles. but in terms of the balance of power, it make a single bit of difference where it's really important is for understanding the psychology of john f kennedy. if want to see leadership, listen to the tapes of october seventh, 1962. everybody surrounding the president is telling him, don't accept the demand to dismantle the turkish missiles. and the president disagrees with them. he says history, i'm paraphrasing and he was more eloquent history will never forgive me if if people learn that i gave up the opportunity to end this crisis peacefully just because of a serious set of obsolete nuclear missiles in turkey. so i think the turkish missile story tells you a lot about john f kennedy. but actually, not as much as people say about khrushchev. but i want the panel to think about how friends i but i'm going to just say it's not up to us to decide when the ukrainians stop fighting. that's not our decision. and if you think about i didn't mean. no, no, no, i'm not sorry. i don't mean to be vehement, but you know, i mean, every time this conversation comes up, it's almost like when will you westerners pressure, the ukrainians, to surrender their territory to an invading army, you know, and my answer is, well, first of all, why would i do that? and second of all, i can't. i can't. it's they live there. it's their decision to keep fighting. what the answer is, yes, but giving them weapons that allows them to continue the fighting. but the thing about an off is you have to want one. putin keeps burning bridges behind him, not just to put himself in bad situation, but because and i'm going to say this, i don't mean this flippantly because he's a bad story. i don't want be stupid, but he's a bad strategy. a he's just lousy at this. we've internalized this narrative about putin, you know, this icy playing. he's an he's a thug. he doesn't know what he's doing half the time. you know, hey, here's a good idea. let's conscript hundred thousand guys and throw them into that and you could almost a certain amount of time this will humiliate again and going to be an anger everyone in russia that has been staying out. you know you promised that this wasn't going to touch these people in moscow and petersburg and other places. and he is so isolated this was at one point i want to come back to about cuba and we didn't get it wrong. khrushchev got it wrong. the problem is on a personalized system of government, you can be really right about most of the government feels about something. but if that one guy makes a bad, it defeats all of your ability to do forecasting and prediction and all that other stuff. remember that after 1962 we found out the soviet general staff was totally against whole idea. it's the chief of the soviet general staff who coined the phrase, uses the phrase. this was harebrained scheming. so you know, it's like in a way, i guess i want to defend that article and say, yeah, khrushchev didn't get it wrong. and around him in moscow thought so too. but the same problem with putin. so when i hear about off ramps, it's like, you know, what is it? what do you do with a guy who says, no, before we talk, i want to humiliate one more time with a really bad decision that's going to put me in an worse position. i don't i genuinely i'm not a professional diplomat. i don't know. you do. about a situation. it's hard to. have an off ramp when you annexed the territories you don't even control. right. i mean do you that that's not the the basis for an offhand question we have time for two more so one one another online question did president kennedy want the death level raised? i thought he was angry that it was raised without his instruction and to do so. i don't i, i don't i'm sorry. i can't. do you know anything that i, i don't it seems unlikely that it would happened without him making about it. i mean, he is the commander in chief, but i do do think i've read that wasn't happy about it. so that those two things don't make too much sense. i think he was very unhappy. there was a way in which the some of the some the us air force were harassing cubans, which he felt ratcheting up the tensions at a time that was not helpful because. he was engaged in a secret negotiation by that point, a epistolary negotiation with khrushchev when. they saw things as in an analog sense we're doing compare and contrast ukraine after the war began, remember, had that televised meeting where he sitting down with shreck, who is defense minister and i can't remember who else was there as gareth ratzinger, the chief of general staff. and they're both kind of like these looks on their faces, like no, this is not going well. and he and he makes the announcement that we're raising our strategic alert levels of the nuclear forces. i've talked to a number of intelligence officials who said after that happened, saw nothing but one thing that something else that i remember at reading that kennedy was unhappy about was that the united states undertook a nuclear test during cuban missile crisis, which he had not wanted have happen. he was also unhappy because the cia undertook a sabotage operation that was supposed to all sabotage operations was supposed to be suspended during period. but i have to look into that. i the defcon level was something that he he had to approve as commander in chief. your question you may not want to tell opponent what you're going to do next if he does this or that. but how about telling your opponent what you're not going to do in this particular situation? putin has to use what the world interprets as a tactical nuclear weapon. he hasn't those words all about, we tell putin and the world we could we can communicate with putin privately. okay. what's important is you tell the world here so that putin that he's facing this message, that we're not going respond in kind, use it to a nuclear weapon in ukraine, we're not going use a nuclear weapon. we have other alternatives and in other words, you make a pledge not what if you crossed the line? but here's a line we're going to cross. alexis. on. i think. i guess the you know obviously i can think of a lot of people would be very happy about that. but the only important person is putin. and would he respond to that and? would he respond to that? and thinking that was that was a sign of weakness or would that make some impression? how might that mean? i think it's an interesting it's an question, but what what would be the consequence of making a statement like that? so i guess it. said, i wonder if if the and i agree it all depends on what thinks. and i think that there's a certain kind of a moral gesture that might go along with saying we will not go to that level. now, the same time, i wonder if the united would might deliver that and without even saying explicitly, we won't use tactical nuclear weapons, but we will throw everything else in there and destroy your army within a matter of a week. and you will wish we use the tactical nuclear mean it could be some kind of like you know we're not going to do this but i mean, which would not necessarily get to the peaceful approach that maybe you would want to advocate for, but there would to be some kind of messaging with it. it couldn't just be we're taking an option off the table, and you should interpret that as we won't do anything even approximating the level of destruction of a tactical nuclear weapon, which we could cause without tactical nuclear weapons. ukraine the problem in this hypothetical the problem in this hypothetical is timing. there is a time to say stuff like, i a book about nukes where i one of the arguments i made that kind of aggravate did my old colleagues on the right is think the time has come it's okay for the united states to have as part of its doctrine of no first use doctrine right. so the united states will never be the first to use nuclear weapons in any conflict. announcing right now would be bad. and you know, that's this is not the time to say, oh, and by the way in the middle of all this, we've rethought. i mean, this is i think this is a great time for the united to use the russian formulation. but there have been no changes in our strategic doctrine yet, because the timing of when you say something has a lot of impact and this is not you know, if the president tomorrow said, hey, we're going to have a thoroughgoing review of american nuclear posture, which need but not not not not tomorrow announced from the white house podium. so i don't think that's a good idea of the timing. yeah, i think this is a case saying less is than saying more. oh, thank you, tom. i'd like to give john f kennedy the final word when. listen to this segment from december 1962. you might want to replace soviet union with russia. you might not but listen to president explain why at very least the decade of the 1960s is so dangerous. let's to the real problem is this soviet desire expand their power and influence. mr. khrushchev would consider himself with the real interest of the people. the soviet union, that they have a higher standard of living to protect his own security. there's no real reason why the united states and the soviet union are separated by so many thousands of miles of land and water. both rich countries, both with very energetic, should not be able to live in peace. but it's this constant determination which the chinese show in the most militant form, in which the soviets also shown that they will not settle for that kind of a peaceful world, but must settle for a communist world. that's what makes the real danger combination of these two systems in control around the world in a nuclear age is what makes the sixties so dangerous. i want to i want to thank you. thank want to thank my panelists. thank you. and alan, you is extraordinary. thank you for this remarkable and thought provoking. thank you all for us being with us this afternoon. throughout the day again, alan price, director of the john f presidential library and museum and on behalf of all my library and foundation colleagues, we've been delighted to welcome you to this special conference. the cuban cuban crisis lessons for today. commemorating the 60th anniversary of the cuban crisis. today's exceptional conversations will remain on our website, and we hope that you will them and share them with colleagues and friends again. thank you for joining us.

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