Description
The Cuban Missile Crisis was a 13-day (October 16-28,1962) confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, often considered the closest the Cold War came to escalating into a full-scale nuclear war. President Kennedy would have been surprised by the deployment and the Soviets success in presenting us with a fait accompli had it not been for the personal intervention of CIA Director John McCone. Bruce Held discusses how McCone’s “Honeymoon Telegram” turned a potential intelligence failure into one of the greatest intelligence successes of all time.
Bruce Held is a retired CIA covert officer. From 2010-2012, he was Director of Intelligence and Counterintelligence for the Department of Energy and from 2013-2014 he led the US nuclear weapons program as the Acting Administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration. He is the author of A Spy’s Guide to the Kennedy Assassination.