In 1962 President John F. Kennedy’s administration narrowly
averted possible nuclear war with the USSR, when CIA operatives
spotted Soviet surface-to-surface missiles in Cuba, after a six-
week gap in intelligence-gathering flights. In their forthcoming
book Blind over Cuba: The Photo Gap and the Missile Crisis, co-
authors David Barrett and Max Holland make the case that the
affair was a close call stemming directly from a decision made
in a climate of deep distrust between key administration
officials and the intelligence community. Using recently
declassified documents, secondary materials, and interviews with
several key participants, the authors weave a story of intra-
agency conflict, suspicion, and discord that undermined
intelligence-gathering, adversely affected internal postmortems
conducted after the crisis peaked, and resulted in keeping
Congress and the public in the dark about what really happened.
We asked Barrett, a professor of political science at Villanova
University, to discuss the actual ser