In 1951, Ford was employed by the CIA as chief of cybernetics and behavioral sciences research, Through his study of Soviet cybernetics in the 1950s, Ford was invited to the house of Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara on 15 October 1962, to give an informal presentation on "the serious threat to the United States and Western Society posed by increasing Soviet commitment to a fundamentally cybernetic strategy in the construction of communism" to several high-ranking governmental officials, including Robert F. Kennedy. This presentation went positively, until it was interrupted by news of Soviet missiles in Cuba.