LEGACY OF ASHES, TRIAL BY FIRE: 

The Origins of the Defense Intelligence Agency 

and the Cuban Missile Crisis Crucible

Michael B. Petersen

DIA Historical Research Support Branch

Defense Intelligence Historical Perspectives, Number 1

DEFENSE INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
Defense Intelligence Agency

Historical Research Support Branch

Washington, DC

2011

The ideas and opinions expressed in this publication are 

solely the author’s, and do not reflect those of the Defense 

Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense, or the 

United States Government.
Defense Intelligence Historical Perspectives, Number 1

LEGACY OF ASHES, TRIAL BY FIRE: 

The Origins of the Defense Intelligence Agency 

and the Cuban Missile Crisis Crucible

Michael B. Petersen

DIA Historical Research Support Branch
For the Patriots.

Major Robert P. Perry, USA

Celeste M. Brown

Vivienne A. Clark

Dorothy M. Curtiss

Joan K. Pray

Doris J. Watkins

Colonel Charles R. Ray, USA

Chief Warrant Officer Robert W. Prescott, USA

Chief Warrant Officer Kenneth D. Welch, USA

Petty Officer First Class Michael R. Wagner, USN

Captain William E. Nordeen, USN

Judith I. Goldenberg

Staff Sergeant Kenneth R. Hobson II, USA

Master Sergeant William W Bultemeier, USA, Ret.

Shelley A. Marshall

Karl W. Teepe

Patricia E. Mickley

Robert J. Hymel

Rosa M. Chapa

Sandra N. Foster

Charles E. Sabin
i

The history of the Defense Intelligence Agency is one that has not been 

fully told. Scholarly monographs, journalistic publications, and first-person 

reminiscences on intelligence history have tended to focus on either the 

Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, or the Service 

intelligence branches. As a result, Intelligence Community (IC) personnel, even 

those in DIA itself, may only have some knowledge of the Agency’s history and 

its contributions—good and bad—over the last fifty years. Outside the IC, in 

academia and in the general public, knowledge of DIA is only basic at best, and 

the Agency’s story has remained incomplete in popular and scholarly literature.

There are many consequences of this. In the first place, lack of a rigorous 

historical analysis hinders the Agency’s ability to learn from the successes and 

failures of its past. The failure to soberly reflect on the Agency’s history means 

that important lessons may go unexamined and unlearned. If an organization 

is to improve its current practice, it is incumbent upon that organization to pay 

heed to the importance of its past experiences. 

Second, without a better grasp of DIA’s history, the Intelligence Community is 

left with an incomplete understanding of itself. DIA played a significant role in 

U.S. intelligence during the last five decades, but because of the substantial 

dearth of knowledge about the Agency, that role has been either minimized 

or ignored inside and outside of the IC. Intelligence scholars have tended to 

avoid discussions of the Agency’s place. This absence of scholarship on DIA’s 

history opens the field to writers who comprise what historian Christopher 

Andrew has called the “airport bookstall” school, authors for whom a good spy 

story is more important than historical accuracy. As a result, the Intelligence 

Community is left with a skewed understanding of its past and of the historical 

role played by one of its most prominent members. 

Finally, the absence of an awareness of DIA’s history has also stunted the 

development of the Agency’s institutional memory and historical culture. Other 

intelligence agencies, such as CIA and NSA, have rich institutional memories 

that both inform the organizations’ activities and anchor their sense of “place” 

in the Intelligence Community. Without these, an agency’s sense of mission is 

unable to fully develop, and the risk of institutional drift is increased. With this 

knowledge, an agency is better able to define itself and its role. 

Defense Intelligence 

Historical Perspectives
ii 

Defense Intelligence Historical Perspectives is an effort to begin 

addressing these problems. Its goal is to provide an introduction to DIA’s 

participation in many of the salient military and intelligence issues of the 

last fifty years. It focuses on key internal and external events that helped 

shape the Agency into what it is today, and it explores the lessons for 

current and future intelligence professionals that are buried within those 

events. While history does not repeat itself, it does provide context, 

framework, and guideposts. In some ways, the challenges confronting 

today’s Intelligence Community personnel are in not dissimilar to those 

faced by their cohorts from earlier generations. While they obviously differ 

in their specifics, the basic questions surrounding such issues as agency 

organization and management and analytical decision making have not 

changed. Management challenges such as definition of missions and 

roles, and analytic pathologies such as groupthink, mirror-imaging, and 

status-quo thinking were all problems confronted by analysts in the 

Cold War and in the 1990s, much as they are today in the Global War on 

Terrorism. Examining the ways in which personnel from an earlier period 

recognized, addressed, and resolved these sorts of problems (or failed at 

all three) can inform and hopefully improve current intelligence practices. 

In the end, this monograph series attempts to serve a utilitarian function. 

It is designed to inculcate in DIA and the IC workforce writ large a sense 

of DIA’s historical role during the last fifty years and to educate current 

and future analysts about the hard-won lessons learned by those who 

occupied their seats before them. To neglect this story, to ignore the 

lessons of the past, is to invite failure. 
iii

The establishment of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 1961 was the 

result of a confluence of long-term and short-term trends. Seen over the 

long duration, the creation of DIA was a part of the extended process 

of centralization in the Department of Defense that had been taking 

place since the National Security Act created the department in 1947. It 

reflected the expanding influence and growing strength of the Secretary 

of Defense as he attempted over the years to consolidate control over 

his sprawling domain. In the short term, the Agency’s establishment was 

an attempt by John F. Kennedy’s reform-minded Secretary of Defense, 

Robert McNamara, to refashion military intelligence to better serve the 

new strategic doctrine of “flexible response” by eliminating Service 

parochialism in intelligence estimates. Years of backbiting and infighting 

among the Services badly hampered the Secretary of Defense’s ability 

to make informed decisions about U.S. force structure and resulted in a 

wasteful military intelligence establishment that was shot through with 

duplication and redundancy. McNamara set out to change this.

But hostility to McNamara among military officers was deep and bitter. 

His decrees were met with grudging agreement at best; at worst, with 

outright hostility. The extent to which he could achieve his purposes for 

intelligence reform would depend on his subordinates’ willingness to 

challenge Service prerogatives and forcefully assert the new Agency’s 

role while taking over administrative control of many of its personnel and 

resources. But the record would be a mixed one, and a year after DIA’s 

founding, the Cuban Missile Crisis would serve as a trial by fire, revealing 

the potential and the problems, the progress and the difficulties, inherent 

in McNamara’s ambitious intelligence project.

Introduction
Defense Intelligence Historical Perspectives, Number 1
1

Defense Intelligence Historical Perspectives, Number 1

U.S. Military Intelligence in the Wake of World War II

At the end of 1945, Europe lay in ruins. Its colonial empire, but for a few scattered outposts, 

was in tatters. The Soviet Union, despite its military victory, was ravaged by its catastrophic 

war against Nazi Germany. In the Far East, Japan and huge swaths of China and the Pacific 

islands were devastated. The United States was the only major participant in the war to emerge 

relatively unscathed, and it occupied a position of global power unequalled by any other nation. 

As disagreements between East and West hardened and the Cold War began to take shape 

in the immediate post-war years, American military intelligence capabilities declined. At the 

end of World War II, huge portions of the U.S. military demobilized. In August 1945, the United 

States had more than twelve million troops under arms. By mid-June 1947, less than two 

years later, it had fewer than 1.6 million.

A rapid and poorly planned discharge of more than ten million people resulted in serious 

quantitative and qualitative shortages. Military intelligence felt the pinch acutely. Many talented 

individuals returned to civilian life, and some of the most innovative intelligence organizations 

evaporated because of the lack of personnel. As resources vanished, the Services also began 

squabbling over defining their intelligence roles. The more scarce those resources became, 

the more sharply quiet differences devolved into outright internecine arguments, and military 

intelligence in the years after World War II became increasingly balkanized.1

This decline in manpower and resources also had serious practical consequences. When 

the Korean War broke out in 1950, the U.S. Eighth Army, sent to defend South Korea, had 

no photointerpreters. A single reconnaissance squadron in Japan processed all of the 

photointerpretation work for both the Army and the Air Force. It was not until the middle of 1952 that 

the theater command had an all-source targeting and damage assessment capability. The Navy’s 

Seventh Fleet, stationed in Japan, had only one intelligence officer assigned to it in 1950. Fleet 

commanders had to scramble to assemble a qualified group of intelligence officers to support its 

operations in the conflict. In the general area of human intelligence (HUMINT) in Europe and the Far 

East, poor tradecraft of amateur spies employed by occupation forces desperate for intelligence 

on Soviet activities badly compromised many networks. Thus military intelligence activities across 

the tactical, operational, and strategic levels suffered badly in the decade after World War II.2

Despite serious interservice rivalries and a dearth of resources, an effort to establish a more 

unified authority structure in the military establishment blossomed in the postwar years. The 

intelligence disaster at Pearl Harbor and the success of combined arms campaigns in World 

War II taught valuable lessons about the importance of unity of effort in the U.S. military. Within 

the Truman Administration, there was broad agreement that military and intelligence reform was 

necessary, but few could agree on what shape that reform should take. Moreover, influential 

elements within the Services and some members of Congress opposed any radical solution that 

merged the military under one command because they feared overcentralization and diminished 

control of their own branches. A period of intense negotiations between Congress, the White 

House, and the military departments ensued in the years after the war, culminating in the 

National Security Act of 1947.3
2

Defense Intelligence Historical Perspectives, Number 1

Defense and Intelligence Reform

The National Security Act was at its core an effort to find a new way to conduct a more 

coordinated military and national security policy while at the same time allowing the Services 

to retain their traditional independence from each other. It created what it called the National 

Military Establishment (NME), which was neither a department nor agency, but rather a 

nebulous bureaucratic formulation that created a loose confederation out of the Services. 

Perhaps its most important reform was the creation of the Office of the Secretary of Defense 

(OSD) to exercise general control over the now three (Army, Navy, and the new Air Force, also 

established by the Act) military branches, which were given executive departmental status. 

However, it also strengthened the separate prerogatives of the individual Services, a step 

taken to mollify the military and Congressional staffers who argued against centralization. The 

Services retained a significant amount of autonomy and the Secretary of Defense had virtually 

no statutory authority to compel them to fall into line.4

By placing all of the individual Services at the executive departmental level, the National 

Security Act broadened their responsibilities to meet national level requirements. Unfortunately, 

few in the Services could agree on what those requirements were. Intelligence estimates 

were particularly problematic. In 1948, a task force under Ferdinand Eberstadt (which itself 

was supervised by a Presidential commission under former President Herbert Hoover) noted 

“disturbing inadequacies” in the interservice estimating process. According to Eberstadt, the 

three Services offered consistently different estimates on the same topic. “These separate 

estimates,” his task force report noted, “have often been subjective and biased, the capabilities 

of potential enemies have been interpreted as their intentions, and a more comprehensive 

collection system, better coordination, and more mature, experienced evaluation are 

imperative.” In conflating intentions with capabilities, the report complained, the Services also 

tended toward worst-case scenarios. These particular themes would plague the estimating 

process throughout the Cold War.5

The slow process of addressing the flaws in the NME began with the passage of an 

amendment to the National Security Act in 1949. In short, the amendment converted the 

vague concept of the NME into an executive department that would be known as the 

Department of Defense (DoD), and it changed the status of the Services from executive 

departments to military departments within DoD. The amendment more effectively 

subordinated the Services to the Secretary of Defense, and also created the position of 

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Though the Services still retained a great deal of 

bureaucratic independence, it was an important step toward greater centralization and 

coordination within the U.S. military establishment.6

Nevertheless, U.S. military intelligence branches could still operate independently of each 

other because no mechanism existed that could effectively coordinate their efforts or resolve 

Service bias.7 All three Services operated their own collection, production, and distribution 

mechanisms, and, as the Eberstadt Report pointed out, their intelligence branches tended 

to look after the interests of their parent Service. As a result, three competing intelligence 
3

Defense Intelligence Historical Perspectives, Number 1

agendas developed within DoD. These manifested themselves first in the infamous “Bomber 

Gap” controversy, in which the Air Force, despite Army, Navy, and CIA protests to the contrary, 

estimated that Soviet medium and heavy bomber production far outstripped U.S. production; 

the junior Service then successfully lobbied Congress for an expanded U.S. bomber fleet. A 

similar controversy erupted over Soviet ballistic missiles after the publication of the “Gaither 

Report” and the successful Sputnik launch in 1957 convinced many people that the Soviets had 

a substantial development and production lead in intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). The 

Air Force again seized on this to lobby for the expansion of its own ICBM program.8

These problems exposed the wholly uncoordinated state of military intelligence in the Pentagon. 

They gave ammunition to DoD critics who believed that the Secretary of Defense lacked the 

authority to streamline the Services’ redundant, duplicative, and often competing work. In 1958, 

Congress passed an amendment to the National Security Act that came to be known as the 

Reorganization Act. The Act (and its subsequent McCormack-Curtis Amendment, also passed 

in 1958) gave the Secretary of Defense unprecedented authority to overhaul and streamline DoD 

generally, but the Eisenhower Administration still lacked a blueprint for reform.9 

The Roadmap to DIA

Hounded by criticism from some Congressional Democrats 

(including future President John F. Kennedy) and convinced 

that the national military intelligence system was indeed failing, 

President Eisenhower appointed a Joint Study Group (JSG) under 

the leadership of CIA Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick to 

examine the structure of U.S. foreign intelligence activities. The 

JSG was made up of representatives from all of the Services, 

the National Security Council (NSC), the State Department, and 

the President’s Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence 

Activities. The results of their work would lay the foundation for 

the establishment of the Defense Intelligence Agency.10

 The JSG Report, popularly known as the Kirkpatrick Report, 

was completed on December 15, 1960. It focused on the 

organizational and management aspects of the Intelligence 

Community. The report contained forty-three recommendations. 

Insofar as military intelligence was concerned, the general thrust 

of the Kirkpatrick Report’s recommendations was the streamlining 

of intelligence management, collection, and production. The Joint Study Group called for 

better managerial and budgetary control by the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of 

Staff (JCS) as well as a centralization of the intelligence system. Kirkpatrick later recalled that 

“What the Joint Study Group had found in the military intelligence system was a duplicative 

and cumbersome method for issuing requirements for intelligence collection, with the result 

that each of the three services were often sending out identical requests for information to 

both their own collectors and to others.”11 DIA Historical Research Support Branch 

Lyman Kirkpatrick, head of the Joint 

Study Group. 
4

Defense Intelligence Historical Perspectives, Number 1

The report’s findings on military intelligence were highly influential. The Joint Study Group 

noted that the Secretary of Defense needed a stronger mechanism to exert control over military 

intelligence programs and recommended that budgeting matters be more firmly vested in this 

office. It also recommended that more intelligence resources should be placed under the JCS 

in order to help them strengthen their authority over the Services and improve coordination. 

Therefore, while the OSD should, according to the report, exercise overall authority, the JCS 

was responsible for coordinating the actual work of military intelligence. In short, on intelligence 

issues, the authority of the Secretary of Defense should run through the JCS.12

Production of National Intelligence Estimates was another major concern in the Kirkpatrick 

Report. In 1958, the National Security Council created the United States Intelligence Board 

(USIB) to serve as a governing body concerning all major intelligence matters, including the 

formulation of NIEs. Representatives from the State Department, CIA, FBI, Atomic Energy 

Commission, and fully six different elements from the Pentagon, including the JCS, all three 

Services, the National Security Agency, and the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special 

Operations made up its membership. The Kirkpatrick Report argued that there should be only 

a single Defense estimate presented to the USIB, not a possible six. Dissenting intelligence 

opinions should be reconciled before they reached the USIB, not during USIB deliberations.13

Almost immediately after Kirkpatrick submitted his group’s report, the Joint Chiefs of Staff 

protested to Secretary of Defense Thomas Gates that they were “gravely concerned” over many of 

the report’s recommendations. Eisenhower, however, would have none of it. In an NSC meeting on 

January 5, 1961, he noted that the confused state of U.S. military intelligence “made little sense in 

managerial terms” and lamented that his inability to fix the mess would leave a “legacy of ashes” 

for the incoming Kennedy administration. That same day, Eisenhower’s NSC endorsed the Joint 

Study Group’s findings, but the president would be out of office before he could act on the report.14 

A New Intelligence Frontier

Eisenhower’s place was taken by President John F. Kennedy, who was inaugurated on January 

20, 1961. The youngest man elected President in U.S. history, Kennedy rode a reformist 

wave criticizing what he saw as the gray complacency of the Eisenhower Administration and 

promising a “New Frontier,” a break with the old ways of doing business. He surrounded 

himself with young and energetic domestic and foreign policy experts, “The best and the 

brightest,” as author David Halberstam would later write, and empowered them to reform what 

he saw as an ossified Washington establishment. Kennedy sought out minds he identified with 

—“quick, confident, incisive”—and for his Secretary of Defense, he chose Robert McNamara, 

who only one month earlier had risen to become President of Ford Motor Company.15

McNamara had overwhelming confidence in himself, a penchant for micromanagement, and 

a habit of challenging ingrained military habits, all of which often rubbed the Pentagon brass 

the wrong way. Empowered by Kennedy to remake the military bureaucracy, he took an 

extraordinarily active role in reforming the Department of Defense. His two primary objectives 

were to enhance the control that the Office of the Secretary of Defense had over DoD and to 
5

Defense Intelligence Historical Perspectives, Number 1

improve the Department’s efficiency. It rankled him that the Services could not come to an 

agreement on intelligence estimates that would allow him to conduct effective force planning 

to meet Soviet threats, and for him, the inefficiency of having three Services perform the same 

intelligence functions was self-evident. 

Kennedy and McNamara also were harsh critics of the Eisenhower Administration’s reliance 

on the nuclear doctrine of massive retaliation, an all-out nuclear assault in response to any 

form of Soviet aggression. Both favored the emerging strategic concept known as “flexible 

response,” in which a graduated and varied reaction to different forms of Soviet aggression 

would be instituted. Flexible response was a complex notion requiring dramatic improvements 

in intelligence analysis and targeting to accommodate the multiple attack options it demanded. 

The Secretary of Defense needed to have clear, unambiguous intelligence on Soviet intentions, 

capabilities, and targets if he was going to refine U.S. strategic concepts and make the 

changes in force structure such a move would necessitate. He could not be held hostage by 

competing intelligence agendas that might paralyze planning.16

To resolve these issues, McNamara, a champion of rational management structures, embraced 

the recommendations of the Joint Study Group. He seized upon the authority conferred to him 

by the Reorganization Act of 1958 and began a major overhaul of DoD operations generally, 

but the first area for reform under McNamara was intelligence. In February, McNamara wrote 

to General Lyman Lemnitzer, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, requesting the JCS to 

submit a draft concept for an integrated Defense Intelligence Agency, a draft DoD directive 

for its authorization, and a time-phased implementation schedule. “I cannot emphasize too 

strongly the priority nature of this project,” he informed Lemnitzer.17

McNamara set precise, but fairly broad, parameters for the JCS to follow. He did not order 

the Joint Chiefs to make the agency directly responsible to OSD, but rather wrote only that 

“Careful consideration must be given as to where a Defense Intelligence Agency should be 

located in the Department of Defense.” He also noted that “The basic concept and charter of 

the Defense Intelligence Agency should be so comprehensive that there is no question as to 

its full responsibilities, authority, functions, and facilities.” From the standpoint of the Agency’s 

broad conceptualization, McNamara was willing to make room for the Joint Chiefs’ input even 

if the individual Services might not want DIA at all.18

But the devil was in the details. More specific guidelines provided by the Secretary of Defense 

directly challenged Service prerogatives. McNamara ordered that the draft concept include 

provisions for the “complete integration of all defense intelligence requirements and the 

assignment of priorities thereto,” and noted that “Present duplication in intelligence collection, 

processing, production, estimating, publication, and so forth, should be eliminated.” Both reforms 

would reduce the influence that any one Service branch had in the intelligence process, and the 

Joint Chiefs recognized this immediately. Worse from the JCS point of view was McNamara’s 

stipulation that “military department intelligence functions should be limited to training, personnel, 

and support responsibilities” and that intelligence staffing at the Service headquarters should be 

sharply reduced. This meant the wholesale transfer of Service intelligence functions to DIA and a 

loss of direct control over valuable capabilities.19
6

Defense Intelligence Historical Perspectives, Number 1

The Joint Chiefs were of course reluctant to put the Services’ valuable intelligence functions 

under an agency they did not directly control. If the agency were to be under the sole authority 

of the Secretary of Defense, they argued, its ability to provide military forces with tailored 

intelligence would be diminished, leading to a loss of battlefield effectiveness. They contended 

that the JCS should retain direct operational control of what they called a “Military Intelligence 

Agency” to ensure its responsiveness to the needs of the military. Left unspoken, of course, 

was their unhappiness with the fact a new agency would not necessarily strongly represent 

their individual interests to national authorities. In any case, to help ensure the Agency’s 

responsiveness, they also wanted to establish a Military Intelligence Board to advise its 

director, and emphasized that in creating the new Agency, “It is essential that the entire military 

intelligence structure, to include NSA, be embraced in the concept.” In practical terms, the 

new Agency would essentially become a confederation of previously established intelligence 

and counterintelligence activities under the control of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, not the single 

unitary agency envisioned by McNamara.20 

Months of negotiation between the reticent 

Joint Chiefs and the Secretary of Defense 

followed. McNamara was represented 

by his gifted and urbane deputy, Roswell 

Gilpatric, another one of Kennedy’s “best and 

brightest.” Gilpatric was a fierce and brilliant 

advocate for McNamara. He was the driving 

force behind the sharpening of Kirkpatrick’s 

proposals as well as in the establishment of 

the agency itself. In July, he laid down the 

fundamental assumption for the new Agency. 

“Mr. McNamara and I,” he pointedly wrote 

to Lemnitzer and the Service Secretaries 

that month, “desire to emphasize our intent 

that DIA will fully integrate the intelligence 

resources and functions assigned to its 

control. It is not a confederation.” A DIA would 

assume direct control over some functions, 

and would coordinate and supervise the 

execution of others that were not transferred 

to it. The primary objectives of the Agency 

were “to obtain unity of effort among all 

components of the Department of Defense in 

developing military intelligence, and a strengthening of the overall capacity of the Department 

of Defense for the collection, production, and dissemination of intelligence information. 

Gilpatric also noted that efficient allocation of resources was a lesser priority, “but certainly 

not of lesser importance.”21

Photo courtesy of the OSD History Staff

President John F. Kennedy, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, 

and Assistant Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric. With Kennedy’s 

backing, McNamara and Gilpatric set out to remake the Department 

of Defense bureaucracy. 
7

Defense Intelligence Historical Perspectives, Number 1

Both sides eventually agreed that the new Defense Intelligence Agency (a name selected to 

reflect the final authority of the Secretary of Defense) would report to McNamara through the 

JCS. That is, the agency would act under the authority of the Secretary of Defense, but the 

JCS would provide input and guidance, and be a co-recipient of DIA intelligence products. The 

National Security Agency would remain where it was. Gilpatric accepted the idea of a Military 

Intelligence Board, but only as an interim body to advise the DIA Director as necessary. He 

was careful to stipulate that the Military Intelligence Board would meet only at the discretion of 

the Director, and that it might be phased out once the Agency was fully functional.22

Gilpatric issued the final directive establishing DIA on August 1, 1961, to be effective October 1. 

The directive would function as DIA’s charter for the next five years. It established the chain of 

command from the OSD through the JCS and noted that guidance to the DIA Director would 

come from both the Secretary of Defense’s office and the Joint Chiefs, an organizational 

arrangement that would put the DIA Director in the precarious position of having to report to 

two separate institutions that did not always agree. At their broadest, Agency functions were 

clear. The very first task listed in the August directive was its most important. It gave DIA 

responsibility for developing and producing all of the Department of Defense estimates and for 

making DoD contributions to National Intelligence Estimates. Importantly, it also directed DIA to 

design, integrate, and validate intelligence requirements and establish a single DoD collection 

requirements registry. 

Other directives included providing all of DoD’s current intelligence, establishing an 

indications center in the Pentagon, and notably, serving as the Department of Defense 

representative to the United States Intelligence Board. These functions were all designed 

with an eye toward improving the Secretary of Defense’s ability to develop budgets and 

remake forces as he moved strategic doctrine away from massive retaliation and toward 

flexible response. However, buried once again in the functions assigned to the Agency was 

the task of coordinating and planning intelligence activities “to achieve maximum economy 

and efficiency” in Pentagon intelligence activities. The two goals were of a piece. The highest 

priority was given to bringing the estimating and planning process into line, but in so doing, 

economization of intelligence practices would follow.23

Through a Minefield Blindfolded

To head the Agency, McNamara selected Air Force Lieutenant General Joseph Carroll out 

of a pool of candidates provided by the Joint Chiefs. Carroll, a tall, handsome Chicagoan 

with piercing blue eyes, was born in 1910 to poor and only sporadically employed 

parents. In 1934, after twelve years preparing to join the Catholic priesthood at St. Mary’s 

Mundelein Seminary just outside Chicago, Carroll declined ordination and went to work in 

the stockyards, first as a steam fitter’s assistant, then as a meat salesman for Swift Meat 

Company. At night, he studied law at Loyola University and completed his degree in 1940. 

The same year, he joined the Federal Bureau of Investigation and worked in the Chicago field 

office. In 1942, Carroll’s arrest of the infamous Chicago gangster Roger “The Terrible” Touhy 

after Touhy’s escape from prison brought him to the attention of J. Edgar Hoover, who ordered 
8

Defense Intelligence Historical Perspectives, Number 1

the former seminarian and meat salesman to Washington to become the Bureau’s chief of 

kidnapping and bank robbery investigations. 

In 1947, Hoover lent Carroll to the newly formed U.S. Air Force (USAF), where Carroll set 

up the Office of Special Investigations, responsible for investigative and counterintelligence 

functions. In 1948, Carroll went on active duty with the Air Force at the rank of Brigadier 

General, eventually rising to the post of Deputy Director General for Security, which was 

responsible for formulating security policy for the Air Force. In February 1960, Carroll received 

a promotion to Lieutenant General and became the Inspector General, USAF, which he would 

later characterize as “The best job that I ever had throughout my military career.” He remained 

in that position until August 1961, when McNamara appointed him DIA’s first Director. 

Carroll first came to McNamara’s attention during the course of 

several leak investigations in the Pentagon. The Secretary of Defense 

was impressed by Carroll’s discretion, integrity, and success at 

plugging leaks during his career with the Air Force. McNamara knew 

that the Joint Chiefs insisted that any DIA Director come from the 

Services, but he also needed assurance that anyone who assumed 

the post could be counted on to balance the conflicting Service 

requirements without favoring one department over another. When 

the time came to select a DIA Director, McNamara made it very clear 

that he wanted Carroll on the short list.24

When Air Force Lieutenant General Abbot Greenleaf, who assisted 

McNamara with organizational and manpower issues, approached 

Carroll about the possibility of becoming DIA Director, Carroll 

wanted nothing to do with the post. He argued that he was a 

counterintelligence specialist who had virtually no experience in 

other aspects of foreign intelligence, let alone managing an entire 

agency made up of the often quarrelsome Service elements. Thirty-five years later, Greenleaf 

recalled that “I carried that message back to [McNamara] and he said thank you, now get 

word to the Air Force.” The Secretary of Defense was not about to take no for an answer. 

Carroll was in some ways an inspired choice. He was a strong supporter of his Irish Catholic 

President and a believer in the New Frontier. Carroll also had a reputation as an impartial 

broker, someone who did not put the interests of himself or his Service above others, and was 

widely recognized by those who dealt with him as an honest man with great integrity. It was a 

reputation he enjoyed throughout his career. According to his son James, as a relative outsider 

to the Air Force, the elder Carroll was not imbued with the reflexive loyalty to his Service that 

many of his colleagues were. The national interest was far more important to him. Carroll 

“brought fervor to what he said, and an open display of one naked feeling: an unrestrained love 

of his country.” He was, as his son later wrote, “A fluent patriot, a man of power.”25 

But McNamara’s selection of Carroll was also problematic. While his outsider’s status may 

have kept him relatively free of Service bias, it also set him apart from his fellow officers in the DIA Historical Research Support Branch

Lieutenant General Joseph Carroll
9

Defense Intelligence Historical Perspectives, Number 1

Pentagon. Carroll had never served a day in uniform until he received his direct commission 

to Brigadier General. The few campaign and award ribbons he wore on his uniform were only 

the most obvious display of his lack of martial experience compared to other flag officers in 

the Pentagon, some of whom disparaged him as “that cop.”26 Carroll was also a believer in 

the adage that one catches more flies with honey than vinegar, but in some cases, a healthy 

dose of vinegar would be called for, and Carroll would fail to supply it. His nonconfrontational 

approach earned him a great deal of personal respect from those who knew him, but it also 

made him unwilling to directly challenge Service personnel who proved intransigent and 

resisted his efforts to consolidate DIA’s authority once he became Director. Years later, Carroll 

himself would openly wonder if he should have challenged the Service chiefs more directly.

Carroll reluctantly assumed the Directorship on August 12, 1961. Gilpatric put him on notice 

his first day. “I am holding you personally responsible,” he wrote to the new Director, “for 

the expeditious establishment of DIA and for the development of all plans necessary to its 

activation. Such plans will be submitted to me for approval through the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”27 

Nine days later, Gilpatric notified President Kennedy of Carroll’s appointment.28

McNamara and Gilpatric selected the Agency’s senior leadership from three different Services. 

Carroll’s Deputy Director was Army Lieutenant General William “Buffalo Bill” Quinn (Quinn was the 

Army’s choice to head the Agency, but McNamara rejected him because he did not know Quinn 

personally) and his Chief of Staff was Navy Rear Admiral Samuel Frankel. The three men had the 

difficult task of organizing a new agency virtually from scratch, taking capabilities from Services who 

were loathe to give them up to an agency the Joint Chiefs gave only lukewarm support. Andrew 

Goodpaster, at the time the Special Assistant for Policy to Chairman of the JCS General Maxwell 

Taylor, recalled years later that their task was “Like walking through a minefield blindfolded.”29

By the end of September, Carroll and his staff had an Activation Plan in place for the new 

Agency. As DIA absorbed new tasks, “the Director, DIA, will become the principal staff advisor 

to the Joint Chiefs of Staff for substantive intelligence matters, and, acting through the Joint 

Chiefs of Staff, the principal staff assistant to the Secretary of Defense for both substantive 

intelligence and managerial matters within his area of assigned responsibility.” The plan thus 

formalized the dual-reporting arrangement for DIA’s Director.30

The organizational framework for the Agency was designed to balance competing internal 

interests that might emerge. The Activation Plan provided for a command group, a 

headquarters staff, and a group of line elements at the operating level. The Agency would be 

horizontally organized into interdependent functions as a way to avoid vertical “stovepiping” 

and internal empire building that might allow one Service to dominate particular functions. 

This decision, while understandable, had its drawbacks that would fundamentally impact DIA’s 

ability to perform its assigned tasks. The horizontal organization stretched the span of control 

by increasing the number elements reporting directly to Carroll’s staff, requiring the Director to 

make many decisions regarding operations that could be made at lower levels with a different 

organizational arrangement. The interdependent nature of the line elements also necessitated 

close coordination across multiple offices and tended to tie the speed of responsiveness by 

DIA to that of its slowest organization. This would create major problems in the future.31
10

Defense Intelligence Historical Perspectives, Number 1

10 

SPECIAL ADVISORY GROUP

SPECIAL SECURITY OFFICE

ASSISTANT CHIEF OF STAFF 

ADMINISTRATION

PERSONNEL DIVISION

SERVICES DIVISION

ASSISTANT CHIEF OF STAFF 

PLANS, POLICY, AND PROGRAMS

PLANS AND POLICY DIVISION

PROGRAMS DIVISION

TRAINING DIVISION

ASSISTANT DIRECTOR 

FOR PROCESSING

PRODUCTION PLANNING GROUP

ESTIMATES OFFICE

CURRENT INTELLIGENCE AND 

INDICATIONS CENTER

DIRECTOR

Lt Gen Carroll, USAF

DEPUTY DIRECTOR

LTG Quinn, USA

CHIEF OF STAFF

RADM Frankel, USN

SECURITY DIVISION
11

Defense Intelligence Historical Perspectives, Number 1

Defense Intelligence Agency, 1962

INSPECTOR GENERAL

EXECUTIVE OFFICER

SPECIAL ACTIVITIES OFFICE

AUTOMATED DATA PROCESSING 

SYSTEMS DIVISION

ASSISTANT DIRECTOR 

FOR ACQUISITION

PLANS AND PROGRAMS OFFICE

REQUIREMENTS OFFICE

COLLECTION MANAGEMENT 

OFFICE

ASSISTANT CHIEF OF STAFF 

INTELLIGENCE SUPPORT SYSTEMS

RESEARCH AND 

DEVELOPMENT DIVISION

MANAGEMENT ANALYSIS 

DIVISION

STATISTICAL SERVICES 

DIVISION

MANPOWER AND 

ORGANIZATION GROUP

FINANCIAL SERVICES DIVISION

COMPTROLLER
12

Defense Intelligence Historical Perspectives, Number 1

Service facilities and resources were to be transferred to DIA on a graduated basis in order 

to preserve the continuity of their operations. Once the staffing and physical facilities were 

settled, functions would follow. Phasing of this extraordinarily complex process was key. The 

timing depended not only on the character of the function being transferred from the Services 

to DIA, but also on how it could be transferred from each individual organization without 

degrading performance during the changeover. It was obvious to Carroll that there would have 

to be a considerable spread in the timing of DIA’s takeover of various tasks. This also lent itself 

to abuse at the hands of the Service elements that did not wish to lose certain capabilities 

to DIA, and delayed the handover of assets to the Agency. Moreover, the Activation Plan 

underestimated the complexity of the new Agency and its range of missions, forcing Carroll’s 

staff to make even more unplanned claims on Service personnel and facilities and further 

antagonizing the resistant Service chiefs. The need for practical accommodation to these 

realities meant that over the next several years, DIA would develop unevenly and in different 

ways across its various responsibilities.32

From the perspective of DIA’s two major missions, management and analysis, the Activation 

Plan established two key directorates beneath the Command Element that were particularly 

important. One, Acquisitions, validated all Pentagon intelligence requirements, assigned 

collection priorities, and designated resources to be used in collecting intelligence. It 

also maintained an inventory of DoD-wide collection resources, assigned collection 

tasks to intelligence gatherers, and evaluated collection efforts. Importantly, however, 

the establishment of this directorate did not mean the conferral of command authority over 

collection activities in the field. The Agency could furnish guidance and support, but could not 

direct Service-specific activities or those carried by the Unified and Specified Commands.33

The second directorate, Processing, managed the intelligence production staff as well as 

the estimating and current intelligence elements of DIA. It was made up of three different 

organizations. First, a Current Intelligence Indications Center served the JCS, the Secretary 

Defense, the Services, and the Unified and Specified Commands with current intelligence and 

spot reports. Second, an Estimates Office provided all of DoD’s intelligence estimates and 

made the Pentagon’s contributions to the National Intelligence Estimates. Third, a Production 

Center coordinated basic intelligence analysis and integrated the four daily intelligence 

products published by the various Services into two. Two daily DIA intelligence cables to the 

Unified and Specified commanders replaced the five daily Service cables.34 These functions 

were to be slowly phased in over the course of the next few years.

McNamara approved the DIA Activation Plan at the end of September, 1961, and on 

October 1, formally established the Defense Intelligence Agency. But Carroll’s problems 

were just beginning. The military Services in particular resisted DIA’s formation. “The 

Services were dragged kicking and screaming into the idea of a centralized intelligence 

agency of relatively limited scope,” recalled David “Doc” Cook, who, as part of McNamara’s 

planning staff, played an important role in backing the Agency’s establishment that summer. 

At least initially, General Jack Thomas, the Air Force Intelligence Center’s chief, had a “purely 

negative” interest in DIA, and according to Lieutenant General Lincoln Faurer, who would 

eventually rise to DIA’s Deputy Director for Intelligence and Vice Director for Production, 
13

Defense Intelligence Historical Perspectives, Number 1

“There was a great deal of not reluctance but outright fighting against the concept alone of 

DIA.”35 Carroll had to step very carefully and needed all of his political skills to navigate this 

minefield. An exchange between him and members of the House Armed Services Committee 

in August 1962 over DIA’s Activation Plan was telling:

Mr. Blandford: What you have done is to bring to this organization...your 

composite view of what you considered to be the best type of an intelligence 

organization; would that be a fair summary?

General Carroll: A very accurate one, sir.

Mr. Bates: And all the Services agree with this?

General Carroll: Well, this is the organizational structure that we devised in 

DIA, and it was encompassed within the Activation Plan we submitted to the 

Joint Chiefs of Staff and thence to the Secretary of Defense. The Services 

had an opportunity to comment at that time.

The exchange was more revealing for what Carroll did not say than for what he did.36

His problems were seemingly endless. The Services were reluctant to send their most qualified 

personnel to his agency, and they often slow-rolled the transfer of other resources. Carroll’s 

difficulties in achieving agreements with the Services on these transfers led to a series of 

scheduling delays. For example, the original Activation Plan projected that basic intelligence 

analysis and production would be consolidated in the DIA Production Center by July 1962, but 

arguments over resources and sources of administrative support delayed the approval of the 

Production Center’s plan until December. It was not until 1963 that the new Production Center 

would become active.37 

Within the Pentagon bureaucracy, petty obstruction could rear its head anywhere. When 

DIA personnel took over space belonging to the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) and taped 

new signs to the doors, ONI personnel dubbing themselves “Naval Resistance Forces” went 

through the offices at night and tore down the new signs. “Guerilla warfare raged between the 

two organizations,” recalled one observer. “Only sandbags and sniper fire were missing from 

the action on the Pentagon’s fifth floor.”38

Making matters worse, in claiming personnel and resources, Carroll, ever the conciliator, 

was reluctant to push the Services too hard for fear of a backlash, which eventually came 

anyway when Service representatives complained before Congress that DIA could not and 

would not fulfill the purpose intended for it. In an attempt to discredit the effort to establish the 

Agency, the Services also accused DIA of taking too many resources out of their hands and 

crippling their intelligence capabilities. General George Decker, the Army’s Chief of Staff, fed 

Congressional fears of a monolithic military intelligence product when he complained to the 

House Armed Services Committee that “Our people [Army intelligence] will have no way of 

knowing whether [DIA’s intelligence product] is valid or not because their evaluation capability 

is being removed.”39
14

Defense Intelligence Historical Perspectives, Number 1

Congress, stoked by these complaints, began raising questions about DIA’s consumption of 

resources and its ability to bring about any efficiencies. In February 1962, members of the 

House Appropriations Committee pushed Carroll to outline the kinds of savings resulting from 

DIA’s foundation. Because of his concerns about diminishing intelligence performance during 

the transfer period, Carroll had been establishing the Agency with deliberate caution, and 

it was still very much in development in early 1962. As a result, he could not then highlight 

any specific improvements. By that point, the Indications Center was fully functional 

and DIA had started developing its requirements registry, but only five months after the 

Agency’s establishment, it was too early for Carroll to outline savings that had resulted. In 

August 1962, Congress also echoed the Services’ concern that DIA would mute other DoD 

intelligence opinions.40

Nevertheless, over the next several months, DIA’s leadership made slow progress toward 

actually bringing the Agency to its feet. On October 1, 1961, Carroll’s agency was staffed with 

approximately twenty-five people, most of whom were on loan from the Services. On October 

16, DIA received authorization for 500 billets. By January 1962, 710 people, 432 military and 

278 civilians, had been assigned to the Agency.

Well into 1962, most of Carroll’s staff’s efforts were dedicated to acquiring office space (mostly 

in the Pentagon, but they were laying arrangements for other facilities as well), obtaining 

personnel, establishing policies and procedures, and developing internal organizations. By 

early 1962, the Estimates Office and Current Intelligence Indications Center were operational. 

The Estimates Division of the former J-2 of the Joint Staff formed the nucleus of the DIA 

Estimates Office, and the Indications Center likewise was created out of the J-2 Current 

Intelligence Division and the Air Force Warning and Indications Center in the Pentagon.41 

Over the spring and summer, DIA planners, under orders from Gilpatric, began laying the 

groundwork for the consolidation of the Army Strategic Intelligence School and the Naval 

Intelligence School into the Defense 

Intelligence School, which would be 

formally established on November 1. That 

work would be completed by U.S. Army 

Colonel Clarence Langford, the head of 

DIA’s Training Division. Carroll’s staff also 

continued its extensive planning for the 

critical new Production Center that would 

integrate the analytical work of all three 

Services, but Service resistance would 

delay the opening of the Production Center 

until 1963. In any case, by the end of 1962, 

992 military and civilian personnel worked 

for DIA. 

The establishment of DIA’s position within 

the U.S. Intelligence Community took 

time as well, but the process was made 

Photo courtesy of the CIA History Staff

The USIB meets in January 1963. At left, at the head of the table, 

is DCI John McCone. At right, at the other end of the table, is DIA 

Director Carroll. 
15

Defense Intelligence Historical Perspectives, Number 1

considerably smoother by the active involvement of McNamara and Director of Central 

Intelligence (DCI) John McCone. McCone himself, contrary to his predecessor Allen Dulles, 

supported the establishment of DIA, and had a good relationship with Carroll and his staff. 

At nearly the same time that Carroll was setting up DIA, McCone was taking on the Services 

over a proposal by the Joint Study Group to reduce their membership on the USIB, which had 

been set up by President Eisenhower as a forum for all of the intelligence chiefs to provide 

advice to the DCI. McCone wanted membership reduced by five by removing the Services and 

the National Security Agency. McNamara, with McCone’s approval, proposed that NSA keep 

its place and that DIA join as the representative of the Secretary of Defense and Joint Chiefs 

of Staff. Because of the glacial pace of DIA’s establishment, however, the Services retained 

their full membership until 1964. Even after that, they retained the right to send observers and 

register dissents in the formal National Intelligence Estimates.42 Thus, even after a year of 

work, DIA still had a long way to go before it could fully assume the functions envisioned for it 

by McNamara and Gilpatric. But the world waited for no one, and in 1962, DIA, an agency that 

was in every way in its infancy, was forced to confront a crisis that brought the world to the 

brink of nuclear war.

Trial by Fire: The Cuban Missile Crisis

Cuba had been a festering problem for the Kennedy Administration since the Bay of 

Pigs fiasco in April 1961. In the months following that debacle, the U.S. began exploring 

other options designed to isolate and even remove Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Operation 

MONGOOSE, established by the president in November 1961, was the most provocative. 

Under the leadership of Brigadier General Edward Lansdale, McNamara’s Assistant for Special 

Operations, MONGOOSE encompassed a variety of plans to get rid of Cuba’s nettlesome 

dictator, ranging from fomenting an uprising in Cuba to even entertaining the possibility of 

assassination. In early 1962, DIA, with its still-meager resources, found itself quietly drawn into 

Operation MONGOOSE.

On January 23, 1962, Colonel John R. Wright, DIA’s Chief of the (one-person) Latin American 

Division in the Estimates Office, received a cryptic call from his boss instructing him to report 

immediately to Brigadier General William H. Craig of the Joint Staff. Craig was the Deputy 

Chief of the Special Activities Division in the J-5 (Strategic Plans and Operations) of the Joint 

Staff and the Special Project Officer for Operation MONGOOSE. When Wright arrived in 

Craig’s office, he was told that he was chosen to be the DIA representative and Deputy Chief 

of the Joint Staff’s working group for the operation. Wright had not even heard of MONGOOSE 

previously. His job would be to provide, from DIA, the latest intelligence needed by the working 

group. Only Carroll and Quinn were to know the specifics of his work. In February, Wright 

developed a list of twenty Essential Elements of Information (EEI) needed by the group, which 

he brought to Quinn, who told him that “The full facilities of the DIA were at my disposal on 

this project.” The EEIs went on to form the basis for an Intelligence Community-wide collection 

effort against Cuba to support Defense’s MONGOOSE requirements beginning in March and 

April 1962.43
16

Defense Intelligence Historical Perspectives, Number 1

The timing was propitious. That same April, Soviet Defense Minister Rodion Malinovsky 

visited his friend and patron, Premier Nikita Khrushchev, who was vacationing in his 

expansive dacha on the Black Sea. After briefing Khrushchev on the progress of Soviet 

ICBM development—the Soviets were still years behind the United States, despite its earlier 

success with Sputnik—Malinovsky gestured out over the water and mentioned to his boss 

that nuclear-tipped Jupiter missiles placed in Turkey by the United States were just becoming 

operational. For years, Khrushchev had railed against what he perceived as the U.S. flaunting 

its military and economic superiority and its fostering of a double-standard regarding 

nuclear deployment. The Jupiter missiles were an insult and further strengthened an already 

substantial strategic advantage over his country. Khrushchev wanted to turn the tables. “Why 

not throw a hedgehog at Uncle Sam’s pants?” he is reported to have asked.45

At that point, the question was little more than an idle musing, but the notion stayed with 

Khrushchev. In May, he decided to put the idea of deploying medium range nuclear missiles 

in Castro’s Cuba before the Soviet Presidium, and he received their approval at the end of 

the month. The plan was both bold and dangerous. Code-named Operation ANADYR, it 

ultimately called for the secret placement in Cuba of five nuclear missile regiments (SS-4 

medium range ballistic missiles – MRBMs – and SS-5 intermediate range ballistic missiles – 

IRBMs), complemented with a large combined-arms force that included tactical air assets, 

tanks, infantry, and surface-to-air missile (SAM) batteries. The Soviets would also send tactical 

nuclear weapons to Cuba in addition to the strategic nuclear weapons it placed there. The 

force included two cruise missile regiments equipped with nuclear warheads and at least nine 

Luna surface to surface missiles (FROGs – Free Rocket Over Ground – in NATO parlance), also 

with nuclear warheads. At no time during the crisis was anyone in the U.S. aware that tactical 

nuclear weapons were also on the island alongside the strategic missiles.46

In the U.S., at the end of July and the beginning of August, John Wright began noting an 

upsurge in Soviet arms arriving at western Cuban ports. Of particular interest was the 

possible SA-2 SAM systems being reported in debriefings of Cuban refugees arriving at 

the CIA’s Caribbean Admission Center in Opa Locka, Florida.47 Wright asked members of 

DIA’s Special Activities Office, which reported directly to Carroll’s staff and helped manage 

DIA reconnaissance requests to the USIB’s Committee on Overhead Reconnaissance 

(COMOR), to have photointerpreters at the new National Photographic Interpretation Center 

(NPIC – photointerpreters here were from CIA, DIA, and the Services) examine these areas 

after the next U-2 mission. On August 17, the Special Activities Office notified Wright that 

the photography in the areas he requested revealed “long, slim objects” and their transport 

vehicles in convoy formation. Wright was convinced that these were SA-2 missiles. The 

next day, DIA analysts in the Indications Center reported the presence of electronic 

countermeasures (ECM) equipment on the island. They could see little role for ECM equipment 

in Castro’s campaign against “counterrevolutionaries,” and to them, it seemed to indicate that 

the Soviets were installing a complex integrated air defense system on Cuba. The question 

was why.47 

Wright’s suspicions about the air defense system were confirmed when a U-2 reconnaissance 

mission at the end of August captured images of seven separate SA-2 sites on the island.
17

Defense Intelligence Historical Perspectives, Number 1

The presence of the SA-2s led Secretary of State Dean Rusk and National Security Advisor 

McGeorge Bundy, both of whom feared that a U-2 might be shot down, to pressure the 

COMOR not to submit requests for overflights of Cuba to national leadership. The result 

in mid-September was the curtailing of U-2 flights over the island and the opening of 

a major intelligence gap in Cuba. The timing could not have been worse. Just as the 

photoreconnaissance opportunities dried up in the middle of the month, Soviet ballistic 

missiles began arriving.48 In lieu of the U-2 photography, DIA’s Special Activities Office would 

later make a request to the COMOR to overfly western Cuba with a Corona satellite, but that 

mission did not return photographs that were clear enough to provide any solid evidence of 

offensive missiles.49 

On September 21, Wright received a report through DIA’s Indications Center from a Cuban 

refugee who claimed to have seen a convoy of twenty objects measuring between sixty-five and 

seventy-five feet, far too large to be SA-2s.50 When Wright showed the report to analysts in 

DIA’s Estimates Office (SNIE), he was unable to convince them anything more than just the 

defensive SA-2 systems might be in Cuba. They agreed with a Special National Intelligence 

Estimate (SNIE) published on September 19 arguing that the buildup in Cuba was purely 

defensive, dismissing the notion that the buildup was offensive in nature and thereby cutting 

off the idea that strategic nuclear weapons were on the island.51 In any case, by that point, 

nearly fifteen SA-2 sites and Soviet military camps had been plotted in Cuba. In Wright’s 

view, at least three of the SA-2 sites in Piñar del Rio province in western Cuba had no 

obvious reason for being there. When Wright and his assistant recalled a HUMINT report 

noting the presence of a trapezoidal-shaped restricted area cordoned off by Soviet troops 

in Piñar del Rio, they discovered that it was guarded by the three SA-2 sites. “Thus, the 

pattern of the SA-2 sites, the reported presence of MRBMs, and the large restricted area in 

Piñar del Rio when put together led to the hypothesis that the Soviets could be setting up 

strategic missiles in Cuba,” Wright later wrote. Their conclusions were deemed plausible 

enough that he was ordered to brief them to McNamara and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of 

Staff Maxwell Taylor on October 1.52 

McNamara was convinced. After Wright’s briefing, the Secretary of Defense ordered Admiral 

Robert Dennison, Commander-in-Chief of U.S. Atlantic Command, to be prepared to institute 

a blockade against Cuba. The next day, McNamara sent a memorandum to the Joint Chiefs 

outlining several possible scenarios, including the Soviets’ placement of offensive missiles in 

Cuba, in which military action would be necessary, and ordered them to begin contingency 

planning. These events moved DIA into high gear. On October 4, eleven days before the 

U.S. discovered the ballistic missiles, Carroll set up a special Cuban Situation Room so that 

the Agency could provide twenty-four-hour coverage and better support JCS contingency 

planning. Wright also returned to DIA’s Special Activities Office with a request that Piñar del 

Rio be made a priority target for overhead reconnaissance. Using this justification, DIA’s 

representatives to the USIB’s COMOR urgently recommended that the San Cristobal area 

in Piñar del Rio be put at the top of the reconnaissance target list. At the same time, Carroll 

pressed McNamara for increased U-2 flights over western Cuba.53
18

Defense Intelligence Historical Perspectives, Number 1

A week later, Carroll notified McNamara and Taylor that DIA analysts, using special crate 

analysis techniques (“crateology”), had detected the first hard evidence of Il-28/BEAGLE 

bombers in Cuba, which Carroll considered offensive weapons. At the same time, the 

accumulating evidence forced Rusk and Bundy to relent on their objections to U-2 overflights. 

Strategic Air Command, with McNamara’s and Gilpatric’s support, wrestled control of 

the flights away from CIA and received permission from Kennedy to conduct one “in and 

out” reconnaissance run. The selected path was a south to north pass over Piñar del Rio, 

through the center of the SA-2 triangle and the trapezoidal restricted area noted by Wright on 

September 21.54

On October 14, a U-2 piloted by Air Force Major Richard Heyser arrived over Cuba, where it 

photographed an MRBM convoy just before it pulled into a wooded area off a road near San 

Cristobal, almost exactly the location where DIA analysts estimated that any missiles might 

be located.55 The next morning, the photographs from Heyser’s mission arrived at NPIC. The 

photointerpreters there discovered six cylindrical, canvas-covered objects and determined 

that they were likely to be seventy-foot SS-4 MRBMs. Colonel David Parker, assigned by 

DIA to serve as NPIC’s Deputy Director, immediately called John Hughes, Carroll’s Special 

Assistant, and asked him to come to the NPIC building in northwest Washington, D.C. right 

away. Hughes and his assistant John McLaughlin arrived there at 7:00 in the evening, where 

they learned the astounding news.56 

Havana

Ciego 

de Avila

Camaguey Holguin

Moa

U.S. Naval Base

Guantanmo Bay Santiago de Cuba

Key West

Gulf 

of

Mexico

Caribbean Sea

North Atlantic 

Ocean

Banes

Cayman Islands

JAMAICA

BAHAMAS

CUBA

U-2 flight path

SA-2 SAM Sites

MRBM Sites

Gulf 

of

Mexico

Caribbean Sea

Key West

JAMAICA

BAHAMAS

U-2 flight path

SA-2 SAM Sites

MRBM Sites

Havana

Santa Cruz

de Norte

Camaguey Holguin

Santiago de Cuba

Key West

B

Matanzas

San Julian

Los Palacios

Santa Lucia San Cristobal

Mariel San Diego

de los Banos

October 14, 1962

Mission

Bahia Honda

Area of enlargement
19

Defense Intelligence Historical Perspectives, Number 1

Hughes and McLaughlin immediately took the new intelligence to Carroll at his home on 

Bolling Air Force Base, located hard on the Potomac River in Washington, D.C. Carroll 

instructed both men to inform Roswell Gilpatric right away, and called the Deputy Secretary of 

Defense at home to let them know his aides were on their way over. Hughes and McLaughlin 

got back into Hughes’ beat-up yellow DeSoto and made their third cross-city journey of the 

evening to brief the Deputy Secretary of Defense at his home near the National Cathedral. 

Gilpatric and Carroll had plans to attend a party at Maxwell Taylor’s home, and Taylor would learn 

the news there from Carroll (DCI McCone was on the west coast for his stepson’s funeral and 

would receive a call from Walter Elder, his Executive Assistant, that evening). McNamara was 

attending a self-improvement seminar at Robert Kennedy’s estate at Hickory Hill, so Gilpatric told 

Carroll and Hughes to be ready to brief the Secretary of Defense the next morning.57

At 7:30 a.m. the next day, October 16, Carroll and Hughes showed McNamara the 

photographs of the missiles near San Cristobal. The news hit like a thunderclap. Gilpatric, who 

arrived in the middle of the briefing, recalled that McNamara “had that sort of taut look that 

DIA Historical Research Support Branch

This photo, taken on October 14, revealed the presence of Soviet MRBMs in Cuba. The missiles are visible at the 

bottom-right of the photo. 
20

Defense Intelligence Historical Perspectives, Number 1

I came to recognize when something came upon him that he just felt he couldn’t you know, 

handle, didn’t have any immediate solution for.”58 The Secretary of Defense ordered Carroll 

to develop as much intelligence as he could using all the means at his disposal, and Carroll 

immediately set to work. Samuel Frankel, Carroll’s Chief of Staff, recalled—with only some 

hyperbole—that 

[Carroll] required that every agency, including that portion of CIA that dealt with 

photography, overflights, be immediately responsive to his requirements. Flights were 

laid on, Navy ships were moved about for intelligence collection purposes, special 

courier flights were established, and the photographs processed and analyzed with such 

speed that I don’t think there was any photograph which was more than twelve hours 

late – within twelve hours after the picture was taken the information was available.59

Every morning for the rest of the crisis, Hughes would arrive at NPIC to review the intelligence 

findings from the night before, and he and Carroll would brief McNamara, Taylor, and the 

rest of the Joint Chiefs on the latest information. DIA personnel in the Pentagon fed target 

intelligence developed by the reconnaissance photos to the military commanders ordered to 

plan for an invasion of Cuba, and they published intelligence updates on the situation in Cuba 

and Soviet force preparedness worldwide for the Unified and Specified Commands.60 

On October 16, President Kennedy set up the ExComm, the Executive Committee of the 

National Security Council. Its members included Secretary of Defense McNamara, Secretary 

of State Rusk, National Security Advisor Bundy, Taylor, Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul 

Nitze, former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, and Attorney General Robert Kennedy, among 

others. From the start, the President’s advisors were deeply divided between hawks such 

as Taylor, McCone, and Nitze, who favored swift and strong military reaction, and the doves, 

like McNamara, Rusk, and others, who argued for moderation. The debate between the two 

groups colored the ExComm’s deliberations throughout the crisis.

On the 17th, photointerpreters at the NPIC discovered new SS-5 IRBMs at Guanajay, just 

west of Havana. These missiles had about the same yield as the SS-4s, about 1 megaton, 

but at 2200 miles, nearly doubled their range. In the next few days, they discovered more 

MRBMs at Sagua la Grande and IRBMs at Remedios, both located in north-central Cuba. 

With that news, Maxwell Taylor, supported by McCone, Nitze, and the rest of the Joint Chiefs 

of Staff, pushed for full invasion of Cuba. Others, including McNamara and Rusk, supported 

a proposal by former Ambassador to the Soviet Union Llewellyn Thompson for a blockade 

backed by the threat of an invasion. The president did not initially support this idea, but by 

October 18, had come around to Thompson’s position. From the start, the Joint Chiefs of 

Staff believed that the Soviets were establishing a permanent base on Cuba and favored a 

vigorous military response. They informed McNamara of this on the 16th, and reiterated their 

preference for an immediate air assault on all known missile sites, combat ships, armored 

formations, and potential nuclear warhead storage sites, coupled with a complete blockade of 

Cuba the next day.61
21

Defense Intelligence Historical Perspectives, Number 1

DIA and the Joint Chiefs saw eye-to-eye on the issue of Soviet basing in Cuba. In a 

memorandum circulated on October 20, the Agency took the position that the magnitude 

of the combined arms buildup indicated that the Soviets were indeed establishing a “prime 

strategic base” on the island. Their position was bolstered by a Special National Intelligence 

Estimate stating that “A major Soviet objective in their military buildup in Cuba is to 

demonstrate that the world balance of forces has shifted so far in their favor that the U.S. 

can no longer prevent the advance of Soviet offensive power even into its own hemisphere.” 

The SNIE also appeared to support the hawks on the question of military strikes, arguing that 

since the Soviets had no formal treaty with Castro’s regime, they would not risk a war with 

the U.S. over Cuba. It acknowledged that the U.S.S.R. may strike the U.S. elsewhere to offset 

any potential losses there if the Americans attacked, but that “the Soviet leaders would not 

deliberately initiate general war or take military measures, which in their calculation, would run 

the gravest risks of general war.” In short, the Intelligence Community calculated that a military 

assault on Cuba would of course lead to local hostilities with Soviet forces, but was not likely 

to lead to a global war.62

That same day, however, the ExComm voted in favor of a blockade and held direct military 

action in abeyance. McNamara split with the JCS and fully backed a blockade. The Secretary 

of Defense, who had been a consistent advocate of forbearance, voted for the blockade not 

San Cristobal 

MRBM Sites

Guanajay 

IRBM Sites Sagua La Grande 

MRBM Sites

Remedios 

IRBM Sites

Gulf 

of

Mexico

Caribbean Sea

North Atlantic 

Ocean

Key West

JAMAICA

BAHAMAS

CUBA

SA-2 SAM Sites

MRBM Sites

IRBM Sites 

Ground Force Installations

IL-28 Airfields

MIG-21 Airfields
22

Defense Intelligence Historical Perspectives, Number 1

on the basis of intelligence produced by his new DIA, which had not challenged the SNIE’s 

conclusions. Rather, after spending hours “wargaming” various scenarios with Gilpatric, 

McNamara came away convinced that a military assault would lead to war. There is no 

evidence that any reporting from DIA changed McNamara’s assumptions about the potential 

Soviet reaction at any point in the crisis.63

At 7:00 p.m. that Monday (the 22nd), in a televised address, Kennedy announced the 

presence of nuclear-capable ballistic missiles in Cuba and that he was ordering a “quarantine” 

to arrest Soviet action. The president was nevertheless keeping the military options open. With 

Kennedy’s and McNamara’s approval, and target intelligence from DIA, the Joint Chiefs were 

polishing invasion plans if the quarantine did not work. Military planners expected casualties in 

the area of 18,000-19,000 in ten days of combat. Those casualties would probably have been 

worse than projected because of the failure to identify the tactical nuclear weapons brought to 

Cuba by the Soviets. Moreover, U.S. intelligence was not aware of an additional 20,000 Soviet 

combat troops on the island. This key tactical intelligence only became apparent thirty years 

after the crisis.64

Following Kennedy’s announcement of the quarantine, Moscow announced that it was placing 

its military forces on a war footing. This turned out to be little more than Khrushchev’s typical 

bluster. Shortly after the Soviet announcement, DIA analysts monitoring Soviet forces worldwide 

confirmed that Soviet and Eastern Bloc troops were on alert, but not preparing for war.65

Nevertheless, Kennedy’s public announcement set 

off a flurry of activity in Cuba. Soviet troops and 

technicians rushed to unpack and assemble the Il-28 

bombers and complete operational preparations for 

the missiles. John Hughes reported to the Joint Chiefs 

that two of the six MRBM sites were operational, 

with another two undergoing a crash setup and 

expected to be operational within days. The two 

remaining launchers, the Agency surmised, would 

be operational within a week. On October 23, lowlevel reconnaissance missions validated by DIA and 

conducted by the Air Force and Navy began rocketing 

over the Soviet positions with no warning, jangling 

Soviet nerves and putting their troops on a hair 

trigger, increasing the fear of war. The flights provided 

extremely helpful intelligence, but fed the fear on Cuba 

that the U.S. intended to invade.66

On the evening of October 23, NSA reported that Soviet ships appeared to be turning around. 

The Navy, thinking the course change was a ruse, was skeptical, but by October 25, agreed that 

the ships suspected of carrying missile parts were returning to the Soviet Union. That same day, DIA Historical Research Support Branch

Low-level reconnaissance missions like this one over San 

Cristobal provided excellent intelligence on the readiness of 

the Soviet missile forces, but increased the risk of escalation.
23

Defense Intelligence Historical Perspectives, Number 1

Kennedy rejected the offer of a summit from Khrushchev and maintained that he would accept 

nothing less than total capitulation from the Soviets. After receiving Kennedy’s response, it 

became clear to Khrushchev that he had underestimated the American President.67

The quarantine appeared to be having the 

desired results. Its operation, however, 

demonstrated the limits of DIA’s ability 

in 1962 to coordinate and manage 

intelligence collection activities with the 

Services and the Unified and Specified 

Commands. The announced effort to 

board and search Soviet vessels provides 

a case in point. The presence of U.S. 

sailors and Marines aboard Soviet military 

cargo vessels presented an excellent 

collection opportunity for the Americans. 

Nevertheless, in an October 26 meeting 

between DIA officials and representatives 

of the Service intelligence organizations, 

it became apparent that there were no 

collection plans or collection operations 

being levied for the boarding parties. 

According to the Air Force representative present, “Operations in connection with quarantine 

and blockade are conducted in complete absence of intelligence collection operations.” While 

everyone present agreed that a coordinated intelligence gathering operation should take place, 

“Less clear,” wrote the unnamed USAF officer, “is who should take the initiative ... Neither DIA 

nor the Services could dictate to CINCLANT [Commander-in-Chief, Atlantic Fleet] how the 

collection operation should be conducted ...”68

This type of collection operation was tailor-made for DIA. It required the rapid coordination 

and validation of all of the Service intelligence requirements followed by a notice to CINCLANT 

from DIA that supplied planning and operational guidance for the naval boarding parties. No 

one present at the meeting, however, would agree that DIA even had the authority to manage 

such a mission, much less task CINCLANT to carry it out. Long-standing Service traditions 

and Carroll’s unwillingness to challenge them also impeded this potentially useful intelligence. 

The DIA Director himself admitted years later that he was unwilling to confront the Navy over 

issues related to the quarantine. “Can you imagine me,” he recalled, “an Air Force officer, 

approving the Navy’s plan for a quarantine?” The new Agency was therefore relegated to little 

more than a bystander in the failed effort to coordinate collection requirements during the 

Navy’s quarantine operation. The momentum it had built up at the beginning of the crisis was 

waning as war fears grew.69

On October 26, the text of a letter from Khrushchev arrived at the White House. In it, Khrushchev 

proposed removing the Soviet missiles from Cuba in exchange for a U.S. pledge not to invade 

the island. The ExComm was in no mood for a deal, however. Low-level photography indicated DIA Historical Research Support Branch

The USS Joseph P. Kennedy stops and boards the Marucla, a 

Lebanese cargo ship under Soviet charter to Cuba. Military 

intelligence failed to capitalize on these opportunities to collect 

information on the Soviet deployments.
24

Defense Intelligence Historical Perspectives, Number 1

that Soviet troops on Cuba were maintaining their accelerated missile site preparations. The next 

day, a more confident Khrushchev sent a second letter demanding the withdrawal of the U.S. 

Jupiter missiles from Turkey in exchange for removing the missiles from Cuba. Almost no one 

on the ExComm supported Khrushchev’s second proposal. Such a deal was political suicide for 

Kennedy, and worse, no U.S. leader could accept a public deal that would undermine the North 

Atlantic Treaty Organization’s confidence in the U.S. nuclear umbrella.70 

The morning of the 27th, Hughes informed the Joint Chiefs that five of the six MRBM sites 

were operational. Analysis done by DIA also reiterated the Agency’s position that the Soviets 

put missiles in Cuba to both improve their nuclear attack capability against the U.S. and to 

demonstrate that the U.S. could not stop a Soviet advance into the western hemisphere. This 

tense situation degenerated further at 10:00 that morning, when an SA-2 missile shot down 

a U-2 piloted by Major Rudolph Anderson, who was killed in the attack. News of his death 

reached the White House that night. Low-level reconnaissance flights were also receiving flak 

and small-arms fire. Furious, both Maxwell Taylor and McNamara argued—to no avail—in 

favor of air strikes on several different installations in Cuba.71

Just as the crisis began to spin out of control, word reached the ExComm on October 28 

that Khrushchev agreed to dismantle and remove the missiles from Cuba. Prodded by the 

President, Robert Kennedy had negotiated an agreement with Soviet Ambassador Anatoly 

Dobrynin in which the U.S. would pledge not to invade Cuba in exchange for the removal of 

the Soviet missiles. Kennedy and Dobrynin also secretly agreed to “consider” the issue of 

the Jupiter missiles in Turkey at a later date. The secrecy was necessary to avoid the public 

impression of caving to Soviet blackmail. Though the immediate fear of war receded, tension 

over verifying the missiles’ removal remained.72

Because of the brief time lag in processing the raw intelligence collected by the reconnaissance 

flight, DIA’s analysts were initially skeptical of the deal. The day after the agreement, Hughes 

reported to the Joint Chiefs that construction at the missile sites appeared to be continuing and 

that the operational status of the Il-28 bombers had remained the same (though Khrushchev’s 

agreement did not mention the bombers). Given this, DIA’s analysts also continued to believe 

that the Soviets were still intent on finding ways to offset the U.S. strategic advantage. They 

did not believe the agreement was genuine, arguing that Khrushchev’s message “Appeared 

to be an attempt to ward off any contemplated U.S. action that might destroy the bases.” 

As late as October 31, Carroll could report to Gilpatric that there was no evidence indicating 

the dismantling of the missiles sites and that the Soviets may have even begun additional 

construction on the island. Only on November 2 could the Agency confirm that the Soviets 

were abandoning the sites and bulldozing the construction. As a harbinger of things to come, 

however, DIA’s analysts also noted that assembly of the Il-28 bombers continued.73 

The issue of removing the bombers nearly torpedoed the entire agreement. By 1962, the Il-28s 

were becoming outdated, but were still considered a dangerous, nuclear-capable offensive 

threat able to reach American shores from Cuba. While DIA tracked the movement of missilerelated equipment on its way back to Cuban ports, the Agency also reported that the bombers 

still remained on Cuban airfields in various states of assembly. As diplomatic talks between 

the two nations proceeded, DIA analysts repeatedly noted that the bomber force on Cuba was 
25

Defense Intelligence Historical Perspectives, Number 1

growing as ground crews continued assembling more aircraft. The number of fully assembled 

bombers—seven by November 1—was small, but DIA personnel kept close track of them in 

the event the White House decided that an air strike was necessary.74

Moreover, the Soviets dragged their feet removing their ground forces from Cuba. On 

November 9, Carroll presented Taylor with an assessment pointing out that their continued 

presence “posed a potent source of influence on the internal political scene and that their 

retention would indicate that Moscow had not fully abandoned the concept of developing 

Cuba as a potential Soviet strategic base.” A week later, the entire USIB concurred with DIA’s 

assessment.75

In their negotiations with the Soviets, the White House chose to focus on the missiles and 

the bombers instead of the ground forces, which posed little immediate danger to the United 

States. After protracted negotiations during which the U.S. considered a covert sabotage 

operation against the bombers, Khrushchev relented and agreed to remove them. With that 

concession, Kennedy agreed to lift the naval quarantine. Finished intelligence provided by 

DIA to the Joint Chiefs confirmed that Soviet technicians began dismantling and crating the 

bombers by November 27. However, as late as February 1963, DIA estimated that 17,000 

Soviet troops remained in Cuba.76

DIA’s role in the crisis was not over, however, even if the prospect of war had passed. 

Persistent rumors about an ongoing Soviet nuclear presence in Cuba continued into 1963. 

Finally, on February 6, McNamara decided to take the classified case public to dispel rumors 

that the Soviets were still there. In a coda to the dramatic events of October, he scheduled 

a nationally televised briefing and ordered DIA’s John Hughes, who first informed Carroll of 

the presence of Soviet missiles and had staked out a reputation as a masterful briefer during 

the crisis, to conduct the briefing. Standing in front of a massive projection screen in the 

State Department and using a makeshift pointer fashioned from two fishing poles to highlight 

imagery from the crisis, the thirty-four-year-old Hughes provided a briefing which thrilled the 

President and put a stop to all but the most extreme rumor-mongering about Soviet missiles.77

DIA in the Cuban Missile Crisis: An Assessment

The Cuban Missile Crisis demonstrated in acute detail the potential and the limitations of the 

Defense Intelligence Agency in its formative years. Initially, the unified defense intelligence 

concept seemed to function well. DIA analysts made persuasive arguments for levying key 

reconnaissance missions over Cuba, and the Agency’s leadership was able to garner support 

for these controversial missions that were flown by the Air Force and led to the discovery of 

the Soviet missiles. Carroll’s energetic early efforts were also the impetus behind the tasking 

and coordination of Air Force and Navy reconnaissance missions. During September and 

October, Agency personnel performed brilliantly, piecing together bits of information to provide 

invaluable intelligence that offered fresh, convincing analytical insights and influencing key 

policy and operational decisions. DIA’s influence over tactical and operational issues waned, 

however, as the prospect of war increased. Agency personnel were unable to coordinate or 

manage Service requirements, which led to several lost opportunities. In light of the failure 
26

Defense Intelligence Historical Perspectives, Number 1

to discover tactical nuclear weapons on the island, this failure is particularly egregious. 

Ship inspections might have revealed the presence of such weapons, which would have 

considerably altered war plans and policy decisions at the national level. 

Aside from the erroneous September SNIE, DIA’s strategic intelligence estimation was 

in retrospect fairly accurate. Soviet documentation released in the 1990s indicates that 

Khrushchev’s gambit was intended to tilt the strategic balance in favor of the Soviet Union. 

The Soviet Premier hated and feared U.S. nuclear superiority and was intent on ending it 

by expanding Soviet power into the western hemisphere, much as DIA indicated he would. 

Moreover, given the scope of the Soviet buildup and the military hardware deployed in 

Operation ANADYR, the Soviets clearly intended to establish a large and permanent military 

presence on Cuba, an assertion made by DIA on October 20. Problematically, not one agency 

in the Intelligence Community had any way of knowing Khrushchev’s intentions with any 

certainty. U.S. intelligence had no sources in the highest levels of the Kremlin and therefore no 

way of knowing for sure what was on Khrushchev’s mind during the showdown. Despite its 

accuracy, DIA’s estimative analysis was in the end only one educated guess among many.78

Analysts and historians have often depicted the Cuban Missile Crisis as an intelligence triumph 

for the Central Intelligence Agency. While this is true, credit should also go to DIA for its early 

and penetrating intelligence analysis and its steady pressure for increased U-2 flights in the 

days before the missiles were discovered. Overall, the Agency also accurately portrayed the 

strategic dimensions of the crisis throughout October. Even so, the shortcomings in collection 

management and evident difficulties associated with intelligence production for combat forces 

made it clear that agency had serious problems in these key areas of intelligence support.

For DIA, the Cuban Missile Crisis was ultimately a study on both the efficacy of the integrated 

defense intelligence concept, with all its limitations and potential, and the choices made 

by policymakers to either exploit or ignore intelligence produced for them. Much of the 

Congressional resistance to the concept abated after the crisis, but the Services continued to 

resist. It would take another two years for the Agency to become fully operational, and Service 

resentment lingered well after that. 

* * * *

In 1961, the establishment of the Defense Intelligence Agency was supposed to bring about 

a sea change in how the United States operated its military intelligence establishment. Robert 

McNamara, ever the rational manager, envisioned an agency that would fully coordinate 

intelligence collection and analysis, resolve analytic bias, remove redundancy, and report its 

results directly to him. The Agency would serve as his foreign intelligence eyes and ears, and 

with it, he would remake U.S. strategic policy.

A year later, the complexity of the organization and the difficulty of crafting an entirely new 

agency in the face entrenched bureaucratic resistance had provided a hard dose of reality. On 

one hand, Roswell Gilpatric and Joseph Carroll had indeed begun the most sweeping change 

in the structure of U.S. military intelligence since 1947. On the other hand, the need to keep 

intelligence functions running during the transition period prolonged DIA’s development and 
27

Defense Intelligence Historical Perspectives, Number 1

offered plenty of opportunities for intransigent military leadership to slow the process. The 

Services, fearful of losing personnel, resources, and influence, used the phased development 

schedule as an excuse to delay, prevaricate, and attempt to undercut Carroll’s efforts to 

craft his new agency from their parts. The JCS may have agreed in principal, but in practice, 

the Services were less than supportive. The result was a new Agency beset with missed 

development deadlines and buffeted by military and Congressional criticism.

The Cuban Missile Crisis presented the hobbling young Agency with an opportunity to 

overcome much of this criticism. Indeed, in the summer and early fall of 1962, astute analysis 

and assertive management by individual DIA personnel led to important breakthroughs in 

Cuba, and the Agency deserves credit for unmasking one of the most dangerous Soviet 

military deployments of the entire Cold War. On the other hand, it was also clear that the 

Agency still had maturing to do. DIA’s inability to collect and validate requirements, then 

task them to the Navy’s quarantine force, closed off the potential opportunity to discover the 

tactical nuclear weapons components shipped by the Soviets, and it opened the possibility of 

a terrible intelligence surprise in the form of the nuclear annihilation of thousands of Americans 

on the beaches of Cuba had an invasion taken place. Some of the blame for this must rest 

with Joseph Carroll, nonconfrontational and honorable to a fault, who refused to challenge the 

Navy’s authority during the quarantine.

Thus DIA was off to a mixed start. In less than a year, McNamara, Gilpatric, and Carroll had 

planned and instituted a massive, sweeping reform of defense intelligence. In the face of 

great resistance, a new intelligence agency was being born, one that would go on to play a 

major role in U.S. national security issues for the next fifty years. But it was that self-same 

resistance, combined the occasional self-inflicted wound, that delayed the full activation of the 

Agency and kept those parts of it that had been established from fully realizing their potential. 

For the three men who served as the agency’s midwives, only time would tell whether or not 

DIA would survive its difficult birth. 

29

1 Steven L. Rearden, History of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Volume I: The Formative Years, 

1947-1950 (Washington, D.C.: Historical Office, Office of the Secretary of Defense, 1984), 12; Michael 

Warner, “The Collapse of Intelligence Support for Air Power, 1944-1952,” Studies in Intelligence, Vol 

49, No. 3 (2005), 42; Herman S. Wolk, Planning and Organizing the Postwar Air Force, 1943-1947

(Washington, D.C.: Office of Air Force History, 1984), 117; Walton S. Moody, Building a Strategic Air 

Force (Washington, D.C.: Air Force History and Museums Program, 1996), 50.

2 Warner, “The Collapse of Intelligence Support for Air Power,” 44; Wyman H. Packard, A Century of 

Naval Intelligence (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Navy, 1996), 28-29; On HUMINT failings, see, 

for example, Goda, “Tracking the Red Orchestra” in U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis (Washington, D.C.: 

National Archives Trust Fund Board, 2004), 293-316, and Michael B. Petersen, “The Intelligence that 

Wasn’t: CIA name Files, the U.S. Army, and Intelligence Gathering in Occupied Japan,” in Researching 

Japanese War Crimes: Introductory Essays (Washington, D.C.: Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial 

Government Interagency Working Group, 2006).

3 Rearden, History of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Vol. I, 17-23.

4 Patrick Mescall, “The Birth of the Defense Intelligence Agency,” in Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, North American 

Spies: New Revisionist Essays (Lawrence, KA: University of Kansas Press, 1991), 16; Rearden, History of 

the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Vol. I, 23-27, 35-43 . The National Security Act also established the 

National Security Council as a policy coordinating body and provided the legal authority to charter 

the CIA.

5 Quoted in Deane J. Allen, “Overview of the Origins of DIA,” http://dia.ic.gov/homepage/aboutdia/

History/shorthistories/orgins.html, accessed 12 December 2007. Eberstadt was a former Vice Chairman of 

the War Production Board and former Chairman of the Army Munitions Board. 

6 Rearden, History of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Vol. I, 42-43.

7 Allen, “Overview of the Origins of DIA,”; Deane J. Allen, “Organizational Relationship of DIA and the 

JCS/J2,” http://www.dia.ic.gov/homepage/aboutdia/History/shorthistories/relationship.html. Since 

1948, the Joint Chiefs of Staff received intelligence from a Joint Intelligence Group (JIG), composed of Army, 

Navy, and Air Force representatives. Size limitations severely restricted the JIG (which would eventually 

become the J-2 of the Joint Staff) and forced it to rely almost completely on the Services for support. The 

JIG could not act independently to provide intelligence assessments to the Joint Chiefs or the Secretary 

of Defense. This arrangement meant that neither the Joint Staff nor the Services had a forum to resolve 

differences of opinion. 

8 Ronald Cole, et al., The History of the Unified Command Plan, 1946-1999 (Washington, DC: Joint History 

Office, 2003), 13; John Prados, The Soviet Estimate: U.S. Intelligence Analysis and Soviet Strategic Forces 

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 40-44; Raymond L. Garthoff, “Estimating Soviet Military 

Intentions and Capabilities,” in Gerald K. Haines and Robert E. Leggett, eds., Watching the Bear: Essays 

on CIA’s Analysis of the Soviet Union, http://www.csi.cia.gov/books/WatchingtheBear/article05.html, 

accessed 10 November 2007. The official title of the Gaither Report was “Deterrence and Survival in the 

Nuclear Age.” It was published by the Security Resources Panel of President Dwight Eisenhower’s Science 

Advisory Committee, and named for the panel’s chairman, Horace Rowan Gaither. 

Endnotes
30

Defense Intelligence Historical Perspectives, Number 1

9 Mescall, “The Birth of the Defense Intelligence Agency,” 166-167; Cole, et al., The History of the Unified 

Command Plan, 26.

10 Prados, The Soviet Estimate, 123; Lyman Kirkpatrick, The Real CIA (New York: The MacMillan Company, 

1968), 217, 221.

11 Michael Warner and J. Kenneth McDonald, US Intelligence Community Reform Studies Since 1947, 

(Washington, D.C.: Center for the Study of Intelligence, 2005), 17-19; Kirkpatrick, The Real CIA, 225.

12 “The Joint Study Group Report on Foreign Intelligence Activities of the Unites States Government,” 

15 December 1960, in Deane J. Allen and Brian Shellum, eds., At the Creation: Origination Documents of the 

Defense Intelligence Agency (Washington, D.C.: DIA History Office, 2002), 13-14.

13 “The Joint Study Group Report,” Allen and Shellum, At the Creation, 13; Allen, “Overview of the Origins of 

DIA”; Kirkpatrick, The Real CIA, 226-227.

14 Memorandum of Discussion at the 473rd Meeting of the National Security Council, 5 January 1961; 

Memorandum of Discussion with President Eisenhower, 5 January 1961, Foreign Relations of the United States, 

1961-1963: Organization of Foreign Policy; Information Policy; United Nations; Scientific Matters (Washington, 

D.C.: GPO, 2001), 142-143.

15 Lawrence Kaplan, Ronald Landa, and Edward Drea, History of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, 

Volume V: The McNamara Ascendancy (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Secretary of Defense, 2006), 4.

16 Watson, History of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Volume IV, 474-475; Kaplan, et al., History of the 

Office of the Secretary of Defense, Vol. V, 296; Mescall, “The Birth of the Defense Intelligence Agency,” 178. The 

classic book on the subject of nuclear strategy is Lawrence Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy (New York: 

St. Martin’s Press, 1981).

17 McNamara to Lemnitzer, “Establishment of a Defense Intelligence Agency,” 8 February 1961, in Allen and 

Shellum, eds., At the Creation, 22-25.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid.

20 JCS 2031/166, Memorandum by the Director, Joint Staff for the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Establishment of a 

Defense Intelligence Agency, 7 April 1961, in Allen and Shellum eds., At the Creation, 27-33.

21 Gilpatric Memorandum, “Establishment of Defense Intelligence Agency,” 5 July 1961, in Allen and Shellum, 

eds., At the Creation, 39-40.

22 Ibid.

23 Department of Defense Directive 5105.21, 1 August 1961, in Allen and Shellum, eds., At the Creation, 43-45.

24 Lieutenant General Abbot Greenleaf remarks in conference marking the 35th Anniversary of DIA, 18 October 

1996, DIA Historical Research Support Branch (HRSB).

25 James Carroll, An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War that Came Between Us (Boston: Houghton 

Mifflin, 1996), 1.

26 Ibid., 54.

27 Gilpatric to Carroll, “Specific Responsibilities of the Director, Defense Intelligence Agency,” 12 August. 1961, 

in Allen and Shellum, eds, At the Creation, 59; Andrew Goodpaster Remarks, DIA 25th Anniversary Celebration, 

undated, HRSB. Quinn was a Major General before coming to DIA, but George Decker, the Army Chief of Staff, 

arranged a promotion for him if he served with the Agency. See William W. Quinn, Buffalo Bill Remembers: Truth 

and Courage (Fowlerville, MI: Wilderness Adventure Books, 1991) 36. 
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Defense Intelligence Historical Perspectives, Number 1

28 Gilpatric to Kennedy, 21 August 1961, in Allen and Shellum, eds., At the Creation, 61.

29 Andrew Goodpaster Remarks, DIA 25th Anniversary Celebration, HRSB.

30 Plan for the Activation of the Defense Intelligence Agency, in Allen and Shellum, eds., At the Creation, 

71-110. Gilpatric Memorandum, “Establishment of a Defense Intelligence Agency,” 5 July 1961, in Allen 

and Shellum, eds., At the Creation, 39; Allen, “Military Intelligence Board (MIB),” http://www.dia.ic.gov/

homepage/aboutdia/History/shorthistories/mib.html, accessed 15 December 2007. 

31 “Establishment of the Defense Intelligence Agency,” 1965, HRSB, 3.

32 Ibid.

33 Report of the Special Subcommittee on Defense Agencies, Committee on Armed Services, House of 

Representatives, 87th Congress, 2nd Session, 13 August 1962, 6603.

34 Ibid; Carroll testimony, Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, House of 

Representatives, 87th Congress, 2nd Session, 1962 (Hereafter HAC Hearings, 87/2), 810.

35 Air Force representatives, perhaps sensing the futility of obstruction and the advantages to being proactive 

while other Services dithered, eventually became a key source of assistance. They played a lead role in 

establishing DIA’s Current Intelligence and Indications Center and provided the physical space for its new 

Production Center.

36 Carroll to McNamara, “Establishment of the Defense Intelligence Agency,” 18 September 1961, in Allen and 

Shellum, eds., At the Creation, 64; David Cook Remarks, Faurer Remarks, DIA 25th Anniversary Celebration, 

HRSB; Carroll testimony, Hearings Before the Special Subcommittee on Defense Agencies, Committee on Armed 

Service, House of Representatives, 87th Congress, 2nd Session, 1962 (hereafter HASC Hearings, 87/2), 6770.

37 “Establishment of the Defense Intelligence Agency,” 6.

38 Author’s notes of discussion with A. Denis Clift, October 2007.

39 Kaplan, et al., History of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Vol. VI, 23; Decker testimony, HASC 

Hearings, 87/2, 6818. Decker’s criticism of DIA may have been disingenuous. He himself selected LTG 

Quinn, one of his best and most experienced intelligence officers, to head the agency. See Quinn, Buffalo Bill 

Remembers, 365.

40 Elizabeth Jeszenszky, “The Defense Intelligence Agency: Jointness is Goodness,” American Intelligence 

Journal, Summer 1992, 81; Faurer Remarks, DIA 25th Anniversary Celebration, HRSB. 

41 Rear Admiral Donald Showers Remarks before the Armed Forces Staff College, 21 March 1969, HRSB. A 

former DIA analyst has argued that the practical effect of the new Current Intelligence and Indications Center was 

that the Air Force had essentially absorbed the Army’s and Navy’s current intelligence functions. Army and Navy 

concerns were subsumed under the Air Force’s, which was concerned mostly with strategic issues, that is, the 

Soviet nuclear threat. See George Allen, None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam

(Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001), 130. 

42 HASC Hearings 87/2, 6768; Prados, The Soviet Estimate, 179.

43 John R. Wright Diary Entry in John R. Wright to Elie Abel, 15 November 1966, Elie Abel Oral History 

Interview with Dennis O’Brien, April 19, 1970, Appendix, John F. Kennedy Library Oral History Program, 

hereafter cited as Wright Diary.

44 Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble: Krushchev, Castro, and Kennedy 1958-1964, 

The Secret History of the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), 171-172; Raymond Garthoff, 

“The Cuban Missile Crisis: An Overview,” in James A. Nathan, ed., The Cuban Missile Crisis Revisited (New 

York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 41-42.
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Defense Intelligence Historical Perspectives, Number 1

45 Garthoff, “The Cuban Missile Crisis,” 41-43; Fursenko and Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble, 181-192; 

Michael Dobbs, One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War (New 

York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008) 37. The Presidium was the executive committee of the Supreme Soviet, which itself 

was the legislative body of the Soviet Union.

46 Wright Diary; Memorandum from the Chief of Operations, Operation Mongoose (Lansdale) to the Special 

Group (Augmented), 25 July 1962, FRUS 1961-1963, Vol. X, Cuba, Jan. 1961-September 1962, Document 

360.

47 Wright Diary; “Timetable of Soviet Military Buildup in Cuba, July-October 1962,” in Mary S. McAuliffe, 

ed., CIA Documents on the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962 (Washington, D.C.: Center for the Study of Intelligence, 

1992), 7; Chronology of JCS Decisions concerning the Cuban Crisis, 21 December 1962, in National Security 

Archives, Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962 microfiche collection (Alexandria, VA: Chadwyck-Healy, 1990), 1-2; 

Carroll Testimony, House Foreign Affairs Committee, 88/1, “Castro-Communist Subversion in the Western 

Hemisphere,” 173.

48 See Max Holland, “The ‘Photo Gap’ that Delayed Discovery of Missiles, Studies in Intelligence Vol. 49, 

No. 1 (2005). 

49 President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, “Chronology of Specific Events Related to the Military 

Buildup in Cuba,” National Security Archive, www.gwu.edu, accessed 15 May 2011, hereafter cited as PFIAB 

Chronology.

50 An article published in 2005 argues that Wright received this information from CIA officers in Task Force 

W (the CIA element supporting Operation MONGOOSE), who themselves received it in a coded message 

from a Cuban observer agent. They informed Wright because they wanted him to push a request for a U-2 

flight up his chain of command, fearing that intelligence developed by CIA would be portrayed as the product 

of “a politicized, overly aggressive, or simply unreliable agency.” Wright’s own testimony, offered in 1963 

but uncited by the author of the article, tracks a similar chronology, but the 2005 article cites an oral history 

interview conducted some forty years later to note a different source of the information. See Max Holland, “The 

‘Photo Gap’ that Delayed Discovery of Missiles.” In addition, the chronology prepared for the President’s Foreign 

Intelligence Advisory Board notes that “The fact that CIA considered San Cristobal as a suspect MRBM site was 

not included in any of CIA’s current intelligence publications until after photographic confirmation was obtained 

in mid-October.” See PFIAB Chronology, 38.

51 SNIE 85-3-62, “The Military Buildup in Cuba,” 19 September 1962, in McAuliffe, CIA Documents, 9.

52 Wright Diary; FRUS 1961-1963, Vol. X, Cuba, Jan. 1961-September 1962, 1054-1055. The HUMINT report 

has been declassified and released in McAuliffe, ed., CIA Documents on the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962, 

103-104. The briefing Wright delivered to McNamara and Taylor noted three SA-2 sites that he could not connect 

with any significant military installation, but that three and possibly four others were also located in western Cuba. 

See Wright Briefing, Box 14, Cuba, Cuba Intelligence, Maxwell Taylor Papers, National Defense University.

53 Laurence Chang and Peter Kornbluh, eds., The Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: The New Press, 1998), citing 

CINCLANT Historical Account of the Cuban Missile Crisis, 29 April 1963, 41-42; SAC, backed by Carroll, 

lobbied Gilpatric for control of the flights because of the growing military threat in Cuba. The Kennedy White 

House supported the proposal because it was eager to avoid another incident similar to the Francis Gary Powers 

shootdown in May 1960. Powers was technically an employee of CIA on a covert intelligence gathering mission at 

the time. An Air Force pilot could fly much less incendiary “military reconnaissance” flights. JCS Chronology, 3-4.

54 Dino A. Brugioni, Eyeball to Eyeball: The Inside Story of the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: Random House, 

1990), 151, 181.

55 Rear Admiral Samuel Frankel Oral History Interview, National Security Archives, Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962, 

Document No. 3258 (hereafter cited as Frankel OHI); JCS Chronology, 5; Fursenko and Naftali, One Hell of a 

Gamble, 221.

56 Brugioni, Eyeball to Eyeball, 208-209; Hughes and Clift, “The San Cristobal Trapezoid,” 154.
33

Defense Intelligence Historical Perspectives, Number 1

57 Brugioni, Eyeball to Eyeball, 209; Hughes and Clift, “The San Cristobal Trapezoid,” 154-155.

58 Roswell Gilpatric OHI, National Security Archive, The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962, Doc. No. 3253.

59 Frankel OHI; Hughes and Clift, “The San Cristobal Trapezoid,” 155; Brugioni, Eyeball to Eyeball, 226-228.

60 Hughes and Clift, “The San Cristobal Trapezoid,” 158.

61 Hughes and Clift, “The San Cristobal Trapezoid,” 155; Brugioni, Eyeball to Eyeball, 251-259; Fursenko and 

Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble, 230-231; Garthoff, “The Cuban Missile Crisis,” 47.

62 JCS Chronology, 23; SNIE 11-18-62: Soviet Reactions to Certain U.S. Courses of Action on Cuba, in 

McAuliffe, ed., CIA Documents on the Cuban Missile Crisis, 197-202. 

63 Fursenko and Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble, 236; Kaplan, et al., History of the Office of the Secretary of 

Defense, Vol. V, 209; Gilpatric OHI, 51.

64 Kaplan, et al., History of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Vol. V, 213; Garthoff, “The Cuban Missile 

Crisis,” 47.

65 Adam Yarmolinsky, “Department of Defense Operations during the Cuban Missile Crisis,” National Security 

Archive, The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962, Doc. No. 2925; JCS Chronology, 38-39.

66 JCS Chronology, 37; Fursenko and Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble, 254-255.

67 Brugioni, Eyeball to Eyeball, 391-392; JCS Chronology, 42, 44; Fursenko and Naftali, One Hell of a 

Gamble, 260.

68 Memorandum for the Record, “DIA Meeting – Cuba,” National Security Archives, Cuban Missile Crisis, 

1962, Doc. No. 1632.

69 Joseph Carroll Oral History Interview with Deane Allen, 13 August 1986, DIA HRSB.

70 Fursenko and Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble, 266, 271; Kaplan, et al., History of the Office of the Secretary 

of Defense, Vol. V, 213-214.

71 JCS Chronology, 48; Brugioni, Eyeball to Eyeball, 462; Fursenko and Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble, 277-281. 

72 Kaplan, et al., History of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Vol. V, 214.

73 JCS Chronology, 55, 60, 64.

74 Ibid., 68, 74.

75 Hughes and Clift, “The San Cristobal Trapezoid,” 162; JCS Chronology, 85, 95, 106.

76 This number is probably too low, given the gross underestimation of the troops in Cuba at the peak of the 

crisis. Kaplan, et al., History of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Vol. V, 216-217; JCS Chronology, 112; 

Carroll Testimony , House Foreign Affairs Committee, 88/1, “Castro-Communist Subversion in the Western 

Hemisphere,” 160.

77 Hughes and Clift, “The San Cristobal Trapezoid,” 163-164.

78 Oleg Penkovsky, the West’s best source in the Soviet Union, worked for the GRU, but was not privy to the 

political deliberations in the Kremlin. 

Michael B. Petersen is a Historian with the DIA 

Historical Research Support Branch. He previously 

served on the staff of the National Security Council 

and with the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial 

Government Records Interagency Working Group (IWG) 

at the National Archives and Records Administration. 

He holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of 

Maryland, College Park and is the author of Missiles for 

the Fatherland: Peenemünde, National Socialism, and 

the V-2 Missile (Cambridge University Press, 2009).

About the Author

The DIA Historical Research Support Branch

The Defense Intelligence Agency Historical Research Support 

Branch develops and preserves the institutional memory of 

DIA, conducts historical research and analysis in support of 

the DIA mission, and promotes historical awareness among 

the DIA workforce.
COMMITTED TO EXCELLENCE IN DEFENSE OF THE NATION

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