ABSTRACT
This chapter examines certain important problems preoccupied US intelligence and establishes how well informed intelligence was, whether it interpreted information correctly, and how well it predicted coming events. It provides the story of US intelligence performance just as it began to get its stride by clearing up the exaggerations and hysteria of the "missile gap" controversy to which it had earlier contributed. The Cuban missile crisis provides a unique opportunity to study the record of US intelligence before it becomes "ancient history", because the data used for analysis are largely in the public domain. The intelligence community interests in the military buildup in Cuba that began in summer of 1962. The major intelligence issues of the 1960s and early 1970s provide vivid illustrations. Intelligence was handicapped by its inability to entertain the hypothesis that Soviet leaders were acting on assumptions quite different from what Americans assumed them to be.
