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President John F. Kennedy was apoplectic. An article in The New York Instances on July 26, 1962, instructed readers that the Soviet Union had begun reinforcing some intercontinental ballistic missile websites with further concrete, rising the chances that the launchpads might survive an American nuclear strike.
The issue wasn’t that the story was unsuitable. The issue for the president was that the story was so correct that it had to have come from a high-level supply. The creator, Hanson W. Baldwin (1903-1991), was a properly revered navy affairs correspondent with nearly unparalleled insider entry on the Pentagon.
From studying The Instances, the Soviets would have discovered that American intelligence officers knew loads concerning the supposedly secret websites the place Soviet ICBMs lay hid in giant concrete “coffins,” at or close to floor degree. When the coffin lids opened, the missiles could possibly be raised for launching.
“It’s astonishing and disappointing {that a} reporter of Mr. Baldwin’s expertise and popularity ought to have been the instrument of so grave an act in opposition to the pursuits of the US,” President Kennedy mentioned in a confidential letter to Orvil E. Dryfoos (1912-1963), the writer of The Instances. The letter was given to the Museum at The Instances by Mr. Dryfoos’s daughter, Susan W. Dryfoos.
The letter was hand-delivered to Mr. Dryfoos by the president’s naval aide, along with an evaluation by the president’s Overseas Intelligence Advisory Board that the article would result in elevated concealment of Soviet ICBMs and a “extreme discount in our potential henceforth to acquire such intelligence.”
Lawyer Normal Robert F. Kennedy, the president’s brother, ordered the Federal Bureau of Investigation to plug the leak. “Twenty F.B.I. brokers spent August 1962 interviewing 238 navy and civilian personnel within the authorities to search out Baldwin’s supply,” Robert B. Davies wrote within the 2013 biography “Baldwin of The Instances.”
Mr. Baldwin by no means disclosed his sources. Mr. Davies wrote that in 2005 he discovered the identify in a transcript of interviews with Robert Kennedy: Roswell L. Gilpatric, the deputy secretary of protection. For his half, Mr. Gilpatric acknowledged assembly with Mr. Baldwin on July 7, 1962, however instructed the F.B.I. that he was not Mr. Baldwin’s supply.
There have been quickly larger issues to fret about when Soviet missiles had been found in Cuba. Mr. Gilpatric is credited with serving to persuade President Kennedy to impose a naval blockade slightly than attacking Cuba militarily, a course that may have prompted the Soviets to open these concrete coffin lids.
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