Thirteen days, seen through the intelligence files
Thirty years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the CIA published its internal documentary record. What did the agency know as the nuclear confrontation unfolded?
The story
In October 1962, an international nuclear crisis unfolded around Soviet missile deployments in Cuba. Three decades later, the Central Intelligence Agency assembled a collection of declassified reports and correspondence that lets readers encounter the event through the agency's own documentary record.
Edited by Mary S. McAuliffe of the CIA History Staff and published in Washington in October 1992, this volume reproduces intelligence memoranda, situation assessments, and documents with the characteristic redactions, classification markings, and cable formatting of Cold War bureaucracy. It traces how institutions recorded and assessed fast-moving events, not how they would later remember them.
The original government-issued paperback bears the printed insignia of the CIA and the flags of the United States, Cuba, and the Soviet Union. Its wrappers show wear and handling soil; the internal pages photographed remain legible. This is a 1992 documentary publication reproducing 1962 material, not a surviving 1962 classified file or an annotated personal copy.
Details
- Date
- 1992
- Publisher
- Central Intelligence Agency History Staff, Washington, DC
- Binding
- wrappers
- Condition
- Oversized cream printed paperback with cover soil, rubbed edges and a few creases; internal documents photographed. Pagination/collation not checked.
- Interpretation
- A history of an international crisis told not through hindsight, but through the forms, redactions, and language of the intelligence record. Of interest to readers of espionage, Cold War politics, government secrecy, and archival material.
