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Incompetence That Shaped History

Khalid Elhassan March 9, 2020 33 min

Nineteenth century Washington Metropolitan Police Force officers. Washington Metropolitan Police

5. Sports and the Cuban Missile Crisis

The humiliating failure of the Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961 left the Kennedy administration leery of adventurism in Cuba. However, in September of 1962, a CIA analyst spotted numerous soccer fields along the Cuban coast, and grew concerned. Cubans did not commonly play soccer, but do you know who did? Russians. Soccer fields’ presence allowed the CIA to figure out that there were Soviets around.

US intelligence analysts worked out that the soccer fields indicated the presence of Soviet military camps nearby. Between that and other intelligence, Kennedy authorized U2 spy planes to overfly Cuba and see what was going on. Aerial photography revealed a significant Soviet presence in Cuba. More significantly, it also revealed the presence of Soviet missiles that could reach much of the continental US, including Washington, DC, within a few minutes. The result was the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.