CIA director who alone warned that Soviet missiles were coming to Cuba
He warned that a surprise attack on Cuba would leave the United States with a 'Pearl Harbor indictment,' and argued that Castro and Khrushchev should be given 24 hours' warning before any airstrike.
An American businessman and Republican, he was appointed CIA Director by President Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Throughout the summer and fall of 1962, he repeatedly warned that the Soviets would place nuclear missiles in Cuba, warnings the intelligence community dismissed, and on September 20, in the 'honeymoon telegram' sent from Paris, he demanded imaginative analysis of the Soviet buildup; on October 14 he ordered the U-2 overflights that discovered the missile sites. He served under President Johnson after Kennedy's assassination but resigned in 1965 over disagreements about the escalation of the war in Vietnam.
Career Timeline
- 1929Executive VP, Consolidated Steel Corporation
- 1937Co-founder, Bechtel-McCone Corp.
- 1941–1945President, California Shipbuilding Corp.
- 1950–1951US Under Secretary of the Air Force
- 1958–1961Chairman, US Atomic Energy Commission
- 1961–19656th Director of Central Intelligence