Germany 'Warned U.S. Before Cuban Missile Crisis'
Fri Nov 29,11:00 AM ET
By Adam Tanner
story.news.yahoo.com
[Good luck with your thread, Hawkmoon. I've seen it on and off the no. 1 spot of the SI hot list...]
BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany warned the United States that Moscow planned to install nuclear missiles in Cuba months before the Cuban missile crisis threatened to spark nuclear war, a former head of German foreign intelligence said on Friday.
"The information was passed on but was not taken seriously. This was before the nuclear missiles were in Cuba," Hans-Georg Wieck, head of the German Intelligence Agency from 1985-90, told Reuters.
Wieck, who was a political officer in the German embassy in Washington during the crisis of October 1962, said the embassy's intelligence officer passed on the warning to U.S. authorities.
"We did not see the ships with the missiles on them but we received warnings," he said. "This came from discussions between Germans and specialists in the Soviet Bloc."
"We had an intelligence liaison officer at the embassy. A communication came from the German services with information about rockets and then was communicated further (to America) in a private conversation," he said. "This was in the summer in July or August."
The Americans only acted on October 16 when President John F. Kennedy summoned his closest advisers to discuss new photo intelligence identifying Soviet nuclear missile facilities under construction on Cuba.
The two-week crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear war and ended when Moscow ordered the missiles be withdrawn.
"It was the most dangerous moment in human history," Kennedy aide and historian Arthur Schlesinger said at a conference marking the 40th anniversary of the event last month.
Contacted at his Manhattan home on Friday, Schlesinger said he had not heard the story of the German warning before.
"The CIA assessment of the situation was that it was inconceivable that the Soviet Union would send missiles. They had never done it to the Eastern Bloc for example," he said.
"On the other hand McCone, John McCone, who was director of the CIA, did have a kind of presentiment that there might be missiles going, and maybe that view was kind of reinforced by the German intelligence."
Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador in Washington in 1962 who helped negotiate an end to the crisis with Attorney General Robert Kennedy, said the revelation about the German warning appeared new.
"I am hearing this for the first time. When I was working at the embassy and then later I never heard about this," he told Reuters by telephone from Moscow.
Nigel West, author of a book about the crisis with an emphasis on the spies involved, also said Wieck's story revealed a new footnote to the darkest hour of the Cold War.
"It is perfectly credible," he said, adding that the French supplied a similar warning before the crisis began. |
