Working long before the invention of automated GPS systems, they navigated primarily with maps and compasses and used landmarks like bridges and railroads to find their targets. The film brings home the dangers and difficulties the pilots faced. In all, I examined nearly 200 cans of film containing several thousand photographs. Beginning with that number, I ordered random samples of cans until I had identified the shelves where the Blue Moon material was generally located. I desperately needed the help of the researcher’s old friend, luck, and I got it when I stumbled across the identification number of one of the missile-crisis cans in a document I found in the Archives. Without it, requesting cans of Blue Moon film seemed like a hopelessly long shot. There is just one catch: The cans are numbered in a seemingly haphazard fashion, and the CIA finding aid for the materials is still classified. Researchers are not permitted at the Ice Cube, but they may order ten cans of film at a time, which are then air-freighted to the National Archives facility in College Park, Maryland. To my surprise, no one had ever requested the Blue Moon material. That tip launched me on a chase that led to a National Archives refrigerated storage room in Lenexa, Kansas, nicknamed “the Ice Cube,” the final resting place for hundreds of thousands of cans of overhead imagery taken during and after the missile crisis. A member of the team that prepared the photo boards for Kennedy, Brugioni told me that thousands of cans of negatives had been transferred to the National Archives, making them available for public inspection-at least in theory. I assumed that the raw footage was locked away in the vaults of the CIA until I received a tip from a retired photo interpreter named Dino Brugioni. When I was researching my 2008 book on the crisis, One Minute to Midnight, I came across stacks of declassified American intelligence reports based on the Blue Moon photographs. government has published only a handful of low-altitude photographs of Soviet missile sites-a small fraction of the period’s total intelligence haul. In the 50 years since the standoff, the U.S. They showed that the missiles were not yet ready to fire, making Kennedy confident that he still had time to negotiate with Khrushchev.
The Blue Moon pictures provided the most timely and authoritative intelligence on Soviet military capabilities in Cuba, during and immediately after the crisis. While Kennedy and Khrushchev engaged in a war of nerves that brought the world the closest it has ever come to a nuclear exchange, the president knew little about his counterpart’s intentions-messages between Moscow and Washington could take half a day to deliver. As the Cuban missile crisis reached its peak over the next few days, low-flying Navy and Air Force pilots conducted more than 100 missions over the island in Operation Blue Moon. Half a dozen analysts pored over some 3,000 feet of newly developed film overnight.Īt 10 o’clock the following morning, CIA analyst Art Lundahl showed Kennedy stunningly detailed photographs that would make it crystal clear that Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had broken his promise not to deploy offensive weapons in Cuba. and driven by armed CIA couriers to the National Photographic Interpretation Center, a secret facility occupying an upper floor of a Ford dealership in a derelict block at Fifth and K streets in Northwest Washington. The film was flown to Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, D.C. Banking away from the site, the pilots returned to Florida, landing at the naval air station in Jacksonville. Swooping over the target at a mere 1,000 feet, Ecker turned on his cameras, which shot roughly four frames a second, or one frame for every 70 yards he traveled. Kennedy was going to make the case that the weapons were a menace to the entire world, he would need better pictures. A U-2 spy plane, flying as high as 70,000 feet, had already taken grainy photographs that enabled experts to find the telltale presence of Soviet missiles on the island. Bruce Wilhelmy, he headed toward a mountainous region of western Cuba where Soviet troops were building a facility for medium-range missiles aimed directly at the United States. Ecker took off from Key West at midday in an RF-8 Crusader jet equipped with five reconnaissance cameras. Analysts failed to detect tactical nuclear warheads at a bunker near Managua. Low-altitude images, previously unpublished, reveal gaps in U.S.