Amplifying Efforts During The Cold War

Introduction: American intelligence collection against the Soviets during the Cold War was not effective. The United States was able to intercept suspicious activities and investigate further to expose what the suspicious activity was, but they failed to intercept critical movements of the Soviets before they occurred. Looking at the Cuban Missile Crisis, American signals intelligence was able to respond to Soviet movements and prevent much escalation, but they were unable to learn about and stop such movements preemptively. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, American Signals Intelligence was not successful because they did not detect IRBM and MRBM missiles in Cuba, even though they were able to intercept messages alluding to suspicious activity
Amplifying Efforts: The NSA and the rest of the signals intelligence community increased efforts to intercept/decipher messages in Cuba to better understand what they were working on and what the Soviets were doing with them. American surveillance efforts showed Russian military equipment in Cuban military bases and that Russian passenger ships weren’t disembarking tourists but other materials; they also monitored the movement of Russian cargo into Cuba; however, this cargo was mostly unidentified (Alvarez, American Signals Intelligence and the Cuban Missile Crisis, 171). On October 18, the NSA finally determined that 12/63 Cuban aircraft were definitely piloted by Russians, and another 22 were suspected to be piloted by Russians and on August 29, 1962 a US spy plane took a photograph of a Soviet SAM being constructed in Cuba. On October 28, 1962 an American U-2 traveling over Cuban airspace was shot down by Soviets (DNSA Collection, A Reconsideration of the Role of SIGINT during the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1). With this small look into the Soviet’s influence in Cuba, the United States was
The NSA then built multiple intercept stations on fishing trawlers that would float up and down South America and Africa. The NSA officers also established a handling channel codenamed “funnel” to deal with the possibility of offensive weapons in Cuba, which would be directly sent to the NSA’s director with the highest level of priority (Alvarez, American Signals Intelligence and the Cuban Missile Crisis, 171). The United States performed an electronic intelligence operation against Cuba to locate offensive weapons systems, where Komet missiles and “Spoon Rest radars” with SA-2 missiles were discovered. The NSA again diverted more energy and resources to collect signals intelligence on Cuba because the discovery of the missiles meant they needed to be fast and accurate, according to reports (DNSA Collection, A Reconsideration of the Role of SIGINT during the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1). The NSA and the rest of the signals intelligence community continued to work harder and gain more resources, but ultimately, they were spreading themselves too