Several years ago I first read this article on remembering the Cuban Missile Crisis. While it’s from 2007, I think I more likely read it in 2012, when I read some anniversary stories, then Googled for personal remembrances.
Now, in this article, the author mentions a guide in Cuba saying there never were missiles:
That made me curious; I’ve heard many conspiracy theories on the Moon Landing and the JFK assassination. And on MLK and RFK assassinations. Even some tying Marilyn Monroe’s death in. But I’ve not heard many conspiracy/fringe theories (they don’t always involve conspiracies) on the Cuban Missile Crisis. I just thought of that article a few minutes ago, for no reason at all, and wondered if anyone else knew any CBC conspiracy theories.
There may in fct not have been any actual missiles at those sites.
As I recall, our reconnaissance planes discovered the sites as they were being prepared for missiles (it takes quite a bit of construction work to build a missile site, or it did then.) And the US objected quite strongly as soon as they had been identified as missile sites-to-be. I can’t remember if there were missiles on site, but still in crates at that time, or if the missiles were on ships enroute to Cuba. But there probably weren’t any installed & ready to launch at that time.
Of course, the story of painting palm trees silver is a foolish lie.
They might have done as the Cuban guide said. Military use of dummieshas a long history espeically in that era of not exactly top rate quality of pictures for photo recon.
However, I suspect the guide has taken the information about dummies which were meant to be employed to confuse USAF bombers and extrapolated that to never were any rockets in Cuba. Its possible also he meant that this was a dummy site and the jounalist took that to mean “he believes there were never any rockets”. God knows I have seen journalists misunderstand and misrepresent stuff before.
I dunno - it looks like there may have been a bitmore than painted palm trees in Cuba at that time.
As noted, there have been deceptions employed to fool aerial reconaissance (the Brits hired a magician to create such illusions during WWII, including one that convinced the Nazis that they’d heavily damaged an aircraft plant), but surveillance techniques were considerably more sophisticated by 1962.
Khrushchev thought he had missiles in Cuba. So obviously some Magic Organization had diverted the nukes he had sent there without his knowledge as well. And when the missiles were removed did the USSR get the palm trees instead?
There are ties to the Cuban Missile Crisis among the JFK conspiracy theories. Bay of Pigs comes up more often though because it led to the missile crisis. The crisis was over quickly, we won, but then we shook hands with the Soviets and went on with the Cold War.
Of historical note: one of Churchill’s loonier ideas (as First Lord of the Admiralty in WWI) involving creating a fleet of mock dreadnoughts. A bunch of non-military vessels (including ocean liners) were fitted with false superstructures and fake guns. This deception plan was supposed to strike fear into the Germans and confuse them about British intentions.
The pseudo-fleet was never actually deployed, and the vessels eventually were sent to do various prosaic tasks.
Dummies are used when your enemy already knows you have military weapons in the area. Dummies are to mislead him into believing you have more weapons than you actually do, or to confuse him about which ones are the real weapons.
Cuba/USSR were trying to do this in secret, to prevent the US from even knowing they were there until they were ready to go. So there would be no point to having dummies – it would actually be counterproductive.
That’s questionable. We had to (secretly) remove our missiles from Turkey that were already installed & ready to use and near the USSR; they had to stop working on building a missile site in Cuba. So we had to give up a longstanding, working missile site, while the one they gave up was just being developed and possibly not even operational yet.