Secret Removal of Jupiter Missiles from Turkey — Cuban Missile Crisis Resolution
The Jupiter missiles came out of Turkey in April 1963 and both governments said it had nothing to do with Cuba. The undertaking had been given in Robert Kennedy's meeting with Ambassador Dobrynin on 27 October 1962, in terms he made explicit: the missiles would be gone within four or five months, this was not part of the settlement, and if the Soviets referred to it publicly the assurance was void. Nothing was written down on the American side. The concealment served both. Kennedy could not be seen to have traded an ally's defences under pressure, with mid-term elections behind him and a re-election ahead; Khrushchev could not admit that he had extracted anything, since his own case at home was that he had saved Cuba. The removal was therefore presented as a routine modernisation, and it was in fact overdue — the Jupiters were liquid-fuelled, above ground and obsolete, and Polaris submarines were already covering the same targets from the Mediterranean. Turkey had objected for two years to any suggestion of withdrawal on the grounds of what it would signal, and was told in 1963 that a Polaris boat would be assigned to the eastern Mediterranean instead. The last missile was dismantled by 25 April. The historical cost of the secrecy was considerable. A crisis settled partly by concession was taught for thirty years as a demonstration that firmness alone works, and later administrations acted on that reading. Dobrynin's cable reporting the assurance was declassified in the 1990s, and Robert Kennedy's own memoir of the crisis, published after his death, omits it. The participants who knew maintained the omission for a quarter of a century.
- Year: 1963 CE
- Category: Diplomatic
