The First Domino
How Missiles in Turkey Set Off a Chain That Still Shapes America’s Enemies
It started not in Cuba, but in Turkey.
By the autumn of 1961, John F. Kennedy had been in the Oval Office for barely nine months. The youngest elected president in U.S. history was facing a Soviet Union that had crushed uprisings in Eastern Europe and was closing the nuclear gap. Inside the Pentagon, Kennedy’s generals came forward with a plan that was as bold as it was risky: station U.S. nuclear-armed Jupiter missiles in Turkey—mere minutes from the Soviet border.
For the hawks in Washington, the logic was simple: proximity equals deterrence. For Moscow, it would be nothing less than a pistol pressed to the temple.
By early 1962, launch pads near Izmir were operational. Sleek, white missiles rose from olive groves and farm fields, visible to the trained eyes of Soviet reconnaissance aircraft. The Kremlin’s high command noticed.
Khrushchev’s Countermove
In Moscow, Premier Nikita Khrushchev didn’t need an intelligence briefing to know what was at stake. A missile in Turkey could reach Soviet industrial centers in minutes—far faster than any weapon the USSR had in range of Washington.
The response was equal parts strategic and theatrical: move Soviet nuclear missiles to Cuba, 90 miles from Florida, under the innocuous cover of “tractor parts” shipments. On paper, the deliveries were civilian aid. In reality, they were components of medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles that could hit almost every major U.S. city.
Fidel Castro, still basking in the afterglow of surviving the CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion the previous year, didn’t need convincing. Hosting Soviet missiles meant deterrence against another American invasion—and a seat at the Cold War’s most exclusive table.
October 14, 1962 — The U-2 Photographs
On a Sunday morning in October, a U.S. Air Force U-2 reconnaissance plane traced a high-altitude path over western Cuba. Its cameras clicked off hundreds of feet of film. Back in Washington, in a dimly lit analysis room, CIA photo interpreters threaded the reels into projectors.
The images were stark: long concrete launch pads, missile erectors, and cylindrical crates resting in neat rows. In the corners of the frames, men in fatigues worked under the Caribbean sun. A red grease-pencil circled the missile launchers on the projection screen.
“They’ll be operational in under ten days,” one analyst warned.
That estimate launched thirteen days of hair-trigger brinkmanship now known as the Cuban Missile Crisis—a standoff that brought the world closer to nuclear war than ever before or since.
A Year Later — Mexico City
In October 1963, as the superpowers resumed their Cold War chess game, another drama was unfolding far from the public eye. In Mexico City, CIA surveillance teams recorded a lanky, nervous-looking man entering the Soviet Embassy. His name: Lee Harvey Oswald.
Within hours, he was spotted meeting with Cuban officials. The content of those conversations has never been fully disclosed, but the timing is haunting. One month later, on November 22, 1963, President Kennedy was shot dead in Dallas.
The Warren Commission concluded that Oswald acted alone. For many, the conclusion never fit the facts.
The 2025 Files
For decades, the details of Oswald’s Mexico City visit, the CIA’s surveillance methods, and Kennedy’s own private misgivings about his intelligence services were locked behind redactions.
Then, in March 2025, the U.S. government released more than 63,000 pages of previously classified assassination documents. This time, the black marker was gone from many of them.
The documents confirmed that the CIA had been monitoring Oswald months before Dallas—particularly during his time in Mexico City. They revealed that Kennedy distrusted the Agency deeply, a sentiment captured in memos by aide Arthur Schlesinger Jr. And they documented a startling fact: at least 14 Cuban diplomats were secretly on the CIA payroll in the early 1960s.
No single page provided a “smoking gun” that overturned the official history. But collectively, they told a story of a government engaged in deep, dangerous games: nuclear brinkmanship in Turkey and Cuba, espionage in Latin America, and intelligence wars whose secrets would outlast generations.
The Pattern That Would Repeat
The episode didn’t end in Havana or Dallas. It set a template: confront a rival, push the edge of escalation, cloak the operation in secrecy, and manage the fallout in public decades later.
That template would survive the Cold War, migrate into the oil markets of the 1970s, the shadow wars of the Middle East in the 1980s, and eventually into the financial and political architecture that made the United States both the world’s most powerful country—and one of its most targeted.
Next in this series: How Nixon’s quiet Sunday-night TV announcement in 1971 severed the dollar’s tie to gold, locked it to oil, and built the financial empire America would fight to defend for the next half-century.
Pop Culture Mirror — Dr. Strangelove (1964)
Just two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Stanley Kubrick released Dr. Strangelove, a black comedy about nuclear brinkmanship gone absurd. Its doomsday scenarios, rogue generals, and accidental war mirrored the very real paranoia of 1962 — only slightly exaggerated.
Films like From Russia with Love (1963) glamorized espionage, turning deadly spy games into suave adventure. The villains were often thinly veiled Soviet operatives, a stylish reflection of the real CIA–KGB chess match happening in places like Mexico City.
