Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky Read Online Free Page A

insignificant. The only two places where you can find it reported are in a footnote, on another topic actually, in one of these national security journals, International Security , and also in a pretty interesting book by one of the top State Department intelligence specialists, Raymond Garthoff, who’s a sensible guy. He has a book called Reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis , and he brings in some of this material.   27
    Actually, other things have been revealed about the Crisis which are absolutely startling. For instance, it turns out that the head of the U.S. Air Force at the time, General Thomas Power, without consultation with the government—in fact, without even informing the government—raised the level of American national security alert to the second highest level [on October 24, 1962]. See, there’s a series of levels of alert for U.S. military forces: it’s called “Defense Condition” 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Usually you’re at “5”; nothing’s going on. Then the President can say, “You can move up to ‘3,’ ” which means, get the Strategic Air Command bombers in the air, or “Go up to ‘2,’ ” which means you’re ready to shoot, then you’re at “1,” and you send them off. Well, this guy just raised the level of alert unilaterally.
    Now, when you raise the level of alert, the point is to inform the Russians and to inform the other major powers what you’re doing, because they know something’s happening—they can see what you’re doing, they can see the S.A.C. bombers going up and the ships getting deployed: this stuff is all meant to be seen. So one of the top U.S. generals openly raised the level of security alert to just before nuclear war right in the middle of the Missile Crisis, and didn’t inform Washington—the Secretary of Defense didn’t even know about it. The Russian Secretary of Defense knew it, because his intelligence was picking it up, but Washington didn’t know. And this general did it just out of, you know, snubbing his nose at the Russians. The fact that this happened was just released about a year ago.   28
    M AN : At that point, did the Russians go up to the next level too?
    No, they didn’t react. See, we would have seen if they’d reacted, and Kennedy probably would have shot off the missiles. But Khrushchev didn’t react. In fact, throughout this whole period the Russians were very passive, they never reacted much—because they were scared. The fact is, the United States had an enormous preponderance of military force. I mean, the U.S. military thought there was no real problem: they wanted a war, because they figured we’d just wipe the Russians out.   29
    W OMAN : But are you saying that the U.S. intentionally created the Cuban Missile Crisis?
    Well, I’m not quite saying that. These are things that happened in the course of the Crisis—how we got to it is a little different. It came about when the Russians put missiles on Cuba and the United States observed that missiles were going in and didn’t want to allow them there. But of course, there’s a background, as there always is to everything, and part of the background is that the United States was planning to invade Cuba at the time, and the Russians knew it, and the Cubans knew it. The Americans didn’t know it—I mean, the American people didn’t know it. In fact, even a lot of the American government didn’t know it; it was only at a very top level that it was known.
    Government Secrecy
    There’s a point here to be made about government secrecy, actually: government secrecy is not for security reasons, overwhelmingly—it’s just to prevent the population here from knowing what’s going on. I mean, a lot of secret internal documents get declassified after thirty years or so, and if you look over the entire long record of them, there’s virtually nothing in there that ever had any security-related concern. I don’t know if Stephen Zunes [a professor in the audience], who’s