Dino A. Brugioni, in Eyeball to Eyeball: The Inside Story of the Cuban Missile Crisis, presents a fascinating and detailed account of the generally successful American policy in the 1962 confrontation with the Soviet Union over the Soviet effort to place nuclear missiles in Cuba. His work is invaluable as a sourcebook for understanding the behind-the-scenes formation of that policy, particularly with respect to the intelligence operations involved. As an insider in the photographic realm upon which President Kennedy relied so heavily for his policy, Brugioni was privy to matters of vital importance to any understanding of that crisis. If there is any reasonable criticism of Brugioni's work, it must focus on his blatant biases favoring the intelligence community, and on his failure to recognize the larger issues of foreign policy. In other words, the author assumes, from his limited perspective, that whatever the intelligence community does is right and good, and that if only political leaders would make proper use of intelligence everything would go well for the United States in world affairs.
In short, Brugioni's book can be seen as two works in one. If we read the book as a bird's-eye view of the operations of the intelligence community, it is valuable and, we trust, accurate. However, if we read the book hoping for an objective portrait of American policy in the Cuban Missile Crisis or in general, then we are going to be disappointed, for the author is a biased reporter who assumes that the policy which is based exclusively on American self-interest is the best policy.
Brugioni qualifies as a knowledgeable spokesman for the intelligence-gathering arm of the government in the 1950s and 1960s:
I was one of the original cadre of twelve people who
. . . organized the National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) in the mid to late 1950s. During the Cuban missile crisis, . . . the center became a focal point of...