According to the Wall Street Journal, the Pentagon recently spent at least $1.5 million to down high-altitude objects, including the infamous Chinese balloon that supposedly was spying on the United States. Oh well, what’s another $1.5 million added onto a national debt of almost $31.6 trillion dollars?
The entire panicked brouhaha over the Chinese balloon caused me to think about Major Rudolf Anderson, Jr., a U.S. Air Force pilot who got killed when his U-2 reconnaissance plane got shot down while flying over Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
What was Anderson doing flying a spy plane over Cuba? He was spying! That’s right — he was doing the same thing to Cuba with his spy plane that the Pentagon is accusing China of doing with its supposed spy balloon.
Major Rudolph Anderson, Jr.
Anderson had no more right to be flying his spy plane over Cuba than the Chinese have any right to be sending spy balloons over the United States. Cuba is a sovereign and independent nation and under International law had every right to shoot down Anderson’s plane.
The incident occurred at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, a crisis that brought the United States and the Soviet Union (i.e., the Russians) to the brink of all-out, full-scale, nuclear war.
The dark irony is that it was the U.S. national-security establishment that was responsible for the Cuban Missile Crisis, just as it is responsible for provoking the current war in Ukraine through its NATO expansionary antics.
After the communists booted the pro-U.S. dictator Fulgencio Batista out of Cuba, the Pentagon and the CIA became obsessed with ousting Cuba’s communist regime and putting another Pentagon-CIA-controlled puppet back into power. In 1961, the CIA’s invasion of Cuba failed miserably and led newly elected President Kennedy to vow to destroy this evil and malevolent agency.
After that fiasco, the Pentagon relentlessly did everything it could to pressure Kennedy into ordering a full-scale military invasion of Cuba. Such pressure included Operation Northwoods, the top-secret false-flag operation that the Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously recommended to Kennedy. To his everlasting credit, JFK rejected the plan.
The Cubans and the Soviets knew that the Pentagon and the CIA wanted a full-scale military invasion of the island. That’s why they installed those Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. They wanted to deter the U.S. from initiating such an invasion. If the deterrence failed, they wanted the nuclear weapons in order to defend Cuba against the much more powerful U.S. military.
What is oftentimes lost in all this is that Cuba and the Soviet Union had the right under international law to install nuclear missiles in Cuba. That’s because, again, Cuba is a sovereign and independent country.
But Kennedy, the Pentagon, and the CIA were bound and determined not to let that happen. That’s why there was a crisis. Kennedy demanded that the Soviets remove the missiles. He also implemented a military blockade to prevent Russian ships from delivering any more missiles to Cuba. Under International law, that blockade was an act of war.
What was Kennedy’s justification for his actions? He, the Pentagon, and the CIA simply did not feel comfortable with having Russian nuclear missiles stationed so close to the United States.
In other words, their position was the same as Russia’s position in Ukraine today. Russia knows that if Ukraine becomes a member of NATO, as the Pentagon is insisting it should, the U.S. gets to install its nuclear missiles (and bases, troops, tanks, etc.) in Ukraine.
Russia is as opposed to that possibility as Kennedy, the Pentagon, and the CIA were opposed to Russia doing the same thing in Cuba. That’s why Russia invaded Ukraine — for the same reason that the Pentagon and the CIA wanted Kennedy to invade Cuba — to prevent nuclear missiles from being installed there.
At the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Major Rudolf was ordered to fly his military spy plane over Cuba to look for Soviet missiles. It was an illegal flight under international law. Rudolf had no right to be flying a spy plane over Cuba.
What is fortunate is that President Kennedy did not react with a military strike against Cuba, which likely would have led to all-out nuclear war between Russia and the United States. Instead, he reached a deal with the Soviets in which he promised that he would not permit the Pentagon and the CIA to again invade Cuba. He also promised to remove U.S. missiles in Turkey that the Pentagon had pointed at Russia.
Needless to say, the Pentagon and the CIA were enraged. The Joint Chiefs of Staff considered Kennedy’s resolution of the crisis to be the biggest defeat in U.S. history. As I point out in my book An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story, Kennedy’s resolution of the missile crisis was likely the point when the national-security establishment came to the conclusion that Kennedy needed to be removed from power.
Rudolf was 35 years old when he was shot down. He was born and raised in South Carolina. He was married to a woman named Frances Jane Corbett. I looked her up. She ended up dying in 1981 at the age of 46 from a respiratory ailment.
Needless to say, the Pentagon and the CIA looked on Rudolf’s illegal spy mission differently from how they look on China’s supposed balloon spy mission. Rudolf was hailed as a hero and was posthumously awarded the Air Force Cross for extraordinary heroism in connection with military operations against an armed enemy. Numerous memorials have also been erected in his honor.
Of course, it bears emphasizing that the United States was not at war with either Cuba or Russia and that Rudolf’s spy mission was as illegal as China’s recent balloon incursion over American skies. It also bears emphasizing that the Pentagon and the CIA brought America and Russia to the verge of nuclear war, just as they are doing today in Ukraine.
Several years ago, I visited the Museum of the Revolution in Havana, where part of the wreckage from Rudolf’s plane is displayed. In the museum, I happened to overhear a Cuban public-school teacher indoctrinating Cuban students about the longstanding U.S. aggression against Cuba. Of course, here in the United States, public-school teachers indoctrinate American students with a completely different interpretation of Cold War events.