Word: mig-23s
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...Council staff had asked the intelligence community for more information on Cuba. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski had speculated that there must have been more Soviet activity on the island than was immediately apparent, primarily because some 40,000 Cuban troops were in Africa and a number of Soviet MiG-23s were based in Cuba. Meanwhile, Senator Richard Stone, a Florida Democrat, began pressing in mid-July for an investigation of the reports of more Soviet troops in Cuba, but his demands received little attention. Washington skeptics noted that he was up for re-election and that he had many...
Shortly after President Carter took office in January 1977, he canceled the SR-71 flights over Cuba as part of a general policy of cutting back intelligence operations. The flights were not resumed until November 1978, when American intelligence began to fear that the Soviet MiG-23s stationed in Cuba might be capable of carrying nuclear weapons. But satellite and SR-71 photos did not clear up the matter. It took HUMINT to do the job. An agent with access to the MiG airfield was sent in to take a snapshot of a friend who just happened to be standing...
Castro also took the opportunity to scoff at Washington's concern over the disclosure that the Soviet Union had delivered 20 high-powered MiG-23 Flogger jets to Havana. One version of the Flogger can carry nuclear weapons, and its presence in the Caribbean would be a serious violation of the 1962 Kennedy-Khrushchev agreement that ended the Cuban missile crisis. The MiG-23s are "purely of a defensive nature," insisted Castro. He added that Cuba had received the warplanes a year...
...Castro's claims about those "defensive" MiG-23s, the U.S. still plans on a series of high-altitude reconnaissance missions over Cuba before taking the dictator's word that the MiGs are not the ones with offensive nuclear capability...
...taking office because they had irritated Cuba's Fidel Castro. From the SR-71 's photos, experts will be able to determine whether Cuba's Floggers can carry a nuclear payload. Meanwhile, a group of U.S. Senators visiting Moscow asked Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin about the MiG-23s, noting that their presence in Cuba might hurt the chances of the Senate's ratifying a strategic arms limitation treaty. Kosygin snapped at his visitors that he "didn't need a lecture" on the U.S. political system and that the planes were only defensive weapons...