Posted on Feb 23, 2021
The Once-Classified Tale of Juanita Moody: The Woman Who Helped Avert a Nuclear War
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On the morning of Sunday, October 14, 1962, Juanita Moody exited the headquarters of the National Security Agency, at Fort Meade, Maryland, and walked the short distance to her car, parked in one of the front-row spaces reserved for top leadership. The sky was a crystalline blue, “a most beautiful day,” she recalled later. Moody had just learned that the U.S. Air Force was sending a U-2 spy plane over Cuba to take high-altitude photographs of military installations across the island. Moody was worried for the pilot—twice already in the past two years a U-2 spy plane had been shot out of the sky, once over the Soviet Union and once over China. She was also worried for the country. Tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union were worsening by the day. President John F. Kennedy, American military leaders and the intelligence community believed that the Soviet military was up to something in Cuba. Exactly what, no one could say. “I went out and got into my old convertible at the precise moment I had been told this pilot was going to get into his plane,” Moody said.
The Once-Classified Tale of Juanita Moody: The Woman Who Helped Avert a Nuclear War
Posted from smithsonianmag.com
Cold War
Military History
Nuclear
Spying
Posted 4 y ago
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Little-known contributions by an accomplished woman, in government service to others, and in the right place, at the right time!
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Wow. What a career. The woman was a national treasure. Great service to our nation.
Also a lot of history in the article it is good to know.
I recall the 70s surveillance goings-on before all the sh_t hit the fan in the mid70s. It wasn't pretty . . .
Didn't know all the details about the Cuban Missile Crisis. Didn't know we more or less started the entire chain of events with the botched attempt to overthrow Castro. I do remember the seemingly simple chess-move type solution giving pause for thought about how international politics functioned . . . at potential dangerous cost to all. ("Finally, on the morning of October 28, after the United States secretly offered to remove its nuclear missile bases in Turkey and Italy, Khrushchev agreed to dismantle the missile sites in Cuba.")
And who could forget the crisis aspect of it that went on for weeks - at school, then at home was eventually in the nightly news - non-stop. We had drills nearly weekly at school where we were required to get in the position under our desks for "protection". It was no easy feat getting under one of those individual desks when many of us had nearly reached our adult size - and of course the futility of the "protection" offered from being under a tiny desk was obvious. So go memories, in retrospect, of the very active good 'ol Cold War days.
Also a lot of history in the article it is good to know.
I recall the 70s surveillance goings-on before all the sh_t hit the fan in the mid70s. It wasn't pretty . . .
Didn't know all the details about the Cuban Missile Crisis. Didn't know we more or less started the entire chain of events with the botched attempt to overthrow Castro. I do remember the seemingly simple chess-move type solution giving pause for thought about how international politics functioned . . . at potential dangerous cost to all. ("Finally, on the morning of October 28, after the United States secretly offered to remove its nuclear missile bases in Turkey and Italy, Khrushchev agreed to dismantle the missile sites in Cuba.")
And who could forget the crisis aspect of it that went on for weeks - at school, then at home was eventually in the nightly news - non-stop. We had drills nearly weekly at school where we were required to get in the position under our desks for "protection". It was no easy feat getting under one of those individual desks when many of us had nearly reached our adult size - and of course the futility of the "protection" offered from being under a tiny desk was obvious. So go memories, in retrospect, of the very active good 'ol Cold War days.
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