Cuban Missile Crisis into Cuba. On October 13, Dobrynin was questioned by former Undersecretary of State Chester Bowles about whether the Soviets planned to put offensive weapons in Cuba. He denied any such plans. On October 17, Soviet embassy official Georgy Bolshakov brought President Kennedy a personal message from Khrushchev reassuring him that "under no circumstances would surface-to-surface missiles be sent to Cuba." As early as August 1962, the US suspected the Soviets of building missile facilities in Cuba. During that month, its intelligence services gathered information about sightings by ground observers of Russian-built MiG-21 fighters and Il-28 light bombers. U-2 spyplanes found
Missile gap a dangerous extremist, who worked with the American military to plant the idea of a Soviet first-strike capability to justify a pre-emptive American attack. That belief about Kennedy as a militarist was reinforced in Soviet minds by the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961, which led to the Cuban Missile Crisis after the Soviets placed nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962. A second claim of a missile gap appeared in 1974. Albert Wohlstetter, a professor at the University of Chicago, accused the CIA of systematically underestimating Soviet missile deployment in his 1974 foreign policy article, "Is There a Strategic Arms