Although U2 intelligence programs provided unprecedented and reassuring evidence that there was a missile gap in favor of the United States, President Eisenhower’s administration was accused of allowing the Soviet Union to accumulate a missile gap against the United States. The false claims behind a Soviet Missile gap began after CIA Director Allen W. Dulles presented new estimates of the Soviet’s nuclear program to the National Security Council on January 7, 1960. The report presented by Dulles showed the Soviet Union did not have a crash program to build ICBMs and that they only had 50 ICBMs operational. Disagreements between the future capabilities of the Soviet Union to produce ICBMs by members of the National Security Council leaked to the public causing the false notion of a missile gap. As members of the National Security Council, representatives of the Airforce pessimistically estimated that the Soviet Union could possess more than 800 ICBMs by 1963. One week after the National Security Council meeting, Washington Post reporter, John G. Norris, published an article that selectively reported and misinterpreted highly classified information that claimed the National Security Council acknowledged a missile gap with the Soviets and that they would possess over 1000 ICBMs by 1963. Later that month, The New York Times would publish an article that claimed that there was “clear evidence that the Russians superiority in intercontinental ballistic missiles.” The distortions and inconsistencies caused by the inaccurate articles in the media led the public to mistrust the Eisenhower administration. Senator Symington accused the administration of “deliberately manipulating the intelligence estimate to mislead the public.” Journalists, such as Joe Alsop, charged the Eisenhower administration with “gambling the nation’s future” on questionable intelligence. Alsop’s ideas would appeal to John F. Kennedy who incorporated them in his election campaigns that criticized the Eisenhower administration for allowing a missile gap to exist.