CIA releases Cold War intel briefs

On October 30, 1962 President John F Kennedy received a secret CIA briefing on the first results of his diplomatic dance with Nikita Khrushchev to end the Cuban missile crisis.

Now, thanks to a major release of previously classified CIA documents, Cold War historians can read along with him the daily memos he and his successor Lyndon B Johnson received.

The 1960s were tumultuous years, and the news on that day was far from clear. Kennedy's spy chiefs were seeking concrete evidence that nuclear armageddon had been averted.

"We are so far unable to verify Kuznetsov's assertion that the Soviets have begin to dismantle their missile bases in Cuba," they wrote, referring to the deputy Soviet foreign minister.

Two days earlier, they had warned the president, under pressure from hawks in his administration to invade Cuba, that US planes had spotted 24 "fully operational" nuclear missile launchers.

Kennedy held his nerve, enforcing a naval quarantine of the island and reaching out to his Kremlin counterpart through diplomatic back channels.

The Soviets famously blinked and -- in exchange for Washington removing some missiles from Europe -- agreed to take their own medium-range weapons home from the Caribbean.

The documents released on Wednesday are still heavily redacted by US intelligence officials, but it is not hard to find telling examples of CIA hubris in these moments of victory.

Foreign policy experts had asked for the CIA to release the files, but the spy agency had long resisted, arguing that the act of briefing the president should be a secret.

The released documents can be viewed on the CIA's Freedom of Information Act website: http://www.foia.cia.gov.