The Cuban Missile Crisis: 40 Years On

Using recently declassified documents from the KGB archive and interviews with Soviet and Cuban insiders, former Moscow correspondent Allan Little retraces the steps leading up to 'Black Saturday', the day the world came close to nuclear war, and describes how disaster was averted. Detailed accounts include those from Castro's brother, a Soviet nuclear missile engineer and a former Cuban soldier. This is a fascinating and revealing documentary broadcast 40 years after the crisis.

The Soviet secret service, known as the KGB from 1954, became the world's largest foreign intelligence service and was as formidable domestically as it was abroad. It accessed every major Western security operation and obtained scientific and technical information to help develop Soviet military equipment, including submarines. Some of the KGB's power was reduced by Mikhail Gorbachev, who was Communist Party leader from 1985 until 1991, and part of its archive was released in 2001.