<v Speaker 1>I'm Jerry Broadway, and this is Anonymous America where we

<v Speaker 1>take a deep dive into American history to find an

<v Speaker 1>individual who did something incredible and then was lost to

<v Speaker 1>the sands of time. In October nineteen sixty two, the

<v Speaker 1>world came about as close as it ever has to

<v Speaker 1>just completely ending. Two superpowers with thousands of nuclear weapons

<v Speaker 1>between them were facing off, and there was only ninety

<v Speaker 1>miles of ocean standing between them. For thirteen days, two

<v Speaker 1>men were one decision away from watching a war, and

<v Speaker 1>they both knew that when that war was over, there

<v Speaker 1>would be no winter. Russia had built secret nuclear missile

<v Speaker 1>sites in Cuba, and President John F. Kennedy wanted them gone.

<v Speaker 1>Nikita Krushchev, of course, flatly denied that any missiles had

<v Speaker 1>been sent there. And for thirteen days the world was

<v Speaker 1>on the brink while two men, each with the power

<v Speaker 1>to wipe the other off the map, faced off. And

<v Speaker 1>what finally pulled the world back from the edge wasn't

<v Speaker 1>a general, wasn't a president. It was a single photograph,

<v Speaker 1>and that photograph was taken by a man who was

<v Speaker 1>willing to fly straight into the guns to get it.

<v Speaker 1>For Maydad Productions, this is anonymous America. His name was

<v Speaker 1>William Ecker, Commander US Navy in the fall of nineteen

<v Speaker 1>sixty two. He ran a squadron with a nickname that

<v Speaker 1>fit them perfectly. They were called the Fighting Photo Squadron.

<v Speaker 1>They didn't drop bombs, they didn't fire missiles. In fact,

<v Speaker 1>the only thing they were capable of shooting were pictures.

<v Speaker 1>The planes of the Fighting Photo Squadron had no weapons

<v Speaker 1>at all. They just carried cameras where the guns would

<v Speaker 1>normally go. They were fast jets stripped of their weapons

<v Speaker 1>so they could fly alight, and they could fly low.

<v Speaker 1>By that October, the high altitude U two spy planes

<v Speaker 1>had already brought back grainy pictures that suggested the Soviets

<v Speaker 1>were secretly building nuclear missile sites in Cuba. But grainy

<v Speaker 1>it was not going to be good enough not to

<v Speaker 1>face down the Soviet Union, and certainly not to prove

<v Speaker 1>the United States case to the rest of the world.

<v Speaker 1>President Kennedy needed photographs that were so sharp and so

<v Speaker 1>undeniable that no one could argue with them, and that

<v Speaker 1>meant going in low, not seven miles up in the

<v Speaker 1>safety of the stratosphere. We're talking a few hundred feet

<v Speaker 1>off the deck, right over the missile sites, and right

<v Speaker 1>through the anti aircraft fire, unarmed and so On October

<v Speaker 1>twenty third, nineteen sixty two, Commander Ecker climbed into an

<v Speaker 1>unarmed RFA Crusader, took his wing man up beside him,

<v Speaker 1>and flew the very first low level run over Cuba.

<v Speaker 1>It was an operation with the code name Blue Moon,

<v Speaker 1>flying tree top height at several hundred miles an hour,

<v Speaker 1>cameras rolling the entire time. Commander Ecker said he came

<v Speaker 1>in so low and so fast that the skyline of

<v Speaker 1>Havana rose up in the windshield of his jet, where

<v Speaker 1>it had absolutely no business being. He was flying over

<v Speaker 1>the most dangerous piece of air on the face of

<v Speaker 1>the Earth at the time, in an airplane with nothing

<v Speaker 1>at all to shoot back with, and his one and

<v Speaker 1>only job was to hold it steady and let the

<v Speaker 1>camera do its work. Ekcker and his wingman brought those

<v Speaker 1>pictures home, not fuzzy shapes seen from seven miles up,

<v Speaker 1>but clear close, undeniable images of Soviet nuclear missiles sitting

<v Speaker 1>on Cuban soil. They rushed the film to Washington, and

<v Speaker 1>those were the photographs that ended up on the table

<v Speaker 1>in front of the President and his advisors. Those are

<v Speaker 1>also the photographs that got held up in front of

<v Speaker 1>the entire world at the United Nations while the Soviets

<v Speaker 1>stood there and tried to deny the whole thing. But

<v Speaker 1>there it was proof, the kind you can't argue with.

<v Speaker 1>For thirteen days, the world held its breath, and then

<v Speaker 1>the Soviets blinked, the missiles came out of Cuba, and

<v Speaker 1>the war that could have ended everything simply did not happen.

<v Speaker 1>Now President Kennedy knew exactly where those pictures had come from.

<v Speaker 1>He wrote Commander Eker a personal and told him one

<v Speaker 1>of the photographs was hanging on the wall of his office.

<v Speaker 1>He pinned the Distinguished Flying Cross on Ecker down in

<v Speaker 1>Key West, and Ecker Squadron received a unit commendation, the

<v Speaker 1>first one ever handed out for a peacetime operation. But

<v Speaker 1>here's the part that never quite made it into the

<v Speaker 1>history books. You know, when you and I think about

<v Speaker 1>the Cuban missile crisis, we picture the men in suits

<v Speaker 1>sitting around a table, sweating profusely, the President, the advisors,

<v Speaker 1>those tense phone calls in the middle of the night

<v Speaker 1>between countries, but no one ever thinks about the guy

<v Speaker 1>in the cockpit. The entire crisis turned on a single

<v Speaker 1>piece of evidence, and that evidence came from a pilot

<v Speaker 1>flying an unarmed jet at tree top level, trusting that

<v Speaker 1>in this situation a camera was more valuable than a gun.

<v Speaker 1>William Aker flew Navy planes for thirty two years and

<v Speaker 1>lived to the ripe old age of eighty five. And

<v Speaker 1>most of the people who know the story of those

<v Speaker 1>thirteen days, the closest to human race has ever come

<v Speaker 1>to the nuclear edge, have never heard the name of

<v Speaker 1>the pilot who end did it all and never fired

<v Speaker 1>or shot because he didn't have to. He was armed

<v Speaker 1>with the truth, and the truth did the rest. That's

<v Speaker 1>Commander William Ecker, and that is anonymous America.