One minute to midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the brink of nuclear war (22 page)

Whatever his true mental state, Khrushchev was certainly disturbed by the latest turn of events. He had witnessed a conventional war up close, and had no desire to experience a nuclear one. As a top commissar at the battle of Kharkov in May 1942, he had seen an entire army wiped out unnecessarily because of the mistakes and stubbornness of political leaders. The Soviet Union had lost some 30 million people during the Great Patriotic War. The dead included Khrushchev's oldest son, Leonid, a fighter pilot shot down in a skirmish with the Luftwaffe. A nuclear war would almost certainly result in even more casualties. The chairman was determined to do everything in his power to avoid plunging his country into another war. But he also understood that there was now a danger of events spinning out of his--and Kennedy's--control.

Part of the problem lay in his own miscalculation of the likely American response to the deployment of Soviet missiles to Cuba. Khrushchev had assumed that Kennedy would end up grudgingly accepting Soviet missiles in Cuba just as he himself had accepted U.S. nuclear weapons in Turkey and Italy. The Americans would be irritated, even angry, but they would not take the world to the brink of a nuclear war.

"You don't have to worry; there will be no big reaction from the U.S.," Khrushchev had told Che Guevara when they first discussed the matter back in July. "And if there is a problem, we will send the Baltic fleet." When he heard this remark, Che raised his eyebrows in disbelief, but did not protest. He may have thought this was simply another of Comrade Khrushchev's little jokes. The Russian Baltic fleet was scarcely a match for the U.S. Navy: the last time it had been deployed into foreign waters was in 1904, when it was annihilated by the Japanese imperial navy, one of the greatest military defeats ever inflicted on Russia.

Like his opposite number in the White House, Khrushchev had ordered his armed forces to an advanced state of alert. All military leave had been canceled, and discharges from the army deferred indefinitely.

As he looked down the Presidium table, Khrushchev understood he had to prepare his colleagues for a probable retreat. He had concluded that he had "to dismantle the missile sites." But he wanted to implement this decision in a way that would permit him to claim that he had achieved his primary objective, the defense of the Cuban revolution. As Khrushchev described the situation, it was Washington, not Moscow, that was backing down.

"We have made Cuba a country at the center of international attention," he told the Presidium. "The two systems have come head-to-head. Kennedy is telling us to take our missiles out of Cuba. And we reply: 'Give us firm guarantees, a promise, that the Americans won't attack Cuba.' That's not bad."

A deal was possible. In return for a noninvasion guarantee, "we could take out the R-12s, and leave the other missiles there." This was not "cowardice," merely common sense. "We will strengthen Cuba, and save it for two or three years. In a few years' time, it will be even harder [for the U.S.] to deal with it." The important thing now was to avoid bringing the crisis "to the boil."

There were murmurs of "That's right" around the table. Nobody dared challenge the first secretary. Khrushchev insisted that the setback, if it was a setback at all, was only temporary.

"Time will pass. If necessary, the missiles can appear there again."

The tone of Soviet propaganda changed abruptly once Khrushchev decided, at least in principle, to withdraw the missiles. "Hands off Cuba," the Communist Party newspaper
Pravda
had fulminated earlier that morning. "The aggressive designs of United States imperialists must be foiled." The next day's headlines would read: "Everything to Prevent War. Reason Must Prevail."

It was now clear to Khrushchev's colleagues on the Presidium that their explosive leader had no intention of going to war over the missiles. Five thousand miles and seven time zones away in Washington, ExComm members had reached a similar conclusion about Kennedy. The president regarded a nuclear exchange as "the final failure," to be avoided at all costs.

The initial reactions of both leaders had been bellicose. Kennedy had favored an air strike; Khrushchev thought seriously about giving his commanders on Cuba authority to use nuclear weapons. After much agonizing, both were now determined to find a way out that would not involve armed conflict. The problem was that it was practically impossible for them to communicate frankly with one another. Each knew very little about the intentions and motivations of the other side, and tended to assume the worst. Messages took half a day to deliver. When they did arrive, they were couched in the opaque language of superpower diplomacy, which barred the writer from admitting weakness or conceding error.

Once set in motion, the machinery of war quickly acquired its own logic and momentum. The unwritten rule of Cold War diplomacy--never concede anything--made it very difficult for either side to back down.

The question was no longer whether the leaders of the two superpowers wanted war--but whether they had the power to prevent it. The most dangerous moments of the crisis still lay ahead.

The two men sent by the CIA to sabotage the Matahambre copper mine were hacking their way through thick Cuban forest. Their progress was slow and tortuous. Before reaching the forest, Miguel Orozco and Pedro Vera had waded, knee-deep, through a mangrove swamp, with heavy packs on their backs. Orozco carried the radio transmitter, a small generator, and an M-3 semiautomatic rifle. Vera carried three packs of C-4 explosive and timing devices. They had maps and compasses to figure out the direction they were going.

They slept by day and hiked by night. The only sign of civilization en route was a rough road along the coast, which they crossed without incident. They met no one. Even animals were wary of penetrating the dense morass of prickly bushes. Heavy rainstorms made the going more difficult.

On the third day, they had spotted a line of wooden towers supporting an aerial tramway system. They were heading for one particular tower, the so-called "breakover tower," on a 430-foot hilltop between the copper mine and the sea. It looked exactly the same as the model at the Farm, the CIA training camp in Virginia. Vera, a late addition to the sabotage team, had never seen the mock-up. Orozco had practiced climbing the tower many times. This was his fourth attempt to sabotage Matahambre.

They reached the base of the tower around midnight on the fifth day. The tramway operation had halted for the night, and all was quiet. Orozco shimmied up the fifty-foot-high tower. He attached two packets of explosives to different portions of the overhead cable. When the tramway restarted in the morning, one bomb would end up in the copper purification plant in Matahambre, the other in the dockside storage facility in Santa Lucia. Both bombs were designed to explode on contact.

In the meantime, Vera placed a bomb at the base of the tower. He linked it to a timing device, a pencil-shaped metal stick with an acid interior. The acid would slowly eat away at the metal until it set off an explosion, bringing the tower crashing down, along with the power cable leading to the copper mine. Although the bombs were not specifically intended to kill anybody, destruction of the power line would likely trap hundreds of miners below ground with no easy means of escape. The lack of power would also shut down the pumps that extracted water from the mine, causing serious flooding.

Their mission almost accomplished, the two saboteurs headed back for the coast. The return trip would be easier as they knew the way and could see clearly where they were going. They had agreed to meet the CIA exfiltration team between October 28 and 30.

By dawn, they were already well on their way back. The sea sparkled in the distance, across a line of pine-covered hills. Orozco was beginning to experience a sharp pain in his stomach, which made it uncomfortable to walk. It was nothing, he assured his friend.

8:00 A.M. THURSDAY, OCTOBER 25 (7:00 A.M. HAVANA)

At the Soviet Embassy in Washington, diplomats and spies were under pressure from Moscow to produce hard information about American invasion plans for Cuba. Agents counted the number of illuminated windows at the White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department, and struck up conversations with journalists in bars and parking lots. Military attaches tried to keep tabs on the movements of U.S. troop units.

So far, they had little to show for their efforts. Much of the intelligence "information" transmitted to Moscow was culled from the newspapers. Some of it was wrong. A dispatch from Ambassador Dobrynin identified Defense Secretary McNamara as a leader of the hard-line faction on the ExComm, with Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon as a leading opponent of early military action. The reality was the reverse.

The paucity of accurate intelligence was particularly frustrating to the KGB station chief in Washington, Aleksandr Feklisov. He remembered the glory days during World War II, when Kremlin agents succeeded in penetrating the highest levels of the American government. As a young spy in New York, working under cover as a Soviet vice consul, Feklisov had helped run one of the most successful intelligence operations in history: the penetration of the Manhattan Project and the theft of America's nuclear secrets. His agents had included Julius Rosenberg, who provided Feklisov with a proximity fuse, one of the most prized items of American military technology.

It had been easy back then. Soviet prestige was high, particularly following the German invasion in June 1941. Many American left-wing intellectuals felt it was their duty to do whatever they could to help the country that was doing most of the fighting against Nazi Germany. Informants walked into the Soviet consulate in New York off the street, offering their services for purely idealistic reasons.

The Cold War, Khrushchev's revelations about Stalin's crimes, and the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 made life much more difficult for Soviet spies in the United States. They could no longer rely on ideology as the primary inducement for persuading American citizens to cooperate. Money, and in some cases blackmail, had become the KGB's preferred recruiting tools, but they were not nearly as effective as old-fashioned political sympathy.

The drying up of intelligence sources contributed to the Soviet leaders' many misconceptions about America. When Khrushchev visited the United States in 1959, he was insulted to receive an invitation to spend a couple of days at a place called Camp David with President Eisenhower. None of his American specialists knew anything about Camp David. Khrushchev's immediate reaction was that it must be some kind of internment center "where people who were mistrusted could be kept in quarantine." Considerable effort was required to establish that Camp David was "what we would call a
dacha,
" and that the invitation was an honor, not an insult. In his memoirs, Khrushchev would laugh about the incident, saying it showed "how ignorant we were."

When Feklisov returned to the United States in 1960 as KGB station chief, or
rezident,
in Washington, his sources consisted mainly of purveyors of low-level gossip. His agents prowled around the National Press Club, where reporters and diplomats swapped rumors. By keeping their ears open, Feklisov's men were sometimes able to come up with interesting information that had not yet made its way into the newspapers.

On Wednesday evening, a KGB agent working undercover as a TASS correspondent had picked up a prize morsel of gossip in the club. The barman, a Lithuanian emigre called Johnny Prokov, had overheard a conversation between two reporters for the
New York Herald Tribune,
Warren Rogers and Robert Donovan. Rogers had been selected as a member of a pool of eight reporters to accompany the Marines in an invasion of Cuba, if and when there was one. He thought action was imminent, and told Donovan, his bureau chief, that "it looks like I'm going." Prokov relayed a garbled version of the exchange to the TASS reporter, who passed it to Feklisov, who passed it to Dobrynin.

By this time, the information was third or fourth hand, but Soviet officials in Washington were desperate for anything resembling inside intelligence. In order to confirm the tip, Feklisov had another KGB agent "accidentally" bump into Rogers in a parking lot. The agent, whose cover was second secretary in the Soviet Embassy, asked the reporter if Kennedy was serious about attacking Cuba.

"He sure as hell is," Rogers replied belligerently.

Later that morning, Rogers received a call from the Soviet Embassy inviting him to lunch with a senior diplomat, Georgi Kornienko. He accepted the invitation, thinking it might lead to a story. Instead, Kornienko pumped him for information. Not knowing what was really going on inside the ExComm, the reporter depicted McNamara and Bobby Kennedy as the main advocates of an invasion. As Kornienko relayed the conversation to his superiors, Rogers stated that the Kennedy administration had already taken a decision in principle "to finish with Castro." U.S. invasion plans were "prepared to the last detail" and could be implemented "at any moment." The only thing holding up an invasion was Khrushchev's "flexible policy." The president needed a pretext for attacking Cuba that would satisfy both the American people and the international community.

It was the tip the KGB had been waiting for. Both Dobrynin and Feklisov sent urgent telegrams to Moscow recounting the episode, which soon ended up on the desks of Khrushchev and other Soviet leaders. A hurried exchange in D.C.'s National Press Club had been elevated overnight into top secret intelligence information.

The Matahambre mine resumed operations at dawn. Several hundred miners had descended deep below the surface of the earth in metal elevator cages and were crawling through subterranean tunnels toward the rock face. The machinery was in need of repair--no new equipment had been imported into Cuba since the revolution--but the mine still managed to produce around 20,000 tons of copper a year. Much of the output went to the Soviet bloc.

A supervisor at the Santa Lucia end of the aerial tramway suddenly noticed that something was wrong. Felipe Iglesias had been operating the conveyor system for more than twenty years, from the period when the factory was still under American management. He was watching the conveyor buckets move slowly down from Matahambre when he spotted a strange object attached to the cable. If it went any further, it would get tangled in the machinery.