One minute to midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the brink of nuclear war (23 page)

"Stop the conveyor," he yelled into the intercom that connected the Santa Lucia terminal with the copper purification plant in Matahambre. "There is something strange on top of one of the buckets."

"It looks like a bomb," shouted another worker, as he inspected the sticks of dynamite.

Within minutes, a second bomb was discovered, this time at the Matahambre end of the tramway. Teams of securitymen then walked the six-mile length of the tramway, meeting at the breakover tower. They found the final bomb planted by Orozco and Vera shortly before it was due to explode.

NOON THURSDAY, OCTOBER 25 (11:00 A.M. HAVANA)

Lieutenant Gerald Coffee was on his second low-level reconnaissance mission over Cuba. He had taken pictures of the medium-range missile sites near Sagua la Grande. Deep tracks were visible in the mud from the exercise of the previous night. His Crusader jet was headed east toward an intermediate-range missile site at Remedios that was still weeks away from completion when something caught his attention off the left nose of the aircraft.

About two miles to the north of the missile site was a large military-style camp. Coffee could see rows and rows of tanks and trucks, many of them under camouflage. He had to make a split-second decision. As wingman to a more senior pilot, he was meant to fly in lockstep with the lead plane along a preassigned track. But the target was too tempting to miss. The military camp was unlike any he had previously seen in Cuba. He pulled his steering column to the left, leveled his wings, and began taking pictures. His camera recorded several sharp twists and rolls as he maneuvered for the best position, photographing the sky, horizon, and green cane fields in quick succession.

The Crusader roared over the camp at nearly 500 knots, too fast for Coffee to get much sense of what he was photographing. He made a hard right, and fell back in behind his lead pilot. The pilots gave each other the thumbs-up sign, switched on their afterburners, and flew back northward across the Florida Straits.

It would take many weeks for the young Navy lieutenant to realize the significance of what he had just photographed. In due course, a letter of appreciation arrived from the commandant of the Marine Corps commending Coffee's "alertness in a rapidly changing situation." The letter went on to praise "the most important and most timely information for the Amphibious forces which has ever been acquired in the history of this famous Navy-Marine fighting team."

Coffee did not know it yet, but he had just discovered a new class of Soviet weaponry on Cuba.

The overflight of the Crusader was merely the latest in a long string of setbacks for Colonel Grigori Kovalenko, commander of the 146th motorized rifle regiment. His unit possessed some of the most destructive weapons in the Soviet army: T-54 tanks, guided antitank missiles, multiple rocket launchers known as Katyushas, and nuclear-tipped Luna missiles. But Kovalenko's men were sick and exhausted. Almost everything that could go wrong had gone wrong.

Their troubles began on the eighteen-day journey across the Atlantic, when half the soldiers came down with seasickness. Their misery was compounded by being trapped below decks in the boiling heat. After staggering off the boats, they were taken by truck to their deployment area, an abandoned chicken farm. The site was almost completely barren save for a few palm trees, bamboo huts, and a water tower that spewed out a brackish red liquid. Within a few days, soldiers were complaining of dysentery. There were a dozen cases at first, then forty, finally a third of the regiment. It was an epidemic.

Not only was the water poisonous, there was not enough of it. Accustomed to making do with very little themselves, the Cubans assumed that a single well would provide enough drinking water for four thousand soldiers. But a motorized rifle regiment consumed 100 tons a day. Water was required not just for the men but also for the military equipment. There was insufficient time to dig wells. They would have to move somewhere else.

It had taken the regiment a week to redeploy, to another desolate piece of land fifty miles to the east, near Remedios. During the move, a car carrying one of Kovalenko's senior officers crashed head-on with a Cuban truck, almost killing the passengers. The conditions at Remedios were not much better than in the first camp. Drinking water was trucked in from a spring fifteen miles away, but at least it was clean. The men cleared the snakes and large boulders out of the undergrowth, and pitched their tents. Then the rains began, drenching everybody and turning the red earth into a thick mud.

The redeployment was just about complete when Kennedy announced his naval blockade. Kovalenko knew that his regiment was on the front line of a new Cold War crisis, but had difficulty extracting useful information from his superiors. Fortunately, one of his officers was fluent in English. By tuning in to Miami radio stations and the Voice of America, he was able to keep the colonel up to date with the latest news.

The primary mission of the regiment was to protect the nuclear missile sites at Remedios and Sagua la Grande. Two other motorized rifle regiments had been deployed around Havana to defend the capital and the missile sites in Pinar del Rio Province. A fourth regiment was stationed in Oriente Province, in the east, to stop a breakout from Guantanamo. All the regiments--with the exception of the one in Oriente--possessed battlefield nuclear weapons.

Mounted on a light tank chassis, the Lunas were easily maneuverable. It took about thirty minutes to prepare them for firing, and another sixty minutes to reload. The rockets could deliver a 2-kiloton nuclear warhead over a range of twenty miles, destroying everything within a 1,000-yard radius of the blast and spewing radiation over a much larger area. Exposed American troops targeted by a Luna would have been killed instantly by the heat and the pressure. Troops inside vehicles might survive a few days before dying of radiation.

Kovalenko controlled two Luna launchers and four nuclear warheads. The Lunas were lined up neatly in the parking lot, alongside the Katyushas and the T-54 tanks, where they were photographed by Lieutenant Coffee.

Three hundred miles to the east, in the hills above Santiago de Cuba, the capital of Oriente Province, a CIA agent named Carlos Pasqual encoded his latest report in groups of five characters. He pulled his radio set and generator out of their hiding place. Together, they weighed a cumbersome fifty pounds. Making sure that nobody was around, he cranked up the radio set, tuning it to the high-frequency wavelength he used for communicating with headquarters. He tapped a succession of blips and bleeps into the ether and hoped for the best.

The message Pasqual wanted to convey to his superiors was not to expect much out of him over the next few days. They had been pestering him with requests and questions ever since the discovery of Soviet missiles on Cuba. The Cuban authorities had just announced they were commandeering private vehicles for the duration of the
alarma de combate.
Moving around the countryside without official permission had become practically impossible.

The son of a former Cuban air force chief under Batista, Pasqual had left Cuba after the revolution and volunteered his services to the CIA. After being smuggled back onto the island by small boat at the beginning of September 1962, he had made his way to a coffee farm owned by anti-Castro dissidents. From there, he sent dozens of reports to Washington, recording the movements of troop convoys, the unloading of Soviet ships in the port of Santiago, and the construction of rocket bases in the mountains. His most recent report, the previous day, had described the transport of military equipment toward Guantanamo.

It was nerve-wracking work. A tall man with very pale skin, Pasqual stood out from the black and mulatto peasants who had provided him with a place to stay. Everybody was scared, and he was unsure whom he could trust. A couple of weeks before, a relative of the owner of the farm had shown up unexpectedly, and had begun asking questions about the stranger. Pasqual spent the next few days hiding in the mountains, frightened that the militia were about to call. After that incident, he slept down in the cellar, curling up next to sacks of coffee beans. He made sure to leave the farm well before dawn so that no one would see him.

Pasqual worked for a spy network code-named AMTORRID, one of two main groups of agents and informers that the CIA had managed to infiltrate into Cuba during recent months. The other network, code-named COBRA, was based in Pinar del Rio Province at the other end of the island. In addition to intelligence-gathering activities, the COBRA team had branched out into small-scale sabotage operations, and had been supplied with 2,000 tons of arms and explosives by the CIA. Its principal agent claimed twenty subagents and several hundred informants and collaborators.

The CIA's problem in Cuba was the opposite of the KGB's problem in Washington: not too little human intelligence, but too much. In addition to COBRA and AMTORRID, the CIA also received intelligence tips from dozens of disaffected Cubans and refugees arriving in Miami on the daily Pan Am flight. Reports had been streaming into Washington for months about mysterious tube-shaped objects trundling through obscure Cuban villages on giant trailers. Many of the reports lacked detail: untrained observers could confuse a thirty-foot missile with a sixty-foot missile. Some of the reports were demonstrably false as they described weapons systems that had still not arrived in Cuba at the time they were purportedly seen. There was an improbable
Our Man in Havana
quality to many of the rumors. Four years earlier, Graham Greene had written a best-selling novel about a vacuum cleaner salesman who was paid large sums of money by British intelligence for drawings of a "rocket-launching pad" in the mountains of Oriente. The "top secret information" turned out to be sketches of the inside of a vacuum cleaner. The movie based on the book was filmed in Havana in 1959 in the months after Castro's takeover.

As they sorted through a mass of agent and refugee reports--882 such reports were disseminated in the month of September alone--CIA analysts found evidence to support whatever hypothesis was most fashionable at the time. It was difficult to sort out which reports were accurate, which were exaggerated, and which were false. In the words of the CIA official who drafted
The President's Intelligence Check List,
analysts had "come to view all such reports with a high degree of suspicion." The predominant view in the agency, prior to the U-2 flight of October 14, was that the deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba was far too risky for the Soviets to undertake. A September 19 National Intelligence Estimate concluded magisterially that "the establishment on Cuban soil of Soviet nuclear striking forces which could be used against the U.S. would be incompatible with Soviet policy as we presently estimate it."

Once the top CIA estimators had formally concluded that the deployment of Soviet nuclear weapons on Cuba was highly improbable, lower-level analysts were reluctant to challenge their opinion, even on the basis of eyewitness reports of missiles being unloaded from Soviet ships. On the night of September 19, just a few hours after the CIA issued its eagerly awaited Intelligence Estimate, a CIA informant was loitering on the dock at Mariel. He observed "large intercontinental rockets more than 20 meters [65 feet] long" being unloaded from a Soviet ship. His report made its way through a chain of agents to Miami and then to Washington, where CIA headquarters added the dismissive comment: "It is more likely that source observed [SAM] missiles being offloaded." In hindsight, the original report was extraordinarily accurate. An R-12 rocket packaged for transport without the nose cone measures sixty-seven feet in length, double the length of a V-75 SAM missile. Eight R-12 missiles had arrived in Mariel on board the Soviet freighter
Poltava
three days earlier.

It was not just CIA analysts who mistrusted reports of Soviet nuclear missiles until they were confirmed by overhead photography. Other experienced observers, along with the entire Western diplomatic corps in Cuba, were also skeptical. Britain's Man in Havana, Herbert Marchant, would later describe how he had picked up numerous rumors about "giant missiles, each one longer than a cricket pitch," being shipped to Cuba from the Soviet Union in the summer and early fall of 1962. He had dismissed the stories as "a wildly improbable sequel" to Greene's popular novel.

One of the rare dissenters from the conventional wisdom was CIA director John McCone, a hawkish Republican. McCone could not understand why the Soviets had stationed surface-to-air missiles all around the island unless they had something very valuable to hide. The purpose of the SAM sites was obviously to discourage the United States from sending U-2s over Cuba, he reasoned. Vacationing in the South of France with his new wife, he sent a stream of worried messages back to Washington questioning the official CIA estimate and speculating about the deployment of Soviet medium-range missiles. The messages became known as the "honeymoon cables."

As he tapped out his reports to Washington, Pasqual was unaware of the debate raging in the CIA about the value of human intelligence, or "Humint" as it was known in the trade. Recently, his AMTORRID network had picked up information about missile-related activity around the town of Mayari Arriba, in the Sierra del Cristal Mountains. Just two days earlier, on October 23, an AMTORRID message described a "convoy of 42 vehicles including seven missile carriers" heading up a newly built road to Mayari. There were also reports of "construction of underground installations" in the area.

The analysts back in Washington were too preoccupied with figuring out what was happening in the confirmed missile sites in western Cuba to pay much attention to what was going on in an obscure part of Oriente. They were unaware of the nuclear menace hanging over the Guantanamo naval base.

Western diplomats based in Santiago de Cuba had also taken note of a new road into the mountains and the frantic efforts to complete it. Driving through the area on the way to Guantanamo, the British consul noticed a "wide, unpaved, new road running North, curving over a low hill and disappearing from view." Cuban militiamen were dug in behind trees at the top of the hill, guarding the entrance to the road. Neither the consul nor any other foreigner had much idea what lay up the road.