One minute to midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the brink of nuclear war (24 page)

Somewhat belatedly, U.S. intelligence had managed to ferret out many of the most powerful Soviet weapons in Cuba, including the R-12 medium-range missiles, the Ilyushin-28 bombers, the short-range Lunas, and the SAM antiaircraft missile network. But there was much that the Americans had been unable to find. They suspected that the Soviets had nuclear warheads in Cuba, but did not know where they were stored. They had grossly underestimated the numbers of Soviet troops. And they had absolutely no idea about the weapons system that was key to Moscow's plans for defending the island against a U.S. invasion. The story of the nuclear-tipped cruise missiles would remain a secret for forty years and is being told in detail here for the first time.

Had the Western diplomats been able to travel across the rolling hills past Mayari Arriba, they would have eventually come across a cruise missile base. The missiles were stored at a military barracks tucked away in the mountains. They looked like miniature MiG jets, about twenty feet long and three feet wide, with a stubby nose and folding wings. Some were still in their wooden crates; others were hidden under canvas in fields near the motor park.

The warheads for the missiles were located a few hundred yards away from the barracks, in concrete vaults previously used for storing artillery shells. Each warhead weighed about seven hundred pounds and contained a fourteen-kiloton nuclear charge, roughly the power of the Hiroshima bomb. The vaults were hot and humid, not at all suitable for storing nuclear warheads. But the ever resourceful Cubans had a solution for that problem. They scoured Santiago for old American air conditioners, ripping them out of the numerous brothels that had been closed down in the aftermath of the revolution. Before hooking the equipment up to Soviet army generators, Soviet technicians had to adapt the electric circuits from the American standard of sixty cycles per second to the Russian standard of fifty cycles.

Known by the Russian acronym FKR
--frontovaya krylataya raketa,
or "front-line winged rocket"--the cruise missiles were the descendants of the German buzz bombs that terrorized London during World War II. Nicknamed "flying bombs" or "doodlebugs" by the British, the German V-1 missiles were essentially unpiloted aircraft that dropped out of the sky when their fuel ran out. The Soviet trailer-launched missiles could hit targets up to 110 miles away, destroying everything within a radius of six thousand feet. A single FKR missile could devastate a U.S. aircraft carrier group or a major military base.

The Soviets had brought two FKR regiments to Cuba. Each regiment controlled forty nuclear warheads and eight cruise missile launchers. One regiment was stationed in western Cuba, not far from Mariel, near a town called Guerra. Its mission was to defend the vulnerable stretch of coastline west and east of Havana, where the Americans were expected to come ashore. The other regiment, headquartered at Mayari, had been ordered to get ready "to deliver a blow to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay." The plans for GITMO's destruction were closely coordinated with Raul Castro.

Raul was the quiet brother. For thirty-one years, he had lived in the shadow of his charismatic older sibling. He was small and scrawny, and had never been able to grow more than a few wisps of the beard that was almost part of the uniform of Cuban revolutionaries. He described Fidel as "the troublesome one" and laughed at his loquaciousness. He was as fanatical as his older brother, personally supervising the executions of many counterrevolutionaries, but he expressed his fanaticism in a different way. If Fidel was the visionary, Raul was the organizer.

It made sense for Castro to dispatch his younger brother to Oriente immediately after declaring the
alarma de combate
on Monday afternoon. Raul knew the region around Mayari intimately. The village had served as his military headquarters during the later stage of the war against Batista. Fidel had sent him and sixty-five followers from the Sierra Madre on Cuba's southeastern coast to establish a second front inland in the Sierra del Cristal. Mayari consisted of twenty-four ramshackle huts when Raul arrived in a convoy of ten jeeps and pickup trucks. He set up a command post in one of the huts, seized more territory, built an airstrip for the rebel air force, and established schools and health services. Soon Mayari was the capital of a "liberated zone" that extended across the mountains toward the Castro family finca at Biran.

Raul understood immediately that the cruise missiles would be crucial to preventing an American breakout from Guantanamo. Immediately after his arrival, he invited Soviet military commanders to his Santiago headquarters for consultations. Together, they reviewed plans for the destruction of the naval base. The commander of the local FKR regiment, Colonel Dmitri Maltsev, took out a map and briefed Raul on the positions of his troops.

The Soviet officer responsible for the ground defense of Oriente was Colonel Dmitri Yazov. (He would later become Mikhail Gorbachev's defense minister and a leader of the failed August 1991 coup against Gorbachev.) Like Kovalenko in Remedios, Yazov had great difficulty finding a suitable camp for his motorized rifle regiment. The first site was in a forest filled with poisonous trees and bushes. Unaware of the danger, the troops had used branches from the trees to construct makeshift huts and even beds. The monsoon rains released poison from the branches, infecting an entire tank battalion with terrible skin lesions. Other troops suffered from dysentery caused by spoiled food. The regiment redeployed to an airfield outside the city of Holguin, but its combat readiness was much diminished.

Soon after arriving in Oriente, Raul issued an order subordinating all manpower in the province to the Cuban army. Since he was minister of defense, this meant that every worker in Oriente was now under his personal command. Civilian jeeps and trucks became military vehicles that could not be driven without permission. Under the joint defense plan with the Soviets, Raul was also kept informed about the movements of Yazov's tanks and Maltsev's cruise missiles.

Everything was in place for an attack on Guantanamo. Raul had toured the hills above the naval base with Maltsev and had inspected the launch positions for the FKR missiles. Soviet troops had spent weeks clearing openings in the forest for the missile launchers, sealing off the sites with trenches and barbed-wire fencing. The launch positions were well camouflaged and much more difficult to detect from the air than the medium-range missile sites. Some equipment, such as antennas and generators, was prepositioned, but most would be brought in at the last moment.

Raul received regular intelligence updates from Cuban spies mingling with the workers who serviced the base, and commuted back and forth through the U.S. and Cuban checkpoints. The Cubans knew the numbers of Marine reinforcements and where they were deployed. The base was surrounded on all sides. If war broke out, the Soviet navy would mine the entrance to Guantanamo Bay while Yazov's troops blocked the land approaches. Several dozen heavy artillery pieces were stationed in the hills above the base.

The Soviet commanders were confident that the Americans still had no idea about the cruise missiles or their nuclear warheads, despite several U-2 flights over the area. An initial shipment of warheads had arrived on board the
Indigirka
in the first week of October, and had been distributed to the FKR regiments. Nuclear control officers had made the twenty-hour trip to La Isabela over bad roads to meet the
Aleksandrovsk,
unload the warheads, and bring them back to Mayari. They took elaborate precautions to conceal the destination of the convoy, sending decoy trucks and vans in the opposite direction to create maximum confusion.

In the meantime, trucks loaded with cruise missiles were already moving down the newly constructed road from Mayari in the direction of Guantanamo.

Known to the Marines as GITMO, the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base looked like a heavily fortified slice of American suburbia plunked down on the edge of a tropical island. Jeeps stood outside pleasant little one-story bungalows with neatly trimmed lawns. Trucks dragging howitzers and mortars drove along streets lined with bowling alleys, grocery stores, sparkling swimming pools, and a roller-skating rink. Tanks were parked on the edge of the twenty-seven-hole golf course, near road signs reading: TEN M.P.H. ZONE. CHILDREN PLAYING.

The relaxed, small-town atmosphere had disappeared the day Kennedy announced the discovery of nuclear missiles in Cuba. That morning, Marines went door to door, telling women and children they had an hour to pack and leave. By nightfall, 2,810 dependents had been evacuated. Their places were taken by five thousand Marine reinforcements, who fanned out across the fifteen-mile-long land border with Cuba. Naval gunfire ships moved offshore, ready to pound artillery positions in the hills above the naval base. A reconnaissance plane circled constantly overhead, identifying Soviet and Cuban military targets.

On Tuesday morning, a few hours after the president's speech, a U.S. Navy cargo plane ferrying extra ammunition to GITMO crashed while coming in to land. Minutes after the accident, the ordnance on board the plane began detonating in the extreme heat, producing a series of massive explosions and scattering wreckage more than a mile away. It would take four days to clear the area and find the charred remains of the eight-man crew.

Surrounded by protective mountains, GITMO offered the U.S. Navy one of the best natural harbors in the Caribbean. It was also a historical anomaly. The base agreement dated back to the days of Teddy Roosevelt, when Cuba was still under American protection. The fledgling Cuban government was compelled to lease the forty-five-square-mile enclave in perpetuity to the United States for an annual payment of $2,000 in gold coin, later converted to $3,386.25 in paper money. After the revolution, Castro denounced the base agreement as an "illegal" residue of colonialism and refused to accept the rent payments the Americans kept on sending. But he refrained from acting on threats to throw the
gringos
out of Guantanamo, knowing this would be treated as a casus belli by Washington.

Desperate for cash and intelligence, Castro permitted several thousand Cubans to continue servicing the base. Cuban workers manned the grocery stores, repaired and unloaded ships, and even participated in joint American-Cuban police patrols. After streaming through Cuban and American checkpoints at the main Northeast Gate, they were taken to their workplaces by U.S. Navy buses. The Cuban authorities also sold the base all its fresh water, pumping seven hundred million gallons annually from the nearby Yateras River.

As the naval blockade came into force, GITMO commanders braced for retaliatory action by the Cubans. But nearly half the 2,400 Cuban employees reported for work on Tuesday, and even more showed up the next day. The water supply continued uninterrupted. Many of the Cubans had been working at the naval base for years and were opposed to Castro. They provided information about Cuban and Soviet troop deployments to the Marines and welcomed the prospect of a U.S. invasion. Others cooperated with the Cuban secret police. The intelligence flowed in both directions, making everybody happy.

The Marines had good intelligence about troop movements and artillery positions in the immediate vicinity of Guantanamo. They had compiled a target list of dozens of key sites to be taken out in the first few hours of hostilities, including airfields, bridges, communications posts, military encampments, and suspected missile sites. But they attached little importance to the FKR missile base at Mayari Arriba, easily the biggest threat to GITMO. The Mayari area was described as a "low priority" military target in the joint operations plan.

Some of the intelligence coming back from the front lines was of dubious value. The GITMO commander, Brigadier General William Collins, was at first perplexed by reports of a mysterious Cuban signaling system in Caimanera, half a mile north of the fence line. Marines freshly dug in on the American side of the front line reported a series of yellow, green, and red flashes from the Cuban side.

Yellow, green, red. Red, yellow, green. Once he figured out the secret code, the general burst out laughing. His men had been observing a traffic light.

5:00 P.M. THURSDAY, OCTOBER 25

At first, Adlai Stevenson did not want to display the intelligence photographs of the Soviet missiles to the United Nations Security Council. It was the kind of flashy gesture that he naturally disliked. During a lifetime in politics, including two runs for the presidency, he found it distasteful to go for the jugular. As U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, he prided himself on keeping the debate civil and reasonable. Besides, he could never forget the time the CIA had duped him into trying to deceive the world, making him look like a fool in the process.

In April 1961, during the Bay of Pigs invasion, the State Department had persuaded the ambassador to show the United Nations a photograph of a Cuban air force plane that had bombed an airfield near Havana. The "evidence" turned out to be fake. The air raid had not been carried out by Cuban air force defectors, as the Kennedy administration claimed, but by pilots on the payroll of the CIA, in an old B-26 painted with Cuban insignia. To make the story about a defection more believable, CIA men had shot dozens of bullet holes into one of the planes, using .45-caliber pistols. Stevenson was humiliated.

Stevenson had his doubts about Kennedy's handling of the missile crisis. He felt that the United States should negotiate with the Soviets under UN auspices. It was clear to him that Washington would have to offer something in return for the removal of the missiles, perhaps the withdrawal of Jupiter missiles from Turkey and Italy or even the Guantanamo Naval Base. But he was also under pressure from the White House to take a tough public stand. Worried that Stevenson lacked backbone, Kennedy had dispatched John McCloy, all-purpose wise man and former American viceroy in Germany, to sit next to him in New York.

In the absence of live footage from Cuba or the blockade line, the Security Council was the closest the television networks could get to the climactic superpower confrontation. The Council provided the perfect backdrop for a contest of rhetorical gladiators. The chamber was dominated by a giant wall tapestry of a phoenix arising from the ashes--representing mankind recovering from the destruction of World War II. There was space for only twenty chairs around the circular table, providing an intimacy and dramatic intensity that the much larger General Assembly lacked. At moments of crisis, diplomats and officials would crowd around the entrances, watching the debate unfold.