One minute to midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the brink of nuclear war (31 page)

The proposal intrigued the secretary of state. If genuine, it could mark a breakthrough, a Soviet offer to end the crisis on terms that the United States could accept. The way in which the message had been delivered seemed a little odd: neither Feklisov nor Scali had previously been used as backchannel intermediaries between Moscow and Washington. But the Soviets presumably knew that Scali had good contacts at the State Department and was on particularly friendly terms with Rusk's intelligence chief, Roger Hilsman. By sending the proposal through a KGB man and a journalist, Khrushchev could disown the concessions if Kennedy refused to negotiate.

According to Scali, Feklisov wanted a reply as soon as possible. He had provided his home telephone number so that he could be called overnight, if necessary. Rusk drafted a response on a yellow legal pad. He cleared the draft with the White House and handed the sheet of paper to the newsman. It contained a two-sentence message that Scali was authorized to convey to Feklisov at the earliest opportunity:

I have reason to believe that the United States Government sees real possibilities in this and supposes that the representatives of the USSR and the United States in New York can work this matter out with [UN Secretary-General] U Thant and with each other. My definite impression is that time is very urgent and time is very short.

Feklisov was still at the embassy when Scali called back. They agreed to meet in the coffee shop of the Statler-Hilton on Sixteenth Street. The hotel was three blocks from the White House, one block from the Soviet Embassy. By Scali's watch, it was 7:35 p.m. when they arrived. They sat at a table in the back and ordered two coffees. Scali delivered Rusk's message from memory, without revealing precisely who it was from.

"Does this come from high sources?" Feklisov wanted to know, jotting down the points in his notebook.

"The highest sources in the U.S. government."

The KGB man thought about this for a moment, and then raised a new issue. He felt UN inspectors should be allowed into U.S. military bases in Florida and surrounding Caribbean countries to ensure that there would be no invasion of Cuba. Scali replied that he had no "official information," but his "impression" was that such demands would create political difficulties for the president. Right-wingers in Congress and the military were pushing for an invasion.

"Time is of the essence," Scali stressed.

Feklisov promised to convey the message to the "highest sources" in Moscow. He was in such a hurry to get back to the embassy, Scali later reported, that he paid for the coffee with a ten-dollar bill and did not wait for his change, most unusual behavior for a Soviet diplomat.

The encounter between the KGB agent and the reporter was a classic example of miscommunication between Moscow and Washington at a time when a single misstep could lead to nuclear war. Scali may have thought that he was being used as an intermediary to resolve the crisis--he certainly convinced the State Department and the White House that this was the case--but this was not at all the way the Soviets saw it.

Feklisov had been rummaging around for insights into U.S. government decision making since the start of the crisis. The onetime control officer for the Rosenberg spy ring was painfully aware of the pitiful state of Soviet foreign intelligence in the United States. He was under huge pressure from Moscow to come up with "secret information" from Kennedy confidantes. Since he lacked sources in the administration, he had to gather what crumbs he could from the outer rings of the circle. Well-connected reporters like Scali were the closest he could get to the Camelot court.

He had been meeting the ABC correspondent over coffee and the occasional lunch for more than a year. If nothing else, the meetings were a way of improving his English. A voluble Italian-American, Scali was "an exuberant type" from whom it was relatively easy to extract information. Feklisov's standard technique was simply to raise a topic that interested him and then insist at a certain point, "No, it can't be." Eager to display inside knowledge, Scali would reply with a comment such as "What do you mean, it can't be? The meeting took place last Tuesday at four p.m., and I can even tell you it was on the eleventh floor." Feklisov was constantly probing his American contact for information, without providing very much in return. He would throw out ideas just to test his reaction.

After leaving Scali at the coffee shop, Feklisov walked back to the embassy. Finally, he had some real information to transmit back to Moscow. He drafted a cable outlining the three-point solution to the crisis, emphasizing the fact that the reporter was speaking on behalf of "the highest authorities." But the two versions of the proposal differed in one crucial respect. By Scali's account, it was a Soviet initiative; Feklisov depicted it as an American one. What Scali and the Americans interpreted as a feeler from Moscow was in reality an attempt by his KGB contact to identify Washington's conditions for ending the crisis.

Feklisov only had authority to send cables to his direct superiors. To reach Khrushchev, or a member of the Presidium, he needed the agreement of the ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin. After pondering the
rezident
's report for a couple of hours, Dobrynin refused to sign the cable. He explained that the Foreign Ministry had "not authorized the embassy to conduct this type of negotiation." Dobrynin, who had his own backchannel to Bobby Kennedy, was skeptical of KGB initiatives.

The most Feklisov could do was to send his report to the head of foreign intelligence. By the time his cable landed in Moscow, it was already Saturday afternoon local time. There is no evidence that the cable played any role in Kremlin decision making on the crisis or was even read by Khrushchev. But the Scali-Feklisov meeting would become part of the mythology of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

At the same time that Feklisov was meeting with Scali at the Statler-Hilton, down the street at the White House the president was venting his anger over a wire service story saying that U.S. officials were hinting at "further action." Kennedy felt that his careful attempts to manage public expectations about the crisis had been jeopardized by an ill-considered comment from the State Department spokesman. He picked up the phone to personally reprimand the midlevel bureaucrat.

Of course, he knew that the spokesman had not meant any harm. Under pressure from reporters to feed them a little tidbit, Lincoln White had drawn their attention to a sentence in the president's address to the nation on Monday. In that speech, Kennedy had described the imposition of a quarantine around Cuba as a first step in a series of measures to oblige Khrushchev to withdraw his missiles. By singling out the phrase "further actions may be justified" if the Soviet continued "offensive military preparations," White had given the reporters a fresh news angle.

Further complicating matters was the fact that the ExComm had ordered White House press secretary Pierre Salinger to put out a statement summarizing the latest intelligence data from Cuba. Far from stopping work on the missile sites, the Soviets were "rapidly continuing their construction of missile support and launch facilities." With his finely tuned media instincts, Kennedy feared that the reporters would combine the White House and State Department statements and conclude that war was just around the corner. Headlines about imminent military action might force his hand, making it more difficult for him to find a peaceful way out. Any escalation had to be carefully calibrated.

"We got to get this under control, Linc," said Kennedy, his voice seething with frustration. "The problem is when you say further action's going to be taken, then they all say: 'What action?' And it moves this escalation up a couple of days, when we're not ready for it."

"I'm sorry, sir."

Apologies were not enough.

"You have to be goddamn careful! You just can't make references to past speeches, because that gives them a new headline--and they've now got it."

"I'm terribly sorry, sir."

10:50 P.M. FRIDAY, OCTOBER 26 (9:50 P.M. HAVANA)

Kennedy was not the only person to pick up on the State Department's hints about "further action." A thousand miles away, in Havana, Lincoln White's remarks had provoked concern among Cuban and Soviet military leaders. For Castro, they were yet another signal that Washington was preparing some kind of ultimatum on the removal of Soviet missiles. If the Soviets rejected the ultimatum, as he was sure they would, an invasion would follow "within forty-eight hours."

There had been other straws in the wind, in addition to the
Prensa Latina
report from New York earlier in the day. The most specific was a message to Castro from the president of Brazil, transmitted via the Brazilian ambassador in Havana, Luis Bastian Pinto. Brazil had information that the American government was planning to destroy the missile sites unless construction work was "suspended within the next forty-eight hours." Castro took this message very seriously. He was on good terms with Bastian Pinto, who was also well regarded in Washington. In the meantime, Soviet commanders on Cuba were hearing reports about the Strategic Air Command moving to a state of "full military readiness."

Analyzing all this information, Cuban and Soviet officials concluded that the most likely scenario was an American air strike followed by an invasion. The attack could begin any time. The more they thought about it, the more they convinced themselves that the first phase of the attack--the air strike--would probably come overnight.

The commander of Soviet forces on Cuba, Issa Pliyev, had a reputation for caution. A cavalryman with neatly parted gray hair and trim mustache, he weighed his decisions carefully. He had seen enough fighting during the Great Patriotic War. He had no illusions about the likely outcome of a U.S. invasion of Cuba. Still recuperating from his gallstone problems, he tried to avoid excitement, waving away subordinates with alarmist reports. A few days earlier, his adjutant had brought him a report about a possible landing by anti-Castro guerrillas. Other Soviet generals wanted to speak to the commander in chief urgently. "Don't panic. Let them investigate with the Cuban comrades. It might be just a few fishermen," Pliyev had told his adjutant. "When they have thoroughly investigated the matter, report back to me." The report turned out to be a false alarm.

Now even Pliyev was getting worried. After meeting with Castro, he too had come to the conclusion that war was all but inevitable. He had ordered his staff to move to an underground command post, near the El Chico headquarters. Like Castro's bunker in Havana, the Soviet command post was equipped with sophisticated communications equipment, large quantities of food, and bunks for the general staff. As rumors spread of an American attack on Friday evening, Pliyev ordered his troops to full combat alert. He was ready, if necessary, for months of partisan warfare.

"We have nowhere to retreat," he told his commanders. "We are far from the motherland but we have enough supplies to last us five or six weeks. If they destroy us at the army level, we will fight at the division level. If they destroy the divisions, we will fight as regiments. If they destroy the regiments, we will go into the hills."

Pliyev rejected Castro's plea for Soviet soldiers to put on their uniforms. But he agreed to turn on the air defense radars and authorized air defense commanders to respond to a U.S. air strike by firing on enemy planes. He ordered the mining of the land approaches to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay. He instructed two of the Soviet air force's nuclear-armed cruise missile batteries to move up to their advance firing positions in eastern and western Cuba. And he ordered the release from storage of some of the nuclear warheads for the R-12 missiles aimed at targets in the United States.

There had been some initial confusion over whether Pliyev had the authority to use tactical nuclear weapons to resist a U.S. invasion. Soviet military doctrine called for field commanders to have responsibility for battlefield nuclear weapons in the event of war. The Soviet defense minister had drafted an order granting Pliyev such authority, but did not actually sign it. The latest version of the order, issued on October 23, made clear that Moscow retained full control over the use of all nuclear weapons. Nevertheless, Pliyev wanted to make sure that the missiles were ready to fire if war broke out.

At 9:50 p.m. Havana time, Pliyev sent a message to the Soviet defense minister summarizing his actions.

To the Director [a pseudonym for Malinovsky]

According to intelligence data available to us, the U.S. has identified several of the deployment sites of Comrade STATSENKO [chief of Soviet missile forces on Cuba]. The U.S. Strategic Air Command has issued an order for the full military alert of its aviation strike force.

In the opinion of the Cuban comrades, we must expect a U.S. air strike on our sites in Cuba during the night of Oct. 26-27, or at dawn on Oct. 27.

Fidel Castro has decided to shoot down American war planes with his anti-aircraft artillery in the event of an attack on Cuba.

I have taken measures to disperse
tekhniki
[euphemism for nuclear warheads] within the operating zone and to strengthen our camouflage efforts.

In the event of American air attacks on our sites, I have decided to use all air defense means available to me.

He signed the telegram "Pavlov," his official pseudonym.

Colonel Sergei Romanov had the reputation of being as hard on himself as he was on others. He had built his military career on the transporting and storing of nuclear weapons, and it now was in jeopardy. A convoy under his command had been involved in a fatal accident shortly after arriving in Cuba. A Soviet truck had attempted to overtake a slow-moving vehicle on a winding road, and had collided with a car driven by a Cuban civilian. The Cuban was killed. Romanov had received a Communist Party reprimand--a serious punishment. When he got back to Moscow, he would have to face the consequences, a prospect that filled him with dread.