One minute to midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the brink of nuclear war (6 page)

It had taken them nearly three months to become combat-ready. The regimental commander, Colonel Ivan Sidorov, had been given a special "government assignment" at the end of July. Much of August was spent packing the paraphernalia of a mobile missile unit: rockets, trucks, bulldozers, cranes, prefabricated huts, some 11,000 tons of equipment in all. The regiment needed nineteen special trains to reach the Crimean port city of Sevastopol from its base in western Russia. In Sevastopol, the regiment transferred to five cargo ships and a passenger liner.

All this was part of a much larger armada. To transport fifty thousand men and 230,000 tons of supplies across the ocean, Soviet military planners had organized a fleet of eighty-five ships, many of which made two or even three trips to Cuba. There were five missile regiments in all, three equipped with medium-range R-12s and two with intermediate-range R-14s. Other forces deployed to Cuba included four motor rifle regiments to guard the missiles, three cruise missile regiments, a regiment of MiG-21 fighter jets, forty-eight light attack Ilyushin-28 bombers, a helicopter regiment, a missile patrol boat brigade, a submarine squadron, and two antiaircraft divisions.

Like everybody else, Sidorov's men had no idea where or why they were being deployed. To confuse the enemy, the mission had been code-named Operation Anadyr after a city on the eastern tip of Siberia. Skis and heavy felt boots known as
valenki
were loaded onto the transport ships to fool any American spy loitering dockside into thinking the fleet was headed toward the freezing North. Communication with families was forbidden. "The motherland will not forget you," a representative of the Soviet General Staff told the troops as they set sail.

The first ship to depart was the 10,825-ton
Omsk,
on August 25. The Japanese-built freighter normally carried timber and had hatches large enough to accommodate missiles. The sixty-seven-foot-long R-12 rockets had to be stored in a diagonal position, propped up against a wall. Space was so limited that only Sidorov and his senior officers slept in cabins. Ordinary soldiers were crammed into the 'tween deck space beneath the bridge, normally used for storage. In all, 264 men had to share four thousand square feet of living space, just sixteen square feet per person, barely enough to lie down.

Instructions on the route to follow were contained in a series of sealed envelopes, to be opened jointly by the commander of the regiment, the ship captain, and the senior KGB representative. The first set of instructions ordered them to "proceed to the Bosphorus" the second "to proceed to Gibraltar." It was only after the
Omsk
had passed through the Mediterranean and entered the Atlantic that they opened the third set of instructions, which ordered them to "proceed to Cuba."

The atmosphere below decks was stifling. The sun beat down on the heavy metal hatches, pushing the temperature to over 120 degrees at times. Humidity reached 95 percent. The hatches were kept closed whenever foreign ships were around or they were close to land, as in the Bosphorus or the Straits of Gibraltar. Small groups of soldiers were permitted on deck at night to breathe the fresh air, an eagerly awaited privilege. Entertainment consisted of endless reruns of
Quiet Flows the Don,
the latest Soviet blockbuster.

Seasickness was a terrible problem. The ship rode high in the water due to the relatively light weight of the missiles and was tossed about on the waves when she ran into a severe storm in the middle of the Atlantic. Military statisticians later estimated that three out of every four passengers got seriously seasick. The average soldier lost twenty-two pounds in weight during the voyage. Thirty percent of the personnel were unable to do physical labor for a day or two after their arrival, and four percent were incapacitated for more than a week.

As the
Omsk
approached Cuba, U.S. Air Force planes began circling overhead, photographing the deck cargo. One night, Sidorov was woken by a powerful searchlight shining into his cabin. He hurried to the bridge, where he saw an American warship close on the starboard side. At dawn on September 9, as the freighter passed by the Guantanamo Naval Base, patrol boats came out to inspect her. A pair of jet fighters screamed overhead. It would take Washington many weeks to figure out what the
Omsk
was carrying. Relying on intercepted Soviet messages, the National Security Agency had concluded on August 31 that the cargo consisted of "barreled gas oil."

The rest of Sidorov's regiment followed three weeks later on a passenger liner, the
Admiral Nakhimov.
More than two thousand soldiers--described by the Soviet press as "agricultural workers and students"--crammed into a vessel built to carry nine hundred tourists. When the ship docked in Havana, the first thing the sick and exhausted soldiers noticed was smoke rising from a bonfire on land. A Soviet motorized rifle regiment was burning its unneeded ski equipment.

The scale of the Soviet deployment went far beyond the CIA's worst fears. Briefing the president on the afternoon of Saturday, October 20, McNamara estimated Soviet troop strength on Cuba at "six thousand to eight thousand." CIA analysts arrived at the figure by observing the number of Soviet ships crossing the Atlantic, and figuring out the available deck space. There was one missing element in these calculations: the ability of the Russian soldier to put up with conditions American soldiers would never tolerate.

By October 20, more than forty thousand Soviet troops had arrived on Cuba.

Once the missiles arrived on the island, they still had to be transported to the launching positions along winding, mountainous roads. Reconnaissance teams had spent weeks marking out the routes, building new roads and bridges, and removing obstacles. Mailboxes, telegraph poles, even entire houses were torn down overnight to permit the passage of eighty-foot trailers. "For the sake of the revolution" was the standard explanation provided to displaced residents by Cuban liaison officers accompanying the Soviet convoys.

It took two nights to unload the
Omsk,
which had docked in Casilda, a small fishing port on the southern Cuban coast that could accommodate no more than one medium-sized ship. The facilities were so primitive that the 500-foot-long
Omsk
had to be moved around several times, to access all the hatches. The missiles were removed from the ship in total darkness under the protection of a seventy-man detachment of Castro's personal bodyguard from the Sierra Maestra. Patrol boats prevented fishing boats from approaching the port and frogmen inspected the hull of the ship every two hours in case of a sabotage attempt.

To limit the number of eyewitnesses, movement of missiles was restricted to the hours of midnight through 5:00 a.m. Shortly before the convoy departed, police sealed off the route ahead, citing a "traffic accident." Police motorcyclists preceded the convoy followed by an assortment of Soviet jeeps and American Cadillacs and the lumbering missile transporters. Cranes and backup trucks brought up the rear, followed by more motorcyclists. Decoy convoys were dispatched in other directions.

Speaking Russian in public, and particularly over the radio, was forbidden. Soviet soldiers accompanying the convoy were required to wear Cuban army uniforms and communicate with one another with the Spanish words one through ten.
Cuatro, cuatro
might mean "halt the convoy"
dos, tres
"all clear" and so on. The system seemed simple enough, but it created endless misunderstandings. In tense situations, the soldiers would revert to Russian swearwords. Soviet officers joked that "we may not have confused American intelligence, but we certainly confused ourselves."

Three miles north of Casilda, the convoy reached Trinidad, an architectural jewel built by eighteenth-century sugar barons and slaveowners. Since the missiles could not possibly fit through the old colonial streets, Soviet and Cuban troops had constructed a detour around the town. The convoy then skirted the southern edge of the Escambray mountain range, a stronghold of anti-Castro guerrillas, and headed north into the plains of central Cuba.

As dawn broke, the drivers stopped for a rest in a forest outside the town of Palmira. The following night, when the convoy moved off again, news arrived that a bridge had been swept away by a tropical rainstorm. There was a delay of twenty-four hours as the entire male population of the region was mobilized to rebuild the bridge. The 140-mile journey took a total of three nights.

The site chosen for Sidorov's headquarters was tucked behind a range of low hills, between a sugar plantation and a stone quarry. Palm trees dotted the landscape. Soon construction troops were clearing the scrub for a battery of four missile launchers. Four more missile launchers were stationed twelve miles to the northwest, closer to the town of Sagua la Grande.

A tall, imposing man, Sidorov wasted no time making clear who was in charge. "Just remember one thing," the colonel would tell new arrivals in his welcome speech, his hands sweating profusely in the intense Cuban heat. "I am the commander of the regiment. That means I am the representative of Soviet power--the prosecutor, the defense attorney, and the judge, all in one person. So get to work."

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 20, 2:30 P.M.

JFK was on the second day of a long-scheduled campaign trip through the Midwest. Seeking to deflect attention from the international crisis brewing behind the scenes, he had been making a brave show of keeping his public engagements when he received a call from Bobby: he was needed in Washington. His brother urged him to return to the White House to settle a deadlock among his advisers. The time for decision had arrived.

The reporters were climbing aboard buses outside the Hotel Sheraton-Blackstone in Chicago to take them to the next political meeting when they heard that the event had been canceled. "The president has a cold and is returning to Washington," White House press secretary Pierre Salinger announced without further explanation.

Once they were aboard Air Force One, Salinger asked the president what was really going on. Kennedy did not want to tell him. Not just yet anyway. Instead, he teased him. "The minute you get back in Washington, you are going to find out what it is. And when you do, grab your balls."

After four days of agonized debate, the options had boiled down to two: air strike or blockade. Each course of action had its advantages and disadvantages. A surprise air strike would greatly reduce the immediate threat from Cuba. On the other hand, it might not be 100 percent effective and could provoke Khrushchev into firing the remaining missiles or taking action elsewhere. The eight hundred individual sorties planned by the Pentagon might result in such chaos in Cuba that an invasion would become inevitable. A blockade would open the way for negotiations, but might give the Soviets an opportunity to prevaricate while they hurriedly completed work on the missile sites.

The air strike option was known as the "Bundy plan" after its principal author, who was supported by the uniformed military. CIA director McCone and Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon also favored air strikes, but wanted to give the Soviets a seventy-two-hour ultimatum to remove the missiles before beginning the bombing. McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Ambassador to the United Nations Adlai Stevenson, and presidential speechwriter Theodore Sorensen all supported a blockade. Bobby had belatedly come round to the blockade option, but feared this might be "the last chance we will have to destroy Castro and the Soviet missiles on Cuba."

"Gentlemen, today we're going to earn our pay," said Kennedy, as he joined his advisers in his private Oval Sitting Room on the second floor of the executive mansion. "You should all hope that your plan isn't the one that will be accepted."

For the last couple of days, two rival drafts had been circulating within the White House of a presidential address to the nation announcing the discovery of Soviet missiles. One of the two drafts--the "air attack" speech presented to the president by Bundy--would remain locked away in the files for four decades:

My fellow Americans:

With a heavy heart, and in necessary fulfillment of my oath of office, I have ordered--and the United States Air Force has now carried out--military operations, with conventional weapons only, to remove a major nuclear weapons build-up from the soil of Cuba.... Every other course of action involved risk of delay and of obfuscation which were wholly unacceptable--and with no prospect of real progress in removing this intolerable communist nuclear intrusion into the Americas.... Prolonged delay would have meant enormously increased danger, and immediate warning would have greatly enlarged the loss of life on all sides. It became my duty to act.

Like Bobby, the president was now leaning toward a blockade after initially favoring an air strike. His mind was still not completely made up, however. Blockade seemed the safer course, but it too carried huge risks, including a confrontation between the U.S. and Soviet navies. After the meeting was over, he took Bobby and Ted Sorensen out to the Truman Balcony of the White House, looking over the Washington Monument.

"We are very, very close to war," he told them gravely, before deflating the moment with his mordant Irish wit. "And there is not room in the White House shelter for all of us."

CHAPTER TWO

Russians

3:00 P.M. MONDAY, OCTOBER 22 (10:00 P.M. MOSCOW)

Night had already fallen in Moscow when Nikita Khrushchev learned that his great missile gamble had probably failed. Reports had been arriving all evening of unusual activity at the White House and the Pentagon, culminating in the news that the president had requested airtime from the networks to address the American people on a matter of the "highest national urgency." The time set for the broadcast was 7:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, 2:00 a.m. the following day in Moscow.

The Soviet premier had just returned from a walk around the grounds of his residence on the Lenin Hills when he took the telephone call. He had selected this spot, high above a bend on the Moscow River, for his home because of its fabulous view over the city. It also had a celebrated place in Russian history. One and a half centuries before, on September 16, 1812, Napoleon had stood on this very hill as the conqueror of Europe. What should have been a moment of triumph was transformed by the scorched-earth tactics of the Russian defenders into his most terrible defeat. Instead of the prize he had hoped to claim, the emperor gazed out over a burning, devastated city. A month later, he ordered a general retreat.