One minute to midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the brink of nuclear war (60 page)

Moscow Domestic Service in Russian at 1404GMT on 28 October broadcast a message from Khrushchev to President Kennedy stating that the USSR had decided to dismantle Soviet missiles in Cuba and return them to the Soviet Union.

28 Oct 0908A

"I feel like a new man now," JFK told Dave Powers after digesting the news. "Do you realize that we had an air strike all arranged for Tuesday? Thank God it's all over."

Other members of the ExComm were equally ecstatic. John McCone was on his way back from nine o'clock mass when he heard the news over the car radio. "I could hardly believe my ears," he later recalled. The Soviet about-face was as unexpected as it was sudden. Donald Wilson "felt like laughing or yelling or dancing." After several nights with little sleep, wondering if he would see his family again, he was suddenly lighthearted, almost giddy.

It was a gorgeous fall morning in Washington. The leaves on the trees had turned a brilliant red and the city was bathed in golden sunshine. Arriving at the White House, George Ball was reminded of a Georgia O'Keeffe painting of "a rose growing out of an ox skull." Life had magically emerged from the shadow of death.

Bystanders noticed an extra spring in the president's step as he leapt out of his black limousine at the Church of St. Stephen eight blocks from the White House. Just hours earlier, he had been calculating the odds of nuclear war, putting them at somewhere between "one in three and even."

Photo Insert Three

A Soviet motorized rifle regiment stationed near Remedios parades in civilian clothes. Operation Anadyr was nicknamed Operation Checkered Shirt by Russian soldiers because they were issued very similar civilian clothes in hope of disguising their true identities.
[MAVI]

Previously unpublished U.S. Marine reconnaissance photograph of Tarara beach, east of Havana, renamed Red beach in the invasion plan. The Marines were expecting around five hundred casualties during the first day alone, an estimate that assumed the enemy would not use tactical nuclear weapons.
[USNHC]

Contemporary photograph of Tarara beach. Note the concrete bunker constructed in 1962 against a possible U.S. invasion of Cuba, now used as a lifeguard post for foreign tourists.
[Photo by author]

Previously unpublished photograph of the Bejucal nuclear storage site, taken from raw intelligence film shot by U.S. Navy Crusaders on Blue Moon Mission 5008 on October 25. Note the circular road, nuclear warhead vans, single security fence, and lax security at the main gate. See inset of vertical photograph of nuclear warhead vans, shot on the same mission.
[NARA]

Colonel Nikolai Beloborodov, commander of the Soviet nuclear arsenal on Cuba, at the helm of
Indigirka,
the first Soviet ship to arrive in Cuba with nuclear warheads.
[MAVI]

Previously unpublished photograph of the nuclear storage site at Managua, south of Havana, which was used to store the warheads for the tactical FROG/Luna missiles. Labels show the single security fence, the entrances to the bunker, and an antiaircraft site on top of the hill. Photograph shot on October 26 by U.S. Air Force RF-101 on Blue Moon Mission 2623.
[NARA]

Previously unpublished photographs of raw intelligence film from Blue Moon Mission 5025 on Saturday, October 27, showing frames before and after the pilot detected enemy antiaircraft fire. Frame 47 shows the San Cristobal MRBM Site No. 2. A fraction of a second later, in frame 48, the pilot turns sharply to the left to escape over the mountains. A photograph of a clock embedded in the film (see inset) shows the precise time of the incident, 20:22:34 GMT, which was 16:22:34 Washington time, or 15:22:34 Cuban time.
[NARA]

The Soviet cruise missile known as FKR, or
frontovaya krylataya raketa,
was aimed at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base during the Cuban missile crisis. The FKR was an unpiloted version of the MiG-15 jet fighter and could deliver a 14-kiloton nuclear warhead.
[Cuban government photo produced for the 2002 Havana Conference]

U.S. Marines guarding Guantanamo Bay Naval Base had no idea that nuclear cruise missiles were stationed in hills fifteen miles away.
[Distributed by the Pentagon]