One minute to midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the brink of nuclear war (64 page)

The fact that the two opposing sides were armed with nuclear weapons served as an additional constraint on Kennedy. The nightmare haunting JFK was that a small incident, such as an exchange of fire between a U.S. warship and a Soviet submarine, would cause the deaths of tens of millions of people. It was sobering to think that a single Soviet nuclear warhead landing on an American city could result in more than half a million casualties, double the number of casualties of the Civil War.

Bismarck defined political intuition as the ability to hear, before anybody else, "the distant hoofbeats of history." Kennedy was surely listening acutely to the hoofbeats as the debate raged around him in the Cabinet Room on Black Saturday over the damage that could be done to NATO by giving up the Jupiter missiles in Turkey. His aides thought in political-military terms; he thought in historical terms. He knew that he had to call Khrushchev's bluff, or the balance of power between Washington and Moscow would be permanently altered. But he also understood, better than anyone else in the room, that future generations would never forgive him if he failed to do everything he could to prevent a nuclear war.

The Cuban missile crisis demonstrates the sometimes pivotal role of personality in politics. Character counts. Had someone else been president in October 1962, the outcome could have been very different. Bobby Kennedy would later note that the dozen senior advisers who took part in the ExComm debates were all "bright and energetic...amongst the most able people in the country." Nevertheless, in RFK's view, "if any of half a dozen of them were president, the world would have been very likely plunged in a catastrophic war." He based that conclusion on the knowledge that nearly half the ExComm had favored bombing the missile sites on Cuba, a step that probably would have led to an American invasion of the island.

Even with the benefit of hindsight, it is impossible to know what would have happened had JFK followed the advice of the hawks. It is conceivable that Khrushchev would have swallowed the humiliation. It is possible that he would have lashed out in Berlin or elsewhere. It is also conceivable that Soviet commanders on Cuba would have used tactical nuclear weapons to defend themselves, whatever their instructions from Moscow. A breakdown in military communications would have effectively devolved control over such weapons to the captains and majors who commanded each individual battery. We have seen how it would have taken just a few minutes to fire a nuclear-tipped cruise missile into the Guantanamo Naval Base. Had such an attack occurred, Kennedy would have been under enormous pressure to order a nuclear response. It would have been difficult to confine a nuclear war to Cuba.

There was much that Kennedy and his advisers did not know about Soviet military capabilities on Cuba. They exaggerated some threats and underestimated others. There were many intelligence failures, along with some noteworthy successes. After playing down the threat, the CIA discovered the construction of the missile sites in the knick of time, and predicted fairly accurately when each site would become operational. But the presence of tactical nuclear weapons on the island would remain a closely held Kremlin secret for more than three decades. The CIA believed there were between six thousand and eight thousand Soviet "advisers" on the island. In fact, there were more than forty thousand Soviet soldiers on Cuba, including at least ten thousand highly trained combat troops.

Reviewing this record, one is struck, above all, by the corrosive effects of conventional wisdom. The problem was not so much with the collection of intelligence as with its interpretation and analysis. Eyewitness reports of giant tubes being unloaded from Soviet ships were dismissed because they were at variance with the official CIA estimate that the deployment of Soviet missiles to Cuba was "incompatible with Soviet practice to date." A postmortem later blamed the "near-total intelligence surprise" on "a malfunction of the analytic process." It was a similar story with the principal nuclear warhead storage center at Bejucal. Numerous photographs were taken of the bunker, along with nuclear warhead vans and cranes parked nearby. The analysts dismissed the site from serious consideration because it was protected by a single security fence, in contrast to the multiple fences and guard posts visible at similar installations in the Soviet Union.

Knowing what we now know, it is hard to quarrel with JFK's decision to go with a blockade of Cuba rather than an air strike leading to a possible invasion. He was surely justified in not taking the risk of provoking the Soviets into what McNamara called "a spasm response." We can only be grateful for his restraint. For all his personal flaws and political mistakes, perhaps in part because of them, Jack Kennedy cuts a very human figure. At a time when politicians were routinely demonizing the other side, he reminded Americans what they had in common with Russians. "We all inhabit this same planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's futures. And we are all mortal." Kennedy's humanity was his--and our--saving grace.

Of course, Kennedy had his critics. One of the most eloquent was former secretary of state Dean Acheson, who took part in some of the early ExComm debates. The grand old man of the Truman administration was appalled by the unstructured nature of the sessions, more reminiscent of a freewheeling academic seminar than a presidential council of war. He favored targeted air strikes against the missile sites to eliminate the threat and dismissed fears that this would kill thousands of Soviet technicians as "emotional dialectics." Acheson attributed the peaceful outcome of the crisis to "plain dumb luck."

This is unfair. The story of the missile crisis is replete with misunderstandings and miscalculations. But something more than "dumb luck" was involved in sidestepping a nuclear apocalypse. The real good fortune is that men as sane and level-headed as John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev occupied the White House and the Kremlin in October 1962.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND A NOTE ON SOURCES

When I first decided to write a book about the Cuban missile crisis, the question I was most frequently asked was, "What is there new to say about a subject that has been so exhaustively studied?" The answer, it turned out, is a great deal. Two years of research in a half-dozen countries, including the United States, Russia, and Cuba, turned up a surprising amount of new information about the thirteen days in October 1962 when the world had its closest brush with nuclear destruction. Some "old" information--such as the widely accepted account of the "eyeball to eyeball" naval confrontation on October 24--proved to be untrue. Several important episodes in this book, including the description of the Soviet plan to attack the U.S. Naval base in Guantanamo and the U-2 overflight of the Soviet Union, rely on previously untapped sources and documents. Other sources have been lying in plain view for many years, without anybody paying much attention. It is safe to say that there will be more revelations in the future.

A huge amount of material on the Cuban missile crisis has become available for research over the last two decades, particularly following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. I was nevertheless surprised to discover that many U.S. government archives dealing with the crisis--including the records of the Strategic Air Command, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Defense Intelligence Agency--remain largely off-limits to researchers. Other record groups, including the holdings of the Air Force Historical Research Agency at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, are severely restricted. Most Soviet government archives, particularly the archives of the Ministry of Defense, are still closed. Access to the Cuban archives will probably have to wait for a change of regime in Havana.

I was able to overcome some of these obstacles by triangulating information from very disparate sources, in English, Russian, and Spanish. For example, this technique was key to discovering the Soviet deployment of nuclear-tipped cruise missiles to within fifteen miles of the Guantanamo Naval Base in the early morning hours of Black Saturday. My curiosity was originally whetted by a list of Soviet casualties in Cuba that showed two Soviet soldiers had been killed near Guantanamo on October 27, 1962. I was also intrigued by an October 1987 article by the investigative reporter Seymour Hersh that talked about a "firefight" in eastern Cuba, involving Soviet and Cuban troops, whose communications were apparently intercepted by U.S. intelligence. The Hersh story mentioned a Soviet commander named Maltsev ordering ambulances to the scene. A further piece to the jigsaw puzzle was provided by a one-sentence reference to the movement of FKR cruise missiles to an "advanced position" near Guantanamo in a Russian-language memoir by Operation Anadyr veterans.

The confused story began to make more sense when my Russian researcher, Svetlana Chervonnaya, tracked down the family of one of the dead Soviet soldiers, Viktor Mikheev. It turned out that Mikheev had been in the convoy that transported the cruise missiles in the middle of the night: his truck fell into a ravine. We found other soldiers in the convoy who remembered the incident and the cruise missile deployment. While combing through documents at the Naval Historical Center in Washington, D.C., I came across a top secret message from the GITMO commander reporting the movement of some "3,000 Russ/Sino/Cuban tr[oo]ps augmented w/unidentified art[iller]y equipment" on the night of October 26-27. The message gave precise military coordinates for the starting and ending points of the deployment, within two hundred yards, which could only have come from radio intercepts. I was able to plot the movement of the convoy to within fifteen miles of Guantanamo, exactly as described by the Soviet veterans. The final pieces of the puzzle fell into place when I learned that the commander of the cruise missile regiment was a Colonel Maltsev. Hersh was correct about the intercept, but wrong about the nature of the "firefight," which he interpreted as a clash between Soviet and Cuban soldiers.

I later came across a memorandum in the Kennedy Library in Boston from a U.S. businessman, William Knox, who met with Khrushchev on October 24. The memorandum included a previously undisclosed threat from the Soviet leader. If Kennedy wants to find out what kind of weapons we have in Cuba, Khrushchev told Knox, let him invade the island: "The Guantanamo naval base will be destroyed the very first day." A visit to Oriente province in Cuba in March 2006 left me with a vivid impression of the rugged terrain around Guantanamo.

Another example: identifying the storage sites for the Soviet nuclear warheads. This was one of the big mysteries of the missile crisis, and one that has never been fully resolved. The CIA assumed that there must be nuclear warheads in Cuba, because the missiles were useless without them. But U.S. intelligence analysts were never able to locate the warheads, and eventually gave up trying. By collating disparate pieces of information, I believe that I have solved the mystery. Soviet officers responsible for handling the warheads gave general descriptions of the location of the bunkers in their memoirs and in interviews with me. They said that the central nuclear storage bunker was somewhere near Bejucal, a town south of Havana. I visited Bejucal in March 2006 but was unable to identify the precise location. While researching CIA records at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, however, I came across references to an "ammunition storage bunker" near Bejucal. It turned out that the CIA had originally suspected that the bunker might be used to store nuclear warheads, but dismissed the idea because of the lack of multiple security fences around the facility.

My hunt for the nuclear warheads gathered pace in the summer of 2007, when I discovered that the raw intelligence film shot by U.S. Navy and Air Force planes during the missile crisis had been transferred to the National Archives. To be more precise, hundreds of thousands of cans of DIA film have been warehoused at an Archives facility in Kansas. There is just one catch: most of the finding aids remain "classified." I could detect little rhyme or reason to the numbering of the cans, making the research process roughly equivalent to finding needles in a haystack. I was permitted to request twenty cans of film at a time, which were then air-freighted overnight from Kansas to Washington. After reeling through more than a hundred cans of film, and tens of thousands of images, I feel enormously fortunate to have found some previously unpublished photographs of the Bejucal facility taken by U.S. reconnaissance planes in October 1962. Several frames included shots of the special vans used to transport nuclear warheads around Cuba, proof that I had found the right place. I was able to combine these photographs with contemporary images from Google Earth to find the precise location of the nuclear storage site.

A final example: uncovering the details of the U-2 flight over Chukotka, also on Black Saturday. Standard academic accounts of the missile crisis usually mention this incident only in passing. The U.S. Air Force has failed to declassify a single piece of information about the flight by Captain Charles F. Maultsby, other than a unit history with the bizarre claim that his mission was "100 percent successful." I began pressing the U.S. Air Force for information on Maultsby's flight in 2005, but they were unable (or unwilling) even to identify the location of the relevant SAC records. In order to piece together the incident, I had to rely on other sources, including a detailed memoir written by Maultsby prior to his death from prostate cancer in 1998, provided to me by his widow, Jeanne. I was able to supplement this with interviews with his navigator, Fred Okimoto, and fellow U-2 pilots. I came across the key document, a map showing Maultsby's precise flight route, along with tracking data on Soviet MiGs that were sent up to shoot him down, in the files of the State Department Executive Secretariat, which were declassified by the National Archives at my request. I suspect that the map may have been released inadvertently by State Department declassifiers unaware of its significance. As the reader can see from the illustration on the last page of the third insert, the map contains no special classification marking. It is difficult to understand why the Maultsby flight is still the subject of so much official secrecy. The most plausible explanation is that the U.S. government does not want to confirm the widely known fact that it intercepted real-time Soviet air defense tracking, and used these reports to figure out what had happened to the missing U-2 pilot and steer him safely back home.