The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (94 page)

To ship so many missiles and over 50,000 men some 7,000 miles at the height of the hurricane season was a bold gambit. Even more astonishing was how long it took the Americans to cotton on to ‘Operation Anadyr’. Because US aerial surveillance of Soviet naval activities and of Cuba itself had been stepped down, Kennedy did not hear that a U-2 spy plane had spotted missiles near Havana until the morning of Tuesday, October 16. Even two days later, the Soviets were still denying it. On being quizzed by Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko acted, in Khrushchev’s gleeful words, ‘like a gypsy who’s been caught stealing a horse: It’s not me, and it’s not my horse’. According to the myth perpetuated by Kennedy’s acolytes, what followed was a triumph of hardball diplomacy. In the phrase of Dean Rusk which has adorned a thousand textbooks, Kennedy and Khrushchev were ‘eyeball to eyeball’ over Cuba and ‘the other fellow… blinked’. This was far from the truth. On the contrary, Kennedy and his key advisers (assembled on what became known as the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, or ‘ExComm’) were thrown into confusion by the audacity of the Soviet move. Already, the CIA reported, up to eight medium-range missiles could be fired from Cuba. Within six to eight weeks, the two longer-range missile sites would be ready too. Once all the missiles were installed, it was estimated, only 15 percent of US strategic forces would survive Soviet attack. ‘[It’s] just as if we suddenly began to put a major number of medium range ballistic missiles in Turkey,’ fumed Kennedy. ‘Well, we did, Mr President,’ someone reminded him. Kennedy’s next thought was to order air strikes against the missile sites. But the Joint Chiefs of Staff could not guarantee that all the missiles would be destroyed in such a raid, leaving the possibility open of Soviet retaliation. Instead, Kennedy adopted a twin-track approach. He decided to impose a naval blockade to halt further Soviet shipments of military hardware to Cuba. At the same time, he issued an ultimatum demanding that the Soviets withdraw their missiles; this was broadcast on television. In case this ultimatum was rejected, he ordered the preparation of an invasion force of 90,000 ground troops.

At 10 o’clock in the evening of October 24, the Russian barman at the National Press Club in Washington overheard two seasoned hacks discussing an impending ‘operation to capture Cuba’. The news reached Khrushchev – dishevelled by a night on his office sofa – the next day. OPLAN 316, which envisaged an air strike followed by an amphibious invasion, was indeed ready to get underway. And repeatedly during the following days key figures like McNamara urged invasion, even if it meant the Soviet Union ‘doing something’ in Europe in response. As Kennedy himself admitted, an invasion would have been ‘one hell of a gamble’. He did not know how big a gamble. For the two Red Army regiments Khrushchev had sent to accompany the missiles were equipped with eighty short-range missiles carrying nuclear warheads. Each had an explosive power of between five and twelve kilotons. On September 7, as tension first began to mount, Khrushchev had dispatched a further six atomic bombs for the Ilyushin Il-28 bombers on Cuba, along with twelve nuclear Luna rockets. Each of these could blow a hole 130 feet wide and deep and kill everything within a radius of a thousand yards. Khrushchev had also sent four submarines with nuclear-tipped torpedoes. Although he had expressly forbidden his commanding officer in Cuba to use these weapons without his permission, a full-scale American invasion would have presented him with little alternative – other than abject surrender.

Yet even this would not have worried some senior military figures – and not only the chronically bellicose LeMay. The new head of Strategic Air Command, General Tommy Powers, was known to be undaunted by the prospect of a nuclear war. (It was he who once said: ‘At the end of the war, if there are two Americans and one Russian, we win.’) Former Secretary of State Dean Acheson (also an ExComm member) argued that an American strike on Cuba would lead to a Soviet strike on Turkey, which would require the US ‘to respond by knocking out a missile base inside the Soviet Union’. ‘Then what do we do?’ he was asked. The politicians had no illusions about what war would mean. Kennedy spoke of 200 million dead; Khrushchev of 500 million. ‘If the United States insists on war,’ he told a visiting American businessman (one of many informal channels used during the crisis), ‘we’ll all meet in hell.’ This did not mean that war was impossible. It meant that the two sides were now playing the game of chicken in earnest.

There is, of course, a ‘cooperative’ outcome in the game of chicken. If both players swerve, nobody wins, but both come out alive, and no one can call the other a chicken. That was indeed what happened in the Cuban game. Khrushchev offered Kennedy two possible deals, one delivered through the usual, rather slow channel of the diplomatic telegraph, the other broadcast on Radio Moscow. The first simply envisaged a withdrawal of the missiles in return for an American guarantee not to invade Cuba; it reached the State Department at 9 p.m. on Friday, September 26. The second, which reached the White House as the ExComm convened thirteen hours later, offered a withdrawal of the Cuban missiles in return for the withdrawal of the Jupiter missiles in Turkey. According to the legend spread by Kennedy’s hagiographers, the second of these proposals was spurned. In fact, it had already been suggested by the Americans themselves to the Soviet agent Georgi Bolshakov, probably at the instigation of Kennedy’s brother Robert, the Attorney-General and the President’s closest confidant. Nevertheless, a war could still have broken out that weekend, despite the search for a compromise. Castro certainly thought so. In the early hours of Saturday 27th, fuelled by sausages and beer, he drafted a letter to Khrushchev which essentially urged him to go nuclear if the Americans invaded, ‘however harsh and terrible the solution would be’. The ‘Maximum Leader’ was enjoying the effect of the crisis on the popular mood. ‘We did not even arrest anyone,’ he later remarked, in a revealing moment of candour, ‘because the unity of the people was so staggering.’ Later that morning, at 10.22 a.m., an American U-2 spy plane was shot down over Cuba by a Soviet SA-2 rocket. The pilot, Rudolf Anderson, was killed. Cuban anti-aircraft batteries subsequently fired at other low-flying American reconnaissance planes. Meanwhile, another U-2 had unintentionally strayed into Soviet airspace near the Bering Straits. When Soviet MiGs took off to intercept it, Alaskan-based F-102As were scrambled. Elsewhere, mere accidents came close to triggering the apocalypse. A bear at Duluth airbase led to the mobilizing of nuclear-armed F-106s in Minnesota. A routine test at Cape Canaveral was mistaken for a Soviet missile by a radar unit in New Jersey.

By the afternoon of the 27th, the members of ExComm were in a state of high anxiety. The day had begun with a warning from
J. Edgar Hoover that the Soviet officials in New York were shredding documents, apparently in the expectation of war. Then came Khrushchev’s second, very public proposal, apparently contradicting his first. Of all those present, only the President himself seemed to take seriously the idea of trading Turkish missiles for Cuban; the majority of his advisers saw it as a bid to weaken NATO, the transatlantic military alliance of which Turkey was a member. At 4 p.m. came the news of the downed U-2. We know from the tape recordings Kennedy secretly made of this meeting how he reacted to this bombshell: ‘How do we explain the effect?’ he asked, barely coherent. ‘This Khrushchev message of last night and their decision… How do we – I mean that’s a…’ The phrase on the tip of his tongue was presumably something like ‘a provocation we can’t ignore’. But if that was what Kennedy nearly said, he stopped himself. Instead, he sent his brother Robert to discuss the Cuban–Turkish missile swap with the Soviet ambassador, lining up the UN Secretary General to raise the issue the next day if he drew a blank. The key point, as Robert Kennedy explained to the Russians, was to avoid ‘public discussion of the issue of Turkey’. He did not have to spell out his brother’s and the Democratic Party’s vulnerability on the issue. There had been repeated Republican accusations that the administration was backsliding over Cuba; and Congressional elections were due the following month. It must also be remembered that the Cuban crisis came just a year after the building of the Berlin Wall, the latest in a succession of Soviet challenges to the four-power control of the former German capital.

Khrushchev was asleep on his Kremlin sofa while all this was happening. The ambassador’s report did not reach the Soviet Foreign Ministry until the following morning. As soon as he was briefed about what Robert Kennedy had said, Khrushchev drafted another public letter, which was duly broadcast at 5 p.m. Moscow time, 9 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. (It should have been earlier, but the courier got stuck in rush-hour traffic.) This time Khrushchev merely said that the missiles in Cuba would be dismantled, crated and returned home. It was over. ‘I felt like laughing or yelling or dancing,’ recalled one intensely relieved member of ExComm. The British journalist Alistair Cooke watched a seagull soar in the sky above him and wondered why it was not a dove. Yet a gull was perhaps the right bird. For at
the same time Khrushchev sent two private messages to Kennedy. The second said that the missiles were being withdrawn only ‘on account of your having agreed to the Turkish issue’. Later, the American ambassador to the UN, Adlai Stevenson, would be accused of having raised the Turkish issue. This was a smear; it was the Kennedy brothers who had done it. Nor was the crisis quite at an end. The Pentagon continued to prepare its invasion of Cuba, still unaware (or ignoring the fact) that there were ten times as many Soviet troops on the island as they had estimated and that they were armed with battlefield nuclear missiles. It was not until November 20, when Khrushchev agreed also to withdraw the 11-28 bombers, that the game of chicken was really at an end.

When both drivers swerve, as we have seen, there is no winner. True, having concealed from the American public his readiness to abandon either toppling Castro or the Turkish missiles, Kennedy could strike a tough-guy pose as the Soviets dismantled their missiles. But his military chiefs were disgusted; to the President’s face, LeMay called it ‘the greatest defeat in our history’. On the other hand, so convincing was Kennedy’s claim to have made Khrushchev blink over Cuba that, just over a year later, a Castro sympathizer named Lee Harvey Oswald shot him dead.
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Khrushchev also emerged from the crisis weaker. At a meeting of the Central Committee on November 23, he sought to make the best of it, with characteristic peasant humour: ‘It was not necessary to act like the Tsarist officer who farted at the ball and then shot himself.’ A Soviet missile had downed an American plane. ‘What a shot! And in return we received a pledge not to invade Cuba. Not bad!’ But the men with the medal-bedecked chests felt that he had acted recklessly for little net benefit. In October 1964, two years after trading Cuban missiles for Turkish, Khrushchev himself was traded in for Leonid Brezhnev. In truth, Castro was the sole beneficiary of the crisis – and he was the only one of the three leaders who was disappointed by the peaceful outcome. According to Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, when Castro heard of the compromise, ‘he
swore, kicked the wall and smashed a looking glass’. Yet Castro’s position was enormously strengthened by the crisis. Kennedy was soon dead, Khrushchev ousted. The Cuban leader, however, would enjoy more than four more decades in power.

The Cuban missile crisis showed just how close to a Third World War it was possible for the United States and the Soviet Union to come, despite their vastly increased destructive capabilities. Yet it also revealed that even if they both chose to swerve in the great game of nuclear chicken, war could still be waged in other ways. It is sometimes claimed that the advent of ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’ ushered in an era of world peace. But this is to misunderstand the character of the Cold War. The real and bloody Third World War was in fact fought by the likes of Castro – in the Third World itself. The War of the World had been a succession of head-to-head collisions between the world’s empires, played out in the crucial conflict zones at either end of the Eurasian land mass. The Third World’s War, by contrast, was fought indirectly in new and more remote theatres, where the strategic stakes (though not the human costs) were lower.

There were three reasons for this relocation of conflict. First, the possibility of ethnic conflict in the western and eastern borderlands of Eurasia, the principal battlefields of the first half of the century, had been dramatically diminished. Not only had ethnic cleansing during and after the Second World War decimated minority populations, homogenizing societies as never before; at the same time, the most contested frontiers of all were hermetically sealed. After 1953 the border between North and South Korea was transformed into a heavily fortified zone across which no human being dared venture. In 1961, as we have seen, a wall was built across Berlin and through the heart of Germany, with the intention of stemming the flow of East Germans absconding to the western Federal Republic; its effect, however, was to formalize not only the partition of Germany but also the division of Europe. Central Europe disappeared. Henceforth there
would be only Western and Eastern Europe. Churchill had earlier warned of the dangers of an Iron Curtain stretching between ‘Stettin in the Baltic and Trieste in the Adriatic’. Yet once it was drawn, this geopolitical drape turned out to have unexpected benefits. Political segregation turned out to stop what had once been one of the principal sources of conflict in Central and Eastern Europe – friction between the peoples of the imperial borderlands. As Kennedy rightly observed, ‘a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war’.

The second reason conflict moved was economic. The War of the World had been propelled forward by economic volatility. It had been the great interruption to globalization caused by the First World War that had plunged the world economy into three decades of upheaval. Inflation, deflation, boom, bust and depression; these had been the forces that had intensified the instability of both Europe and East Asia. They had weakened the existing empires. They had undermined the new democracies. They had heightened racial antipathies. They had paved the way for the empire-states that arose in Turkey, Russia, Japan and Germany, each with its own pathological yearning for ethnic homogeneity and hierarchy. It had been economic volatility that had justified Stalin’s creation of the planned economy, a new kind of slave state based on state ownership of capital and unfree labour. Above all, it had been economic volatility that had inspired a new and ruthless imperialism, based on the seductive notion of ‘living space’ – of economic recovery through territorial expansion.