One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War

by M. Dobbs

  One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War

  M. Dobbs

  In October 1962, at the height of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union appeared to be sliding inexorably toward a nuclear conflict over the placement of missiles in Cuba. Veteran Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs has pored over previously untapped American, Soviet, and Cuban sources to produce the most authoritative book yet on the Cuban missile crisis. In his hour-by-hour chronicle of those near-fatal days, Dobbs reveals some startling new incidents that illustrate how close we came to Armageddon.

  Here, for the first time, are gripping accounts of Khrushchev’s plan to destroy the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo; the accidental overflight of the Soviet Union by an American spy plane; the movement of Soviet nuclear warheads around Cuba during the tensest days of the crisis; the activities of CIA agents inside Cuba; and the crash landing of an American F-106 jet with a live nuclear weapon on board.

  Dobbs takes us inside the White House and the Kremlin as Kennedy and Khrushchev — rational, intelligent men separated by an ocean of ideological suspicion — agonize over the possibility of war. He shows how these two leaders recognized the terrifying realities of the nuclear age while Castro — never swayed by conventional political considerations — demonstrated the messianic ambition of a man selected by history for a unique mission. As the story unfolds, Dobbs brings us onto the decks of American ships patrolling Cuba; inside sweltering Soviet submarines and missile units as they ready their warheads; and onto the streets of Miami, where anti-Castro exiles plot the dictator’s overthrow.

  Based on exhaustive new research and told in breathtaking prose, here is a riveting account of history’s most dangerous hours, full of lessons for our time.

  Michael Dobbs

  One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War

  For Olivia

  Cuba, October 1962

  PREFACE

  Few events in history have been as studied and analyzed as the Cuban missile crisis. The thirteen days in October 1962 when the human race had its closest ever brush with nuclear destruction have been examined in countless magazine articles, books, television documentaries, treatises on presidential decision making, university lecture courses, conferences of former Cold War adversaries, and even a Hollywood movie. Yet remarkably, given this torrent of words, there is still no minute-by-minute account of the drama in the tradition of The Longest Day or Death of a President.

  Most books on the crisis are either memoirs or scholarly studies, devoted to one particular facet of a vast and complicated subject. Somewhere in this wealth of academic literature the human story has been lost: a twentieth-century epic that witnessed one of the greatest mobilizations of men and equipment since World War II, life-and-death decisions made under enormous pressure, and a cast of characters ranging from Curtis LeMay to Che Guevara, all with unique stories to tell.

  My goal in this book is to help a new generation of readers relive the quintessential Cold War crisis by focusing on what Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., called "the most dangerous moment in human history." Known as "Black Saturday" around the Kennedy White House, October 27, 1962, was a day of stomach-churning twists and turns that brought the world closer than ever before (or since) to a nuclear apocalypse. It was also the day when John F. Kennedy and Nikita S. Khrushchev, representing the rival ideological forces that had taken the world to the edge of nuclear annihilation, stepped back from the abyss. If the Cuban missile crisis was the defining moment of the Cold War, Black Saturday was the defining moment of the missile crisis. It was then that the hands of the metaphorical Doomsday Clock reached one minute to midnight.

  The day began with Fidel Castro dictating a telegram urging Khrushchev to use his nuclear weapons against their common enemy; it ended with the Kennedy brothers secretly offering to give up U.S. missiles in Turkey in exchange for a Soviet climbdown in Cuba. In between these two events, Soviet nuclear warheads were transported closer to Cuban missile sites, a U-2 spy plane was shot down over eastern Cuba, another U-2 strayed over the Soviet Union, a Soviet nuclear-armed submarine was forced to the surface by U.S. Navy depth charges, the Cubans began firing on low-flying U.S. reconnaissance aircraft, the Joint Chiefs of Staff finalized plans for an all-out invasion of Cuba, and the Soviets brought tactical nuclear weapons to within fifteen miles of the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay. Any one of these incidents could have led to a nuclear exchange between the two superpowers.

  In telling this story, I have tried to combine the techniques of a historian with the techniques of a journalist. The missile crisis took place long enough ago for the archives to have delivered most of their secrets. Many of the participants are still alive and eager to talk. During two years of intensive research, I was amazed by the amount of new material I was able to discover by digging through old records, interviewing eyewitnesses, visiting the missile sites in Cuba, and poring over thousands of photographs shot by U.S. reconnaissance planes. The most interesting revelations often came from triangulating disparate pieces of information, such as an interview with a Soviet veteran and an American intelligence intercept, or the memories of an American U-2 pilot and a previously unpublished map of his two-hour incursion over the Soviet Union that I discovered in the National Archives.

  Despite the vast amount of scholarly work on the missile crisis, it turns out that there is still much to be uncovered. Many of the Soviet veterans quoted in this book, including the men who physically handled the nuclear warheads and targeted them on American cities, had never been interviewed by a Western writer. As far as I am aware, no previous missile crisis researcher inspected the hundreds of cans of raw intelligence film sitting in the Archives that provide detailed documentation of the construction and activation of the Cuban missile sites. This is the first book to use archival evidence to plot the actual positions of Soviet and American ships on the morning of October 24, when Dean Rusk spoke of the two sides coming "eyeball to eyeball."

  Other sources have become the focus of an academic cottage industry specializing in presidential decision making. The most obvious example are the forty-three hours of tape recordings featuring JFK and his closest advisers that have been examined in exhaustive detail by rival groups of scholars. The White House tapes are extraordinarily important historical documents, but they are only a slice of a much larger story. Some of the information that flowed into the White House during the crisis was incorrect. To rely on statements by presidential aides like Robert McNamara and John McCone without checking them against the rest of the historical record is a recipe for inaccuracy. I point out some of the most obvious errors during the course of this narrative.

  The early 1960s, like the first years of the new millennium, were a time of economic, political, and technological upheaval. The map of the world was being redrawn as empires disappeared and dozens of new countries joined the United Nations. The United States enjoyed overwhelming strategic superiority. But American dominance bred enormous resentment. The flipside of hegemony was vulnerability, as the American heartland became exposed to previously unimaginable threats from distant lands.

  Then, as now, the world was in the throes of a technological revolution. Planes could travel at the speed of sound, television could transmit pictures instantaneously across the oceans, a few shots could trigger a global nuclear war. The world was becoming "a global village," in the newly minted phrase of Marshall McLuhan. But the revolution was unfinished. Human being
s possessed the ability to blow up the world, but they still used the stars for navigation. Americans and Russians were beginning to explore the cosmos, but the Soviet ambassador in Washington had to summon a messenger on a bicycle when he wanted to send a cable to Moscow. American warships could bounce messages off the moon, but it could take many hours to decipher a top secret communication.

  The Cuban missile crisis serves as a reminder that history is full of unexpected twists and turns. Historians like to find order, logic, and inevitability in events that sometimes defy coherent and logical explanation. As the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard noted, history is "lived forwards" but "understood backwards." I have tried to tell this story as it was experienced at the time, forward rather than backward, preserving its cliff-hanging excitement and unpredictability.

  To provide readers with the necessary background for understanding the events of Black Saturday, I have begun the story at the start of the "Thirteen Days" made famous by Bobby Kennedy's classic 1968 memoir. I have compressed the first week of the crisis ― a week of secret deliberations in Washington prior to JFK's televised ultimatum to Khrushchev ― into a single chapter. As the pace quickens, the narrative becomes more detailed. I devote six chapters to the events of Monday, October 22, through Friday, October 26, and the second half of the book to a minute-by-minute account of the peak of the crisis on Black Saturday and its resolution on the morning of Sunday, October 28.

  The Cuban missile crisis was a global event, unfolding simultaneously across twenty-four different time zones. The action takes place in many different locales, mainly Washington, Moscow, and Cuba, but also London, Berlin, Alaska, Central Asia, Florida, the South Pacific, and even the North Pole. To keep the reader oriented, I have translated all times into Washington time (with local times in parentheses), and have indicated the current time at the top of the page.

  The plot of the story is simple enough: two men, one in Washington, one in Moscow, struggle with the specter of nuclear destruction they themselves have unleashed. But it is the subplots that give the story its drama. If seemingly minor characters sometimes threaten to take over the narrative, it is worth remembering that any one of these subplots could have become the main plot at any time. The issue was not whether Kennedy and Khrushchev wanted to control events; it was whether they could.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Americans

  TUESDAY, OCTOBER 16, 1962, 11:50 A.M.

  The Central Intelligence Agency's chief photo interpreter hovered over the president's shoulder. Arthur Lundahl held a pointer in his hand, ready to reveal a secret that would bring the world to the edge of nuclear war.

  The secret was buried in three black-and-white photographs pasted to briefing boards hidden in a large black case. The photographs had been shot from directly overhead, evidently from a considerable distance, with the aid of a very powerful zoom lens. On superficial inspection, the grainy images of fields, forests, and winding country roads seemed innocuous, almost bucolic. One of the fields contained tubelike objects, others oval-shaped white dots neatly lined up next to one another. John F. Kennedy would later remark that the site could be mistaken for "a football field." After examining the photographs earlier that morning, his brother Bobby had been unable to make out anything more than "the clearing of a field for a farm or the basement of a house."

  To help the president understand the significance of the photos, Lundahl had labeled them with arrows pointing to the dots and blotches, along with captions reading "ERECTOR LAUNCHER EQUIPMENT," "MISSILE TRAILERS," and "TENT AREAS." He was about to display the briefing boards when there was a commotion outside the door. A four-year-old girl burst into one of the most heavily guarded rooms in the White House.

  The heads of the fourteen most powerful men in the United States swiveled to the doorway as Caroline Kennedy ran toward her father, babbling excitedly: "Daddy, daddy, they won't let my friend in."

  The somber-looking men in dark suits were used to such intrusions. Their frowns dissolved into smiles as the president got up from his leather-upholstered seat and led his daughter back toward the door of the Cabinet Room.

  "Caroline, have you been eating candy?"

  No reply. The president smiled.

  "Answer me. Yes, no, or maybe."

  Father and daughter disappeared for a few seconds, his arm draped around her shoulders. When Kennedy returned, his expression had again become grave. He took his place at the center of the long table beneath the presidential seal, his back to the Rose Garden. He was flanked on either side by his secretary of state and secretary of defense. Facing him across the table were his brother, his vice president, and his national security adviser. Behind them stood a small bronze bust of Abraham Lincoln, flanked by some model sailing ships. Above the fireplace to the right was the celebrated Gilbert Stuart portrait of a powdered and bewigged George Washington.

  The thirty-fifth president of the United States called the meeting to order.

  Kennedy seemed preternaturally calm to the other men in the room as he listened to the evidence of Kremlin duplicity. In secrecy, while insisting they would never contemplate such a thing, the Soviet leaders had installed surface-to-surface nuclear missiles on Cuba, less than a hundred miles from American shores. According to the CIA, the missiles had a range of 1,174 miles and were capable of hitting much of the eastern seaboard. Once armed and ready to fire, they could explode over Washington in thirteen minutes, turning the capital into a scorched wasteland.

  Lundahl took the briefing boards out of his bag and laid them on the table. He used his pointer to direct the president's attention to a canvas-covered missile trailer next to a launcher erector. Seven more missile trailers were parked in a nearby field.

  "How do you know this is a medium-range ballistic missile?" asked the president. His voice was clipped and tense, betraying a boiling anger beneath the calm.

  "The length, sir."

  "The what? The length?"

  "The length of it, yes."

  CIA experts had spent the last thirty-six hours poring over thousands of reconnaissance photographs of the hills and valleys of western Cuba. They had discovered telltale cables connecting one of the tubelike objects to the nearby oval-shaped splotch, and had used a revolutionary new computer device that filled up half a room ― the Mann Model 621 comparator ― to measure its length. The tubes turned out to be sixty-seven feet long. Missiles of identical length had been photographed at military parades in Red Square in Moscow.

  The president asked the obvious question: when would the missiles be ready to fire?

  The experts were unsure. That would depend on how soon the missiles could be mated with their nuclear warheads. Once mated, they could be fired in a couple of hours. So far, there was no evidence to suggest that the Soviets had moved the warheads to the missile sites. If the warheads were present, one would expect to see some kind of secure storage facility at the missile sites, but nothing was visible.

  "There is some reason to believe the warheads aren't present and hence they are not ready to fire," said Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara. The computerlike brain of the former head of the Ford Motor Company clicked away furiously, calculating the chances of a surprise attack. He believed the president still had some time.

  The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff disagreed. General Maxwell Taylor had parachuted into Normandy during World War II, and had commanded Allied forces in Berlin and Korea. It fell to him to point out the risks of delay. The Soviets could be in a position to fire their missiles "very quickly." Most of the infrastructure was already in place. "It's not a question of waiting for extensive concrete pads and that sort of thing."

  The president's advisers were already dividing into doves and hawks.

  Kennedy had received an initial intelligence briefing earlier that morning. His national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, had knocked on the door of his bedroom, on the second floor of the White House, shortly after 8:00 a.m. The president was propped up in bed, in
pajamas and dressing gown, reading the morning newspapers. As often happened, he was annoyed by a page-one headline in The New York Times. On this particular morning, his exasperation was directed at his predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had broken the unwritten convention of former presidents refraining from publicly criticizing the current occupant of the Oval Office.

  EISENHOWER CALLS PRESIDENT WEAK ON FOREIGN POLICY

  Denounces "Dreary Record," Challenging Statements by Kennedy on Achievements

  HE SEES SETBACK TO U.S.

  As Bundy described the latest U-2 mission over Cuba, Kennedy's irritation with Ike was replaced by a burning anger toward his Cold War nemesis. Over the past two years, he and Nikita Khrushchev had been engaged in a very public game of nuclear oneupmanship. But Kennedy thought he had an understanding with the mercurial Soviet premier. Khrushchev had sent word through intermediaries that he would do nothing to embarrass the U.S. president politically before the midterm congressional elections, which were exactly three weeks away.

  News that the Soviets were constructing missile bases on Cuba could hardly have come at a worse time. During the 1960 presidential election, Kennedy had used Cuba as a stick to beat the Republicans, accusing the Eisenhower government of doing nothing to prevent Fidel Castro from transforming the island into "a hostile and militant Communist satellite." Now that the Democrats were in power, the political roles were reversed. Republican politicians were seizing on reports of a Soviet military buildup on Cuba to denounce Kennedy for weakness and fecklessness. Just two days earlier, Kennedy had sent Bundy out on nationwide television to knock down a claim by the Republican senator from New York, Kenneth B. Keating, that the Soviets would soon be able "to hurl rockets into the American heartland" from their Caribbean outpost.