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

by M. Dobbs

  Kennedy's immediate reaction on learning from Bundy that Khrushchev had double-crossed him was to sputter, "He can't do this to me." An hour later, he walked into the office of his appointments secretary, Kenny O'Donnell, and announced glumly, "Ken Keating will probably be the next president of the United States."

  Determined to keep the information secret as long as possible, Kennedy decided to stick to his regular schedule, acting as if nothing was amiss. He showed off Caroline's pony Macaroni to the family of a returning astronaut, chatted amiably for half an hour with a Democratic congressman, and presided over a conference on mental retardation. It was not until nearly noon that he managed to break away from his ceremonial duties and meet with his top foreign policy advisers.

  Kennedy conceded that he was mystified by Khrushchev. Alternately ingratiating and boorish, friendly and intimidating, the metalworker turned superpower leader was unlike any other politician he had ever encountered. Their single summit meeting ― in Vienna, in June 1961 ― had been a brutal experience for Kennedy. Khrushchev had treated him like a little boy, lecturing him on American misdeeds, threatening to take over West Berlin, and boasting about the inevitable triumph of communism. Most shocking of all, Khrushchev did not seem to share his alarm about the risks of nuclear war, and how it could be triggered by miscalculations on either side. He spoke about nuclear weapons in a casual, offhand kind of way, as simply one more element in the superpower competition. If the United States wants war, he blustered, "let it begin now."

  "Roughest thing in my life," Kennedy had told James Reston of The New York Times, after it was all over. "He just beat the hell out of me." Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was contemptuous of his boss's performance. "Khrushchev scared the poor little fellow dead," he told his cronies. British prime minister Harold Macmillan, who met with Kennedy shortly after he left Vienna, was only slightly more sympathetic. He thought that the president had been "completely overwhelmed by the ruthlessness and barbarity of the Russian Chairman." For the first time in his life Kennedy had met a man "who was impervious to his charm," Macmillan noted later. "It reminded me in a way of Lord Halifax or Neville Chamberlain trying to hold a conversation with Herr Hitler."

  Part of the problem lay in Kennedy's own miscalculations as president. The biggest mistake of all was the Bay of Pigs. In April 1961, four months after taking office, he had authorized an invasion of Cuba by fifteen hundred CIA-trained Cuban exiles. But the operation was disastrously planned and executed. Castro mounted a vigorous counterattack, trapping the exiles in an isolated beachhead. Anxious to conceal official American involvement as much as possible, Kennedy refused to order U.S. ships and planes stationed just offshore to come to the rescue of the outnumbered invaders, most of whom ended up in Castro's jails. As Kennedy later confessed to Reston, his superpower rival had no doubt concluded that "I'm inexperienced. Probably thinks I'm stupid. Maybe most important, he thinks that I had no guts." The perception of an inexperienced leader with no guts was one that he had been struggling to reverse ever since.

  The news from Cuba reinforced Kennedy's impression of Khrushchev as a "fucking liar." He complained to his brother that the Soviet leader had behaved like "an immoral gangster…not as a statesman, not as a person with a sense of responsibility."

  The question was how to respond. They would definitely step up U-2 reconnaissance of the island. Military options ranged from an air strike targeted on the missile sites alone to an all-out invasion. General Taylor warned that it would probably be impossible to destroy all the missiles in a single strike. "It'll never be a hundred per cent, Mr. President." Any military action was likely to escalate quickly to an invasion. The invasion plan called for as many as a hundred and fifty thousand men to land in Cuba a week after the initial air strikes. In the meantime, the Soviets might be able to launch one or two nuclear missiles against the United States.

  "We're certainly going to do [option] number one," Kennedy told his aides grimly, referring to the air strike. "We're going to take out those missiles."

  TUESDAY, OCTOBER 16, 2:30 P.M.

  Robert Kennedy still had an angry glint in his eye later that afternoon when he met the men in charge of America's secret war against Fidel Castro in his cavernous Justice Department office. He was determined to make clear the president's "dissatisfaction" with Operation Mongoose, which had been under way for a year, achieving virtually nothing. Countless acts of sabotage had been planned, but none had been carried out successfully. Fidel and his bearded revolutionaries were still in power, inflicting daily humiliations on the United States.

  Officials from the CIA, the Pentagon, and the State Department were arrayed in a semicircle in front of the attorney general. A fresh assortment of his children's watercolors decorated the walls, along with standard-issue government art. One of the documents on the untidy, paper-littered desk was a two-page memorandum captioned "SECRET MONGOOSE" with the latest ideas for fomenting an insurrection inside Cuba. It had been put together by the CIA in response to prodding from the Kennedy brothers to be much more "aggressive." RFK nodded approvingly as he glanced through the list:

  • Demolition of a railroad bridge in Pinar del Rio province;

  • Grenade attack on the Chinese Communist embassy in Havana;

  • Mine the approaches to major Cuban harbors;

  • Set an oil tanker afire outside Havana or Matanzas;

  • Incendiary attacks against oil refineries in Havana and Santiago.

  The attorney general title masked Bobby's true role in government, which was closer to that of deputy president. His extracurricular responsibilities included heading a secret committee known as the Special Group (Augmented), whose goal was to "get rid of" Castro and "liberate" Cuba from Communist domination. The addition of the president's brother to the group ― signified by the cryptic word "Augmented" ― was a way of emphasizing its importance to the rest of the bureaucracy. Soon after taking personal control of Operation Mongoose in November 1961, Bobby had decreed that "the Cuban problem carries top priority in the U.S. government. No time, money, effort, or manpower is to be spared." By coincidence, he had arranged a long-scheduled review of covert action plans against Cuba the very day that Soviet missiles were discovered on the island.

  Bobby chose his words carefully as he addressed the Special Group. Half the officials in the room were unaware of the latest developments, and the president had stressed the need for total secrecy. But it was difficult for him to conceal his anger as he talked about "the change in atmosphere in the United States government during the last twenty-four hours." Frustrated by the lack of "push" in getting on with acts of sabotage, he announced that he planned to devote "more personal attention" to Mongoose. To accomplish this, he would meet with the Mongoose operational team every morning at 9:30 until further notice.

  For Bobby, the appearance of Soviet missiles in the western hemisphere was not simply a political affront; it was a personal affront. He was the emotional member of the family, as rough and intense as his brother was smooth and calm. JFK had been humiliated once again by Castro and Khrushchev, and RFK was determined to redress the insult. He was extraordinarily competitive ― even by the intensely competitive standards of the Kennedy clan ― and the longest to nurse a grudge. "Everybody in my family forgives," the family patriarch, Joseph Kennedy, Sr., had once remarked. "Except Bobby."

  He had found out about the missiles in an early morning phone call from Jack. "We have some big trouble," the president told him. Soon afterward, Bobby was in Bundy's office at the White House, poring over reconnaissance photographs. "Oh shit, shit, shit," he moaned, smacking the palm of his hand with his fist. "Those sons a bitches Russians." While Jack reacted to bad news by becoming cold and withdrawn, Bobby would pace the room angrily, uttering curses and raising his fists to his chest, as if ready to punch someone.

  Bobby was furious at Khrushchev. But he was also furious with the sluggish U.S. bureaucracy that was forever talking about restoring freedom to C
uba but never actually did anything. And he was furious at himself for believing Soviet denials of a missile buildup in Cuba, despite numerous reports from anti-Castro Cubans and undercover CIA agents of missile-related activity on the island. As he later wrote, "the dominant feeling was one of shocked incredulity. We had been deceived by Khrushchev, but we had also fooled ourselves."

  Over the last year, the Kennedys had tried every means in their power to get even with Castro, short of ordering an outright invasion of Cuba. "My idea is to stir things up on island with espionage, sabotage, general disorder, run & operated by the Cubans themselves," Bobby noted in a November 1961 memo. "Do not know if we will be successful in overthrowing Castro but we have nothing to lose in my estimate." No method was considered too dirty or too outlandish to achieve the desired goal. The State Department drafted plans for the sabotage of the Cuban economy; the Pentagon came up with a scheme for a wave of bombings in Miami and Washington that could be blamed on Castro; the CIA infiltrated anti-Castro exiles back into Cuba to cache arms and foment an insurrection. There were numerous CIA-backed assassination plots against Castro, including an ongoing effort to use the Mafia to smuggle weapons and poison pills into Cuba to eliminate "el lider maximo." A fallback option was to use chemical agents to destroy Castro's beard, so that he would become a laughingstock among the Cuban people.

  Bobby took a personal interest in every facet of the anti-Castro campaign. He invited anti-Castro activists to his sprawling home at Hickory Hill in Virginia, and discussed ways of unseating the dictator while the children played with trains under the bed. He phoned his contacts in the Cuban exile community directly, avoiding the normal bureaucratic channels. He even had his own full-time liaison officer at the CIA, who operated independently of the rest of the agency and undertook secret missions for the attorney general without informing his superiors.

  The official chronicler of the Kennedy years, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., would describe Operation Mongoose as "Robert Kennedy's most conspicuous folly." But it was not just Bobby's folly. While RFK was certainly the most energetic advocate of overthrowing Castro in the Kennedy administration, he had the full support of the president. No one who attended the meetings of the Special Group had any illusions about that. Bobby would "sit there, chewing gum, his tie loose, feet up on his desk, daring anyone to contradict him," recalled Thomas Parrott, the official White House notetaker at the meetings. "He was a little bastard, but he was the president's brother, the anointed guy, and you had to listen to him. Everybody felt that he would tell Big Brother if you didn't go along with what he was proposing."

  There was a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde quality to the Jack-Bobby relationship. The tortured, agitated Bobby was a darker, rougher version of his calmer, more easygoing older brother. After observing the two brothers interact extensively, another White House official, Richard Goodwin, came to believe that Bobby's harsh polemics "reflected the president's own concealed emotions, privately communicated in some earlier intimate conversation…. [There] was an inner hardness, often volatile anger, beneath the outwardly amiable, thoughtful, carefully controlled demeanor of John Kennedy."

  Jack was forty-five when plunged into the gravest crisis of the Cold War, two years after becoming the youngest elected president in American history. Bobby was just thirty-six.

  The Kennedy brothers' instrument for implementing their will in Cuba was a dashing Air Force brigadier general named Edward Lansdale, now seated in front of the attorney general, diligently taking notes. With his trim mustache, matinee-idol smile, and eager beaver expression, Lansdale looked like a sixties version of Clark Gable. He exuded a can-do confidence that appealed to Bobby and Jack. His formal title was "chief of operations" of "the Cuba project."

  A former advertising executive and specialist in black propaganda, Lansdale had made his reputation in Southeast Asia, helping the Philippine government suppress a Communist insurgency. He had also served as an American military adviser in South Vietnam. Some thought he was the model for the earnest yet naive hero of Graham Greene's novel The Quiet American, who leaves havoc all around him in his single-minded determination to export American-style democracy to the Asian jungle.

  Beginning in January 1962, Lansdale had issued a stream of directives and plans for Castro's overthrow, neatly organized under different tabs such as "Psychological Support," "Military Support," and "Sabotage Support." The target date for the "Touchdown Play" was mid-October, a date calculated to appeal to the political instincts of the Kennedy brothers, a couple of weeks before the U.S. midterm elections. A top secret Lansdale memorandum dated February 20 laid out the timetable:

  • Phase I. Action, March 1962. Start moving in.

  • Phase II. Build-up, April-July 1962. Activating the necessary operations inside Cuba for revolution and concurrently applying the vital political, economic, and military-type support from outside Cuba.

  • Phase III. Readiness, 1 August 1962. Check for final policy decision.

  • Phase IV. Resistance, August-September 1962. Move into guerrilla operations.

  • Phase V. Revolt, first two weeks of October 1962. Open revolt and overthrow of the Communist regime.

  • Phase VI. Final, during month of October 1962. Establishment of new government.

  Lansdale was a general without an army, however. He had very few assets inside Cuba itself. He did not even control the sprawling American bureaucracy, which was divided into autonomous fiefdoms. Mongoose operatives at the CIA, supposedly subordinate to him, were contemptuous of his "unrealistic, half-baked" schemes. They nicknamed him the "field marshal" or the "all-American guerrilla fighter," dismissing him as a "kook," "a wild man," and "just plain crazy." They found it difficult to understand the almost "mystic" hold he seemed to exercise over the Kennedys. For George McManus, an aide to CIA director John McCone, "Lansdale's projects simply gave the impression of movement," a whirlwind of activity without any substance.

  As the target dates for causing havoc inside Cuba came and went, with nothing much happening, Lansdale came up with increasingly bizarre ideas for overthrowing the Cuban dictator. His latest plan, dated October 15, was for a U.S. submarine to surface off Havana in the middle of the night and fire star shells toward the shore. The shells would light up the nighttime sky. In the meantime, CIA agents would have spread the word around Cuba that Castro was the anti-Christ, and that the illumination was a harbinger of the Second Coming of Christ. Lansdale suggested that the operation be timed to coincide with All Soul's Day "to gain extra impact from Cuban superstitions." CIA skeptics dubbed the scheme "Elimination by Illumination."

  Another pet Lansdale project was branding the Cuban resistance with the symbol "gusano libre." Official Cuban propaganda constantly denounced anti-Castro Cubans as "worms" ("gusanos"). Lansdale wanted to turn this rhetoric against Castro, and encourage dissidents to see themselves as "free worms," subverting the Cuban economy and political system from within through minor acts of sabotage. But the public relations campaign was a flop. Imbued with pride and machismo, Cubans refused to identify with worms, free or not.

  Lansdale's ideas for fomenting an anti-Castro rebellion through small-scale guerrilla operations backed by skillful propaganda were inspired by Castro's own success in overthrowing his U.S.-backed predecessor, Fulgencio Batista. A student rebel leader jailed for two years and then exiled to Mexico, Castro had returned to Cuba by boat in December 1956, accompanied by eighty-one lightly armed followers. From their hideouts in the Sierra Maestra Mountains of eastern Cuba, the barbudos (bearded ones) had launched a peasant uprising against Batista's fifty-thousand-strong army. By the end of December 1958, the dictator had fled and Fidel was the unchallenged ruler of Cuba.

  Unfortunately for the Kennedy administration, there were many differences between Castro's revolution and the one that Lansdale was attempting to engineer. Fidel's victory was swift and spectacular, but it was preceded by a long period of preparation. Even before his exile, Castro had painstakingly laid th
e groundwork for an uprising, exploiting popular unhappiness with Batista, attacking an army barracks in Santiago de Cuba, Cuba's second city, and using his own trial as a platform for anti-Batista propaganda. The energy and impetus for the Fidelista revolution came from within Cuba, not from outside. Furthermore, as a successful revolutionary, Fidel knew how to defend his regime against people like himself. Since coming to power, he had turned Cuba into a police state, full of informers and revolutionary watchdog committees.

  And then there were the constraints imposed by the Kennedys themselves. They wanted a plausibly deniable revolution that could not be traced back to the White House. It was a fatal contradiction. Time and again at Mongoose meetings, Bobby would demand more "boom and bang" in Cuba, and then complain about the "noise level" of previous operations. What the Kennedys got in the end was a revolution on paper, complete with stages, carefully tabbed binders, dates for achieving different objectives, and an unending stream of top secret memos. By October, it was apparent that Lansdale and his fellow Mongoose operatives had no idea how to make a revolution. Unlike Castro, who had fought in the jungle and gone without food for months on end, they were bureaucrats, not revolutionaries.

  The spirit of the enterprise was captured by a September 11 memo to government agencies from the "chief of operations" requesting updated information about their needs for "secure communications" and "filing space" in the Pentagon war room "in the case of a contingency" in Cuba. With military efficiency, Lansdale gave the agencies one week in which to respond. The State Department reply was typical: one classified telephone and one secure filing cabinet "will meet our requirements."

  Had Operation Mongoose merely been an exercise in self-delusion ― "a psychological salve for inaction," as Bundy later described it ― it would have been relatively harmless. In fact, it was the worst possible foreign policy combination: aggressive, noisy, and ineffective. It was clear to anybody who paid attention to leaks in the American press and rumors in the Cuban exile community that the Kennedys were out to get Castro. There was enough substance to Mongoose to alarm Castro and his Soviet patrons into taking countermeasures ― but not enough to threaten his grip on power.