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

by M. Dobbs

  What nobody on the ExComm realized was that the reporter and the rezident had greatly exaggerated their own importance. The Scali-Feklisov "backchannel" was itself largely fluff.

  Back in the Cabinet Room, JFK was facing mounting opposition to his willingness to consider some kind of Cuba-Turkey deal. The revolt was being led by Mac Bundy, who feared the mere hint of a trade would cause "real trouble" for the United States. The experts were all agreed, the national security adviser insisted. "If we appear to be trading the defense of Turkey for a threat to Cuba, we'll have to face a radical decline" in the effectiveness of NATO.

  Kennedy was irritated by Bundy's arguments. The allies might complain about a missile trade, but they would complain even louder if the Soviets responded to a U.S. invasion of Cuba by attacking Berlin or Turkey. "We all know how quickly everybody's courage goes when the blood starts to flow," he told the ExComm. "That's what is going to happen to NATO. When [the Soviets] grab Berlin, everybody's gonna say, 'Well, that was a pretty good proposition.' Let's not kid ourselves."

  The president thought Khrushchev had to be offered some inducement to take his missiles out of Cuba. Having made a public offer of a Turkey-Cuba trade, he was not going to simply back down without getting anything in return. There were only two ways to get the Soviet missiles out of Cuba, Kennedy believed: by force or by negotiation. He preferred negotiation.

  "I don't agree, Mr. President," objected Llewellyn Thompson. "I think there is still a chance we can get this line going."

  "That he'll back down?"

  The former ambassador pointed out that Khrushchev had been ready to settle for a noninvasion of Cuba guarantee less than twenty-four hours before. It was possible he was just trying to put "pressure on us," to see how much he could get. The president should try to steer him back to the ideas outlined in his private letter on Friday. Thompson was also worried by the terms of the proposed Cuba-Turkey deal. The wording of the Soviet letter suggested that Khrushchev wanted to exchange missiles for missiles, airplanes for airplanes, and bases for bases. Getting the Russians out of Cuba might require the dismantling not just of the Jupiters but of the entire U.S. military presence in Turkey, NATO's eastern flank.

  By now, several rival drafts of a possible reply to Khrushchev were on the table. In a phone call from New York, Adlai Stevenson had objected that the State Department draft sounded "too much like an ultimatum." He proposed new, more conciliatory language. Kennedy attempted to merge the two drafts, and began dictating changes to Dean Rusk. Soon, everybody was offering suggestions.

  "Change it a little," instructed Kennedy. "Start again, Mr. Secretary."

  "You can cut the next sentence," chimed in Bundy.

  "'Welcome the statement of your desire,'" said Rusk, reading back his notes. "Couldn't we just say, 'My desire is the same?'"

  "My desire isn't the same as his," Kennedy objected. How about "I can assure you of the great interest of the people of the United States to find a satisfactory solution to this…"

  "Interested in reducing tensions," murmured the secretary of state.

  "We have to fudge it somewhat," conceded the president.

  Rusk pressed on. "We are of course quite prepared to consider with our allies the suggestions that you and your partners in the Warsaw Pact might have in mind."

  The notion that the Soviet-dominated Warsaw Pact was an alliance of free nations was too much for the hawkish Bundy. "Do we have to talk about their 'partners in the Warsaw Pact'? he interrupted peevishly. "What you [Khrushchev] have in mind."

  "Yeah, I think you oughta…" the president agreed.

  Seated across the table from Jack, Bobby could no longer conceal his frustration. The cobbled-together draft was full of noble sentiments but didn't actually say anything. Like Thompson, Bobby wanted to steer the exchange with Moscow back to the original Friday night proposal. He suggested his brother tell Khrushchev, "You made an offer to us, and we accept it. And you've also made a second offer, which has to do with NATO, and we'll be glad to discuss that at a later time."

  The youngest and least experienced member of the ExComm, Bobby frequently veered between belligerence and inarticulateness. But he also had a knack for occasionally homing in on the essence of a problem. He sensed that the discussion in the ExComm was going around in circles, and that everybody was getting lost in a morass of commas and subordinate clauses. He urged his brother to permit him and Ted Sorensen to go off into another room and draft the reply to Khrushchev.

  "Why don't we try to work it out for you, without you being there to pick it apart?"

  The suggestion drew laughter from the rest of the ExComm. Nobody else dared speak so frankly to the president. Bobby broke the tension again a couple of minutes later when Taylor announced that the Joint Chiefs were calling for massive air strikes against Cuba by Monday morning at the latest "unless there is irrefutable evidence in the meantime that offensive weapons are being dismantled."

  "Well, I am surprised."

  ExComm members were still debating what to do about the Turks and the Jupiters when they were jerked back to the present. More than four hours had passed without any news on the fate of Major Anderson. He was almost certainly dead, but it was unclear whether his disappearance over Cuba was due to an accident or enemy action. An intercepted Cuban communication settled the issue.

  "The U-2 was shot down," said McNamara, reading a note handed to him by an aide.

  "Was the pilot killed?" Bobby wanted to know.

  General Taylor had some more details. "The pilot's body is in the plane." The U-2 had likely been shot down over the town of Banes by a Soviet SAM missile. An American reconnaissance plane had picked up missile guidance radar signals from a SAM site near Banes at the same time as the U-2 overflight. "It all ties in in a very plausible manner."

  Kennedy was taken aback by the apparent Soviet "escalation." There must have been a significant "change of orders" from Moscow. He began connecting the dots. A tough new message from Khrushchev earlier in the day following more conciliatory signals on Friday. Antiaircraft fire against low-level U.S. Navy reconnaissance planes. And now a U-2 shot down. The outlook suddenly seemed very bleak. Mixing metaphors somewhat, Bobby Kennedy would later describe a sense in the room that "the noose was tightening on all of us, on Americans, on mankind, and that the bridges to escape were crumbling."

  "They've fired the first shot," said Paul Nitze, the hard-line assistant secretary of defense.

  The immediate question was how to respond.

  "We can't very well send a U-2 over there, can we now, and have a guy killed again tomorrow," said the president.

  Taylor agreed. "We certainly shouldn't do it until we retaliate, and say that if they fire again on one of our planes that we will come back with great force."

  "We ought to go in at dawn and take out that SAM site," said McNamara.

  His deputy, Gilpatric, argued that the downing of the U-2 was more ominous than the antiaircraft fire against the low-level planes. The antiaircraft batteries were probably manned by Cubans, but the SAM missiles were almost certainly controlled by Soviets.

  "This is a change of pattern," concluded McNamara, thinking aloud. "Now why it's a change of pattern, I don't know."

  5:50 P.M. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27 (12:50 A.M. SUNDAY, MOSCOW)

  The families of the U-2 pilots lived alongside each other at Laughlin Air Force Base outside Del Rio, Texas, a small town on the Mexican border surrounded by cactus and sagebrush. The 4080th Strategic Wing, which consisted of one U-2 squadron with about twenty-five pilots, was a large, rambunctious family. The Air Force had built brand-new bungalows on good-size lots for the pilots. Their social life revolved around bridge parties and church and backyard barbecues. Rudolf Anderson, Sr., and his wife, Jane, were pillars of the bridge-playing set, together with their best friends, Robert and Marlene Powell, who had children around the same age.

  The pilots' wives had little information about what was taking place in the skies over
Cuba. Their husbands all disappeared at the start of the crisis, without saying very much about what they were doing. The women were left to fend for themselves, stockpile canned food, and tape up their windows in case of a Soviet attack. As they tried to preserve a semblance of routine, there was one sight that encapsulated all their fears: a chaplain and a colonel walking up the driveway with serious expressions on their faces.

  Jane Anderson had already been through this ghastly routine. A few months earlier, the Air Force had reported that Rudy had been killed in a U-2 crash during a refueling exercise. It turned out to be a false report. There had been a mix-up in the manifest, and another pilot had died. Shortly before the Air Force officers showed up on Jane's doorstep to deliver the news, Rudy called to let her know that he was okay. It took some time to sort out the confusion.

  When the Air Force staff car appeared in the officer housing complex on Saturday afternoon, the women looked out of their windows to see where it was headed. As the car carrying the colonel and the chaplain passed their houses, everybody breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, the officers got out of the car and went looking for Marlene Powell. She assumed that something had happened to her husband. Instead, they asked her to accompany them across the street to the Anderson bungalow. Definitive word on what had happened to Rudy had still not reached Del Rio. All that was known was that he had gone missing over Cuba.

  When she heard the knock on her door, Jane ran into the bathroom and refused to come out. Marlene tried to comfort her through the locked door.

  "Don't get worried," she told her friend, who was stifling her sobs. "There's still hope."

  When Jane finally reappeared in the living room, an Air Force doctor wanted to give her a drug to calm her nerves. Marlene took the doctor aside. As Jane's best friend, she knew something nobody else knew.

  "Don't give her anything," she whispered. "She's pregnant."

  Rudy Anderson's widow gave birth to a baby girl seven and a half months later.

  Because of the seven-hour time difference, it was already well after midnight in Moscow. Nikita Khrushchev was resting at his villa on the Lenin Hills, with its panoramic view of the Kremlin and the winding Moscow River. He had returned home late from the office and asked for his usual nighttime drink, tea with lemon. He suggested that his wife and son drive out to their weekend retreat outside Moscow in the morning. He had summoned other Presidium members to meet with him at a government villa nearby. As soon as he was free, he would join the rest of his family at the dacha.

  Around 1:00 a.m., Khrushchev got a series of calls from his aides. A telegram had just arrived from the Soviet Embassy in Havana relaying the letter from Fidel Castro predicting an American attack on Cuba in the next twenty-four to seventy-two hours. It also contained a dramatic plea. Hearing the letter read to him over the phone, Khrushchev concluded rightly or wrongly that Castro was advocating a preemptive nuclear strike against the United States. He interrupted his aide several times to clarify certain passages in the text.

  Khrushchev viewed Castro's message as a "signal of extreme alarm." Earlier in the day, he had decided there was still time to negotiate a face-saving compromise with Kennedy. The Americans seemed to be wavering. A U.S. invasion of Cuba appeared unlikely at a time when Washington was responding to Soviet diplomatic feelers through the United Nations. But what if Castro was right? Khrushchev had instructed Soviet troops to come to the aid of their Cuban comrades in the event of an American attack. There would inevitably be many Soviet casualties. It would be very difficult, perhaps impossible, to limit the fighting to Cuba.

  Another factor to be considered was Castro's fiery personality. Khrushchev did not doubt that his Cuban friend was extraordinarily courageous, and willing to sacrifice his life for his beliefs. He liked and admired Fidel enormously, but he was also aware of his headstrong nature. Castro reminded the onetime Ukrainian peasant of "a young horse that hasn't been broken." It was necessary to tread very carefully with such a creature. The man Cubans called el caballo was "very spirited." He needed "some training" in order to turn him into a reliable Marxist-Leninist.

  The idea that the Soviet Union would be the first to use nuclear weapons was completely unacceptable to Khrushchev, however much he threatened and blustered. Unlike Castro, he had no illusions about the USSR's ability to win a nuclear war. The United States had more than enough nuclear weapons both to sustain a first strike and to wipe out the Soviet Union. The Cuban obsession with death and self-sacrifice startled Khrushchev, who had seen more than his share of destruction and suffering. He understood, perhaps for the first time, just how differently he and Castro "viewed the world" and valued human life. As Khrushchev saw it, "We are not struggling against imperialism in order to die" but to achieve the long-term "victory of communism." To be Red and dead was to miss the point.

  And yet here was this Cuban revolutionary talking blithely about launching a nuclear strike against the United States. Having lived through World War I, the Russian Civil War, and the Great Patriotic War, Khrushchev shuddered to think what would happen if he followed Castro's advice. America would obviously sustain "huge losses," but so would the "socialist camp." Even if Cubans fought and "died heroically," their country would be destroyed in the nuclear crossfire. It would be the start of a "global thermonuclear war."

  The jolt of Castro's letter was soon followed by another shock. At 6:40 p.m. Washington time, 1:40 a.m. Sunday in Moscow, the Pentagon announced that an American military reconnaissance aircraft had gone missing over Cuba and was "presumed lost." The Pentagon statement did not make clear whether the plane had been shot down, but the implications for the Kremlin were deeply disturbing. While Khrushchev had authorized his commanders on Cuba to fight back in self-defense, he had not ordered attacks on unarmed reconnaissance planes. He wondered whether Kennedy would be willing to "stomach the humiliation" of the loss of a spy plane.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Cat and Mouse

  5:59 P.M. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27

  By the afternoon of what was fast becoming Black Saturday, the U.S. Navy had located all four Soviet submarines. They were deployed in a large rectangle, measuring 200 by 400 miles, that stretched in a north-easterly direction from the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands. It looked as if two of the Soviet submarines had been assigned to protecting Soviet shipping along the northern route to Cuba across the Atlantic, while the other two were deployed along a more southerly route.

  The hunt for the Foxtrots took place in secret, unbeknownst to the American public. For the most part, Kennedy permitted the Navy to conduct its antisubmarine operations without much second-guessing. McNamara had warned that it would be "extremely dangerous" to interfere with the decisions of the commander on the scene, or defer an attack on a Soviet submarine that presented a significant threat. "We could easily lose an American ship by that means," he cautioned the president. The ExComm approved procedures to be used by American ships to signal Soviet submarines to come to the surface. The signals consisted of four or five practice depth charges, to be dropped directly on top of the submarines. Navy chiefs assured McNamara that the depth charges were "harmless." They were designed to produce a loud explosion beneath the water, but would supposedly cause no material damage to the Soviet vessel.

  Hunting Soviet submarines and forcing them to come to the surface was the ultimate game of cat and mouse. Arrayed against the submarines were four hunter-killer carrier groups, each one of which included an aircraft carrier, dozens of planes and helicopters, and seven or eight destroyers. In addition, long-range U.S. Navy P2V anti-submarine aircraft based in Bermuda and Puerto Rico were on constant patrol. The Foxtrots had an entire ocean in which to hide. But at least once a day, they were obliged to come out of their hiding places to communicate with Moscow and recharge their batteries.

  Soviet Submarine Positions, October 27, 1962

  Earlier in the afternoon, the Americans had photographed a previously unidentified submarine, designated B-4 by
the Soviets, 150 miles inside the quarantine line. It submerged immediately after being spotted. B-36, under the command of Captain Dubivko, was moving slowly eastward after being detected in the vicinity of Grand Turk with the help of underwater sonar techniques. A group of hunter-killer destroyers under the aircraft carrier Essex was pursuing the submarine B-130, skippered by Nikolai Shumkov and moving slowly eastward under the power of just one diesel engine.

  The most active chase under way on Saturday afternoon was for submarine B-59, known to the Americans as C-19. It was being led by the USS Randolph, a venerable aircraft carrier that had first seen action against Japan in World War II. Helicopters and twin-engined Grumman S2F trackers from the Randolph had been hunting the Soviet sub all day, dropping sonobuoys and triangulating the sound echoes. The search focused on an area three hundred miles south of Bermuda. It was an over-cast day, with the occasional heavy rainstorm.

  "Submarine to starboard," yelled the spotter on the tracker plane. The sub was heading north, attempting to hide behind a squall line. Several men were visible in the tower.

  By the time the S2F came round for a second pass, the Soviet sailors had disappeared and the decks of the Foxtrot were underwater. On the third pass, the sub was fully submerged. The Americans dropped practice depth charges to signal the Soviet sub to surface and identify itself. American helicopter pilots maintained sonar contact with the sub, and could hear the clanking of heavy machinery and the suction noise caused by a propeller. One pilot even heard the slamming of hatches from the area of the underwater explosion "leaving no doubt that we had a submarine contact." But B-59 remained below water.