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

by M. Dobbs

  The reports of dissent in the ranks filtered up to Washington via the CIA station chief in Miami. After eight months in Florida, Ted Shackley had come to view the Cubans as a "volatile, emotional, expressive people." He worried what would happen if the operation was called off altogether and the teams disbanded. Cubans being Cubans, there was a great risk that the disillusioned fighters "would talk and their experience would sweep [the] exile community like wildfire." If that happened, the story would inevitably "hit press." Shackley outlined his concerns in flawless agency bureaucratese, describing "nuts and bolts intelligence realities based on clinical objective appraisal our situation." He began by emphasizing that his men were at "highest possible pitch of motivation and state of readiness" following "equipment checkout, commo briefings, discussion infil routes." He continued in a darker vein:

  Human psychology and stamina being what they are, this high peak of proficiency cannot be maintained indefinitely because fighters of all types go stale as is so well documented in pugilistic annals and all other competitive fields where combat readiness is required….While this [is] well known Headquarters believe fluctuations in go and stop orders over past seven days have been such that prudent judgment dictates that you be personally appraised that we are sitting on explosive human situation which could blow at any time within next forty-eight hours. Wish assure you that while full gamut of leadership tradecraft psychology and discipline will be harnessed to prevent any human explosion we cannot guarantee that it will not happen.

  ***

  On the other side of the Florida Straits, in Havana, the Soviet ambassador was doing his best to calm down an indignant Fidel Castro. The Cuban leader had been outraged to learn from the radio that morning of Nikita Khrushchev's proposal for a Cuba-Turkey missile swap. His naturally suspicious mind interpreted this as a signal that his country could become a pawn in some kind of grand bargain between the superpowers.

  "Friends simply don't behave in this way," he raged to Aleksandr Alekseev, when the ambassador called on him on Saturday evening with an official explanation of the latest Soviet position. "It's immoral."

  After three years of dealing with Castro, Alekseev was accustomed to defusing his anger. He was constantly looking for ways to avoid offending his host while carrying out the instructions of his own government. It was a tricky balancing act. He sometimes reworded messages from Moscow to make them more acceptable to the explosive Cuban. His approach this time was to put his own reassuring spin on a message that had managed to set alarm bells ringing in Washington, Havana, and Ankara.

  "As I see it, Nikita Sergeyevich is not posing the question of a trade," the ambassador said soothingly.

  Alekseev depicted Khrushchev's letter as a negotiating ploy, designed to expose the hypocrisy of the American position. The United States claimed it had the right to deploy missiles around the borders of the Soviet Union, but denied a similar right to Moscow. It was most unlikely that Kennedy would accept Khrushchev's offer. Nikita's maneuver would make it easier to justify the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba to international public opinion.

  Though still not satisfied, Castro began to soften. He told Alekseev that the first news reports on the letter had "confused" certain sections of Cuban public opinion, including the military. Some officers had asked him whether Moscow was reneging on its commitments to Cuba. He would do his best to explain the logic behind the proposal to the Cuban people.

  Castro was not as nervous as he had been the previous night, when he appeared at the Soviet Embassy in Vedado and announced that a U.S. attack was imminent. As Alekseev later reported to Moscow, "He began to assess the situation more calmly and realistically…. He nevertheless continues to believe that the danger of a sudden attack still exists as before."

  Despite his frustration with Khrushchev, Castro was delighted that his Soviet comrades had shot down an American spy plane. He told the ambassador that the Cuban authorities had collected the wreckage of the plane, along with "the corpse of the pilot." Without knowing the military details, Alekseev assumed that the U-2 had been downed by the Cubans, not the Soviets. His subsequent report to Moscow sidestepped the question of responsibility, but emphasized that Fidel felt fully justified in ordering his forces to respond to any American overflights.

  "Castro said that in the event of an [American] attack, full fire would be turned against the aggressor, and that he was sure of success," Alekseev cabled.

  9:52 P.M. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27

  Valentin Savitsky had finally concluded that the only reasonable choice left open to him was to come to the surface. The commander of submarine B-59 had been tempted to use his nuclear torpedo to blast his tormentors out of the water, but his fellow officers had persuaded him to calm down. He made the decision to surface jointly with the chief of staff of the flotilla, Vasily Arkhipov. As soon as they were able to raise the radio antenna, they sent a message to naval headquarters, giving their location and recounting what had happened.

  As B-59 rose to the surface with a giant gurgling sound, the Soviet sailors were startled to find the whole area floodlit. They had surfaced in the midst of four American destroyers. Helicopters hovered overhead, illuminating the sea with powerful searchlights. Bobbing up and down on the waves were dozens of sonobuoys used by the Americans to pinpoint the location of the submarine, easily identifiable by their flickering navigation lights. It seemed as if the dark sea was ablaze with fire. U.S. Navy logs recorded the time as 9:52 p.m.

  Savitsky went up to the bridge, accompanied by Arkhipov and several other officers. It was 30 degrees cooler up here than down below. They drank in the night air like drowning men gasping for breath. One officer "almost fell into the water from the sensation of gulping down so much fresh sea air." As they caught their first glimpse of the sailors on the decks of the American warships in their neatly pressed uniforms, the Soviet officers felt even more uncomfortable and humiliated. They were dirty, dispirited, and exhausted. Their submarine was in terrible shape. But they also felt a defiant pride. They had undertaken a 5,000-mile odyssey, to seas that no Soviet submariner had sailed before. They had endured physical hardships that their smartly dressed enemies could barely imagine. It was the machines that had failed, not the men of B-59.

  Savitsky ordered his men to run up the Soviet flag. Not the blue-and-white pennant of the Soviet navy, but the crimson red flag of the Soviet state, with the hammer and sickle emblazoned in the corner. It was his way of signaling that his battered vessel was under the protection of a mighty superpower. One of the American destroyers sent a message by flashing light asking if he needed assistance. "This ship belongs to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics," Savitsky replied. "Halt your provocative actions."

  American S2F tracker planes made repeated low-level runs at B-59, taking photographs and dropping more sonobuoys, recording devices, and flares. The flares dropped several hundred feet before igniting in a brilliant incendiary display. Each flare had the power of 50 million candles. From the bridge of B-59, it seemed as if the planes were making practice bombing runs. Lookouts reported that the Americans were spraying the sea with machine-gun tracer fire.

  After an hour or so, a radio message arrived from Moscow instructing B-59 "to throw off your pursuers" and move to a reserve position closer to Bermuda. But that was easier said than done. Everywhere he looked, Savitsky could see American warships and planes. The sea was a cauldron of blazing light.

  11:00 P.M. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27 (10:00 P.M. HAVANA)

  Americans went to bed on Saturday night in a state of high uncertainty, not knowing what the next day would bring. The White House was almost deserted. Kennedy dismissed most of his aides, telling them to go home to their wives and families and get some rest. The one person he kept by his side was Dave Powers, Camelot's court jester. The wry little Irishman had the job of boosting JFK's spirits when they were low. On any given day, Powers was usually the first staffer to say good morning to the president and the last to wish him goodnight. H
is duties included ensuring a plentiful supply of clean shirts and cool drinks. He often arranged for women to visit his boss when he was traveling or Jackie was away.

  An inveterate womanizer, Kennedy told cronies that he was prone to migraines if he did not get a "piece of ass every day." His libido certainly did not take a break because of the heightened risk of nuclear war. He was still seeing a longtime lover, Mary Pinchot Meyer, the wife of a senior CIA official, Cord Meyer. Artistic, sophisticated, and intelligent, Mary was different from the usual string of presidential girlfriends with nicknames like "Fiddle" and "Faddle." Kennedy had known her since his boyhood, and often turned to her at moments of high stress and tension. He had invited her at the last minute to a family dinner at the White House on the evening of Monday, October 22, at which Jackie's sister, Lee Radziwill, and her dress designer, Oleg Cassini, were also present. Mary telephoned Jack in the Oval Office on Saturday afternoon. Unable to reach him immediately because he was tied up in discussions, she left a contact number in Georgetown, where she lived.

  Dave Powers makes no mention of Meyer or any other presidential girlfriend in his hagiographic memoir of JFK. By his account, the president spent part of Saturday evening writing a letter of condolence to the widow of Major Anderson. He then went to the White House movie theater to watch one of his favorite actresses, Audrey Hepburn, in Roman Holiday. Before going to bed and turning off the light, he reminded his aide of the schedule for the following morning.

  "We'll be going to the ten o'clock mass at Saint Stephen's, Dave. We'll have plenty of hard praying to do, so don't be late."

  Other officials grabbed what rest they could. At the Pentagon, there was a flurry of late-night excitement about the Grozny, the Soviet ship heading full speed for Cuba. It looked as if the tanker would reach the quarantine line by dawn, shadowed by two American warships. The president would then have to decide whether to stop her or let her go. The choice boiled down to risking a confrontation with Khrushchev before he was really ready or being viewed around the world as weak and vacillating.

  George Anderson retired to bed with a cold shortly before 11:00 p.m. after receiving a briefing from Curtis LeMay on everything that had happened in Washington while he was at the Navy-Pitt football game. More than fourteen thousand air reservists had been called up for a possible invasion of Cuba. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had promulgated a revised schedule of reaction times for attacking Cuba:

  Air Strikes against SAM sites: two hours.

  Full Air Strike: twelve hours.Invasion: Decision Day plus seven days.

  All Forces ashore: Decision Day plus eighteen days.

  Even more ominously, the ExComm was planning to announce that any Soviet submarine located within the 500-mile intercept zone would be presumed to be "hostile." American antisubmarine forces had located two Soviet submarines inside the zone; another two were just outside. The proposed declaration was vaguely worded. Under certain circumstances, it could be interpreted as granting U.S. warships the authority to open fire on the submarines inside the zone, if they presented "a threat."

  In Havana, Sergio Pineda was preparing for another long night. The reporter for the Prensa Latina news agency had been filing dispatches to Latin American newspapers from the Cuban capital. On Saturday evening, he described the call-up of hundreds of young women into health battalions and the appearance of soldiers in steel helmets outside large office buildings "unloading enormous crates of medicine and surgical material."

  "Now anything can happen," Pineda reported. "There is calm at this time in the city. Everything appears to be sunken into stillness." As he typed his report, the only sound he could hear was the fluttering of a flute from a radio receiver in a nearby guard post. The music was occasionally interrupted by a radio announcer repeating the words of Antonio Maceo Grajales, one of the heroes of the Cuban war of independence against Spain:

  "Whoever attempts to invade Cuba will gather only the dust of its blood-drenched soil, if they do not die in the fight."

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  "Crate and Return"

  2:00 A.M. SUNDAY, OCTOBER 28 (10:00 A.M. MOSCOW)

  Events had unfolded very differently from the way Nikita Khrushchev imagined when he sent his armies across the ocean, further than Soviet, or indeed Russian, soldiers had ever ventured before. At the time he made the decision, back in May, it had seemed inspired. He would defend the newest member of the socialist community from American aggression while strengthening the overall military position of the Soviet Union. He had assumed, naively, that it would be possible to hide the nuclear weaponry until he could present the world with a fait accompli. Now, he was faced with a choice he had never anticipated: an American invasion of Cuba and possible nuclear war or a personal humiliation.

  The situation was changing hour by hour, sometimes minute by minute, in dangerous, unpredictable ways. Meeting with his Presidium colleagues on Saturday morning, he had announced that an American invasion Cuba was "unlikely" in the near future. Even though he had already concluded that he would have to withdraw the missiles, it was still possible to negotiate, extracting maximum advantage for the Soviet Union from Kennedy's reluctance to go to war. But a series of unforeseen incidents ― including the shooting down of one U-2, the penetration of Soviet airspace by another, and the alarming message from Castro predicting an imminent yanqui attack ― had persuaded Khrushchev that time was running out.

  He had asked the Soviet leadership to meet with him at a government dacha in the bucolic Moscow countryside. A fairy-tale landscape of billowing birch trees, picture-book villages, and the meandering Moscow River, the area around Novo-Ogaryevo had been the playground of the Russian ruling class for centuries. Tsarist governors of Moscow had carved ornamental gardens out of the thick forest; Stalin came here to escape the Kremlin demons; Khrushchev had his own weekend place nearby, where he liked to relax with his family.

  A two-story mansion with a mock neoclassical facade, the Novo-Ogaryevo dacha bore a passing resemblance to the White House in Washington. It had originally been built for Stalin's putative successor as Soviet prime minister, Georgi Malenkov, who was quickly pushed aside by the more forceful Khrushchev. After Malenkov's disgrace, the estate was taken away from him and turned into a government guest house. Novo-Ogaryevo would achieve greater fame decades later as the presidential retreat of Mikhail Gorbachev and the site of negotiations that led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

  The Presidium members were seated in front of the first secretary along the long, polished oak table. The eighteen attendees included Andrei Gromyko, the foreign minister, and Rodion Malinovsky, the defense minister. Aides hovered in the background, to be summoned and dismissed as needed. As usual, it was Khrushchev's show. The others were happy to let him talk and talk. "You dragged us into this mess; it is now up to you to find a way out of it" was the unspoken sentiment in the room. Apart from Khrushchev, the only people who contributed very much to the discussion were Gromyko and Anastas Mikoyan.

  Lying on the table in front of each Presidium member was a folder with the latest missives from Kennedy and Castro. The White House had released the JFK letter to the press to avoid the long communications delays between Moscow and Washington. Dobrynin's report on his meeting with Bobby Kennedy had still not reached Moscow when the Presidium session began. But Khrushchev was encouraged by the passage in the Kennedy letter that expressed a willingness to discuss "other armaments" once the Cuban crisis had been resolved. He understood this as "a hint" on the withdrawal of the Jupiters from Turkey.

  Khrushchev had prepared the Presidium for the inevitability of a tactical retreat by depicting the American promise not to invade Cuba as a victory for Soviet diplomacy. His defense was that he was acting in the tradition of the great Lenin, who had surrendered a huge swathe of territory to the Germans under the punitive 1917 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk to "save Soviet power." The stakes were even higher now. Khrushchev told his colleagues that they had to defuse "the danger of w
ar and nuclear catastrophe, with the possibility of destroying the human race. To save the world, we must retreat."

  An aide jotted down the two main points made by the first secretary:

  1. If an attack [on Cuba] is provoked, we have given the order for a retaliatory response;

  2. We agree to dismantle the missile sites.

  The real question facing Khrushchev was not whether to retreat but the logistics for implementing the pullout decision and the concessions he could extract from Washington in return. That issue was largely resolved for him by a series of alarming reports that arrived while the meeting was in progress.

  A telegram from the KGB residency in Havana reported that "our Cuban friends consider that invasion and bombarding of military objects is inevitable." The cable gave added emphasis to Castro's earlier warning. This was followed at 10:45 a.m. Moscow time by the formal Soviet report on the downing of the American U-2 the previous day. The message, signed by Malinovsky, made clear that the plane had been brought down by a Soviet, rather than Cuban, antiaircraft unit. But it did not say who ordered the shootdown. The possibility that Soviet commanders on Cuba were following Castro's orders on such a sensitive matter alarmed Khrushchev.

  As the Presidium members were digesting this information, Khrushchev's foreign policy aide, Oleg Troyanovsky, was summoned to the telephone. The Foreign Ministry had just received a coded cable from Dobrynin on his meeting with Bobby Kennedy. Troyanovsky scribbled down the essential points and returned to the Presidium session.