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

by M. Dobbs

  A huge amount of material on the Cuban missile crisis has become available for research over the last two decades, particularly following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. I was nevertheless surprised to discover that many U.S. government archives dealing with the crisis ― including the records of the Strategic Air Command, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Defense Intelligence Agency ― remain largely off-limits to researchers. Other record groups, including the holdings of the Air Force Historical Research Agency at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, are severely restricted. Most Soviet government archives, particularly the archives of the Ministry of Defense, are still closed. Access to the Cuban archives will probably have to wait for a change of regime in Havana.

  I was able to overcome some of these obstacles by triangulating information from very disparate sources, in English, Russian, and Spanish. For example, this technique was key to discovering the Soviet deployment of nuclear-tipped cruise missiles to within fifteen miles of the Guantanamo Naval Base in the early morning hours of Black Saturday. My curiosity was originally whetted by a list of Soviet casualties in Cuba that showed two Soviet soldiers had been killed near Guantanamo on October 27, 1962. I was also intrigued by an October 1987 article by the investigative reporter Seymour Hersh that talked about a "firefight" in eastern Cuba, involving Soviet and Cuban troops, whose communications were apparently intercepted by U.S. intelligence. The Hersh story mentioned a Soviet commander named Maltsev ordering ambulances to the scene. A further piece to the jigsaw puzzle was provided by a one-sentence reference to the movement of FKR cruise missiles to an "advanced position" near Guantanamo in a Russian-language memoir by Operation Anadyr veterans.

  The confused story began to make more sense when my Russian researcher, Svetlana Chervonnaya, tracked down the family of one of the dead Soviet soldiers, Viktor Mikheev. It turned out that Mikheev had been in the convoy that transported the cruise missiles in the middle of the night: his truck fell into a ravine. We found other soldiers in the convoy who remembered the incident and the cruise missile deployment. While combing through documents at the Naval Historical Center in Washington, D.C., I came across a top secret message from the GITMO commander reporting the movement of some "3,000 Russ/Sino/Cuban tr[oo]ps augmented w/unidentified art[iller]y equipment" on the night of October 26–27. The message gave precise military coordinates for the starting and ending points of the deployment, within two hundred yards, which could only have come from radio intercepts. I was able to plot the movement of the convoy to within fifteen miles of Guantanamo, exactly as described by the Soviet veterans. The final pieces of the puzzle fell into place when I learned that the commander of the cruise missile regiment was a Colonel Maltsev. Hersh was correct about the intercept, but wrong about the nature of the "firefight," which he interpreted as a clash between Soviet and Cuban soldiers.

  I later came across a memorandum in the Kennedy Library in Boston from a U.S. businessman, William Knox, who met with Khrushchev on October 24. The memorandum included a previously undisclosed threat from the Soviet leader. If Kennedy wants to find out what kind of weapons we have in Cuba, Khrushchev told Knox, let him invade the island: "The Guantanamo naval base will be destroyed the very first day." A visit to Oriente province in Cuba in March 2006 left me with a vivid impression of the rugged terrain around Guantanamo.

  Another example: identifying the storage sites for the Soviet nuclear warheads. This was one of the big mysteries of the missile crisis, and one that has never been fully resolved. The CIA assumed that there must be nuclear warheads in Cuba, because the missiles were useless without them. But U.S. intelligence analysts were never able to locate the warheads, and eventually gave up trying. By collating disparate pieces of information, I believe that I have solved the mystery. Soviet officers responsible for handling the warheads gave general descriptions of the location of the bunkers in their memoirs and in interviews with me. They said that the central nuclear storage bunker was somewhere near Bejucal, a town south of Havana. I visited Bejucal in March 2006 but was unable to identify the precise location. While researching CIA records at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, however, I came across references to an "ammunition storage bunker" near Bejucal. It turned out that the CIA had originally suspected that the bunker might be used to store nuclear warheads, but dismissed the idea because of the lack of multiple security fences around the facility.

  My hunt for the nuclear warheads gathered pace in the summer of 2007, when I discovered that the raw intelligence film shot by U.S. Navy and Air Force planes during the missile crisis had been transferred to the National Archives. To be more precise, hundreds of thousands of cans of DIA film have been warehoused at an Archives facility in Kansas. There is just one catch: most of the finding aids remain "classified." I could detect little rhyme or reason to the numbering of the cans, making the research process roughly equivalent to finding needles in a haystack. I was permitted to request twenty cans of film at a time, which were then air-freighted overnight from Kansas to Washington. After reeling through more than a hundred cans of film, and tens of thousands of images, I feel enormously fortunate to have found some previously unpublished photographs of the Bejucal facility taken by U.S. reconnaissance planes in October 1962. Several frames included shots of the special vans used to transport nuclear warheads around Cuba, proof that I had found the right place. I was able to combine these photographs with contemporary images from Google Earth to find the precise location of the nuclear storage site.

  A final example: uncovering the details of the U-2 flight over Chukotka, also on Black Saturday. Standard academic accounts of the missile crisis usually mention this incident only in passing. The U.S. Air Force has failed to declassify a single piece of information about the flight by Captain Charles F. Maultsby, other than a unit history with the bizarre claim that his mission was "100 percent successful." I began pressing the U.S. Air Force for information on Maultsby's flight in 2005, but they were unable (or unwilling) even to identify the location of the relevant SAC records. In order to piece together the incident, I had to rely on other sources, including a detailed memoir written by Maultsby prior to his death from prostate cancer in 1998, provided to me by his widow, Jeanne. I was able to supplement this with interviews with his navigator, Fred Okimoto, and fellow U-2 pilots. I came across the key document, a map showing Maultsby's precise flight route, along with tracking data on Soviet MiGs that were sent up to shoot him down, in the files of the State Department Executive Secretariat, which were declassified by the National Archives at my request. I suspect that the map may have been released inadvertently by State Department declassifiers unaware of its significance. As the reader can see from the illustration on the last page of the third insert, the map contains no special classification marking. It is difficult to understand why the Maultsby flight is still the subject of so much official secrecy. The most plausible explanation is that the U.S. government does not want to confirm the widely known fact that it intercepted real-time Soviet air defense tracking, and used these reports to figure out what had happened to the missing U-2 pilot and steer him safely back home.

  During two years of research for this book, I interviewed more than a hundred former Cuban missile crisis veterans in the United States, Russia, Ukraine, and Cuba. Since most of them are quoted by name in the endnotes, I will not repeat them all here, but there are some people I would like to single out for special thanks. In Russia, I relied on the research assistance of Svetlana Chervonnaya, a formidable archival sleuth responsible for breaking several important historical stories. Thanks to Svetlana, I met several times with Aleksandr Feklisov, the Soviet spy who over-saw Julius Rosenberg and ran the KGB operation in Washington during the missile crisis. She was also my conduit to the Soviet veterans' group headed by General Anatoly Gribkov (who was the Soviet General Staff representative in Cuba during the missile crisis) and Leonid Sannikov (a young lieutenant serving with one of the missile regiments near Sagua la Grande). Sann
ikov generously allowed me to review the letters and memoirs collected by his organization, the Inter-regional Association of Internationalist Fighters (Mezhregional'naya Assotsiatsia Voinov-Internationalistov), from missile crisis veterans over the past decade. In addition to putting me in touch with many of his members, he also introduced me to Lieutenant Colonel Sergei Karlov, a historian with the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces, whose encyclopedic knowledge of Operation Anadyr is based on a study of original documents still closed to Western researchers.

  Among the Soviet veterans on Cuba, I would particularly like to thank Colonel General Viktor Yesin, the former chief of staff of the Strategic Rocket Forces, and a lieutenant-engineer in Cuba in October 1962. Yesin, now a professor at the USA-Canada Institute in Moscow, patiently explained to me the functioning of the R-12 missile and the firing procedures. For understanding how the missile was targeted on U.S. cities, I am indebted to one of the deputy heads of the Ballistics Division at Soviet headquarters, Major Nikolai Oblizin. A noted mathematician, Oblizin did many of the complicated ballistic calculations involved in targeting Washington, D.C., and other U.S. cities in the pre-computer, pre-GPS era. In Kiev, General Valentin Anastasiev treated me to jaw-dropping stories about the handling of Soviet nuclear warheads, including six Hiroshima-type atomic bombs that were his personal responsibility.

  In the United States, I was fortunate to be able to interview several political veterans of the crisis, including former defense secretary Robert McNamara and Theodore Sorensen, special counsel and speechwriter to JFK. Special thanks are due to Dino Brugioni, a top assistant to NPIC director Arthur Lundahl, who spent many hours educating me on the art of photo reconnaissance and how it was applied in Cuba. Dino also alerted me to the transfer of the raw intelligence film to the National Archives, sending me off on a frustrating but eventually rewarding detective chase. Other American missile crisis veterans who went out of their way to help me include: Raymond Garthoff, formerly with the State Department, who read an early draft of my manuscript and made many helpful comments; U-2 pilots Richard Heyser and Gerald McIlmoyle, both of whom flew over Cuba during the missile crisis; Gregory J. Cizek, who was preparing to land on Cuba with the U.S. Marines; and intelligence veterans Thomas Parrott, Thomas Hughes, and Warren Frank. I am grateful to Robb Hoover, the unofficial historian of the 55 Strategic Reconnaissance Wing, for putting me in touch with many veterans of his unit, and to George Cassidy for doing the same with veterans of the USS Oxford. In Florida, I would particularly like to thank former Miami Herald reporter Don Bohning, who introduced me to veterans of the anti-Castro struggle, including Carlos Obregon and Carlos Pasqual, an undercover CIA agent in Cuba's Oriente province during the missile crisis. My thanks also go to Pedro Vera, who spent seventeen years in Cuban jails after being abandoned by the CIA after a failed attempt to sabotage the Matahambre copper mine. He now lives in Tampa.

  I received no assistance from the Cuban authorities. My request for a visa to research the missile crisis was apparently stymied by the bureaucratic paralysis in Havana during Castro's waning years and the transfer of power to Raul: even simple decisions cannot be taken in Cuba without the consent of the man at the top. In the event, I do not think that the lack of cooperation made much difference to my research. Cuban assistance to other historians has largely been limited to long monologues from Fidel, who has said virtually everything he is going to say on the subject, and interviews with a few carefully screened veterans. The official Cuban viewpoint has been amply documented in conferences organized by the National Security Archive, a nonprofit group affiliated with George Washington University in Washington, D.C. I was able to make two private trips to Cuba in 2006 and 2007, and traveled across the entire island, visiting many of the sites associated with the missile crisis, including Che Guevara's cave in Pinar del Rio province, the copper mine at Matahambre, the planned U.S. Marine invasion beach at Tarara, and Soviet headquarters at El Chico. I spoke unofficially with dozens of Cubans, including several with vivid memories of October 1962.

  While the accounts of missile crisis veterans were very important to my research, I checked all such testimony against the written record. Memory can play tricks on even the most meticulous eyewitnesses four decades after the event, and it is easy to make mistakes, conflate different incidents, and confuse dates. Archival records are also frequently incomplete and sometimes inaccurate. Even ExComm members sometimes received incorrect information that has turned up in various accounts of the missile crisis. I will mention just two examples. First, on October 24, CIA director John McCone noted in his diary that a Soviet ship headed for Cuba turned around after been confronted by a U.S. destroyer. This incident never happened. Second, on Black Saturday, McNamara reported to President Kennedy that U.S. reconnaissance planes overflying Cuba had been hit by anti-aircraft fire, which later turned out to be incorrect. The most sensible approach for the researcher is to find multiple sources, and use documentary evidence to corroborate oral history, and vice versa.

  The starting point for my archival research was the extensive Cuban missile crisis documentation assembled by the National Security Archive, an indispensable reference source for contemporary historians. The Archive, under the direction of Tom Blanton, has taken the lead in aggressively using the Freedom of Information Act to pry historical documents out of a frequently recalcitrant U.S. bureaucracy. In the case of the Cuban missile crisis, it fought a landmark court battle in 1988 to obtain access to a collection compiled by the State Department historian. In cooperation with academic researchers, the NSA has also helped organize a series of important conferences on the missile crisis, including one in Moscow in 1992 and others in Havana in 1992 and 2002. I am indebted to various NSA staff members, including Blanton, Svetlana Savranskaya, Peter Kornbluh, Malcolm Byrne, and William Burr for providing documents and generally steering me in the right direction. In recognition of this debt, I am making my own missile crisis records available to other researchers via the Archive.

  Transcripts of the missile crisis conferences are available in the series of "On the Brink" books by James Blight, Bruce Allyn, David Welch, and others, which I refer to in individual source notes. Until the Cuban government opens its own archives to researchers, these conference materials constitute the best available source for the Cuban point of view. For transcripts of ExComm meetings, I have primarily relied on the work of the Miller Center at the University of Virginia. The transcripts are a work in progress and have been updated to take into account the objections of other scholars, notably Sheldon Stern, a former historian at the JFK library, who pointed out various errors. Nevertheless, they remain the most comprehensive source on what took place at the ExComm meetings and are conveniently available online via the Miller Center Web site, along with the original audio recordings.

  Soviet documentation on the missile crisis is more accessible in the United States than in Russia. The best source of Soviet material is the Dmitrii Volkogonov collection at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Many of the documents collected by Volkogonov, a Soviet military historian, have been translated by the Cold War International History Project and have been published in their bulletins. Other Soviet documents were provided to me by Svetlana Savranskaya of the National Security Archive and Mark Kramer, director of the Cold War studies project at Harvard University. Kramer has done extensive research in Soviet and Eastern European archives and has written authoritatively about the Soviet military. Savranskaya is the leading expert in the United States on the role played by Soviet submarines during the missile crisis. She has personally interviewed many of the key Soviet players in the crisis, including the four submarine skippers. She introduced me to Vadim Orlov, a member of the crew of B-59, and provided me the gripping diary of Anatoly Andreev, a submariner aboard B-36. The media center for the Russian foreign intelligence agency, the SVR, gave me copies of Soviet intelligence reports on the missile crisis.

  Leading American archival collections on the Cuban missile
crisis include the JFK library in Boston, the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, and the Naval History Center in Washington, D.C. Each has its strengths and weaknesses. The national security files at the JFK library are a comprehensive and easily accessible source of documentation on the crisis, as viewed from the White House. Unfortunately, the Kennedy family still imposes restrictions on parts of the collection. The personal records of Robert F. Kennedy, including many that deal with the failed Operation Mongoose, are largely closed to independent researchers. The family also insists that researchers examining the president's medical records be accompanied by a "qualified" medical expert. Robert Horsburgh, a professor of epidemiology at Boston University, generously agreed to give up an afternoon of his valuable time and go through the medical records with me. I would like to thank the former director of the JFK library, Deborah Leff, for her help and advice.

  The missile crisis records at the National Archives are scattered among many different collections, with varying degrees of public access. Curiously enough, one of the richest and most accessible collections is that of the CIA, an agency frequently criticized for its lack of openness. A large number of CIA records on the missile crisis, including daily photographic interpretation reports and updates on the status of the Soviet missile systems in Cuba, are available in digital form at the Archives through the CREST computer system. Detailed documentation on Operation Mongoose is available through the JFK Assassination Records Collection, with an online finding aid at the National Archives Web site. This invaluable collection includes many documents that are only tangentially related to the assassination, such as the U.S. marine invasion plan for Cuba in October 1962 and reports from American agents inside Cuba during the missile crisis.