“You SOB,” Kisevalter snarled at the heavyset man with hazel eyes. “You’re a first-class blackmailer. This is shantazh.”
Hearing the Russian word for blackmail, Golitsyn started to reconsider his gambit. Maybe issuing demands to the leader of the free world wasn’t such a good idea.
Golitsyn asked for the letter back.
“Oh no,” Kisevalter purred. “You want it delivered to the President. I’ll deliver it.”
In retirement, Kisevalter relished the memory of Golitsyn’s panic.
“Golitsyn jumped up on top of the desk and then jumped down on my side and we began wrestling for the letter. I let him win.”
Golitsyn never asked for a meeting with JFK again.
Yet Angleton’s faith in Golitsyn never wavered.
“For reasons most intelligence professionals still do not understand, Angleton accepted at face value virtually every judgment Golitsyn rendered over more than a decade,” said two Agency historians.148
* * *
WHEN ANGLETON FIRST HEARD of the story of Yuri Nosenko in June 1962, he thought it improbable.
Nosenko, a veteran KGB officer in Geneva, had approached the U.S. embassy saying he needed some Swiss francs to replenish official funds blown in a drinking spree with some dubious women. In return, he said, he would supply the U.S. government with information that it would find useful.149
Nosenko was turned over to Pete Bagley in the Soviet Russia Division. Bagley initially found his story convincing.150 Angleton did not.
Angleton referred to Golitsyn, who had said the defectors who came after him “would all be phonies,” meaning they would be agents dispatched and controlled by the KGB.151
Nosenko’s father was the Soviet minister of shipbuilding in the 1950s, no small position. He was friends with senior Politburo members. Was it really probable, Angleton asked, that such a well-connected man would sell out his country for a few hundred dollars?152
With his powers of persuasion, Angleton was able to bring Bagley and David Murphy, the chief of the Soviet Russia Division, around to his view that Nosenko was a false defector, dispatched by Moscow Center to distract the CIA.153
But for everyone at the CIA who found Golitsyn credible, there were others who balked.
Golitsyn “certainly showed every indication of having a severe paranoid disorder,” said CIA doctor John Gittinger. “I had an opportunity to see a great deal of information that he had provided and the various things he had done.… Much of it was so absurd that it was impossible to believe that anybody would believe it.”154
Angleton believed it.
* * *
ON THE NIGHT OF October 15, 1962, the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center in Southwest Washington, D.C., was a busy place. The latest surveillance imagery from U-2 flights over Cuba showed new construction near the village of San Cristóbal. The star-shaped battery of missiles was identical to Soviet nuclear missile bases described in material passed on by Oleg Penkovsky, a Soviet official who was spying for the CIA. “The Penkovsky Papers,” as they were dubbed, confirmed what the analysts were seeing in the U-2 photos: The Soviet Union was installing nuclear missiles in Cuba.
On Tuesday morning, October 16, 1962, CIA deputy director Marshall Carter briefed President Kennedy and his brother at the White House on what the photographs showed. All concerned realized the gravity of the revelation. The installation of the Soviet missiles so close to the American homeland was unprecedented. It was another test of the mettle of the man in the Oval Office.
HAMLET
THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS of October 1962 was, in the words of historian Arthur Schlesinger, “the most dangerous moment in the history of the world.”155
The story of how that moment came and went has evolved over the decades. First told in daily news stories, the saga of the “October crisis,” as it was called, was then fleshed out in longer magazine articles.156 Then came the memoirs and the histories with portentous titles such as Thirteen Days, The Missiles of October, and Eyeball to Eyeball.
Thirty years later came the accounts of most of the officials involved, American, Russian, and Cuban, who spoke at a conference in Havana. Since then a dominant narrative of the crisis has emerged, at least in English-language accounts. It is a tale of heroic liberal statesmanship.
President Kennedy resisted the advice of a majority of his military advisers. The so-called hawks urged air strikes to destroy the Soviet missile sites, followed by a U.S. invasion to remove and replace the Castro government. JFK was a dove and opted for diplomacy. After thirteen days of tense deliberations, Kennedy managed to coerce and persuade Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev to remove the missiles without going to war.
The accounts of the former officials strengthened the dominant interpretation.157 It turned out that the U.S. military planners who assured Kennedy that the Soviets would step aside and acquiesce to a U.S. invasion were ill informed. They estimated the Soviet Union had fifteen thousand troops on the island and that the nuclear missiles were not yet operational.
Former Soviet officials told the Havana conference that they actually had forty-two thousand troops on the island and the field commanders in Cuba had authority from Moscow to fire tactical nuclear weapons if attacked.158 A U.S. invasion, which the Joint Chiefs predicted would end with a quick victory, probably would have resulted in thousands of U.S. soldiers dying in the first use of atomic weapons since 1945.
In the event of such an attack, U.S. military doctrine called for massive nuclear retaliation on scores of Soviet cities. Soviet doctrine also called for massive retaliation if the USSR was attacked by the United States.
So if the United States had invaded, as the Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously urged, the world might well have experienced a nuclear holocaust. With the benefit of hindsight, many scholars regard the peaceful resolution of the crisis as JFK’s finest moment as president of the United States.
* * *
WHAT THE LIBERAL ACCOUNT of the October crisis tends to overlook is the impact on President Kennedy’s government. JFK’s refusal to go to war in October 1962 despite the advice of the Joint Chiefs stoked the Seven Days in May mood of rebellion that already pervaded the councils of U.S. national security agencies.
The generals felt the president was abandoning the U.S. policy of containment of the Soviet Union in favor of accommodation. When JFK asked General LeMay how the Soviet military would respond to a U.S invasion, LeMay assured him there would be no reaction. After all, the United States had overwhelming military superiority.
The United States had fifteen hundred long-range B-47 bombers and five hundred B-52s armed with nuclear bombs, as well as two hundred intercontinental ballistic missiles. The Soviet arsenal, by contrast, consisted of a few long-range missiles, whose unreliability was so great that it was uncertain exactly whom they threatened. The Soviet’s long-range bomber forces consisted of one hundred Tu-95 Bear bombers and thirty-five Bison bombers, whose range and flight characteristics made them easy targets for U.S. fighter jets and surface-to-air missiles.159
Kennedy doubted U.S. military superiority would overawe the Soviets.
“They, no more than we, can let these things go by without doing something,” he told LeMay. “They can’t, after all their statements, permit us to take out their missiles, kill a lot of Russians, and then do nothing.”160
LeMay argued that not attacking Cuba would invite aggression in the heart of Europe.
“This blockade and political action … will lead right into war,” he warned.
LeMay feared a strategic misjudgment similar to that of the European powers facing Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
“This is almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich,” he said to the president. “In other words, you’re in a pretty bad fix at the present time.”
“What did you say?” JFK asked.
“You’re in a pretty bad fix.”
Kennedy wouldn’t be bullied.
“You’re in the
re with me,” he said coolly.
LeMay went silent, chewing his unlit cigar in disgust.
JFK walked out of the meeting, furious.
“These brass hats have one great advantage in their favor,” he snapped to his aide Ken O’Donnell afterward. “If we … do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them that they were wrong.”
JFK had recently read Barbara Tuchman’s bestselling book The Guns of August, about how the leaders of Europe had stumbled into a world war in August 1914 that few wanted or anticipated. Kennedy talked about the miscalculations of the Germans, Russians, Austrians, French, and British.
“The great danger,” he said, “is a miscalculation—a mistake in judgment.”
His cautious view differed radically from the confidence of men like LeMay and Angleton. They thought the greatest danger was not war but Castro and the spread of Cuban-style revolutions in the western hemisphere.
The tension between the White House and the national security agencies came to a boil in a meeting at the Pentagon in the middle of the crisis. Bill Harvey announced he had ordered six scouting teams to infiltrate Cuba in advance of the expected invasion.
Bob Kennedy told him to call it off.
Harvey said the mission was urgent. Kennedy told him to recall the teams. Harvey objected. The attorney general insisted. The younger man was staring down the older man when Harvey exploded.
“If you fuckers hadn’t fucked up the Bay of Pigs, we wouldn’t be in this fucking mess,” he sneered.161
Bob Kennedy didn’t have his brother’s coolness. He just walked out of the meeting.
“Of course, I was furious,” he said later. “You’re dealing with people’s lives. The best of the Cubans, the ones who volunteer, and you’re going to go off with a half-assed operation such as this?”162
Most of the CIA men in the meeting agreed with Harvey, but they held their tongues.163
“Harvey has destroyed himself today,” said John McCone. “His usefulness has ended.”164
Not to Angleton it hadn’t.
* * *
THE FISSURES IN KENNEDY’S government widened as Khrushchev balked at Kennedy’s demand that the missiles be withdrawn. The chiefs started to mobilize U.S. armed forces for the invasion they favored. Almost overnight South Florida became an armed camp.
“Military convoys clogged highways, the railroad line to Homestead Air Force Base was jammed with military supplies,” recalled Justin Gleichauf, a CIA man who was there. “Barbed wire went up along the beach in Key West and rockets sprouted along the Overseas Highway. As one of my last support activities, I obtained six thousand road maps of Cuba for use in what we felt would be an invasion.”165
In Cuba, soldiers wheeled out artillery guns onto the Malecón, the waterfront boulevard of Havana. Across the island, Castro’s government called up the armed forces, the militias, and the neighborhood block committees to fight the expected Yanqui invasion.166
After ten days of impasse, nuclear war was no longer a theoretical proposition; it was a looming reality. JFK sent his wife, Jackie, and their children, Caroline and John-John, to their country house in Virginia. He invited one of his paramours, a nineteen-year-old college student named Mimi Beardsley, to the White House to divert him as he tried to manage his predicament.
Kennedy spent his days wondering if he was going have to start a war that might end with whole cities and millions of people incinerated by atomic bombs. Beardsley, who spent the night of October 27, 1962, in JFK’s bed, observed his tense mood. Coming out of one meeting and going into another, he told her something he could never have admitted in public: “I’d rather my children be red than dead.”167
Throughout the crisis, Jack and Bob relied on a Russian diplomat and friend, Georgi Bolshakov, to pass private messages to the Soviet leadership. When the Kremlin’s answers seemed conflicted and confusing, JFK sent Bob to see Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin with one last message.
Dobrynin could see from Kennedy’s eyes that he had not slept for days.
“The President is in a grave situation,” RFK told him, “and does not know how to get out of it. We are under very severe stress. In fact, we are under pressure from our military to use force against Cuba. Probably at this very moment the President is sitting down to write a message to Chairman Khrushchev.”
Bob Kennedy said he was delivering the last U.S. statement on the subject.
“President Kennedy implores Chairman Khrushchev to accept his offer and to take into consideration the peculiarities of the American system. Even though the President himself is very much against starting a war over Cuba, an irreversible chain of events could occur against his will. That is why the President is appealing directly to Chairman Khrushchev for his help in liquidating this conflict. If the situation continues much longer, the President is not sure that the military will not overthrow him and seize power. The American army could get out of control.”168
Another point not emphasized in the liberal narrative of the October crisis: The president feared that 186 years of constitutional government in the United States of America was in jeopardy. A military coup was a real possibility.
The American army could get out of control.
That wasn’t paperback fiction. It was the reality of power in John Kennedy’s Washington.
* * *
WAR NEVER CAME. AT noon on Sunday, October 28, the White House received a communication from Chairman Khrushchev that began “Dear Mr. President.” The missiles would be removed, he told Kennedy. The Soviet leader said he had installed the missiles only to help Cuba deter the threat of an American invasion. With the president’s assurances that there would be no invasion, Khrushchev said the missiles were unnecessary.169
The crisis was over.
“Most of us felt limitless relief,” wrote Arthur Schlesinger.170
Not the men at the Pentagon. They felt limitless dismay. The chiefs heard about the end of the crisis at the same time as the American people did, via a wire-service report read on the radio. President Kennedy had made a strategic decision about national and hemispheric security without involving his military commanders.171
Curtis LeMay wanted to repudiate the deal.
“Why don’t we go in and make a strike on Monday anyway?” he asked. He was appalled that Kennedy, who had many hundreds more strategic and tactical nuclear weapons at his disposal than did Khrushchev, had not extracted more gains.
“We could have not only gotten the missiles out of Cuba,” LeMay said, “we could have gotten the Communists out of Cuba.”172
* * *
WHAT HAS BEEN ALL but forgotten over time is the conservative critique of Kennedy’s diplomacy, which prevailed in the Pentagon, the CIA, the Cuban colony in Miami, and much of the Republican Party. This interpretation would influence a generation of U.S. policymakers. In this view Khrushchev had successfully bullied Kennedy. By inserting the missiles and then ostensibly backing down, the Russian leader extracted a concession from Washington in the form of Kennedy’s guarantee that the United States would not invade Cuba. With a much weaker military hand, the wily Communist had come out ahead.
The conservative narrative, retailed in popular books with titles like Stab in the Back, Illusion and Reality, and Thirteen Mistakes, argued that Kennedy had chosen a popular but illusory “peace.”
“By the time the Cuban missile crisis ended, relations between the Kennedy administration and the Joint Chiefs of Staff (Taylor excepted) were at an all-time low,” wrote Pentagon historian Steven L. Rearden. “In contrast, Kennedy’s public stature and esteem had never been higher. Lauded by his admirers and critics alike for showing exemplary statesmanship, fortitude, and wisdom in steering the country through the most dangerous confrontation in history, the President emerged with his credibility and prestige measurably enhanced.”
“But to end the crisis,” Rearden went on, “he made compromises and concessions that his military advisors considered in many ways unne
cessary and excessive.… The consensus on the Joint Staff was the United States had come out on the poorer end of the bargain.”
Angleton believed JFK’s concessions had not only fumbled an opportunity to liberate Cuba; they also signaled a fatal compromise of U.S. policy with regard to containing communism.
“There was first Kennedy’s unmistakable faltering of will at the Bay of Pigs,” Angleton said, “and, then, a year and a half later, his reluctance to make good the showdown and exact fair price in the missile crisis by forcing Castro’s expulsion from Cuba for having conspired with the Kremlin to bring Soviet nuclear power into the Western Hemisphere.”173
For Angleton, his wife’s analogy of JFK to Hamlet was apt. Like the Danish prince, the American president was intelligent, self-absorbed, and indecisive. He lacked will, and the United States was weaker for it.
PART III
IMPUNITY
KIM
“AN EVEN-HANDED ASSESSMENT OF Angleton’s career would discern two distinct phases to it, although most of his detractors concentrate on the second,” wrote CIA historian David Robarge. “From the late 1940s to the early 1960s, he and his staff provided a useful voice of caution in an Agency seized with piercing the Iron Curtain to learn about Soviet intentions and capabilities.”
And then he lost his way.
“For roughly the next ten years, distracted by unsubstantiated theories of Soviet ‘strategic deception,’ Angleton and his staff embarked on counterproductive and sometimes harmful efforts to find moles and prove Moscow’s malevolent designs,” Robarge said.
In the Agency’s institutional perspective, Angleton faltered at a time when U.S. intelligence was vulnerable.
“He was losing his sense of proportion and his ability to live with uncertainty right around the time, 1959–63, when it became startlingly evident—agents compromised, operations blown, spies uncovered—that something was seriously amiss with Western intelligence and more aggressive CI and security were needed.”1
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