One minute to midnight

by Michael Dobbs

  In April 1961, during the Bay of Pigs invasion, the State Department had persuaded the ambassador to show the United Nations a photograph of a Cuban air force plane that had bombed an airfield near Havana. The "evidence" turned out to be fake. The air raid had not been carried out by Cuban air force defectors, as the Kennedy administration claimed, but by pilots on the payroll of the CIA, in an old B-26 painted with Cuban insignia. To make the story about a defection more believable, CIA men had shot dozens of bullet holes into one of the planes, using .45-caliber pistols. Stevenson was humiliated.

  Stevenson had his doubts about Kennedy's handling of the missile crisis. He felt that the United States should negotiate with the Soviets under UN auspices. It was clear to him that Washington would have to offer something in return for the removal of the missiles, perhaps the withdrawal of Jupiter missiles from Turkey and Italy or even the Guantanamo Naval Base. But he was also under pressure from the White House to take a tough public stand. Worried that Stevenson lacked backbone, Kennedy had dispatched John McCloy, all-purpose wise man and former American viceroy in Germany, to sit next to him in New York.

  In the absence of live footage from Cuba or the blockade line, the Security Council was the closest the television networks could get to the climactic superpower confrontation. The Council provided the perfect backdrop for a contest of rhetorical gladiators. The chamber was dominated by a giant wall tapestry of a phoenix arising from the ashes--representing mankind recovering from the destruction of World War II. There was space for only twenty chairs around the circular table, providing an intimacy and dramatic intensity that the much larger General Assembly lacked. At moments of crisis, diplomats and officials would crowd around the entrances, watching the debate unfold.

  As luck would have it, the Soviet ambassador, Valerian Zorin, was chairing the meeting when Stevenson asked for the floor. Zorin was tired and ill, and had been showing signs of mental deterioration in recent months. Sometimes, during private meetings, he would look up, as in a daze, and ask, "What year is this?" He had been left to fend for himself by Moscow. Without instructions, he had relied on the traditional techniques of Soviet diplomats: obfuscation and denial. Zorin continued to deny the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba, even as Khrushchev was privately confirming them to the visiting American businessman, William Knox.

  Zorin's denials had become too much, even for the patient, well-mannered Stevenson. Seated four chairs around the table from the Russian, Stevenson insisted on asking "one simple question."

  "Do you, Ambassador Zorin, deny that the U.S.S.R. has placed, and is placing, medium and intermediate range missiles and sites in Cuba?"

  There was nervous laughter around the chamber as Stevenson pressed his question. "Yes or no--don't wait for the translation--yes or no."

  "I am not in an American courtroom, sir, and I do not wish to answer a question put to me in the manner in which a prosecutor does," replied Zorin, in his whining, high-pitched voice. He smiled and shook his head as if amazed by Stevenson's effrontery.

  "You are in the courtroom of world opinion right now, and you can answer yes or no. You have denied that they exist, and I want to know if I have understood you correctly."

  "You will receive your answer in due course. Do not worry."

  There was more nervous laughter as Stevenson tried to corner his opponent.

  "I am prepared to wait for my answer until hell freezes over, if that is your decision."

  The phrase "until hell freezes over" would soon become celebrated as the perfect put-down to the stonewalling Soviet ambassador. In fact, it was the opposite of what Stevenson really meant. The Americans were not prepared to wait for a Soviet answer. They wanted it immediately. To force a response from Zorin, Stevenson had a pair of wooden easels set up at the back of the chamber and proceeded to produce the photographic evidence.

  As everybody else in the room strained to see the photographs, Zorin ostentatiously scribbled notes to himself.

  "He who has lied once will not be believed a second time," he told the Council, after a long pause for the consecutive French translation of his tormentor's remarks. "Accordingly, Mr. Stevenson, we shall not look at your photographs."

  Among the millions of Americans watching the Security Council debate via television was the president. Seated in his rocking chair in the Oval Office, he made notes on a legal pad, circling and underlining key words.

  "Missile," he wrote at the top of the pad. He drew a box around it, and then repeated the word, this time with a circle around it. "Veto, veto, veto, veto." "Provocative," he scrawled, with a heavy circle. He repeated the word "provocative," this time with a slightly lighter circle. He underlined the words "close surveillance" and "Soviet ship." At the bottom of the page, he drew a series of interlocking boxes that trailed off into the margins.

  After Stevenson finished, Kennedy looked up from his legal pad. "Terrific," he told his aides. "I never knew Adlai had it in him. Too bad he didn't show some of this steam in the 1956 campaign."

  1:03 A.M. FRIDAY, OCTOBER 26 (12:03 A.M. CENTRAL TIME)

  The nightwatchman was on his regular rounds. Everybody was on alert for surprise raids by Russian commandos known as spetsnaz infiltrated into the United States in advance of war. War planners had warned that a Soviet nuclear first strike could be preceded by sabotage attacks against military command-and-control facilities. The sector direction center on the southern edge of Duluth Airport was an obvious target as it housed the computers and radar systems that pulled together air defense information across the Great Lakes. If Soviet saboteurs could blow up the fortresslike concrete blockhouse, the United States would lose much of its ability to track Soviet bombers flying in from the North.

  The guard was patrolling the back of the four-story building when he saw a shadowy figure climbing a fence near the electricity generating plant. He fired a few shots into the darkness and ran off to sound the alarm. Within seconds, the klaxon had begun to wail, startling pilots in the mess hall several hundred yards away. Nobody knew what to make of the alarm, which was different from the standard scramble signal. They were still wondering what to do when someone reported that it was a sabotage siren, not a scramble siren.

  While the pilots at Duluth were waiting for instructions, alarms began going off all over the region, from Canada to South Dakota. Could a Soviet sabotage plot be under way? The antisabotage plan called for "flushing" the interceptor force, Air Force terminology for getting as many planes into the air as quickly as possible. Unable to figure out what was happening in the Duluth direction center, the controller responsible for Volk Field in Wisconsin decided that "discretion was the better part of valor" and proceeded to implement the plan.

  It had already begun snowing in central Wisconsin and temperatures were hovering around the freezing point. Volk Field was in an isolated area known for its deep ravines and dramatic rock formations. The field was mainly used for training purposes by the Air National Guard. There was no hangar for the alert planes, no radar-guided landing system, no control tower, inadequate runway overruns, and a chronic shortage of deicing equipment. Technicians were still tinkering with the klaxons, and were relying on a jerry-rigged phone system to distribute and authenticate a flush order.

  Conditions at some of the other fields being used to host the nuclear-armed F-101s and F-106s of the Air Defense Command were even more rudimentary. Siskiyou County Airport in California lacked virtually everything "except a runway and a converted dental van" that served as a control tower. At Williams Air Force Base in Arizona, an Air Force pilot watched in horror as an inexperienced civilian contractor spilled twenty gallons of fuel onto the tarmac. It turned out that the contractor had pushed the wrong button. Instead of pumping fuel into the plane, he was pumping fuel out of it.

  Aircraft from the big Air Force bases at Duluth and Detroit had been dispersed to Volk, ready to be flushed in the event of a Soviet attack. The Detroit pilots had flown in from Hulman Field outside Terre Haute, a co
uple of days after one of their colleagues overshot the runway. The pilots bunked down in hospital beds in the dispensary, a thirty-second jeep ride across the tarmac from their planes. They slept in their flight suits.

  The order to flush came at 12:14 a.m. Central Time, eleven minutes after the klaxons went off in Duluth. Roused from their sleep, the pilots pulled on their zippered boots, and ran outside into a snowstorm. As he jumped into a jeep and headed to his plane, Lieutenant Dan Barry was convinced that war had broken out. It would be crazy to launch fully armed nuclear interceptors in these conditions in peacetime. He ran up the ladder into the plane, and flicked a switch to bring the engine from shutoff to idle. While the engine warmed up, he strapped on his helmet and the parachute, which was part of the seat. The F-106 was already fully loaded with an MB-1 "Genie" nuclear-tipped missile, two infrared heat-seeking missiles, and two radar-guided missiles.

  A flushed plane is like an ambulance or a fire engine, with priority over all other traffic. After climbing to two thousand feet, the planes would make contact with sector headquarters at Duluth. The assumption was that they would head north, to intercept the Soviet Bears and Bisons believed to be swarming over Canada.

  Barry was pulling onto the runway when he saw a jeep coming down the runway toward him, flashing its lights frantically. The lead F-106 was about to take off. A second message had arrived from the Duluth controller, canceling the sabotage alert. Since there was no control tower, the only way to prevent the planes from getting airborne was by physically blocking the runway.

  It took exactly four minutes to call the planes back. Another minute, and the first nuclear-armed F-106 would have been in the air, the others immediately behind.

  Back in Duluth, meanwhile, guards were still searching for the mysterious intruder. A short time later, they found some bullet holes in a tree. They eventually concluded that the suspected spetsnaz saboteur was probably a bear.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Intel

  7:50 A.M. FRIDAY, OCTOBER 26

  The time had arrived for some political theater. Four days had gone by since Kennedy's announcement of a naval blockade of Cuba--officially known as a "quarantine"--but the U.S. Navy had yet to board a single ship. Journalists were asking questions about the effectiveness of the blockade. Admirals and generals were grumbling about a Soviet oil tanker, the Bucharest, that had been permitted to sail on to Havana on the basis of an assurance by her master that she was not carrying any "prohibited materials."

  No one was more aware of the public relations aspects of the blockade than the president, a practiced and very effective manipulator of the media. He was his own chief spinmeister, inviting publishers to the Oval Office, stroking the right editors, telephoning influential columnists and reporters, reprimanding administration officials who spoke out of turn. He read newspapers assiduously and encouraged his aides to think about ways to "brainwash" the press, a term used by his military assistant at the start of the crisis. For Kennedy, the quarantine was primarily a political tool rather than a military one. Public perceptions were all-important.

  The ship selected for the necessary demonstration of American resolve was the 7,268-ton Marucla, a Lebanese freighter under charter to the Soviet Union. She was on her way to Cuba from the Latvian port of Riga, with a declared cargo of paper, sulfur, and spare truck parts. The chances of a Lebanese-registered ship, with a largely Greek crew, being found to carry banned Soviet missile parts were practically nonexistent, but that was not the point. By boarding the Marucla, the Navy would signal its determination to enforce the quarantine. As Kennedy told the ExComm on October 25, "We've got to prove sooner or later that the blockade works."

  The destroyer closest to the Marucla was the USS John R. Pierce, which initiated the chase on Thursday evening. But the Navy thought it would be "nice" if the interception was made by the USS Joseph P. Kennedy, a destroyer named after the president's brother. The Kennedy was considerably further away from the Marucla at the time, and had to fire up three of her four boilers, reaching a speed of 30 knots, to close the distance. The boarding party would consist of six officers and men from the Kennedy plus the executive officer of the Pierce.

  As the Kennedy steamed toward the Marucla, the captain convened a meeting in the wardroom to discuss boarding formalities. After some discussion about what to wear, the boarding party eventually decided on service dress whites without sidearms. Whites were more formal than khaki and would make a good impression. The captain stressed the need for "friendly gestures" and "courtesy" rather than peremptory shots across the bow. On Thursday, October 25, the Navy had issued instructions for a gentler approach to enforcing the blockade. If necessary, boarding officers were authorized "to distribute magazines, candy, and lighters." A budget of two hundred dollars per ship was authorized for the purchase of appropriate "people-to-people materials."

  "Take no menacing actions," the cable instructed. "Do not train ships guns in direction merchantmen."

  Shortly after dawn, the Kennedy instructed the Marucla by flag and flashing light to prepare for inspection. The immediate challenge was getting on board. The seas were choppy and the whaleboat from the Kennedy bobbed up and down, tantalizingly out of reach of the rope ladder put out by the crew of the Marucla. The officer in charge of the boarding party, Lieutenant Commander Kenneth Reynolds, was afraid of being dunked in the ocean and looking ridiculous. He eventually made a successful leap for the ladder. By 7:50 a.m., everybody was safely on deck.

  The obliging Greek sailors offered their guests coffee, pulled back the covers of the cargo hatches, and invited the Americans to search for missile parts. There were none to be found. A crate labeled "scientific instruments" that had piqued the curiosity of Reynolds turned out to be a collection of "rather shoddy devices that one might find in an old high school physics lab."

  There was no time for a proper search. Superiors all the way up the chain of command were constantly demanding information by sideband radio. The Pentagon was getting nervous. The White House wanted some good news to distribute. After two hours of rummaging around, Reynolds decided he had seen enough. He authorized the Marucla to proceed to Havana.

  The streets around the Steuart Motor Company building in downtown Washington, D.C., were littered with broken bottles, abandoned vehicles, and piles of trash. Tramps and drunkards lived in the run-down alleyways behind the nondescript seven-story building. Parking and public transportation facilities were so limited that CIA analysts usually took car pools to work. Before parking their cars, the agency men often had to sweep away broken glass.

  Located on the corner of Fifth and K streets in northwest Washington, the Steuart building was home to the CIA's photo interpretation effort. (The agency occupied the top four floors, above an automobile showroom and a real estate office.) Every day, military couriers showed up with hundreds of cans of film shot from spy planes or satellites overflying targets such as the Soviet Union, China, and most recently Cuba. During periods of crisis, it was not unusual for black limousines to show up outside the building, discharging cabinet secretaries and generals who had to avoid scrums of car salesmen and hobos to attend top secret intelligence briefings.

  As he had every day during the crisis, Arthur Lundahl made his way through the security turnstiles at the entrance to the Steuart building to his office overlooking Fifth Street. The director of the National Photographic Interpretation Center would spend much of the day traveling around Washington, briefing political and military leaders on the latest intelligence. But first he had to immerse himself in the details of the latest batch of photos taken by Navy Crusader jets over central and western Cuba and analyzed overnight by teams of expert photo interpreters.

  After weeks of studying high-altitude U-2 imagery, it was a relief finally to examine the low-level photos. Everything was so much clearer and more detailed. Even laymen could make out the telltale features of a Soviet missile camp: the long missile shelter tents, the concrete launch stands, the fuel trucks,
the bunkers for nuclear warheads, the network of feeder roads. It was possible to see individual figures strolling among the palm trees or running for cover as the Navy Crusaders flew overhead.

  The overnight intelligence haul included information about military units and weapons systems never before seen on Cuba. A low-level photograph of the Remedios area of central Cuba showed row after row of T-54 tanks, electronics vans, armored personnel carriers, an oil storage depot, and at least a hundred tents. From the layout of the site and the precise alignment of the tents and vehicles, it was obvious that this was a Soviet military encampment, not a Cuban one. These were clearly combat troops, not "technicians," as U.S. intelligence had previously described them. And there were many more of them than anyone had suspected.

  The photo interpreters drew the director's attention to an oblong object with sharklike fins, some thirty-five feet long, alongside a radar truck. Lundahl recognized the object as a FROG, an acronym for "Free Rocket Over Ground." (FROG was the American designation; the official Soviet name was Luna.) It was impossible to tell whether this particular FROG was conventional or nuclear, but military planners had to assume the worst. There was now a frightening possibility that, in addition to the missiles targeted on the United States, Soviet troops on Cuba were equipped with short-range nuclear-tipped missiles capable of destroying an American invading force.