One minute to midnight

by Michael Dobbs

  As the Cuban crisis wore on, the prime minister began feeling the strain as never before. He had to tread a careful line between his desire to support Kennedy and the skepticism felt by many British politicians and intelligence experts about the Cuban "threat." Europeans had learned to live with Soviet nuclear weapons in their backyard and it was difficult to understand why Americans should not do the same. From the British point of view, West Berlin was a much more valuable strategic asset than Cuba. Some British analysts even questioned the photographic evidence "proving" the existence of Soviet missiles in Cuba. To counter such skepticism, the U.S. Embassy in London released some of the photos to the British press before they were distributed in Washington. American reporters were outraged at being scooped.

  Macmillan continued to display his trademark calm in public, but betrayed his emotion behind the scenes. The U.S. ambassador to Great Britain, David Bruce, reported dryly to Washington that he thought he detected "a slight oscillation in one wing" of the famously unflappable prime minister. He advised Kennedy to ignore the "caterwauling" and not pay too much attention to the qualms expressed by his British allies when America's "most vital interests" were at stake. "Only stupid giants let themselves be tied down by Lilliputians," he cabled.

  Kennedy went out of his way to show the British that he took them seriously. He telephoned Macmillan almost every day. The British ambassador to Washington, David Ormsby-Gore, occupied a special position in the court of Camelot. He had been friends with Jack since the days when Joseph Kennedy, Sr., served in London as U.S. ambassador. The president treated Ormsby-Gore as an informal adviser, to the annoyance of other allies, particularly the French. It was rumored in Washington that two beautiful young women seen frequently in the company of the French ambassador were "plants" whose true mission was to "get close to Jack" and neutralize the schemings of perfide Albion.

  Macmillan had spoken with Kennedy the previous evening from Admiralty House. He urged Kennedy to compromise with Khrushchev. Laying the groundwork for a possible grand bargain with Moscow, he offered to "immobilize" sixty Thor missiles stationed in Britain. The intermediate-range Thors were under joint British-American control: the British had formal ownership of the missiles while the Americans were responsible for the 1.4-megaton nuclear warheads. The president promised to put Macmillan's idea into the bureaucratic "machinery." He later sent a message saying such a deal was premature. He would keep the British proposal in reserve in case all else failed.

  In the meantime, Macmillan quietly authorized an increase in British readiness levels. He ordered his defense chiefs to place the Thor missiles and Britain's own Vulcan nuclear bombers on fifteen-minute alert.

  "Berlin is the testicles of the West," Nikita Khrushchev liked to say. "Every time I want to make the West scream, I squeeze on Berlin."

  Finding a suitable squeeze point was not very difficult. West Berlin was a virtually defenseless capitalist bastion of 2 million people more than one hundred miles inside Communist East Germany. The city was connected to West Germany by thirteen negotiated access routes, any one of which could be severed in minutes by overwhelmingly superior Soviet forces. The access routes included four Autobahns, four railway lines, the Elbe River, a canal, and three air corridors, each of them twenty miles wide. The air corridors had been a lifeline in 1948 after Stalin cut the overland connections. The Western Allies ferried in supplies by air for 462 consecutive days. At the height of the blockade, one Allied transport plane landed in Berlin's Tempelhof airport every minute.

  Both Kennedy and Khrushchev considered Berlin "the most dangerous spot in the world." They had been sparring over the city ever since Kennedy's election as president. The status quo was unacceptable to the Soviets: hundreds of East German refugees were crossing the border every day. At the Vienna summit in June 1961, the Soviet leader threatened to sign a peace treaty with East Germany and eliminate Allied rights to West Berlin. Two months later, he chose a different option, erecting a 104-mile-long "anti-Fascist defense barrier," more commonly known in the West as the Berlin Wall. But tensions continued. On October 26, 1961, American and Soviet tanks had faced each other directly at Checkpoint Charlie in a two-day standoff. It was the first direct American-Soviet confrontation of the nuclear age, with "soldiers and weapons eyeball to eyeball."

  The fate of Berlin had been on the minds of the president and his advisers from the moment they first learned about the presence of Soviet missiles on Cuba. "I am beginning to wonder whether maybe Mr. Khrushchev is entirely rational about Berlin," Dean Rusk told his colleagues during the first session of the ExComm, on October 16. "They may be thinking that they can either bargain Berlin and Cuba against each other, or that they could provoke us into a kind of action in Cuba which would give an umbrella for them to take action with respect to Berlin."

  Fear of Soviet retaliation in Berlin was one of the main reasons why Kennedy decided to blockade Cuba rather than bomb the missile sites, his initial instinct. As he explained to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a U.S. attack on the missile sites would give the Soviets a pretext to "take Berlin," just as they had invaded Hungary in response to the Anglo-French attack on Egypt in 1956. In the minds of the Europeans, "we would be regarded as the trigger-happy Americans who lost Berlin." A Soviet attack on Berlin would leave the president with "only one alternative, which is to fire nuclear weapons." As Kennedy remarked, that was "a helluva alternative."

  During the weeks leading up to the Cuban crisis, Kennedy had been preoccupied by the question of how to deter a Soviet attack on West Berlin. There was no way the West could win a conventional war over Berlin, but at least he could raise the costs of a Soviet attack. He asked his aides how long it would take to get a battalion-sized force up the Autobahn into Berlin in an emergency. The answer was thirty-five hours. At the president's request, the military considered ways to cut the reaction time to seventeen hours by repositioning the force. The CIA reported on October 23 that the city had sufficient stocks of food, fuel, and medicine to survive a six-month blockade.

  Contrary to American expectations, the Soviets did not increase the pressure on Berlin in response to the U.S. blockade of Cuba. There were the usual incidents on the border and arguments about movements of allied convoys. Soviet troops in East Germany were ordered to a higher state of alert. Soviet and American officers exchanged accusations about "provocative actions" by the other side. But it was all more or less routine.

  East Germans were still fleeing to the West, although in much reduced numbers. In the early hours of Saturday morning, five young men and a woman clawed their way through layers of barbed wire to reach the French sector. East German border guards sent up flares to illuminate the night and sprayed the ground with automatic weapons fire. The twenty-three-year-old woman caught her coat in a barbed-wire barricade. Her male companions helped her untangle herself and dodge the bullets in the pouring rain. Another group of three young men crept through a graveyard on the border and scrambled over a barbed-wire-topped brick wall into West Berlin.

  In the afternoon, a U.S. transport plane flying out of the city along the central air corridor was buzzed by Soviet fighter-interceptors. The Soviet jets made three passes at the slower-moving American T-29 prop aircraft, but did not otherwise interfere. American intelligence officers wondered if the incident was an early sign of a new campaign of air corridor harassment.

  Khrushchev may well have seen a link between the deployment of Soviet missiles in Cuba and the endgame over Berlin. In his mind, everything was connected. Had the Cuban gamble succeeded, his overall geopolitical bargaining power would be much greater. He had been dropping heavy hints about a major new initiative on West Berlin, including the signing of a peace treaty with East Germany, after the U.S. congressional elections on November 6. "We will give [Kennedy] a choice. Go to war or sign a peace treaty," the chairman told Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall in September. "Do you need Berlin? Like hell you need it."

  Whatever his initial motives for dep
loying Soviet missiles to Cuba, Khrushchev now had no stomach for a wider confrontation with the United States. He resisted the temptation to raise the stakes in West Berlin at a time when the world was close to nuclear war in Cuba. When a deputy Soviet foreign minister, Vasily Kuznetsov, proposed "increasing pressure" on West Berlin as a way of countering American pressure on Cuba, Khrushchev reacted sharply. "We are just beginning to extricate ourselves from one adventure, and you are suggesting that we jump into another."

  Khrushchev had decided to give the West's "testicles" a rest.

  9:09 A.M. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27

  At McCoy Air Force Base outside Orlando, Florida, Major Rudolf Anderson, Jr., was completing final preparations for his sixth U-2 mission over Cuba. He had received a last briefing from the navigators, gone through his breathing exercises, and wriggled into his partial-pressure flight suit. He would make a one-hour fifteen-minute reconnaissance flight over the eastern half of the island.

  Lean and athletic, with dark hair and striking dark brown eyes, the thirty-five-year-old Anderson was a classic Type A personality. Flying was his life and his passion. As a child, he built model airplanes and dreamed of becoming a pilot. His evaluations were uniformly excellent, signposting the way to a brilliant military career. Exuberant in private--he once jumped out of his second-story college dorm window to chase a bird that had escaped from its cage--he was intensely serious when it came to work. His friend Bob Powell considered him the type of pilot "who took every mission you could get. You would volunteer for backup if the primary aborted. You had to go. He was irrepressible."

  Anderson was engaged in a friendly competition with another U-2 pilot, Richard Heyser, to rack up the most combat missions over Cuba. Heyser was senior to Anderson in rank, but Anderson was chief of standardization for the squadron, a prestigious position overseeing other pilots. Heyser had flown the U-2 mission over San Cristobal in western Cuba on October 14 that discovered the Soviet missiles. Anderson flew a mission the next day, discovering more missile sites in central Cuba, near Sagua la Grande. By Saturday, October 27, each man had flown five sorties over the island.

  Initially, Anderson's name was not on the flight roster for Saturday morning. The original plan consisted of three sorties, to be flown by less experienced pilots. The first mission was a quick twenty-minute hop over the missile sites of central Cuba. The second was a one-hour flight over all the missile sites. The third was a four-hour flight around the periphery of the island, remaining in international airspace. On Friday evening, SAC planners added a fourth mission to the schedule: checking out Soviet and Cuban military deployments in the vicinity of Guantanamo Naval Base and probing the Soviet air defense system. Eager to rack up more combat hours, Anderson lobbied for the assignment.

  One by one, the first three missions were canceled in the early hours of Saturday morning. The Navy was conducting low-altitude reconnaissance of the missile sites, so there was not much sense sending U-2s over the same area at a time when the Soviets had activated their air defense system. One pilot, Captain Charles Kern, was already sitting in the cockpit of his plane when the order arrived from Washington to scrub the flight. That left mission 3128--Anderson's mission.

  The flight plan called for Anderson to fly within range of eight SAM sites at an altitude of seventy-two thousand feet. He was well aware of the threat posed by Soviet V-75 missiles. His U-2 was equipped with a device for detecting the radar systems associated with the missile system. If a Soviet radar painted his plane, a yellow light would appear in his cockpit. If the SAM site locked on to the plane, the light would turn red. He would then attempt evasive action, feinting inwards and outwards like a matador deflecting a bull. It was hoped that the missiles would zip past him and explode harmlessly in the sky above.

  A van drove Anderson to the flight line, where the plane that he had used to make his five previous overflights was waiting. It was a CIA bird, No. 56-6676, repainted with Air Force insignia. Kennedy preferred to have Air Force blue-suiters flying over Cuba rather than CIA pilots: fewer questions would be asked if they were shot down. But the agency U-2s were slightly superior to the Air Force version: they had a more powerful engine and could fly five thousand feet higher. This made them a slightly more difficult target for the Soviet SAMs. The CIA had agreed reluctantly to lend several of its planes to the Air Force on condition that it retained control over the photo interpretation process.

  The agency was unhappy about being upstaged by the Air Force. CIA personnel were still responsible for servicing the spy planes at McCoy and taking charge of the intelligence materials. The Air Force pilots regarded them as interlopers, "looking for fault in everything we did." CIA officials complained that the Air Force did not pay enough attention to the threat posed by the SAM sites. There was no system for using electronic warfare techniques to jam the radars used by the Soviet air defense system or to track the U-2s as they flew over Cuba. Intelligence officers estimated the chances of a U-2 pilot being shot down over Cuba as around one in six.

  Anderson climbed up the steps to the U-2 followed by his mobile control officer and strapped himself into the cockpit. He carried photographs of his wife and two young children in his wallet. He was still feeling some pain in his right shoulder caused by a fall on the ice while on temporary duty in Alaska, but he was not going to let that stop him from flying. When his commander pulled him off the flight schedule one day to give him some rest, he had complained vociferously. "Aren't I doing a good enough job?" he wanted to know.

  The mobile officer, Captain Roger Herman, ran through the final checklist. Herman made sure that Anderson's oxygen supply was connected properly and that the maps and "top secret" target folder were all neatly stacked by the side of the ejector seat. The two pilots tested the emergency systems to make sure they were functioning normally. A surge of oxygen briefly inflated the capstans on Anderson's partial-pressure suit, filling the cockpit. When he was certain that everything was in order, Herman slapped Anderson on the shoulder.

  "Okay, Rudy, here we go, have a good trip. See you when you get back."

  Anderson gave a thumbs-up sign as Herman closed the canopy. Moments later, his U-2 took off for Cuba. It was 9:09 a.m.

  At the time that Anderson took off, an American electronics reconnaissance plane had already been in the air for four hours. The RB-47, a modified version of the B-47 bomber, was ferreting out Soviet radar signals. Captain Stan Willson had taken off at five o'clock that morning from Forbes Air Force Base in Kansas, topped up his fuel tank over the Gulf of Mexico, and was now circling Cuba, taking care to remain over international waters. Although he was interested in any type of radar signal, his primary goal was to find out whether Soviet air defenses had been activated.

  In addition to two pilots and a navigator, the crew of the RB-47 included three electronic warfare officers. In official Air Force lingo, they were known as "ravens," but they preferred a more humorous, self-deprecating term, "crows." Shortly after the plane got in the air, but before it reached altitude, the ravens had crawled back to the converted bomb bay, now stuffed with electronic eavesdropping equipment. Protruding like a pregnant womb from the underbelly of the plane, the "crows' nest" was sealed off from the pilot's compartment and pressurized separately. The ravens would spend the next ten hours listening to a series of beeps and twitters over the airwaves.

  For the most part, it was boring work, punctuated by moments of intense activity. Many of the men on Willson's plane had flown peripheral missions around the Soviet Union, probing for weaknesses in the air defense system in advance of a possible bomber attack. They would aim directly for the Soviet frontier, as if they were on a bombing raid, and then veer away at the last moment. The idea was to provoke the Russians to switch on their radars. The intercept data could be used later to map the Soviet air defense system. There was always a risk that they would stray over Soviet territory and be shot down. Several members of Willson's outfit--the 55th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing--had ended up in
Soviet prisons, while others had been killed by the very weapons systems they had been sent to detect.

  The flights around Cuba were known as "Common Cause." Some thrill-seeking ravens had begun to refer to the missions as "Lost Cause." Entire days could go by without anything happening. For one RB-47 pilot, the defining sound of the Cuban missile crisis was the "noise of silence." Both sides remained off the airwaves for as long as they could in order to give away as little information as possible to the enemy. Normally there was "a lot of chatter," but now everybody seemed to be "holding their breath."

  On Saturday morning, the airwaves came alive again, as the Soviets turned on their air defense tracking system. When the ravens picked up a radar signal, they immediately turned on their tape recorders and scanners. Analyzing radar signals was a cross between monitoring a cardiogram and studying birdsong. Just as experienced birders can make out hundreds of different varieties of birds, ravens learned to distinguish between different types of radar system, and even imitate them. Early warning radars produced a low-pitched sound, with considerable distance between the pulses. Fire-control radars emitted a shriller, almost continuous squeal, like the chirping of a bird. When a raven heard one of those, he knew that his own plane was in danger of being targeted. The pilot was authorized to "fire to destroy" if he thought he was coming under attack.

  As Willson's RB-47 flew around the coast of Cuba, the ravens began picking up radar signals associated with different Soviet missiles. They identified the telltale brrr-brrr of a Spoon Rest, the target acquisition radar for the Soviet SAM system. The spy ship Oxford had picked up similar signals overnight from the middle of the Florida Straits, an early indication that the Soviets had finally decided to activate their air defense system.