A U.S. Navy Crusader flew over the Soviet command post in El Chico almost at the same time the generals decided to shoot down Target Number 33. Moments later, it joined another reconnaissance plane that had taken a slightly southerly route, over the port of Mariel and an intermediate-range missile site at Guanajay. Antiaircraft guns opened up on the two jets as they skimmed the tops of the palm trees and swung northward, skirting the high-rise buildings of downtown Havana.
The low-level surveillance flights had a dual purpose: they were primarily intelligence-gathering missions, but they were also paving the way for bombing raids. As Robert McNamara explained to the ExComm, it was impossible for the Soviets and Cubans to distinguish a reconnaissance plane from a bomber until they were actually bombed. The goal was to "establish a pattern of operation that...cannot be differentiated from an attack." The reconnaissance missions had the effect of reducing the warning time of a real attack to practically zero.
As the Crusaders were nearing the Cuban capital, another pair of jets entered Cuban territory over Mariel and headed westward toward the missile sites clustered around San Cristobal. The pilots got a clear view of the frantic activity below, and captured much of it on film. The canvas covers had been taken off many of the missile launchers. In some cases, the missiles were sitting on their launchers, but still in a horizontal position. Soviet soldiers were scrambling to finish the arched-roof storage bunkers for the nuclear warheads. Men dressed in checkered shirts were digging foxholes and trenches. Bulldozers and dump trucks were improving the roads leading to the launching positions.
Approaching the last of the missile sites, the pilots could see Cuban defenders running across a muddy field to their antiaircraft guns. Large paving stones had been placed in the mud to provide a pathway to the guns. A radar made a futile attempt to lock onto the moving target. By the time the Cubans swiveled their guns and trained them on the Crusaders, it was already too late. The Navy jets had disappeared in a cloud of exhaust.
At the R-12 missile site near Sagua la Grande, Soviet soldiers fired pistols at the Navy jets. More experienced officers shook their heads in disbelief. "First of all, don't shoot at planes from a standing position," a major named Troitsky, who was chief of the chemical defense unit, lectured the greenhorns. "Second, don't use your pistol to shoot at a plane."
Even in normal times, there was an almost hallucinatory quality to life in Castro's Cuba. The sense of living in a dreamworld was heightened during the missile crisis when Cuba--and 7 million Cubans--was threatened with nuclear annihilation. The island was the center of international attention. At the same time, it was disconnected from the rest of the world, and functioned according to its own peculiar rhythms.
The few foreigners left in Havana were amazed by the calm in the eye of the hurricane. "The people at large show neither enthusiasm or panic," reported Herbert Marchant, the British ambassador. "They have been buying up stocks of such things as paraffin, petroleum, coffee, but there has been no frenzied rush on the shops, and food supplies still seem to be adequate. Many fewer people than usual appear on the streets, but it has been raining heavily." Apart from the antiaircraft guns along the shoreline, there was few public signs of serious military preparations. To the Italian journalist Saverio Tutino, Havana was "a city of children playing with pistols."
"Of course we were frightened, but it was more complex than that," recalled Edmundo Desnoes, the Cuban writer who later emigrated to the United States. "When you are in great danger and you feel righteous, it balances out somehow. Besides, we did not really know what it meant to be destroyed. We had no experience of World War II. The only images we had of massive destruction came from the movies."
The Argentinean journalist Adolfo Gilly was unable to detect any sign of panic as he strolled through the streets of Havana on Saturday morning. He dropped in on the Ministry of Industry, hoping to meet with Che Guevara, but he was in Pinar del Rio. An assistant filled Gilly in on the latest news. "We are expecting the attack this afternoon between three and four o'clock," he said, as if discussing the weather or the arrival of a foreign delegation. On the way down in the elevator, the journalist overheard a militiaman tell a colleague that he had been unable to shave that morning.
"It seems they'll be here very soon," the second militiaman replied. "Your shave will have to wait until after the war."
Returning to his room in Vedado, Gilly noticed that the royal poinciana trees in his street had burst into bloom. A beautiful girl was walking along the pavement beneath the brilliant flame red blossoms. Gilly felt a sudden stab of nostalgia for a world that seemed on the point of annihilation. "What a pity," he found himself thinking, "that all this beauty is going to disappear between three and four o'clock this afternoon!"
Havana seemed more timeless, more precarious, more enchanting than ever. The city was like Venice sinking languorously into its lagoon or Paris on the eve of the Nazi occupation, a place of heartbreaking beauty threatened with doom. All that remained was to savor the moment.
The Cuban government had finally begun to make some halfhearted attempts at civil defense by announcing the formation of neighborhood first-aid teams. Local defense committees were ordered to fashion improvised stretchers out of sheets and burlap sacks. First-aid manuals were in such short supply that anybody who owned one was instructed to hand it over to the authorities. A qualified health professional would head each first-aid team, "whether or not he is a member of a revolutionary organization." Hospitals turned away all but emergency cases to leave room for casualties in the event of an invasion. Officials offered a stream of instructions on how to prepare for American air raids:
* Keep two or three buckets of sand in the house to extinguish fires. Cover glass windows with gummed paper.
* Keep a small piece of wood handy to place between teeth when bombing begins.
* Do not gather in groups, as there will be more victims from a single explosion.
* Do not hoard food. Storing food for more than two or three days will cause artificial shortages which helps the enemy.
Along the Malecon, crowds gathered to cheer ships entering Havana Harbor after passing through the American naval blockade. Every so often people would be drenched with a great spume of seawater from the mixture of wind and waves lashing against the seawall. Robert Williams, the founder of Radio Free Dixie, led a march along the waterfront to greet several hundred East German tourists who had arrived in Havana on board one of the ships. He carried a placard reading: "Love Thy Neighbor, Jack?"
On a hill above Vedado, rumors of a possible American invasion were seeping through the thick stone walls of the Castillo del Principe, a colonial fortress that had served as a prison since the days of the Spaniards. The prisoners included some of the exiles captured the previous year at the Bay of the Pigs, mixed in with murderers and common criminals. As a security precaution, prisoners were no longer permitted to receive visits from relatives. Guards spread the word that they had placed dynamite in the lower floors of the massive white castle. If the Marines landed and tried to free the captives, everybody would be blown sky-high.
11:19 A.M. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27 (10:19 A.M. HAVANA)
It had been raining much of the night at the SAM site commanded by Major Ivan Gerchenov. His soldiers had got what rest they could in the water-logged trenches. Everybody was on edge. The battery had been on full alert since late the previous evening when it received the order to switch on its radars. There were rumors that the Americans were planning a paratroop attack in the vicinity of the nearby town of Banes.
The radar screens pulsated with bleeping dots.
"Follow Target Number 33."
Gerchenov ordered Combat Alert No. 1. The missile crews had practiced the drill many times. They transferred the missile from the transporters to the launchers, attaching the necessary cables. The Spoon Rest acquisition radar was already tracking the target. An officer called out height, speed, distance and azimuth data. The gunners raised the elevation of
the launcher until the missile was aimed at the target.
The SAM site was laid out in a hexagonal Star of David formation, with the command post in the center of a fortified ring of six missile launchers. Gerchenov kept his eyes on the Fruit Set fire-control radar, which was receiving continually updated target information from the Spoon Rest radar. Before pushing the button, he needed one last instruction from regimental headquarters at Victoria de las Tunas, seventy-five miles away. The chain of command followed the geography of the island. The regiment received its orders from division headquarters in Camaguey, another seventy miles away, which was in turn waiting for a decision from El Chico.
Suddenly, a new order crackled across the radio. Despite the heavy rain, the connection was clear.
"Destroy Target Number 33. Use two missiles."
There was a whoosh as the first missile roared into the air, chasing the distant contrail in the sky at three times the speed of sound. A second missile followed a few seconds afterward. They locked onto the target through radar, accelerating in a graceful arc. Watching the radar screen, Gerchenov could see two little dots honing in on a larger dot, gathering speed as they moved across the screen. After a few seconds, the dots merged into one and disintegrated. There was a sudden poof of light in the darkened sky. The major could see pieces of wreckage falling to earth.
"Target Number 33 is destroyed," he reported at 10:19 a.m.
Most of the wreckage fell to earth eight miles from the Banes SAM site. One wing of the plane ended up in the center of a little village called Veguitas. A mangled and charred section of fuselage containing Major Anderson's body landed in a sugarcane field a few hundred yards away. The tail of the U-2 glided onward to the sea.
Reconstructing the incident later, American investigators concluded that a proximity fuse had detonated the SAM missile as it closed in on the spy plane, spraying shrapnel in all directions. Several pieces of shrapnel sliced through the cockpit, piercing the pilot's partial-pressure suit and the back of his helmet. Rudolf Anderson was probably killed instantly. Had he somehow survived the initial explosion, he would certainly have died a few seconds later, from the loss of oxygen and the shock of depressurization.
11:30 A.M. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27 (10:30 A.M. HAVANA)
The column of trucks transporting the nuclear warheads from Bejucal to Sagua la Grande had stopped twice during the night to permit the drivers to get some rest. Everything had gone smoothly. Cuban villagers greeted the slow-moving military convoy during the hours of daylight with shouts of "Que vivan los sovieticos!" "Fidel-Khrushchev!" and "Patria o muerte!" But none of the onlookers had any idea what was hidden in the boxy, humpbacked storage vans.
The convoy was within sixty miles of its destination when U.S. Navy planes flew low over the central highway. The Americans had still not succeeded in locating the nuclear warheads, despite a frantic search effort. One of the morning reconnaissance missions passed directly over the main nuclear warhead storage facility outside Bejucal, which CIA analysts were still describing as a "munitions storage site." "Bunker not seen," the photo interpreters reported. "No change in visible portion." The previous day, Air Force jets had photographed the storage site for the Luna warheads, six miles east of Bejucal, without finding anything new. "No apparent change," read the photo interpretation report on the Managua bunker. "Single fence around site is supported by Y-shaped posts. Vines have grown on fence in some sections."
The shipment of nuclear warheads to Sagua la Grande meant that the missiles were almost ready to fire. The commander of the missile troops, Major General Statsenko, was pleased with the rapid progress of the last couple of days. By juggling his supplies and diverting some fueling equipment, he had deployed all twenty-four intermediate-range missiles three days earlier than planned. The last remaining battery near San Cristobal had achieved "combat readiness" on Saturday morning.
On the other hand, hitches had occurred in the plan to circumvent American surveillance by moving at least some of the missiles to reserve positions. The sites had been surveyed in advance and were already aligned to targets in the United States. The R-12 missiles could have been transported to the backup sites in a few hours, but there was a shortage of prefabricated launching pads. Without the heavy concrete pads, the missiles would topple over when fired. In ordering the redeployment on Wednesday evening, Statsenko had hoped that his engineers could get around this problem by constructing makeshift pads. But the pads were still not ready by Saturday morning. At a critical moment in the crisis, there were no backup positions.
In the meantime, Statsenko was picking up signs of mounting tension in the Kremlin. The Soviet High Command had received the message reiterating the prohibition on firing nuclear weapons "without approval from Moscow." This was followed by an instruction to halt all daytime work at the missile sites.
"You are irritating the United Nations," the order read. "Conduct thorough camouflage, work only at night."
During the five days that Che Guevara had been living in the Sierra del Rosario Mountains, his guards had done their best to ensure him some privacy. They built a makeshift hut for him in a corner of the soaring cave known as Cueva de los Portales. Constructed from concrete blocks, the hut included a study for Che and a room for his closest aides. The comandante slept on a simple metal bed beneath a sloping stone ceiling, with an inhaler by his side to ward off frequent asthma attacks. A secret tunnel provided an escape route down the mountain in the event of an American paratroop drop. Just outside the cave, there was a chair and a stone table, where Che played chess with his aides.
The legendary revolutionary had not spent all that much time in the cave since his arrival late on Monday night. He had traveled all round western Cuba, planning ambushes for the invader, inspecting militia units, meeting with Soviet officers. On one such outing, he had visited a Soviet air defense unit in Pinar del Rio. The sight of the "bearded, energetic man dressed in a jump suit and black beret" had "an almost electric effect" on the Soviet troops, who staged "a brilliant demonstration" of how to prepare a SAM missile for firing. A Soviet general was impressed by "the instant rapport our soldiers felt with Guevara, a measure of the attachment they had formed to the Cuban cause."
Whatever his human qualities, Che was also the most fanatical of Castro's aides. How many people would die in the coming war with America was less important to him than the struggle between the opposing ideological systems. In a newspaper editorial written during the missile crisis but published posthumously, he made clear he saw only two possible futures for mankind: "the definitive victory of socialism or its retrogression under the nuclear victory of imperialist aggression." Che had already made his choice: "the path of liberation even when it may cost millions of atomic victims."
The tranquillity of Che's mountain hideout was shattered by the roar of a pair of U.S. Navy jets skimming across the palm tops. They came from the south, following the line of the San Diego River that linked the Cueva de los Portales to the missile sites of Pinar del Rio. They flew so low that the Cuban defenders could even see the pilots in their cockpits as the Crusaders flew overhead. Surely, they must have been discovered.
As it turned out, it was a coincidence. The Crusaders were merely returning to Florida after flying over the missile sites at San Cristobal. In order to conserve film, the pilots had turned off their cameras well before they overflew the warren of secret caves. Although the Americans knew that Che had left Havana, they never did discover his real hiding place. The previous day, the CIA had reported that Che had "established a military command post at the town of Corral de la Palma," some fifteen miles to the east of his true location.
At about the same time that the Crusaders roared over Che's hideout, two other jets overflew San Julian Airfield on the western tip of Cuba. From the cockpit, the American pilots could make out an Ilyushin-28 light bomber in the "final stage" of completion, with both of its engines already installed. Another five planes were in various stages of assembly, a couple wi
th just a fuselage. At least twenty-one planes had still not been removed from their crates, which were neatly lined up on the apron. Cranes, earth-moving equipment, and radar vans were scattered around the airfield.
The IL-28s were of great interest to American intelligence because they were known to be nuclear-capable. Their jet engines had been copied from Rolls-Royce turbojets licensed to the Soviets by the British during the aftermath of World War II. The three-man crew consisted of a pilot, bombardier, and rear gunner. The Ilyushin could carry several small bombs, torpedoes, or naval mines, or a single atomic bomb such as the "Tatyana," the Soviet version of the American "Fat Man" dropped on Nagasaki. It had a range of seven hundred miles, enough to reach southern Florida.
By the early sixties, the IL-28 was teetering on the verge of obsolescence and certainly no match for U.S. air defenses. Nevertheless, its nuclear capabilities worried American generals. Hundreds of IL-28s had been stationed in Poland and East Germany during the fifties to spear-head a wave of tactical nuclear strikes against NATO forces in the event of war. The use of tactical nuclear weapons had long been an integral part of Soviet war plans. The Soviets had even dropped a live Tatyana on their own troops during a military exercise in Siberia that was meant to simulate a nuclear war with the United States. Some forty-five thousand officers and soldiers were exposed to fallout from the blast, and many subsequently died of radiation-related illnesses.
American intelligence analysts had tracked the transport of the bombers across the Atlantic by analyzing the shape of the crates on Soviet freighters. Identical crates had been used to ship IL-28s to Egypt several years earlier. When the crates showed up in San Julian, they had requested intensive low-level surveillance to follow the assembly process. What the Americans did not know at the time was that the San Julian planes were never intended for use with tactical nuclear weapons. They were under the control of the Soviet navy, and were equipped with torpedoes and naval mines for use against an invading fleet.
One minute to midnight Page 32