“How did it all happen?”
“Ah, if only one knew.”
“It is insane,” Kennedy told aides, “that two men, sitting on opposite sides of the world, should be able to decide to bring an end to civilization.”
* * *
Nikita Khrushchev put his hedgehog plan into action that summer.
Khrushchev announced he was sending agricultural equipment to his good friends in Cuba. Cargo ships sailed from Soviet ports, their decks crowded with tractors and other farming machines.
The real cargo was hidden in the holds below.
* * *
The convoys of Soviet ships continued across the Atlantic through summer and into the fall of 1962. American military planes circled overhead, taking pictures. As far as the pilots could see, the ships really did carry farm supplies.
But why did the Cubans suddenly need eighty shipments of tractors? And what was in the holds below deck?
In Washington, D.C., Republican senators demanded answers. Whatever Khrushchev was up to, was President Kennedy going to sit back and let it happen? Was he going to let Khrushchev get the best of him yet again? Senator Kenneth Keating went on television to charge Kennedy with being a “do-nothing president.”
That hit where it hurt. Right up there with Kennedy’s fear of nuclear war was his fear of appearing weak. He pointed out that there was no evidence the Soviet Union was sending offensive weapons to Cuba—but he added some tough talk to the mix.
“Were it to be otherwise,” he said, “the gravest issues would arise.”
* * *
Nikita Khrushchev was at his beach home on the Black Sea when he read Kennedy’s statement. The “Were it to be otherwise” line was worrisome.
It was definitely otherwise.
The U.S. secretary of the interior, Stewart Udall, happened to be visiting Russia, and Khrushchev summoned him for a talk. Udall was flown to Sochi and driven by car to the premier’s waterfront retreat. The luxurious stone villa had balconies overlooking the sea, a badminton court, and a swimming pool with a retractable glass roof.
Khrushchev and Udall changed into swimsuits and walked down to the gravel beach. Udall dove in off a pier. Khrushchev, who did not swim well, bobbed in a rubber tube. After a nice lunch by the pool, the Soviet leader got down to business. He informed his guest that he was tired of Americans acting as if they owned the world.
“War in this day and age means no Paris and no France, all in the space of an hour,” Khrushchev warned. “It’s been a long time since you could spank us like a little boy—now we can swat your ass.”
Then, as usual after a rant, Khrushchev softened his tone. He knew John Kennedy was under pressure at home. He assured his guest that he liked Kennedy and did not wish to embarrass him, especially not before the congressional elections coming up in November.
“Out of respect for your president,” Khrushchev promised, “we won’t do anything until November.”
* * *
That performance, Khrushchev hoped, would buy him a little more time. He didn’t need much.
“Soon the storm will break loose,” he said to Oleg Troyanovsky, one of his top foreign policy aides, when they were back in the premier’s office in Moscow.
Troyanovsky took the storm analogy one disturbing step further. “Let’s hope,” he said, “the boat will not capsize altogether.”
SPECIAL WEAPONS
WINTER ARRIVES EARLY ABOVE THE Arctic Circle. Near midnight on the night of September 30, 1962, four Soviet submarine commanders walked through thick fog along a wooden pier on Sayda Bay, an inlet of the Barents Sea. The men’s boots crunched patches of snow as they approached a wooden shed guarded by armed soldiers.
Inside the windowless space, top commanders of the Soviet navy’s Northern Fleet sat at a table. Coals glowed in a small stove in the corner, no match for the room’s icy air. Admiral Leonid Rybalko, bundled in a wool hat and dark greatcoat, asked the submarine commanders to have a seat.
“Each of you has been entrusted with the highest responsibility imaginable,” the admiral began. “Your actions and decisions on this mission could start or prevent a world war.”
The commanders did not know where they were being sent, or why. But they’d seen crates of summer clothing loaded into their ships. They could guess. They’d watched cranes lowering torpedoes into their subs. This was normal. The unusual thing was that each ship got one torpedo with its nose painted purple. These, they were told, were the “special weapons.” These were nuclear bombs.
Only one of the four commanders, Captain Nikolai Shumkov, had ever fired this type of weapon. In a test a year before, he’d launched a torpedo with a nuclear warhead and watched the fiery explosion through a periscope. The blast was ten kilotons, half the size of the American atomic bombs used in World War II.
So, yes, with such a weapon, a single submarine really could start the next world war. Which brought up the obvious matter of rules of engagement. Under what conditions, asked the commanders, were the weapons to be used?
Under direct orders from Moscow, answered Admiral Anatoly Rossokho. Or, he continued, under dire circumstances, such as being out of touch and under enemy attack.
“I suggest to you,” he told the submarine commanders, “that you use the nuclear weapons first, and then you will figure out what to do after that.”
“Once your face has been slapped,” added another admiral, “don’t let them hit your face one more time.”
* * *
The four commanders huddled on the icy pier after the meeting. They lit cigarettes and kidded each other about who was going to look worst in shorts. They shook hands and wished each other good luck.
Captain Vitali Savitsky, in submarine B-59, was first to cast off his lines and cruise into the bay. Beside him in the open bridge cockpit was Captain Vasili Arkhipov, chief of staff of the four-boat brigade.
A little over a year before, in the summer of 1961, Arkhipov had been an officer aboard the Soviet navy’s first nuclear-powered submarine, K-19. Driven by two fission reactors, this sub was a major advance for the Soviets. But construction had been rushed. Sixteen days into the mission, while the sub was 300 feet beneath the surface of the North Atlantic, a pipe carrying cool water to one of the reactors burst. Before the reactor could melt down and explode, volunteers crawled into the reactor compartment and welded together a backup cooling system. They saved the boat but paid a terrible price.
“Skin not protected by clothing began to redden,” K-19’s captain recalled of the heroic young men who’d made the repair. “Faces and hands began to swell. Dots of blood began to appear on their foreheads, under their hair. Within two hours we couldn’t recognize them.”
Of the 139 crew members, 8 died within days. Fourteen more, poisoned by radioactive steam that leaked out of the reactor compartment, would die within the next two years. The Soviet government covered up the tragedy, warning the survivors they would be imprisoned if they ever spoke of it.
Now, as the four Soviet submarines set out on their mission, the effects of K-19 were still being felt. Nuclear-powered subs could have hidden deep underwater for long periods of time—but the navy was still redesigning its nuclear subs. So, at this key moment, the Soviets had to rely on older boats powered by a combination of batteries and diesel engines. These diesel-electric subs could cruise underwater on battery power for up to forty-eight hours, but to recharge they needed to approach the surface, take in oxygen, and run their diesel engines. This would make them easier for the enemy to track.
Another impact of the K-19 disaster was that the horrific images were still fresh in the mind of Vasili Arkhipov. As the brigade’s chief of staff, Arkhipov could have served aboard any of the four subs heading out to sea. He just happened to be on B-59.
Vasili Arkhipov is not exactly a household name. It probably should be.
* * *
The second submarine to leave was B-36, under the command of Captain Aleksei Dubivko. Snow fell o
n the ship’s black hull as it churned toward the open water. The officers pulled in a few last lungfuls of fresh air, then climbed down the bridge ladder and pulled shut the watertight hatch. The crew opened the boat’s ballast tanks, allowing seawater to rush in. The sub’s bow dipped, and the boat slid beneath the surface.
Dubivko walked through compartments crowded with pipes and valves, engines and batteries, sleeping bunks and stacks of supplies, busy young men at controls. He met his senior officers at a table piled with navigational charts for oceans all over the world—they didn’t know which ones they were going to need. The first officer spun the dial of a safe, opened it, and pulled out an envelope marked TOP SECRET. Dubivko broke the seal and took out a stack of papers.
“Our brigade is tasked with a special mission for the Soviet Union,” he read aloud, “which includes transiting the Atlantic in secret to a new home port in an allied country. The transit must remain undetected by enemy forces, and the submariners must arrive in Mariel, Cuba, by October 20.”
The commanders of the other subs read the same orders. The sailors were excited to be headed to the sunny Caribbean. Best of all, the orders stated that crew members’ families would be able to join them in Mariel, a long way from the Arctic.
Morale was high as they set out on their seven-thousand-mile journey. No one seemed to mind that there was one man aboard each boat who was not an experienced submariner. Probably a KGB man, the crew whispered. Anyway, he carried a pistol in a holster and slept beside a torpedo that, for reasons they could only guess, had its tip painted purple.
MILK RUN
OLEG PENKOVSKY WAS EXHAUSTED, SCARED, and all alone in a way only a spy could understand.
When the British salesman and MI6 agent Greville Wynne visited Moscow, Penkovsky slipped into Wynne’s hotel room. He turned the radio up loud, gestured for Wynne to join him in the bathroom, and blasted the water in the sink and bathtub.
Then he slumped over and began to weep.
His bosses had canceled his last couple of trips abroad, Penkovsky explained. Maybe they suspected something. Maybe they knew something.
“I must go,” he said, pulling himself together. “It looks bad if I hang around here.”
Wynne passed on the bad news. The CIA produced a Soviet passport in the name of Vladimir Butov. The photo in the passport was of Penkovsky. At a Moscow party, an American embassy official slipped the passport to Penkovsky—he’d need it if it became necessary to make a sudden run for the border.
The team then prepared a letter for Penkovsky, thanking him for his vital work and assuring him that a bank account with $250,000 would be waiting when the time came for him to settle in the West. The letter also asked Penkovsky what Nikita Khrushchev was up to in Cuba. Did he know the purpose of all those shipments?
An American embassy official brought the envelope to a diplomatic gathering, the kind of party Penkovsky usually attended. Penkovsky did not show up.
* * *
As Soviet ships arrived in Cuba, Fidel Castro welcomed his new guests with open arms. Castro had liked Khrushchev’s plan as soon as he heard it. He was a gambler, like the Soviet leader, and he enjoyed being center stage. This move would certainly put him there—and, he hoped, protect him from another American invasion.
“They could begin it,” Castro told aides, “but they would not be able to end it.”
Cuban soldiers helped the Soviets load their secret cargo onto eighty-foot trailers. Driving by night, police on motorcycles led slow-moving convoys down narrow back roads. At sharp bends in the road they stopped to tear down huts that were blocking the long trucks from making the turn. Cuban officers assured families who lost their homes that it was “for the sake of the revolution.”
At selected spots in rural areas, Soviet soldiers began cutting trees, surrounding the clearings with barbed wire. Working twelve-hour days in the tropical heat, teams raced to pour concrete rocket-launching pads. General Issa Pliyev, the top Soviet commander in Cuba, reported to Moscow that the work was going well. The new bases would be operational before the end of October.
On October 5, the first James Bond movie premiered in London. In the film, Dr. No, Bond battles a ruthless villain holed up on a Caribbean island with a secret weapon aimed at America.
* * *
At Edwards Air Force Base in California, Major Richard Heyser spent the afternoon of October 13 trying to get some sleep. He rolled out of bed early that evening, ate a big plate of steak and eggs, did his pre-breathing, made his last-chance bathroom stop, pulled on his pressure suit, and climbed into the cockpit of his U-2.
A U-2 flight had kicked the Cold War into a new gear in the spring of 1960. Now, in the fall of 1962, history was about to repeat. President Kennedy had approved an overflight of Cuba. He knew the risks, of course, but this was the only way to get a look at what was happening.
By early on the morning of October 14, Heyser was 72,500 feet above the island, snapping 928 photos through clear blue skies. He was over Cuban territory for just six minutes. The job done, Heyser banked north and brought his plane in for a smooth landing at McCoy Air Force Base in Florida.
“A piece of cake,” he said of the flight. “A milk run.”
* * *
The next day, in a darkened room in Washington, D.C., a team of photo analysts sat at light tables studying Heyser’s U-2 images through microscopes. These analysts had seen plenty of aerial photos of Cuba. They recognized the usual mountains and forests, the sugarcane farms and baseball fields. But this batch of pictures showed something new.
A clearing in the woods. Trucks with trailers. Six long, thin objects on the trailers, covered by canvas. The objects were precisely sixty-seven feet long.
Sixty-seven feet. The analysts turned to their loose-leaf binders, the ones with Soviet missile specs—secret information provided by Oleg Penkovsky, though they did not know the source.
That’s when they called in their boss.
Arthur Lundahl, head of the government’s secret National Photographic Interpretation Center, stepped into the room.
“I understand you fellows have found a beauty.”
Lundahl bent over one of the microscopes. He studied the images, then looked up at his staff.
“I think I know what you guys think they are,” he said, “and if I think they are the same thing, and we both are right, we are sitting on the biggest story of our time.”
Lundahl asked his staff to work through the night. He got on the phone to his boss, Ray Cline, at CIA headquarters in Virginia.
“Ray, our worst fears are coming to pass in Cuba.”
“Are you fellows sure?”
“Yes, I am sorry to have to maintain it, but we are sure.”
Cline passed the news up the ladder to McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy’s national security adviser. Bundy took the phone call in the middle of a dinner party at his home.
“Those things we’ve been worrying about,” Cline said, “it looks as though we’ve really got something.”
“You’re sure?”
Pretty sure, Cline said. They’d know more by morning.
It was Bundy’s job to tell the president. He hesitated. This news was going to set off a crisis like nothing the world had ever seen.
Dinner guests were laughing in the dining room, enjoying an ordinary evening.
Bundy decided the news could wait until morning. Let the president get one last night of good sleep.
* * *
The four Soviet submarines cruised past the Azores, a group of islands about eight hundred miles off the coast of Portugal. The boats performed their daily ritual of coming up to shallow water, raising a radio antenna above the waves, and checking for new orders from the Northern Fleet commanders. There had been no word yet. There was nothing today.
It was unnerving to be so out of touch. Aboard the sub B-130, Captain Nikolai Shumkov gave his communications officer permission to break the rules and try to get some sort of update on world events. The young
submariner put on his headphones and tuned in to an American radio station.
The announcer was in the middle of telling listeners about the exciting World Series between the San Francisco Giants and New York Yankees.
Baseball. A good sign. The world was not at war.
BULLFIGHTER
JOHN KENNEDY SPENT THE MORNING of October 16 in bed in his robe and slippers, reading glasses on, poring through a stack of newspapers. The headline that stuck out was in the New York Times:
EISENHOWER CALLS PRESIDENT WEAK ON FOREIGN POLICY
At a Republican campaign dinner the night before, Dwight Eisenhower had contrasted his own performance with Kennedy’s. “No walls were built,” he said of his time in office. “No threatening foreign bases were established.” Now, in less than two years, you had the Bay of Pigs, the Soviets sending the first man to space, the Berlin Wall—and this suspicious buildup in Cuba. “It is too sad to talk about,” Eisenhower told the crowd.
It was an unwritten rule in American politics that former presidents did not attack current presidents. Well, so much for that.
McGeorge Bundy knocked on the door. He came in and told the president what the photo interpreters had found.
Kennedy’s first response was to lash out at Khrushchev, as if his opponent had broken the rules of the game. “He can’t do this to me.”
He picked up the phone and called his brother. “We have some big trouble. I want you over here.”
* * *
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