“Nadezhda Petrovna,” he called out to his stenographer.
She said, “I’m ready.”
KNOT OF WAR
“I’M GETTING MORE CONCERNED ALL the time,” CIA Director John McCone told President Kennedy that afternoon in Washington.
Some Soviet ships had turned back, but so what? Two more missile complexes in Cuba would be ready to fire by the end of the day.
The blockade was not working.
“We’re not gonna get them out with the quarantine,” Kennedy said of the missiles.
The military leaders were still demanding an air strike, followed by an invasion. But that would give the Soviets time to fire whatever missiles the air strike had missed.
“So,” Kennedy summarized, “it still comes down to a question of whether they’re going to fire the missiles.”
Ten days after the missiles had first been found in Cuba, the president was circling back toward his original position: the U.S. military was going to have to go in and take them out. And the longer they waited, the more dangerous the job became.
“It’s very evil stuff they’ve got there,” McCone said. “They’ll give an invading force a pretty bad time.”
* * *
The Soviet submarines had been ordered to go down fighting. One by one, they would get their chance.
Captain Nikolai Shumkov brought his submarine to shallow depth for a quick recharge. At sea for nearly a month, B-130 had lost two of its three diesel engines. Its batteries could barely hold a charge. Of most immediate concern, they were being tracked by anti-submarine forces, the U.S. Navy’s dreaded hunter-killer groups.
With American ships closing in, Shumkov dove the sub to 450 feet. But they were in the net. The steady ping of the enemy’s sonar waves bouncing off the boat’s metal hull made it all too obvious.
A depth charge exploded in the water outside the sub. Then several more. Most likely, the Americans were just trying to force him to surface. They could use bigger bombs, Shumkov knew, if they were trying to destroy him.
Still, hadn’t those admirals back at Sayda Bay told him not to let his cheek be slapped?
A charge landed directly on the hull, exploding with a deafening roar, violently tossing the entire boat.
Nikolai Shumkov knew the power of his nuclear torpedo. He’d tested one, seen it explode. Whatever fleet the Americans had up there would be wiped out. He and his crew would be killed, too. He had no way of knowing what was happening in the world and no more time to think.
The captain gave the order to surface. If World War III had not already begun, he would not be the one to start it.
The boat broke the surface. A crewman opened the hatch to the bridge cockpit. Shumkov climbed up the ladder and stood in the fresh air, taking in the amazing sight. He was completely surrounded by American ships.
An American destroyer began flashing a message using a bright lamp. The sub’s communications officer knew the code.
“They’re asking us ‘Do you need assistance?’”
Shumkov had to laugh. “Sure,” he said. “How about a couple diesel engines, a ton of fresh water, and some green vegetables?”
Then he added, “Don’t send that.”
* * *
Nikita Khrushchev’s urgent message to John Kennedy followed the usual route. It was dropped off at the American embassy in Moscow, translated into English by the American staff, encoded, sent by telegraph to the State Department in Washington, decoded, and delivered by hand to the White House.
The process took twelve hours.
“This reads as if he wrote it himself,” Llewellyn Thompson said, “without consultation or editing.” Thompson, the former ambassador to the Soviet Union, knew Khrushchev well. “He’s worried. He seems to be under a lot of strain.”
Kennedy read the letter for himself. It was long and emotional, oddly personal. A few passages jumped out.
“If indeed war should break out,” Khrushchev wrote, “then it would not be in our power to stop it, for such is the logic of war. I have participated in two wars and know that war ends when it has rolled through cities and villages, everywhere sowing death and destruction.”
Then Khrushchev made a stunning proposal. If Kennedy promised not to invade Cuba, the Soviets would withdraw their missiles from the island.
“Mr. President, we and you ought not now to pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the knot of war, because the more the two of us pull, the tighter that knot will be tied. And a moment may come when that knot will be tied so tight that even he who tied it will not have the strength to untie it.”
Could this be it? The way out of the crisis?
Or yet another Khrushchev deception?
Kennedy needed time to think about it.
* * *
Nina Khrushcheva called the Kremlin to check on her husband. Nikita told her he would not be home that night. He spent a restless night on his office couch.
Fidel Castro couldn’t sleep either. At 2:00 a.m., he drove to the Soviet embassy in Havana and woke the ambassador, Aleksandr Alekseyev. Convinced the Americans were about to attack, Castro began dictating a desperate message to Nikita Khrushchev.
Alekseyev cut in. His Spanish was excellent, but he wanted to be sure he had not misheard. “You want to say,” the Russian asked, “that we should be the first to deliver a nuclear strike?”
“No, I don’t want to say that directly,” Castro said. “But the situation is developing in such a way that it’s either we or they. If we want to avoid receiving the first strike, if an attack is inevitable, then wipe them off the face of the earth.”
Appalled, Alekseyev took down the message. He began the time-consuming process of sending it to Moscow.
Khrushchev awoke that morning—Saturday, October 27—feeling a little bit better. He had lived through another night. He showered, shaved, ate breakfast, and sat down with the Presidium to write a new letter to the American president. A letter with new demands.
And forget the twelve-hour route to Washington, he decided. This letter would be broadcast on Radio Moscow. The whole world would hear it. Then the pressure would be back on Kennedy. Let him make the next difficult move.
* * *
It was midnight in Alaska. At Eielson Air Force Base, near Fairbanks, U.S. Air Force Captain Chuck Maultsby took off in a U-2 and flew north, soaring past the north coast of Alaska and out over the Arctic Ocean. His mission was to monitor recent Soviet atomic tests by collecting air samples from near the Soviet border.
Obviously, someone should have thought to postpone this flight. Someone should have pointed out that it could wait until the world wasn’t one tiny mistake from calamity. But no one did.
Still, it should have been fine. Chuck Maultsby was an experienced pilot. He was not supposed to come within one hundred miles of Soviet airspace.
The trouble began as he approached Earth’s magnetic north pole. The needle of his compass started to swing and spin, unable to point north since north was straight down. Expecting this, the pilot was prepared to navigate as sea captains had done for centuries, using star charts and a sextant. But he was not prepared for the aurora borealis—the northern lights. This awesome display of flashing color is caused by charged particles streaming out from the sun and colliding with atoms in the atmosphere above the North Pole. Maultsby couldn’t get a clear view of the stars through the dancing streaks of green.
With no landmarks below, no compass, no sextant, Maultsby did the right thing. He turned around.
Only the angle of his turn was, understandably, just a little bit off.
* * *
At a radar station in the far northeast corner of the Soviet Union, crews watched their screens for signs of an American attack. It would likely begin with U.S. bombers coming over the North Pole, taking the shortest route to Soviet cities. Early that morning the radar operators picked up an unidentified plane as it sped down from the pole and crossed the border of the Soviet Union.
&nb
sp; FINAL OFFER
AT THE WHITE HOUSE, SATURDAY morning began with a glimmer of hope as Nikita Khrushchev’s “knot of war” letter was read and discussed in the Cabinet Room.
“He’s scared,” said Robert McNamara.
President Kennedy nodded. He was the only person on earth who fully understood exactly how scared the Soviet leader was.
The good news was that Khrushchev was offering to remove his missiles from Cuba in exchange for an American pledge not to invade. He seemed to be backing down. The group had just begun discussing the proposal when an aide ran in with breaking news from the Associated Press.
Kennedy read aloud from the slip of paper. “Premier Khrushchev told President Kennedy in a message today he would withdraw offensive weapons from Cuba if the United States withdrew its rockets from Turkey.”
The Soviet leader, apparently, had just made this statement on the radio.
Several people began talking at once. What just happened? In yesterday’s letter, Khrushchev had proposed removing Soviet missiles from Cuba in exchange for Kennedy’s promise not to invade. Now he was demanding the Americans remove their missiles from Turkey. Had Khrushchev changed his position overnight?
“It’s very odd, Mr. President,” said McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser.
“I think we have to assume,” Kennedy said, aggravation in his voice, “that this is their new and latest position.”
“How can we negotiate with somebody who changes his deal before we even get a chance to reply?” McNamara asked.
“There must have been an overruling in Moscow,” Bundy said.
Others guessed, correctly, that Khrushchev’s first offer had been made in a state of panic and that this new one was written in a calmer frame of mind. In any case, most of the advisers were in agreement—the president should not make the trade. He must not give in to Soviet pressure. To do so would weaken the United States in the eyes of its allies, and the entire world.
Easy enough to say. Harder for the one who has to decide.
“I’m thinking about what—what we’re going to have to do in a day or so,” Kennedy said.
Say they struck in Cuba. Say the Soviets fired their missiles. There’d be no turning back. And Khrushchev’s Cuba-for-Turkey trade would start to look mighty good.
* * *
“We have a problem.”
These were the words Lieutenant Fred Okimoto heard as he was shaken from sleep at Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska. The man standing over his bed explained that Chuck Maultsby’s U-2 was lost, possibly somewhere over Soviet territory.
Okimoto hurried across the dark base to the U-2 hangar. He climbed the stairs to the small office where he’d plotted Maultsby’s route and prepared his star charts. Now he had to figure out a way to get the pilot home—with no way of knowing precisely where the airplane was.
The navigator looked out the window, thinking. The sky above central Alaska was black. But a band of dim red light was just visible above the hills to the east. This gave Okimoto an idea.
He got Maultsby on the radio and asked if the pilot could see the sunrise.
“Negative,” Maultsby said.
Not good. That meant the plane was very far west, hundreds of miles inside Soviet airspace.
“Turn left 15 degrees,” Okimoto instructed the pilot.
Maultsby heard the transmission, faintly. He was also picking up a much stronger signal from a nearby radio station. Russian folk music played in his headphones. Maultsby felt his lungs tighten. His ears pounded with the sound of his own rushing blood.
The terrible thought in his mind was I’m the next Francis Gary Powers.
* * *
Shortly after noon, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara drove across the Potomac to the Pentagon. For a week he’d been sleeping just a few hours a night on a cot in his office. He was utterly exhausted.
McNamara walked into the “tank,” a war room with a huge world map on the wall. The Joint Chiefs were all there, finalizing plans to destroy the Soviet missiles in Cuba.
What exactly was the plan? McNamara asked.
Start with a massive air strike, General Curtis LeMay explained, followed quickly by a full-scale invasion. “Attacking Sunday or Monday,” he said.
Today was Saturday.
A worried McNamara wanted to know whether they could take out the missiles without killing a lot of Russian soldiers at the missile bases.
LeMay grunted. “You must have lost your mind.”
At this tense moment, news came in from Alaska. A U-2 had strayed over Soviet airspace and was being chased by six Soviet fighter jets. Khrushchev must be thinking, Why now? Why would the Americans send in a spy plane now, unless it was some sort of last-second reconnaissance before the bombers swept in?
The blood drained from McNamara’s face as he shouted, “This means war with the Soviet Union!”
* * *
The president had just finished his lunchtime swim when the secretary of defense called with the U-2 news. Kennedy wasn’t a shouter. All he could do was laugh, as if this were just too much to believe.
Now would be a good time to get on the phone to Moscow. Let Nikita Khrushchev know his country was not about to be wiped off the map.
If only that were possible.
It was maddening, it was crazy, but all the president could do was hope the Soviets did not overreact to the U-2 overflight. Here was yet another painful illustration of just how little control Kennedy had over all the different ways that war could begin.
* * *
Fred Okimoto’s directions saved Chuck Maultsby. And maybe everyone.
After nearly ten hours in the air, his fuel running out, Maultsby put his plane down on a strip of ice at a government radar station in Kotzebue, on the western edge of Alaska. He popped open the canopy but could not stand on numb and frozen legs. Radar operators had to help him out of the cockpit. The pilot’s first request was for a little privacy.
“My bladder was about to burst,” he’d later say. “So I excused myself and shuffled to the other side of the U-2.”
* * *
Word of the pilot’s safe return came as a tremendous relief to Kennedy. But there was to be no letup now.
As soon as the ExComm members gathered, more bad news arrived. A pilot named Rudolf Anderson, flying a U-2 mission over Cuba, had not returned. Nothing more was known.
The team turned to the thorny question of how to respond to Khrushchev’s two different messages. They needed to decide by tonight. Kennedy made the point that no matter what they wound up proposing, this would be the final offer. If Moscow did not agree right away to remove the missiles, the American military would do the job.
The group rushed to put the ultimatum into words. People kept calling out edits, word changes, criticisms of each other’s sentences. Everyone was tired and on edge.
“I just think somebody…,” Kennedy started, then began again. “We’re gonna have to decide which letter we send.”
“Why don’t we try to work it out,” Bobby Kennedy suggested, “without you being there to pick it apart?”
Only Bobby could have said that.
* * *
Now it was Captain Vitali Savitsky’s turn to make the ultimate decision.
As Kennedy’s team met in Washington, the commander of the Soviet submarine B-59 was 1,000 feet below the surface of the sea, penned in by a U.S. hunter-killer group. The torturous ping of enemy sonar waves echoed relentlessly through the boat. The temperature rose to 120 degrees, 140 in the engine compartment. Drenched in sweat, crewmen gasped for air as oxygen levels fell and carbon dioxide levels rose closer to the lethal zone every time someone exhaled.
Depth charges began exploding all around the sub. The captain could not be certain if they were meant to warn him or to kill him.
“I will never surface!” Captain Savitsky vowed to his crew.
To be forced to the surface would be humiliating. And worse, a violation of orders, which cou
ld have awful consequences if he ever made it back home. But that left limited choices. The sub’s batteries were so low that they were making barely three miles per hour. Escape was impossible.
Charges began to hit the boat directly, clobbering the hull like a hammer on a pail. Men were literally falling down from lack of oxygen. Furious, convinced he was under attack, Captain Savitsky called for the officer in charge of the nuclear torpedo.
“Should I ready the special weapon?” the officer asked.
“Affirmative,” Savitsky ordered. “Ready tube number two.”
FIRST SHOT
KENNEDY AND HIS TEAM WERE still debating how to respond to Khrushchev when an aide came in and handed a note to Robert McNamara.
“The U-2,” McNamara said. They all knew he meant the plane that had gone missing over Cuba. “The U-2 was shot down.”
Kennedy sounded stunned. “The U-2 was shot down?”
“Yes, it was found shot down.”
“Was the pilot killed?” Bobby Kennedy asked.
General Maxwell Taylor looked over the brief report. “The pilot’s body is in the plane,” he said.
Rudolf Anderson was the first person to die in the Cuban missile crisis. Yet again, an event outside Kennedy’s control had shoved the world closer to the edge of the cliff.
“How do we—” Kennedy began.
“How do we interpret this?” McNamara said, finishing the president’s sentence.
Khrushchev knew the surveillance planes were unarmed. Why shoot one down? Why now? Was it some kind of signal? Was it too late to negotiate?
“They’ve fired the first shot,” said one of McNamara’s assistants.
Fallout Page 19