The group passed around glasses of vodka and raised a toast.
Khrushchev stood up. “Why don’t we go to the theater? We’ll show the whole world that there’s nothing more to fear.”
Someone went to get a newspaper so they could see what was playing in Moscow.
* * *
What about President Kennedy’s televised speech? The one newspapers had announced he’d be giving that day—the announcement that had pushed Khrushchev to immediately end the most dangerous crisis in human history?
That was just a big misunderstanding.
Television listings in American papers did include a John Kennedy speech at 10:00 a.m. Washington time. But it was only a replay of his speech from six days earlier, the Oval Office address in which he’d announced the crisis to the world. The Soviet agent who’d read the listing had failed to pick up on that important detail.
As they say, fear has big eyes.
* * *
John and Bobby Kennedy enjoyed a quiet moment together in the Oval Office.
The American press was already playing the missile crisis up as a victory for Kennedy, sweet revenge for the beating he’d taken from Khrushchev during his first year in office. The brothers saw it that way, too—but didn’t want to crow too loud in public. What if Khrushchev got angry at being taunted and changed his mind? What if he told the world that Kennedy had secretly promised to remove American missiles from Turkey? That would make the resolution of the crisis look less like an American victory and more like a compromise.
What was wrong with a compromise? Nothing, really, but Kennedy planned to run for reelection in 1964. He preferred the version of the story in which he made the other guy blink.
As the brothers reviewed the gut-churning events of the last thirteen days, Kennedy wondered aloud whether he’d just lived through the high point of his presidency. He talked about Abraham Lincoln, who’d gone to a play right after winning the Civil War—and everyone knows how that turned out. Something about the gory image appealed to Kennedy’s dark sense of humor.
“This is the night I should go to the theater,” he said.
“If you go,” Bobby said, “I want to go with you.”
* * *
Five days later, just as the world was beginning to calm down, a telephone rang in Moscow. It was the line with the emergency number given only to Oleg Penkovsky.
A CIA agent lifted the receiver and held it to his ear.
On the other end, someone blew into the phone three times—puff, puff, puff—then hung up.
Sixty seconds passed. The phone rang again. The code was repeated.
This signal was designed to be used in one case only. It meant the Soviet Union was about to launch a nuclear strike.
REMATCH
BEFORE BURSTING INTO A FULL-BLOWN panic, CIA agents in Moscow made some quick calls to sources around the country. The Soviet military was not at a heightened level of alert. There was no special activity at Soviet missile bases or airfields.
Maybe World War III was not about to begin after all.
An agent ran out to check the lamppost on Kutuzovsky Prospekt. It was marked with a gray chalk X—Penkovsky’s signal that he’d loaded his dead-drop.
The job of unloading the box went to a twenty-five-year-old CIA agent named Richard Jacob. As a precaution, Jacob cut a slit in one pocket of his long raincoat. He walked along crowded Moscow streets, slipping in and out of stores, dry-cleaning himself on the way to the dead-drop location. He stepped into the dingy lobby of an apartment building, reached his arm behind the radiator, and grabbed a matchbox hanging by a wire.
As he turned to leave, four large men charged in and wrestled him out to a waiting car. In the struggle, Jacob managed to drop the matchbox through the slit in his pocket—a clever bit of tradecraft, but it didn’t help. The Russian agents scooped up the box, drove Jacob to a police station, and dragged him into a room where three men in suits were waiting to question him.
Jacob pulled out his diplomatic ID, which showed that he was a secretary and archivist at the American embassy. No one was buying it.
“Secretary-archivist,” demanded one of the interrogators, “or spy?”
* * *
The exact details of Oleg Penkovsky’s arrest are still hidden away in classified Russian files. But we know that once the missile crisis began, the KGB considered it too dangerous to have Penkovsky on the loose. We know they picked him up on October 22—the day of John Kennedy’s dramatic televised speech. And we know Penkovsky talked. At the very least, he talked about the dead-drop location, and he described the CIA’s secret telephone signal.
Which raises the question: Why did the Soviets use the phone signal?
They wanted to set a trap, apparently. They wanted to see who would come to empty the box.
Fine, but what about the fact that the phone signal meant nuclear war was about to begin? What if the Americans in Moscow had relayed this information straight to the White House? What if Kennedy had initiated an American response?
There are two possible explanations, both disturbing:
1. The KGB knew the meaning of the signal but used it anyway. They were willing to risk igniting a whole new crisis to catch a low-level American agent and score points against their archenemies at the CIA.
2. The KGB did not know the true meaning of the signal. Penkovsky told them how it worked, but not what it meant. According to this theory, Penkovsky knew he was a dead man and decided to take the whole world down with him.
Option one seems more likely.
Either way, the eighteen-month mission of the most valuable spy the United States ever ran in Russia was over. Putting it in the merciless terms of the spy game, CIA Director John McCone noted, “This source will be of no further value.”
* * *
A week later, in West Berlin, Harry Seidel decided to attempt his seventh escape tunnel.
Seidel’s mother was finally out of prison in the East. He’d vowed to get her out, and this was his chance. Though he’d always planned and run his own digs, this time, in a hurry to free his mother, he joined an ongoing project. Starting in a landscaping shed in the West, the tunnel went down 9 feet and burrowed toward the yard of a farmhouse on the other side of the wall, 250 feet away. Seidel moved into the shed and worked with his usual furious dedication, going home only to wash his clothes.
Before leaving for the final push, Seidel kissed his young son, Andre, goodbye.
“Be a good boy,” Seidel said, “and in two days from now you’ll be sitting on your granny’s lap.”
On the night of the escape, November 14, the diggers got the “all clear” signal from the farmhouse. The family that lived there was in on the plan and would be among the night’s passengers. Seidel, as always, volunteered to open the hole. Standing on the shoulders of another digger, he punched through the top layer of soil and peeked above the grass.
The passengers should have come right out, but there was no movement in the house. The yard was dark and quiet. Seidel picked up a few crumbs of dirt and tossed them at a window. No response.
He threw a pebble. It plinked off the glass. No response.
Seidel climbed up out of the hole. Easing a pistol from his pocket, he knocked softly on the front door.
The door flew open, and a squad of Stasi agents aimed machine guns at Seidel. He dropped his pistol. They shoved him outside, kicking him toward the tunnel opening as searchlights flooded the yard.
“Go away!” Seidel shouted toward the hole. “The tunnel is betrayed!”
One of the police officers smacked Seidel on the head with his gun, knocking him out—but his warning saved the other diggers, who raced back to safety in the West.
Harry Seidel was hauled to prison. It turned out the Stasi had known about the tunnel for days. They’d forced the family to give the “all clear” signal, then arrested everyone. The only good news was that Seidel’s mother had not yet arrived at the house.
* * *
In an East German prison, Stasi agents grilled Harry Seidel day after day. He refused to talk. Even when the Stasi threatened him with the death penalty, Seidel would not identify a single fellow tunneler. “I only remember,” he said, “that they all had short hair.”
In Cuba, crews of Soviet soldiers dismantled the missile sites. They bulldozed the launch pads, drove the missiles to ports, loaded them onto ships, and sailed for home.
Feeling betrayed by his allies, Fidel Castro refused to even meet with the Soviet ambassador in Havana. “Cuba,” he roared, “does not want to be a pawn on the world’s chessboard!”
The four Soviet submarines limped back to their Arctic base. Promptly ordered to Moscow, the sub commanders were reprimanded for “allowing” themselves to be detected by the Americans. They found no sympathy for the misery and terror they’d endured at sea, no appreciation for the fact that they’d kept their heads under fire and prevented a catastrophic war. “It’s a disgrace,” charged the deputy minister of defense, shattering his glasses on the table. “You have shamed Russia.”
In Washington, John Kennedy watched his approval rating rise to over 70 percent. His early mistakes finally behind him, Kennedy looked forward to winning reelection and taking on big issues at home and around the world. “Wait until 1964,” he told friends.
Nikita Khrushchev also claimed victory in the missile crisis. “For the first time in history, the American imperialist beast was forced to swallow a hedgehog, quills and all,” he declared. “I’m proud of what we did.”
It was a generous interpretation. Most of the world saw Khrushchev’s retreat as a sign of weakness. Soviet officials considered the entire episode a national humiliation. This really rankled Khrushchev—one setback was not the end of the world. It literally could have been the end of the world, and it wasn’t.
It was a bit like a chess match between grandmasters. Such games never end in checkmate. Great players know when their position has become hopeless. They see exactly how they’re going to lose, and they resign. It’s not the end of the world.
The Soviet Union still had a Cold War to win. They still had an enemy to bury. The only thing to do was reset the pieces and play again.
EPILOGUE
CHOOSE YOUR OWN ENDING
“I PLEAD GUILTY IN ALL respects.”
Oleg Penkovsky had to say that. His trial was scripted and judged before it even began.
“Vanity, vainglory, dissatisfaction with my work,” he told the court, “and love of an easy life led me to the criminal path.”
It was all over in a few hours. The judge found Penkovsky guilty of treason and sentenced him to be shot. On May 16, 1963, the Soviet newspaper Pravda noted: “The sentence has been executed.”
In total, Penkovsky had passed nearly ten thousand pages of secrets on Soviet strengths and weaknesses to his American and British contacts. A CIA summary would call this “the most productive classic clandestine operation ever conducted by CIA and MI6 against the Soviet target.”
Harry Seidel had as much chance of a fair trial in East Germany as Penkovsky did in the Soviet Union. For risking his life over and over to lead dozens of people to freedom, Seidel was charged with “organizing kidnappings, and luring persons to West Berlin.” At age twenty-four, he was sentenced to life in prison with hard labor.
In West Berlin, Rotraut Seidel organized protests against her husband’s harsh sentence. The pressure paid off. As part of what the press dubbed the “Bodies for Butter” program, East German dictator Walter Ulbricht accepted bribes of food from Western governments in exchange for the release of political prisoners. “For Seidel,” the Boston Globe reported in 1966, “the Reds got a ransom of $95,000 in fruit.”
Harry’s mother, meanwhile, had escaped on her own.
Seidel returned to his family and to cycling, winning a national racing title with three teammates in 1973. He passed away in 2020 at age eighty-two.
* * *
After his exchange for Rudolf Abel—dramatized in Steven Spielberg’s 2015 film Bridge of Spies—Francis Gary Powers was taken directly to a CIA safe house in rural Maryland and grilled for days on end. The CIA was particularly concerned that the pilot might have been drugged and brainwashed by the Russians. Between sessions, Powers was permitted to read newspapers. These were more upsetting than the interrogations, with headlines including:
HERO OR BUM?
A HERO OR A MAN WHO FAILED HIS MISSION?
Yes, Powers read in disbelief, they were talking about him.
Ignorant of the facts, articles blamed him for being shot down, for “allowing” himself to be captured by not using his poison pin. The CIA eventually cleared Powers of any suspicion of disloyalty—but did not explain to the public that pilots were never ordered to kill themselves, or even to carry the hollow coin with the poison needle.
Powers resigned from the CIA, split up with Barbara, and began a new life. He remarried, had a son, Francis Gary Powers Jr., and became a helicopter pilot and reporter for a Los Angeles television station. He died in a helicopter crash in 1977, at the age of forty-seven.
Thanks largely to the tireless work of his son, Powers was awarded the Silver Star by the Air Force in 2012.
Rudolf Abel enjoyed a less controversial post-spy life. Reunited with his wife, Elena, and daughter, Evelyn, Abel was greeted as a hero in the Soviet Union, celebrated for living under the Americans’ noses for nine years. Abel gave lectures at schools, recounting his experiences in America and encouraging bright young men and women to consider a life of espionage. He was honest, though, about the differences between real-life and movie spies.
“Intelligence work is not a series of rip-roaring adventures, a string of tricks or an entertaining trip abroad,” Abel cautioned. “It is, above all, arduous, painstaking work that calls for an intense effort, perseverance, stamina, fortitude, will power, serious knowledge and great mastery.” Rudolf Abel died in Moscow in 1971, at the age of sixty-eight.
Lona Cohen, who’d helped the Soviets steal atomic secrets during World War II and was Rudolf Abel’s first contact in New York, disappeared behind the iron curtain for several years before reinventing herself as a quirky Canadian named Helen Kroger. She and her husband, Morris, moved to suburban London and continued spying for the Russians. Caught and sentenced to twenty years in prison, she and Morris were eventually exchanged for a British prisoner held in the Soviet Union. Lona lived the rest of her life in a dacha outside Moscow, training younger spies. She died in 1992, at age seventy-nine.
Though he was supposed to be living in hiding in New England, Rudolf Abel’s bumbling agent Reino Hayhanen was lured by the promise of $2,000 to appear on David Brinkley’s Journal, a television news show. His face hidden in shadow, Hayhanen shared his impressions of Abel.
“I didn’t like him. He was sneaky.”
“But spies are supposed to be sneaky,” Brinkley pointed out.
“Yes, but I’m not.”
“Would they like to kill you?” Brinkley asked, referring to the KGB. Russian intelligence was—and still is—infamous for hunting down and murdering former agents.
“Hard job to find me,” Hayhanen said. “They’re trying hard.”
They may have succeeded.
James Donovan, Rudolf Abel’s lawyer, later wrote that Hayhanen died in what he described as a “mysterious” accident on the Pennsylvania Turnpike in the summer of 1961.
There are no police reports or hospital records of any such accident. The CIA, when questioned, would not
comment on the case.
* * *
Following their capture at the Bay of Pigs, Pepe San Román, Erneido Oliva, and more than eleven hundred members of the invading brigade were sentenced to thirty years of hard labor. James Donovan, who negotiated the Abel-Powers trade, convinced Fidel Castro in December 1962 to release the prisoners in exchange for a shipment of food and medicine worth $53 million.
Handsome Johnny Rosselli, another of the many people who tried and failed to get rid of Castro, agreed to testify before a Senate committee in 1975. He detailed his role in the CIA’s assassination plot, and even named high-level mobsters who helped in the effort. Asked by a friend whether he was worried about angering the mob, the seventy-year-old Rosselli shrugged.
“Who’d want to kill an old man like me?”
The following summer, Miami police fished a fifty-five-gallon oil drum from a city bay. Folded inside, a washcloth taped over the mouth, was the body of Handsome Johnny.
In Cuba, Fidel Castro held on to power long after Kennedy and Khrushchev were gone, even outliving the Cold War. His health failing, he stepped aside in 2006, handing power to his younger brother, Raúl. Castro remained controversial and defiant to the very end, dying in Havana in 2016, at the age of ninety.
* * *
Angry about the unfair treatment he and his fellow submariners faced upon their return to port, Vasili Arkhipov spoke little of his mission to Cuba in subsequent years. He died at age seventy-two of kidney cancer, a disease that afflicted many of the sailors who survived the K-19 disaster. In 2012, fifty years after the Cuban missile crisis, Vasili’s wife proudly told his story in a documentary titled, fittingly, The Man Who Saved the World.
Andrei Sakharov, father of the Soviet Union’s hydrogen bomb and designer of the largest explosive ever detonated on earth, did his part to save the world, too. After the Big Ivan test, Sakharov spoke out about the danger of nuclear fallout. Hounded by the government and banned from doing secret military work, he continued to argue against the development of new weapons, and in favor of human rights and greater political freedom for Soviet citizens. “Never trust a government that doesn’t trust its own people,” he often said. Sakharov was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975—though the Soviet government did not permit him to leave the country to receive the prize. Sakharov died in Moscow in 1989, at sixty-eight.
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