Everything went according to Khrushchev’s plan until an American U-2 spy plane returned on October 14 from a routine flight over western Cuba with photographs clearly revealing the outline of a nearly completed missile launch site. National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy informed President John F. Kennedy of the discovery over breakfast on October 16, and the president immediately assembled an ad hoc crisis-management team. Known as the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, or ExComm, the group’s fourteen members included the national security adviser, secretaries of state and defense, director of central intelligence, attorney general (The president’s younger brother Robert), and a handful of other senior officials whose judgment and intellect the president respected. “In the Executive Committee,” wrote presidential adviser Arthur Schlesinger, “consideration was free, intent and continuous. Discussion ranged widely, as it had to in a situation of such exceptional urgency, novelty and difficulty. . . . Every alternative was laid on the table for examination, from living with the missiles to taking them out with surprise attack, from making the issue with Castro to making it with Khrushchev. In effect, the members walked around the problem, inspecting it first from this angle, then from that, viewing it in a variety of perspectives.”3
They winnowed their choices down to three: air strike, invasion, or blockade. An air strike had the advantage of a focused response, but as Khrushchev had predicted, with the targeting technology at the time, the Air Force could only be sure of destroying sixty to ninety percent of the missiles. The military preferred an air strike followed by an invasion, which would eliminate the threat and rid Cuba of Castro for good. But the situation was too volatile for such an escalation, and Kennedy wanted to give the Soviets a chance to back down before taking irrevocable action. A blockade leveraging the overwhelming American naval superiority in the region offered a graduated response and preserved American flexibility. “The blockade,” Bundy explained, “would not remove the missiles; it would not prevent the Russians from completing their installations if they had all the necessary materials at hand, and while the evidence was incomplete, no one could assume they did not. A blockade might produce a deeply embarrassing counterblockade, most obviously in Berlin, and it might require deadly force in its application. But it did not begin with sudden death, and it was a first step, not a last.”4
Kennedy and his advisers prepared for the worst. The president deployed three hundred Navy warships to the Caribbean and South Atlantic in preparation for the blockade; mobilized one hundred eighty thousand troops for a possible invasion of Cuba, the largest invasion force assembled since D-Day; and ordered U.S. missile forces to be ready to launch a full-scale nuclear strike within several minutes’ notice. He ordered emergency supplies of food, water, and medicine sent to nuclear fallout shelters nationwide and prepared a speech to the nation for the evening of Monday, October 22, announcing the discovery of the missiles and his decision to impose a blockade of Cuba.
As the nation sat glued to its television screens, the president calmly delivered his speech from his desk in the Oval Office:
Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island. . . . We no longer live in a world where only the actual firing of weapons represents a sufficient challenge to a nation’s security to constitute maximum peril. Nuclear weapons are so destructive and ballistic missiles are so swift, that any substantially increased possibility of their use or any sudden change in their deployment may well be regarded as a definite threat to peace. . . . The 1930s taught us a clear lesson: aggressive conduct, if allowed to grow unchecked and unchallenged, ultimately leads to war. . . . [O]ur unswerving objective, therefore, must be to prevent the use of these missiles against this or any other country, and to secure their withdrawal or elimination from the Western Hemisphere.5
The president warned that he had directed the armed forces to prepare for any eventualities, and that “these actions may only be the beginning. . . . We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war,” he maintained, “but neither will we shrink from that risk at any time it must be faced.” Kennedy further declared, “It shall be the policy of this Nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.” He called on Khrushchev “to abandon this course of world domination, and to join in an historic effort to end the perilous arms race and transform the history of man.” “This nation,” he said, “is prepared to present its case against the Soviet threat to peace, and our own proposals for a peaceful world, at any time and in any forum—in the OAS, in the United Nations, or in any other meeting that could be useful—without limiting our freedom of action.” It “was not the best speech of JFK’s presidency,” Kennedy speechwriter Theodore Sorensen wrote, “but it surely was his most important.”6
The Soviets responded immediately. Following Kennedy’s speech, Khrushchev activated the Soviet Union’s strategic missile forces and ordered all Soviet ships bound for Cuba to maintain their course. Khrushchev convened the twelve-man Presidium, the highest Soviet governing body, in the Kremlin and told them, “This may end in a big war.”7
Khrushchev composed a defiant letter to Kennedy, advising him to “renounce the actions pursued by you, which may lead to catastrophic consequences for world peace.” He characterized Kennedy’s actions as “undisguised interference in the internal affairs of the Republic of Cuba, the Soviet Union and other states,” and accused the blockade of Cuba of violating the United Nations Charter and international norms of freedom of navigation on the high seas, calling it an “aggressive action” against both Cuba and the Soviet Union. Rejecting Kennedy’s argument, he wrote, “And naturally, neither can we recognize the right of the United States to establish control over armaments which are necessary for the Republic of Cuba to strengthen its defense capability. We reaffirm that the armaments which are in Cuba, regardless of the classification to which they may belong, are intended solely for defensive purposes.”8 That night, Khrushchev recalled, “I slept on a couch in my office—and I kept my clothes on. I was ready for alarming news to come any moment, and I wanted to be ready to act immediately.”9
Kennedy responded with a terse letter to Khrushchev:
Dear Mr. Chairman,
I have received your letter of October twenty-third. I think you will recognize that the steps which started the current chain of events was the action of your Government in secretly furnishing offensive weapons to Cuba. We will be discussing this matter in the Security Council. In the meantime, I am concerned that we both show prudence and do nothing to allow events to make the situation more difficult to control than it already is. I hope that you will issue immediately the necessary instructions to your ships to observe the terms of the quarantine, the basis of which was established by the vote of the Organization of American States this afternoon, and which will go into effect at 1400 hours Greenwich time October twenty-four.10
Following Kennedy’s announcement, the Americans secured the backing of key allies and neighbors. In his briefing to the ambassadors of member states of the Organization of American States, Secretary of State Dean Rusk told them, “I would not be candid and I would not be fair with you if I did not say that we are in as grave a crisis as mankind has been in.”11 The OAS unanimously approved the quarantine, and its members offered naval ships to assist with the blockade. That night Harlan Cleveland, the assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs, said offhandedly to Rusk, “I’ll see you in the morning.” A weary, worried Rusk replied, “I hope so.”12
The day after the speech, the president initiated regular low-level reconnaissance flights over Cuba and signed the order initiating the quarantine. At the White House, Kennedy and his advisers pondered the Soviets’ next move. He had recently read Barbar
a Tuchman’s book The Guns of August, which cataloged the errors that led to the start of World War I, and the risk of catastrophe from one side misinterpreting the other’s signals haunted him. “We were not going to misjudge,” Kennedy said, “or precipitously push our adversaries into a course of action that was not intended or anticipated.”13
Both sides considered traditional channels inadequate for a situation that required speed, clarity, and candor, so the White House and the Kremlin opened a number of improvised and sometimes unorthodox avenues of communication with each other. At a minimum, each needed information on the other party’s thinking, as both governments were flying blind. None of the KGB’s four highly placed sources in the U.S. government had access to the deliberations, and several days before, the KGB had arrested Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, the CIA’s only highly placed spy in Moscow.
As a trial balloon, Robert Kennedy asked Charles Bartlett— the Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington bureau chief for the Chattanooga Times and an old friend of the Kennedys’ who had set John and Jackie up on a blind date—to meet with Georgi Bolshakov. Bolshakov, ostensibly a gregarious reporter for the Soviet news wire agency TASS, was in fact the deputy Soviet military intelligence station chief in Washington, and the Kennedys had used him as a secret conduit with the Kremlin to defuse a crisis over Berlin almost exactly a year before. Bartlett and Bolshakov knew each other through Washington journalism circles, and the two agreed to meet in Bartlett’s office at the National Press Club. President Kennedy had sanctioned the meeting, Bartlett told Bolshakov. “He is very angry about what has happened in Cuba,” he said. “It reminds him of the Japanese deception before Pearl Harbor.” Still, “the President does not want to invade Cuba, he only wants to eliminate the medium-range ballistic missile bases.”14 Bartlett thought there might be a way to solve the problem through the United Nations and wanted to see if the Soviets would be willing to explore that possibility. To facilitate this he proposed the Soviets stop the convoys on their way to Cuba. Bolshakov listened attentively but gave no response. Robert Kennedy asked Bartlett to meet with Bolshakov again later in the day and gave him copies of the missile-site photographs to show the Soviet spymaster as a token of sincerity. As Robert Kennedy had hoped, the meetings alerted Moscow that despite the Americans’ anger, the White House was open to the possibility of working with the Soviets to explore a way out of the crisis.
For the first time, the United States raised its nuclear strike forces alert level to DEFCON 2, one step short of all-out war, making a point of sending the message on an uncoded channel so the Soviets would pick it up and understand the seriousness of the American position. Tensions were high everywhere. “This could well be our last conversation,” the press officer at the Soviet mission to the United Nations told an American reporter. “New York will be blown up tomorrow by Soviet nuclear weapons.”15
That evening at nine-thirty, Robert Kennedy went to see Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin in his office on the third floor of the Soviet Embassy. He knew that Dobrynin had direct access to Khrushchev, and the two of them had worked discreetly together before to smooth over differences without involving the diplomatic bureaucracies. The attorney general, visibly tense and agitated, told the ambassador that he had come on his own initiative to communicate how deeply he and his brother felt deceived after accepting Khrushchev and Dobrynin’s assurances that the Soviet Union would not place offensive missiles in Cuba, including a pledge relayed by Dobrynin from Khrushchev not to take any provocative actions before the midterm congressional elections. After berating the ambassador, Kennedy turned to leave. He paused at the door before turning to ask, “Can you say what instructions were given the captains of the Soviet ships after the President’s speech last night and the signing of the quarantine proclamation today?” Dobrynin answered, “I do know these instructions, they must not submit to any illegal demands on the high seas, as these are in violation of the international norms of free passage.” He added that the order, as far as he knew, had not been changed. As they parted, Kennedy said, “I don’t know how all this will end, but we intend to stop your ships.”16
In Moscow, Khrushchev dictated a spirited and unapologetic reply to Kennedy’s letter from the previous day:
In presenting us with these conditions, you, Mr. President, have flung a challenge at us. Who asked you to do this? By what right did you do this? Mr. President, if you coolly weigh the situation which has developed, not giving way to passions, you will understand that the Soviet Union cannot fail to reject the arbitrary demands of the United States. When you confront us with such conditions, try to put yourself in our place and consider how the United States would react to these conditions. I do not doubt that if someone attempted to dictate similar conditions to you—the United States—you would reject such an attempt. And we also say—no. The Soviet government considers that the violation of the freedom to use international waters and international air space is an act of aggression which pushes mankind toward the abyss of a world nuclear-missile war. Therefore the Soviet government cannot instruct the captains of Soviet vessels bound for Cuba to observe the orders of American naval forces blockading that Island. Our instructions to Soviet mariners are to observe strictly the universally accepted norms of navigation in international waters and not to retreat one step from them. And if the American side violates these rules, it must realize what responsibility will rest upon it in that case. Naturally we will not simply be bystanders with regard to piratical acts by American ships on the high seas. We will then be forced on our part to take the measures we consider necessary and adequate in order to protect our rights. We have everything necessary to do so.17
The blockade went into force at 10 o’clock that morning with twenty-five Soviet cargo ships steaming toward the quarantine line. The blockade’s military value was minimal, as most of the equipment was already on the island, and although deadly serious, the blockade was principally a diplomatic instrument, an announcement initiating the bargaining over the missiles. The U.S. Navy had orders to fire on any ship trying to cross, and every indication pointed to a Soviet intention to run the blockade. “We were close to war,” Khrushchev later wrote, “standing on the very brink of war. Anything could have happened. Whether you wanted it or not, if one side fired, the other would have replied.”18
In the White House, President Kennedy waited with his senior advisers as the ships approached. “This was the moment we had prepared for, which we hoped would never come,” Robert Kennedy wrote. “The danger and concern that we all felt hung like a cloud over us all. . . . These few minutes were the time of greatest worry by the President. His hand went up to his face & covered his mouth and he closed his fist. His eyes were tense, almost gray, and we just stared at each other across the table. Was the world on the brink of a holocaust and had we done something wrong? Isn’t there some way we can avoid having our first exchange be with a Russian submarine—almost anything but that, he said. . . . We had come to the edge of a final decision—& the President agreed. I felt we were on the edge of a precipice and it was as if there were no way off.”19
As the tension hung in the air, an assistant handed a message to CIA Director John McCone from naval intelligence that twenty of the inbound Soviet ships (presumably those carrying incriminating cargo) had either stopped in the water or reversed direction. Rusk turned to Bundy and said, “We’re eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked.”20
“Everyone looked like a different person,” Robert Kennedy remembered. “For a moment the world had stood still, and now it was going around again.”21 The ships’ turnaround brought a pause in the confrontation at sea, but the central problem of the missile bases remained, and as work on them continued, the danger grew as more of the missiles already on the island became operational.
In Moscow, Khrushchev invited American businessman William Knox on short notice to a meeting at the Kremlin, hoping Knox, who was in the Soviet Union on business as president of Westinghouse I
nternational, would pass on a message to the American government. In his three-hour meeting with Knox, Khrushchev suggested a summit between Khrushchev and Kennedy to discuss the crisis. Khrushchev resented the “illegal” blockade and repeated several times during the meeting that he might choose to stop some of the Soviet ships or turn them around, but if Kennedy continued the quarantine he might take action against American shipping elsewhere, and “sooner or later,” the Soviet premier warned the American businessman, “the Soviet Union would send its submarines to sink the ships enforcing the blockade.”22 Khrushchev for the first time privately conceded the existence of nuclear-armed Soviet ballistic missiles in Cuba. He pressed for a meeting with Kennedy, either in Washington, in Moscow, at sea, or elsewhere. He was interested in avoiding catastrophe, but “if the United States insists on war,” he warned, “we’ll all meet in Hell.”23
At the United Nations, Secretary General U Thant called for a two-week pause to arms shipments to Cuba along with a simultaneous suspension of the American quarantine. The proposal, and the Soviet Union’s immediate acceptance, put the Americans at a disadvantage. From their viewpoint it equated aggression and response, said nothing about the missiles already in Cuba, permitted work to go forward on the sites, and contained no provisions for verification. Undersecretary of State George Ball said the plan “was anything but helpful. For us to accept the proposal would so relieve Khrushchev of pressure that we would probably never be able to get the missiles out of Cuba.”24 He was right. A frustrated President Kennedy told his advisers, “We cannot permit ourselves to be impaled on a long negotiating hook while the work goes on on these bases.”25
Great Negotiations Page 17