One minute to midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the brink of nuclear war

by Michael Dobbs

  Like Castro, Che believed that military confrontation with the United States was all but inevitable. As a young revolutionary in Guatemala, he had witnessed a CIA-backed coup against the leftist government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman in 1954. He had drawn several important lessons from that experience. First, Washington would never permit a socialist regime in Latin America. Second, the Arbenz government had made a fatal mistake by granting "too much freedom" to the "agents of imperialism," particularly in the press. Third, Arbenz should have defended himself by creating armed people's militias and taking the fight to the countryside.

  On Castro's instructions, Che was now preparing to do precisely that. If the Americans occupied the cities, the Cuban defenders would fight a guerrilla war, with the help of their Soviet allies. They had arms caches everywhere. Castro had reserved half of his army, and most of his best divisions, for the defense of western Cuba, where most of the missile sites were located and the Americans were expected to land. The whole country could be turned into a Stalingrad, but the focal point of the Cuban resistance would be the nuclear missile bases of Pinar del Rio. And Che Guevara would be in the thick of it.

  6:00 A.M. WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 24 (5:00 A.M. HAVANA)

  Timur Gaidar, the Pravda correspondent in Havana, was getting ready to dictate a story to Moscow when a young man burst through the door of his room in the Havana Libre Hotel, the former Hilton. It was Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the enfant terrible of Soviet literature and semiofficial rebel. The poet was living a kind of gilded exile in Havana, working on an adulatory film about the Cuban revolution called Ya--Kuba (I Am Cuba) as he tried to worm his way back into Khrushchev's good graces.

  "Has Moscow called?"

  "I'm waiting. They'll call soon."

  "Wonderful. I was afraid I would be late. I have been writing all night."

  Yevtushenko had been in the television studio when Castro delivered his speech and had spent the last few hours recording his impressions. It was easy for him to understand Khrushchev's attraction to Castro because he too was half in love. Listening to Fidel speak, he was prepared to forgive him anything. What did it matter if there was only vinegar and cabbage in the grocery stores if Fidel had closed down the whorehouses and declared an end to illiteracy? In the struggle between tiny Cuba and mighty America, Yevtushenko knew which side he was on.

  As he waited for the telephone call from Moscow, the poet paced up and down the room, declaiming his lines. Soon they would be splashed across the front page of Pravda, an editorial in verse:

  America, I'm writing to you from Cuba,

  Where the cheekbones of tense sentries

  And the cliffs shine anxiously tonight

  Through the gusting storm...

  A tabaquero with his pistol heads for the port.

  A shoemaker cleans an old machine gun,

  A showgirl, in a soldier's laced-up boots,

  Marches with a carpenter to stand guard...

  America, I'll ask you in plain Russian:

  Isn't it shameful and hypocritical

  That you have forced them to take up arms

  And then accuse them of having done so?

  I heard Fidel speak. He outlined his case

  Like a doctor or a prosecutor.

  In his speech, there was no animosity,

  Only bitterness and reproach...

  America, it will be difficult to regain the grandeur

  That you have lost through your blind games

  While a little island, standing firm,

  Becomes a great country!

  CHAPTER FOUR

  "Eyeball to Eyeball"

  8:00 A.M. WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 24 (3:00 P.M. MOSCOW)

  Nikita Khrushchev saw no need to communicate directly with his own people at a time of grave international crisis. Even though he was the most personable of Soviet leaders--allowing himself to be photographed strolling through cornfields or waving his fists in the air--public opinion was a relatively minor concern. Unlike Kennedy, he did not face midterm elections. Unlike Castro, he did not need to rally his people against an invasion.

  His main goal was to project a sense of business as usual. He went out of his way to be friendly to visiting Americans. The previous evening, he and other Soviet leaders had gone to the Bolshoi Theater for a performance of Boris Godunov with the American bass Jerome Hines, joining the singers afterward for a glass of champagne. His latest visitor was William Knox, the president of Westinghouse Electric International.

  Knox was in Moscow to explore possible manufacturing deals. His knowledge of the Soviet Union was so limited that he had to ask Khrushchev to identify the sage with the large bushy beard whose portrait hung on the wall of his huge Kremlin office. "Why, that's Karl Marx, the father of Communism," a surprised first secretary replied. Two nights earlier, the Westinghouse president had been woken from a deep sleep by the roar of military vehicles and brilliant searchlights shining into his hotel room opposite the Kremlin. "It was hard to believe my eyes," he wrote later. "Red Square was full of soldiers, sailors, tanks, armored personnel carriers, missiles of various lengths up to at least 100 feet, jeeps, artillery, etc. I simply could not figure it out!" It was not until the following morning that he found out that the nighttime exercise had been part of preparations for the annual November 7 Revolution Day parade.

  The president of an electricity company was a strange choice for the role of superpower emissary. Knox's most important attribute was that he embodied the Soviet preconception of the American ruling class. Steeped in Marxist ideology, Khrushchev really did believe that corporate CEOs ran the U.S. government, like puppetmasters pulling strings behind the scenes. Hearing that a prominent capitalist was in town, he summoned Knox to the Kremlin at less than an hour's notice.

  The message Khrushchev wanted to send America via Knox was that he was standing firm. He conceded for the first time that the Soviet Union had deployed nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles on Cuba, but insisted they were there for "defensive" purposes only. Everything depended on the motive of the person with the weapon, he explained. "If I point a pistol at you like this in order to attack you, the pistol is an offensive weapon. But if I aim to keep you from shooting me, it is defensive, no?" He said he understood that Cubans were a "volatile people," which was why the missiles would remain under Soviet control.

  Having confirmed the presence of the medium-range missiles in Cuba, Khrushchev next alluded to the short-range cruise missiles. If Kennedy really wanted to know what kind of weapons the Soviet Union had deployed to Cuba, all he had to do was order an invasion, and he would find out very quickly. The Guantanamo Naval Base would "disappear the first day."

  "I'm not interested in the destruction of the world," Khrushchev told Knox, "but if you want us to all meet in Hell, it's up to you."

  He then related one of his favorite anecdotes, about a man who had to move in with his goat after falling on hard times. Although he did not like the smell, he eventually became accustomed to it. Russians, Khrushchev said, had been "living with a goat" in the form of NATO countries like Turkey, Greece, and Spain for a very long time. Now Americans would have to get used to their own goat in Cuba.

  "You aren't happy with it and you don't like it, but you'll learn to live with it."

  10:00 A.M. WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 24

  At the White House, the morning ExComm meeting began as usual with an intelligence briefing from John McCone. Colleagues had dubbed the ritual "Saying Grace," because of the CIA director's staunch Roman Catholic faith and droning papal delivery. According to the latest intelligence information, twenty-two Soviet ships were headed for Cuba, including several suspected of carrying missiles. Many of the ships had been receiving urgent radio messages from Moscow in unbreakable code.

  McNamara reported that two of the Soviet ships, the Kimovsk and the Yuri Gagarin, were approaching the quarantine barrier, a five-hundred-mile radius from the eastern tip of Cuba. A Soviet submarine was stationed between the two vessels. The Navy planned to
intercept the Kimovsk with a destroyer, while helicopters from an aircraft carrier attempted to divert her submarine escort. The Finnish-built Kimovsk had unusually long ninety-eight-foot cargo hatches, designed for lumber but well suited for missiles. The rules of engagement promulgated by Admiral Anderson authorized the destruction of the Soviet ships if they failed to comply with U.S. Navy instructions.

  "Mr. President, I have a note just handed to me," interrupted McCone. "We've just received information...that all six Soviet ships currently identified in Cuban waters--and I don't know what that means--have either stopped or reversed course."

  There was a hubbub at the table and a gasp of "Phew!" but Secretary of State Rusk quickly squelched any sense of relief.

  "Whadya mean 'Cuban waters'?"

  "Dean, I don't know at the moment."

  Kennedy asked if the ships that had turned around were incoming or outgoing. The CIA chief did not have an answer.

  "Makes some difference," mumbled Rusk dryly, as McCone stepped out of the room to investigate. His remark was greeted with nervous laughter.

  "Sure does," said Bundy.

  Kennedy was alarmed by the thought that the first confrontation of the crisis might involve a Soviet submarine. He wanted to know how the Navy would respond if a Soviet submarine "should sink our destroyer." Without replying directly, McNamara told the president that the Navy planned to use practice depth charges to signal that Soviet submarines should surface. The depth charges would not cause any damage even if they hit the submarines.

  From the other side of the Cabinet Room, Bobby saw his brother's hand go up to his face and cover his mouth: "He opened and closed his fist. His face seemed drawn, his eyes pained, almost gray. We stared at each other across the table. For a few fleeting seconds, it was almost as though no one else was there and he was no longer the President."

  Suddenly, Bobby found himself thinking of the tough times they had had as a family, when Jack was ill with colitis and almost died, when their brother Joe Junior was killed in an airplane accident, when Jack and Jackie lost their first child through a miscarriage. The voices in the Cabinet Room seemed to blur together until Bobby heard Jack ask if it was possible to defer an attack on the submarine. "We don't wanna have the first thing we attack [be] a Soviet submarine. I'd much rather have a merchant ship."

  McNamara disagreed. Interfering with the on-scene naval commander, he told the president firmly, could result in the loss of an American warship. The plan was to "put pressure" on the submarine, "move it out of the area," and then "make the intercept."

  "OK," said Kennedy, doubtfully. "Let's proceed."

  Half a mile down Sixteenth Street, at the Soviet Embassy, diplomats crowded around radios and television sets. They were as much in the dark about the Kremlin's intentions as everyone else. They watched with mounting tension as the networks reported Soviet vessels approaching an imaginary line in the ocean, counting down the hours and minutes until they came face-to-face with American warships. Dobrynin would later describe October 24 as "probably the most memorable day in the whole long period of my service as ambassador to the United States."

  On the New York Stock Exchange, trading was hectic, and prices were going up and down like a yo-yo. They had fallen sharply on Tuesday. By Wednesday morning, they were 10 percent down from their summer highs. Gold prices were up. A young economist named Alan Greenspan told The New York Times that "massive uncertainty" would likely result if the crisis continued for any significant length of time.

  Fear of nuclear apocalypse was seeping into American popular culture. In Greenwich Village in Manhattan, a tussle-haired bard named Bob Dylan had sat up one night scribbling the words of "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall" on a spiral notepad. He later explained that he wanted to capture "the feeling of nothingness." Images of apocalypse came tumbling from his brain. Unsure whether he would live to write another song, he "wanted to get the most down I possibly could."

  In another unpublished song, Dylan would describe "the fearful night we thought the world would end" and his fear that World War III could erupt by dawn the next day. He told an interviewer that "people sat around wondering if it was the end, and so did I."

  "Whadda ya have, John?" JFK asked impatiently, as McCone returned to the Cabinet Room.

  "The ships are all westbound, all inbound for Cuba," the CIA director reported. "They either stopped them, or reversed direction."

  "Where did you hear this?"

  "From ONI." The Office of Naval Intelligence. "It's on its way over to you now."

  News that the Soviet ships had turned around or were dead in the water came as an enormous relief to the ExComm. After hours of mounting tension, there was a glimmer of hope. An aircraft carrier group led by the Essex had orders to intercept the Kimovsk and her submarine escort. The intercept was scheduled for between 10:30 and 11:00 a.m. Washington time. Believing he had only minutes to spare, Kennedy canceled the intercept.

  Dean Rusk suddenly found himself thinking of a childhood game back in Georgia in which boys would stand two feet apart and stare into each other's eyes. Whoever blinked first lost the game.

  "We're eyeball to eyeball, and the other fellow just blinked," Rusk told his colleagues.

  "The meeting droned on," Bobby Kennedy would recall later. "But everyone looked like a different person. For a moment the world had stood still, and now it was going around again."

  "SECRET. FROM HIGHEST AUTHORITY," read the order to the Essex. "DO NOT STOP AND BOARD. KEEP UNDER SURVEILLANCE."

  In fact, it was impossible to do anything of the sort. The Kimovsk was nearly eight hundred miles away from the Essex at the time this order was issued. The Yuri Gagarin was more than five hundred miles away. The "high-interest ships" had both turned back the previous day, shortly after receiving an urgent message from Moscow.

  The mistaken notion that the Soviet ships turned around at the last moment in a tense battle of wills between Khrushchev and Kennedy has lingered for decades. The "eyeball to eyeball" imagery served the political interests of the Kennedy brothers, emphasizing their courage and coolness at a decisive moment in history. At first, even the CIA was confused. McCone erroneously believed that the Kimovsk "turned around when confronted by a Navy vessel" during an "attempted" intercept at 10:35 a.m. The news media played up the story of a narrowly averted confrontation on the quarantine line with Soviet ships "dead in the water." Later on, when intelligence analysts established what really happened, the White House failed to correct the historical record. Bobby Kennedy and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., would describe a standoff on "the edge of the quarantine line" with Soviet and American ships only "a few miles" apart. The myth was fed by popular books and movies like Thirteen Days and supposedly authoritative works like Essence of Decision and One Hell of a Gamble.

  Plotting the location of Soviet vessels was an inexact science at best, involving a considerable amount of guesswork. Occasionally, they were sighted by American warships or reconnaissance planes. But usually they were located by a World War II technique known as direction finding. When a ship sent a radio message, it was intercepted by U.S. Navy antennas in different parts of the world, from Maine to Florida to Scotland. The data was then transmitted to a control center near Andrews Air Force Base, south of Washington. By plotting the direction fixes on a map, and seeing where the lines intersected, analysts could locate the source of a radio signal with varying degrees of accuracy. Two fixes were acceptable, three or more ideal.

  The Kimovsk had been located 300 miles east of the quarantine line at 3:00 a.m. Tuesday, eight hours after President Kennedy's television broadcast announcing the blockade. By 10:00 a.m. Wednesday--just over thirty hours later--she was a further 450 miles to the east, clearly on her way home. An intercepted radio message indicated that the ship--whose cargo holds contained half a dozen R-14 missiles--was "en route to the Baltic sea."

  The fixes on other Soviet ships trickled in gradually, so there was no precise "Eureka moment" when the intelligence comm
unity determined that Khrushchev had blinked. The naval staff suspected that Soviet vessels were transmitting false radio messages to conceal their true movements. American calculations of Soviet ship positions were sometimes wildly inaccurate because of a false message or a mistaken assumption. Even if the underlying information was correct, direction fixes could be off by up to ninety miles.

  Intelligence analysts from different agencies had argued all night over how to interpret the data. It was not until they received multiple confirmations of the turnaround that they felt confident enough to inform the White House. They eventually concluded that at least half a dozen "high-interest" ships had turned back by noon on Tuesday.

  ExComm members were disturbed by the lack of real-time information. McNamara, in particular, felt that the Navy should have shared its data hours earlier, even though some of it was ambiguous. He had visited Flag Plot before going to the White House for the ExComm meeting, but intelligence officers had termed the early reports of course changes "inconclusive" and had not bothered to inform him.

  As it turned out, the Navy brass knew little more than the White House. Communications circuits were overloaded and there was a four-hour delay in "emergency" message traffic. The next category down, "operational-immediate traffic," was backed up five to seven hours. While the Navy had fairly good information about what was happening in Cuban waters, sightings of Soviet ships in the mid-Atlantic were relatively rare. "I'm amazed we don't get any more from air reconnaissance," Admiral Anderson grumbled to an aide.