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

by Michael Dobbs

  In other words, both the Joint Chiefs and McNamara were right. Deploying missiles to Cuba strengthened Khrushchev's hand, and compensated for his shortage of intercontinental missiles. On the other hand, Khrushchev could not deliver a knockout blow against the United States under any circumstances. The surviving U.S. nuclear strike force would still be able to wreak much greater damage on the Soviet Union than the Soviets had inflicted on America.

  The doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction--MAD for short--was alive and well even after the deployment of Soviet missiles to Cuba.

  An army was on the move. To prepare for a possible invasion of Cuba, the president had ordered the greatest emergency mobilization of U.S. troops since World War II. All of a sudden, everybody in the military seemed to be heading toward Florida, by road, rail, and air, accompanied by huge amounts of equipment. There were bottlenecks everywhere.

  Just to move the 1st Armored Division, 15,000 men plus tanks, armored vehicles, artillery pieces, required 146 commercial airplanes and 2,500 railcars. The logistics experts decided that tanks and other tracked vehicles should remain on the railcars, in case they had to be moved rapidly somewhere else. Railcars were soon backed up all over the southeastern United States. To store the railcars, the Army needed at least thirty miles of sidings, but only six and a half miles were immediately available. Railroad storage space became a prized commodity, jealously guarded by each military service. SAC commanders refused to release siding space to the Army because it might "interfere" with their own mission.

  So many soldiers and airmen converged on Florida that there was no place for them to sleep. Some airfields introduced the "hot bunk" principle, with three men assigned to the same bed, sleeping in eight-hour shifts. The Gulfstream race course at Hallandale, Florida, became a temporary base for the 1st Armored Division. "Soon military police were placed at all entrances," an observer recorded. "Parking lots became motor pools, and the infield was used for storage and mess. Troops were billeted on the first and second floors of the grandstand. Weapons and duffel bags were stacked next to the betting windows. Church services were held in the photo-finish developing rooms."

  Ammunition was an additional headache. Several ordnance factories went over to three-shift, seven-day weeks to produce sufficient quantities of ammunition for the fighter aircraft that were expected to strafe Soviet and Cuban troops. Napalm bombs were stacked like "mountains of cordwood" at airfields in Florida.

  The British consul in Miami was reminded of the atmosphere in southern England prior to D-Day. Military planes were landing at Miami International Airport every minute, troop trains headed southward to Port Everglades, and trucks trundled through the streets loaded with weapons and explosives. An armada of nearly six hundred aircraft waited for orders to attack Cuba and intercept Soviet IL-28 bombers taking off from Cuban airfields. So much military hardware was in Florida that Air Force officers joked the state would sink into the sea under the weight of all the equipment.

  The further south you went, the more imposing the military presence became. The laidback resort of Key West, on the tip of the Florida Keys, suddenly found itself on the front line of the Cold War, like Berlin or the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas. Every government agency wanted a piece of the action. The Navy ran reconnaissance and code-breaking operations out of the naval air station; the CIA established safe houses on neighboring islands; the army moved into the venerable Casa Marina Hotel, built at the beginning of the century by the railroad tycoon Henry Flagler. Soldiers in combat fatigues took over the local baseball stadium, the public beach, and most of the city's parking lots. Marines set up machine-gun nests on the beach, surrounded by rolls of concertina wire.

  Florida was now the soft underbelly of the United States. Prior to October 1962, military strategists had expected a Soviet attack to come from the North, over the pole. Early warning radar systems all faced northward, toward the Soviet Union. Fighter-interceptor squadrons were trained to deploy along the so-called "pine tree line" in Canada against the heavy Soviet bombers known to NATO as "Bears" and "Bisons." Antiaircraft missile systems with small atomic warheads were deployed around East Coast cities like New York and Washington as a last line of defense against a surprise Soviet attack. Almost overnight, American defenses had to be reoriented from north to south.

  Military shipments did not always receive priority. On the morning of Wednesday, October 24, a convoy of three trucks headed down U.S. Highway 1 from an Army depot in Pennsylvania. The commercial tractor-trailers, which had been leased by the Army, were carrying HAWK surface-to-air missiles to protect southern Florida from a Soviet air attack. But the Army had neglected to inform the Virginia State Police that the missiles were on the way. An alert highway patrolman pulled the trucks over at a weighing station in Alexandria, across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. His suspicions were confirmed: the trucks were two thousand pounds overweight. The civilian drivers tried to explain that the shipment was "classified," but failed to sway the patrolman.

  He ordered the trucks to turn around and head back to Pennsylvania.

  1:00 P.M. WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 24 (NOON HAVANA)

  Fidel Castro had spent the night in his underground command post, across the Almendares River from the Havana zoo. His bunker was much less elaborate than that of CINCSAC, but impressive nonetheless for the leader of a small island-nation. It consisted of a tunnel dug into the lush hillside, about two hundred yards long, with half a dozen different rooms branching off on either side. The main entrance was through a set of reinforced steel doors built into a cliff rising from the banks of the river. An emergency elevator led to the Kohly district of Havana, where the homes of many senior government officials were located.

  The tunnel was still being constructed when the missile crisis erupted, but was sufficiently near completion to serve as a command post. Soldiers poured gravel on the roughly finished floors to make the bunker inhabitable. The main drawback was the absence of an adequate ventilation system. The high humidity and lack of fresh air made it difficult to sleep or even breathe, but the tunnel offered decent protection against expected American air attacks. In addition to Castro and his top military advisers, a Soviet general had an office in the bunker as liaison between the two high commands.

  The bunker was equipped with an electric generator, and enough food and water to last for a month. But Fidel did not spend much time underground. Except for the three or four hours a night when he was sleeping, he was constantly on the move, visiting Cuban military units, meeting with Soviet generals, and supervising the defense of Havana. While Kennedy met with the ExComm, Castro consulted with his top commanders.

  "Our greatest problem is communications," reported Captain Flavio Bravo, the chief of military operations, Castro's indispensable right-hand man. "Much of what we should have received is still at sea or hasn't yet left the Soviet Union. Our principal means of communication is the telephone."

  Other officers complained of shortages of trucks and tanks and anti-aircraft equipment. Castro was more concerned by the low-level overflights of U.S. reconnaissance planes the previous day. The impunity with which the American pilots operated was outrageous.

  "There's no political reason of any kind that should prevent us from shooting down a plane flying over us at three hundred feet," he insisted. "We must concentrate our 30mm [antiaircraft] batteries in four or five places. When the low-level planes appear, dejalos fritos."

  "Dejalos fritos"--" Fry them." Almost the same language that General LeMay had used about Cuba.

  After the morning staff meeting, Castro decided to inspect the defenses east of Havana. His convoy of jeeps drove through the tunnel underneath the harbor, skirting El Morro Castle, a stone fortress built by the Spanish at the end of the sixteenth century to deter the pirates roaming the Caribbean. The party passed by the fishing village of Cojimar, where Ernest Hemingway had set his Old Man and the Sea. This stretch of coastline had become a favorite recreation spot for Cuba's new
ruling class. Fidel himself had a villa in Cojimar, which he had used as a secret hideaway during the early months of the revolution while plotting Cuba's transformation into a Communist state. A little further down the coast was the seaside resort of Tarara, where Che Guevara recovered from bouts of malaria and asthma attacks and drafted a slew of revolutionary laws, including the confiscation of foreign-owned sugar plantations.

  A thirty-minute drive brought Fidel and his companions to a Soviet surface-to-air missile site overlooking Tarara beach, where they had a clear view of one of the most likely U.S. invasion routes. To his right was a five-mile stretch of gently sloping golden sand, fringed with palm trees and sand dunes, a tropical equivalent of the beaches of Normandy. Cuban militiamen were swarming along the beach, digging trenches and fortifying the concrete bunkers that Fidel had ordered built along the coastline. The ghostly silhouettes of American warships patrolling the Florida Straits were visible on the horizon.

  Eighteen months earlier, the Americans had chosen one of the most isolated regions of Cuba, the swampy Zapata peninsula, as the site of the ill-fated landing by fifteen hundred Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs. The invading force had been bottled up by the Cuban army and air force, and eventually decimated. They would not make the same mistake again. This time, Castro was convinced, the yanquis would stage a frontal attack in force, using the Marines and other elite troops.

  The SAM site was on high ground, a mile and a half back from the seashore. It was laid out in a Star of David pattern, with six missile launchers in fortified positions in the spokes of the star and electronic vans and radar equipment in the center. The slender V-75 missiles poked up through the trenches in a diagonal slant.

  Castro had pressed the Soviets for SAM missiles long before Khrushchev came up with the idea of deploying nuclear-tipped R-12s and R-14s in Cuba. The surface-to-air missiles were his best defense against an American air attack. No other Soviet weapon was capable of hitting a U-2, the high-altitude American spy plane designed to be invulnerable to normal antiaircraft fire. A V-75 had brought down a U-2 piloted by Francis Gary Powers over Sverdlovsk on May 1, 1960, causing great embarrassment to President Eisenhower. The missile system had proved itself again on September 8, 1962, by destroying a second U-2 over eastern China. The Soviets had ringed Cuba with 144 V-75 missiles deployed at twenty-four different sites. Together, they provided almost complete coverage of the island.

  Excited Soviet troops were anxious to show the Cuban leader what they could do. As Castro watched, they tracked an imaginary American warplane with a van-mounted radar that could spot targets 150 miles away; the missile itself had a range of up to 25 miles. Fidel was impressed. But he was also quick to grasp the principal weakness of the system: its ineffectiveness against low-flying targets. Just the previous day, the Americans had shown they could evade Soviet radar by sending in reconnaissance planes a couple of hundred feet above the water.

  The SAM site was defended by a single artillery piece, a double-barreled antiaircraft gun mounted on a flimsy four-wheel carriage. It was manned by half a dozen Cuban soldiers in casual T-shirts. Like their Soviet comrades, the Cubans responded enthusiastically to Castro's words of encouragement, and were more than ready to fight. But there was no disguising the fact that they were extraordinarily vulnerable to a low-level U.S. air attack.

  As he drove back to Havana, Castro knew he would have to completely reorganize his air defenses. Most of his antiaircraft guns were protecting Havana and other Cuban cities, which would be quickly overrun in the event of an invasion. Their value was largely symbolic. The more Fidel thought about the problem, the more he became convinced that the antiaircraft weapons should be moved inland, to defend the nuclear missile sites, his prize strategic asset. To defeat the invaders, he had to give his Soviet allies time to load and fire their missiles.

  Far from being alarmed by the thought of nuclear war consuming his country, Fidel felt extraordinarily calm and focused. It was at times like this--when his situation seemed most precarious--that he lived life to the full. His aides understood that he thrived on crisis. A Cuban newspaper editor who watched el lider maximo in action during this period felt that "Fidel gets his kicks from war and high tension. He can't stand not being front-page news."

  Castro was accustomed to daunting odds. A cold calculation of the balance of forces suggested that his position had improved rather than weakened since the revolutionary war, when his troops were vastly outnumbered by Batista's soldiers. He now had three hundred thousand armed men under his direct command in addition to the backing of the Soviet Union. He had a vast array of modern military equipment, including antiaircraft guns, T-54 tanks, and MiG-21 fighter jets. If all else failed, his Soviet allies had tactical nuclear weapons hidden in the hills behind Tarara beach and other likely landing spots that could wipe out an American beachhead in a matter of minutes.

  The arrival of these weapons completely changed the calculation of how long Cuba could hold out against an invasion. A few months earlier, Russian military experts had estimated that it would take a U.S. invading force just three or four days to seize control of the island. That was no longer the case. Whatever happened, the yanquis would be in for a prolonged and bloody fight.

  The Marine regiment selected to lead the attack over Tarara beach--renamed Red beach in the American invasion plan--was at that moment steaming off the north coast of Cuba, on its way back from Operation ORTSAC. The Pentagon had canceled the exercises on Vieques following President Kennedy's speech. The Marines were no longer preparing for the overthrow of an imaginary dictator. They had turned their sights on a real one.

  Spirits were high aboard the helicopter carrier USS Okinawa, the temporary regimental headquarters. The Marines spent their time practicing boat-boarding drills, sharpening their bayonets, doing press-ups, and cursing Fidel. A Marine sergeant led the chanting as his men double-timed around the football field-sized deck.

  "Where are we gonna go?"

  "Gonna go to Cuba."

  "Whatta we gonna do?"

  "Gonna castrate Castro."

  Below deck, officers from the 2nd Marine Division pored over Operations Plan 316, which envisaged an all-out invasion of Cuba involving 120,000 U.S. troops. The plan was for the Marines to attack east of Havana, at Tarara, while the 1st Armored Division landed through the port of Mariel to the west. In the meantime, the 101st and 82nd Airborne divisions would conduct a paratroop assault behind enemy lines. In its initial sweep, the invading force would skirt Havana and head directly for the missile sites.

  Many of the officers on board the Okinawa had been preparing for an invasion of Cuba for more than a year. Several had fought at Iwo Jima and Inchon, and were itching to get back into combat. They had studied the landing beaches, mapped out the routes inland, and perused Cuban "Most Wanted" lists. The invasion plan had been expanded and refined until it now included such details as the time the chaplain would arrive on the beach (H-hour plus 27 minutes) and quantities of civilian food relief (2,209 tons of canned chicken, 7,454 tons of rice, and 138 tons of powdered eggs).

  The assault over Red beach and neighboring Blue beach would take the form of a classic amphibious landing, in the tradition of Normandy and Okinawa. The attack would begin with naval gunfire and air strikes. Underwater demolition teams would clear the beach area of mines. Amphibious tractors would arrive carrying troops, followed by larger landing craft, including the flat-bottomed Higgins boats familiar from D-Day. The Marines would link up with helicopter-borne assault troops landing inland to occupy roads and high ground.

  The planners had given barely any thought to the possibility that the enemy might use tactical nuclear weapons to wipe out the beachheads. Defenses against "nuclear, chemical, and biological" attack consisted of face masks and chemical agent detector kits. Otherwise, troops were instructed to clearly mark "contaminated areas" and report burst and yield data for "every delivered nuclear fire" to higher headquarters. The seemingly routine task of drawing up
a nuclear/chemical defense plan was given to a somewhat dim-witted major who "spent his time on things that were not the highest priority."

  Whatever happened, casualties were likely to be heavy. The Marines were prepared for five hundred dead the first day alone--mainly on Tarara beach--and a further two thousand injured. Total casualties during the first ten days of fighting were estimated at over eighteen thousand, including four thousand dead. The Marine Corps would account for nearly half.

  And that was without the participation of Soviet combat troops or the use of nuclear weapons.

  5:15 P.M. WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 24 (4:15 P.M. HAVANA)

  At the Pentagon, reporters had convinced themselves that an interception of a Soviet ship was imminent. Tension had been mounting all day, and officials would reveal nothing about the movement of Soviet ships. The president had ordered "no leaks."

  The Pentagon spokesman was Arthur Sylvester, a former journalist who had spent thirty-seven years on the Newark Evening News. He had tried to stall reporters all day with what his assistant termed "diversionary replies involving tides, sea conditions, and weather." He refused to confirm or deny rumors that five or six Soviet ships had turned back. But the excuses were wearing thin and the press was clamoring for news.