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

by Michael Dobbs

  What rank-and-file FBI agents did not know at the time was that the fifty-seven-year-old convicted mobster was working for the CIA, which had paid for his airline tickets, put him up in safe houses, and arranged for him to travel around the country incognito. They were also unaware that Roselli was the central figure in a series of futile attempts by the CIA to assassinate Castro, using snipers, bombs, and poisoned capsules. (FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had learned of the Roselli-CIA connection, but squirreled the information away for his own use.)

  The CIA had recruited Roselli back in September 1960 at a time when the Eisenhower administration was thinking of moving against Castro. Prior to the Cuban revolution, the Mafia had controlled the casino business in Havana, but its assets were taken over by the Castro regime. Top CIA officials believed that the Mafia had both the motivation and the contacts in Havana to settle the score and promote American foreign policy interests at the same time. Harvey took over as Roselli's case officer and principal contact in April 1962. Several weeks later, he delivered a package of four poison pills to Roselli, assuring him that they "would work anywhere at any time with anything." The Mafia planned to use the pills against Fidel and Raul Castro and Che Guevara. Harvey also dropped off a U-Haul truck filled with arms and explosives in a Miami parking lot, and gave the keys to Roselli. The CIA man and the gangster would meet in Washington, Miami, or the Florida Keys, where they could drink each other under the table and hold conversations no one could overhear.

  Harvey had learned that military action against Cuba could be imminent at the Mongoose meeting with Bobby Kennedy on October 18. As often happened, his instructions were vague. He decided it was his responsibility to mobilize "every single team and asset that we could scrape together" in support of a possible invasion. In addition to the agents preparing to land in Cuba by submarine, he organized teams of frogmen to destroy ships in Havana Harbor and parachutists to blaze a trail to the missile sites. His "assets" included John Roselli.

  By Roselli's account, Harvey sent for him "immediately" and put him in a safe house in Washington, to await further instructions. After a couple of days, Harvey decided that his protege would be more useful in Miami, "gathering intelligence." Roselli spent his time in Miami exchanging gossip about the possible invasion with anti-Castro exiles. The poison pills, euphemistically known as "the medicine," were in a "safe" place in Havana. The Mafia had not been able to find a way of placing one in Castro's food.

  While there is no smoking gun tying the Kennedy brothers to the Castro assassination plot, there is some circumstantial evidence. Jack Kennedy discussed the possibility of Castro's assassination with a journalist, Tad Szulc, in November 1961, only to agree that it would be "immoral" and "impractical." Bobby raised no objection the following month when Lansdale sent him a memo proposing to use "certain of our own criminal elements...who have operated inside Cuba with gambling and other enterprises" to undermine the Castro regime. RFK threw a fit in May 1962 when CIA officials briefed him about the early stage of the assassination plot, but appears to have done little, if anything, to put a stop to it. He had his own connection to the Mafia in the form of a CIA agent named Charles D. Ford, who was given the alias "Rocky Fiscalini" and worked directly for the attorney general. RFK frequently talked about "getting rid" of Castro, without specifying exactly what he had in mind.

  Harvey reported to the CIA's head of covert operations, Richard Helms, a cautious, career-minded bureaucrat who would later rise to become director. The two men made sure that their boss, McCone, was kept out of the loop. On the one occasion when the "liquidation of leaders" was raised in the Special Group, in August 1962, McCone expressed horror at the idea. An ardent Catholic, he told his colleagues that he could be "excommunicated" for condoning murder. The conspiratorial Harvey had the minutes altered to delete any written reference to assassination.

  It is difficult to explain why Helms and Harvey would ask the Mafia to kill Castro without instructions from higher authority. On the other hand, it is possible that the Kennedy brothers refrained from issuing clear instructions to preserve the principle of "plausible deniability." Helms would deny talking to either Jack or Bobby Kennedy about political assassination. But Harvey understood that there were "no holds barred" and that the plot had the "full authority of the White House."

  Harvey would come to see the notion of using the Mafia to kill Castro as a "damn fool idea." He had grave doubts about the Lansdale strategy of "helping Cubans to help themselves" without direct American military intervention. He would regale friends with stories of a dramatic meeting in the White House Situation Room at the height of the missile crisis, at which he supposedly told the president and his brother: "If you fuckers hadn't fucked up the Bay of Pigs, we wouldn't be in this fucking mess."

  There are no documents, and no independent testimony, to support the CIA man's version of the climatic confrontation. But even if it never took place, it revealed a lot about his state of mind. Bill Harvey would never forgive the Kennedys for what he termed the "idiocy" of Operation Mongoose.

  The headquarters of the CIA's secret war against Fidel Castro was a 1,500-acre campus on the southern fringes of Miami. The estate had served as a base for Navy blimps during World War II, but was sold to the University of Miami after being devastated by a hurricane. The university in turn had leased it to Zenith Technical Enterprises, a wholly owned subsidiary of the CIA. The internal CIA code name for the Miami operation was JM/WAVE.

  During the course of 1962, JM/WAVE had grown rapidly, to become the largest CIA station outside of Washington. More than three hundred agency officers and contract employees worked at JM/WAVE, supervising a network of several thousand agents and informants, many of them Cuban veterans from the Bay of Pigs. The station's assets included over a hundred vehicles for the use of case officers, a mininavy for infiltrating agents into Cuba, a warehouse stocked with everything from machine guns to Cuban army uniforms to coffins, a gas station, a couple of small airplanes, hundreds of safe houses in the Miami area, a paramilitary training camp in the Everglades, and various maritime bases and boathouses. The annual budget for the operation exceeded $50 million a year.

  To keep up appearances, a CIA officer served as president of Zenith, with an office for greeting visitors. Wall charts recorded phony sales figures and fictitious charitable contributions by employees. Dozens of smaller CIA front companies were scattered around Miami. The huge CIA operation was pretty much an open secret in the city. Many people, including reporters for the Miami Herald, knew that Zenith was a CIA front but felt they had a patriotic duty to keep quiet. When CIA operatives got in trouble with the police or the Coast Guard, a telephone call was usually sufficient to bail them out.

  The JM/WAVE station chief was Ted Shackley, a tall, muscular, somewhat distant figure known to his colleagues as the "blond ghost." Just thirty-five years old, Shackley was one of the CIA's rising stars. He had a reputation for cold efficiency and a phenomenal memory. In Berlin in the early fifties, he had served under Bill Harvey, who had personally selected him for the Miami assignment. Shackley did his best to prevent Langley from poking into JM/WAVE affairs, but he had to endure the odd visits from Harvey, which were often memorable. On one occasion, Harvey wanted to get inside the building in the evening, and came across a doorway nailed shut with a two-by-four plank. There was another entrance one hundred feet away, but Harvey could not tolerate obstacles. He simply kicked his way in, growling, "I don't have time for this fucking door."

  The officers in Shackley's secret army were mainly American; the foot soldiers were practically all Cuban. They were drawn from the ranks of the quarter of a million Cubans who had fled the island in the four years since Castro came to power. Although they were all passionately opposed to Castro, they had difficulty rallying around an alternative leader. A "counter-revolutionary handbook" drawn up by the CIA listed 415 Cuban exile groups and movements seeking to depose Castro, ranging from former Batista supporters to disillusioned revoluti
onaries. The handbook noted that some of the counterrevolutionary organizations were "sponsored by the [Cuban] intelligence services" for the purpose of staging provocations and sowing dissent in the ranks of the dissidents. Many of the groups existed only on paper, while others channeled their energy into competing with one another "for membership and U.S. financial support." The handbook bemoaned the lack of effective refugee leaders.

  "The trouble with us Cubans," an exile leader told a reporter for The Washington Post, "is that everybody wants to be president of Cuba. We are putting personal ambitions above the national interest."

  Many of the Cuban factions operated on their own. But several hundred cooperated with the CIA and accepted its tutelage. Their fighters were on the agency's payroll. The question that confronted Harvey and Shackley when the missile crisis erupted was how to make best use of these assets. They had had little success with sabotage raids. But they believed that the Cubans could gather useful intelligence on the Soviet military presence in Cuba to supplement the photographic reconnaissance. In the event of an American invasion, the intelligence gatherers would transform themselves into pathfinders for the U.S. military.

  By Friday, JM/WAVE had twenty infiltration teams "safehoused" in the Miami area. A typical team consisted of five or six Cubans and included a radio operator. After long months of preparation, and numerous disappointments and false alarms, the Cubans were eager to go. Few doubted that this time--in contrast to the Bay of Pigs--the Kennedy administration was serious about getting rid of Castro. Shackley reported to Langley that his men were at the "highest possible pitch of motivation and state of readiness." In the Little Havana district of Miami, Bay of Pigs veterans sang their war anthem:

  Que nada ya detenga

  Esta guerra nuestra

  Si es una guerra santa

  Y vamos con la Cruz.

  Let nothing stop

  This war of ours

  A holy war indeed

  We march with the Cross.

  Typical of the fighters waiting to be infiltrated into Cuba was a twenty-one-year-old student named Carlos Obregon. He belonged to a group calling itself the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (DRE)--the Student Revolutionary Directory--made up of former Havana University students opposed to Castro for a mixture of ideological and religious reasons. Like most of his comrades, Obregon came from an impeccable upper-middle-class family. His father was a lawyer and he was educated at a Jesuit high school. His parents disliked Batista, but were even more opposed to the Communists, whom they regarded as evil personified. The family left Cuba shortly after the Bay of Pigs.

  Together with a dozen other DRE members, Obregon began receiving military training from CIA instructors in October 1961. He was taken to a four-bedroom stucco house on Key Largo, and taught the basics of infiltration and exfiltration, handling of subagents, map reading, and handling of weapons and explosives. A few months later, the agency selected him for more intensive training as a radio operator. He was sent to the Farm in Virginia for a six-week course in guerrilla warfare. After passing a polygraph test, he was put on the CIA payroll at $200 a month and introduced to his case officer, a man known simply as "Jerry."

  On Monday, October 22, Jerry told Obregon to wait with the rest of his team in a two-story wooden farmhouse in a rural area south of Miami. That evening, the five Cubans listened on the radio to Kennedy delivering what sounded like an ultimatum to the Soviet Union to withdraw its missiles. They were jubilant. The secret war was no longer secret. The United States was publicly backing their struggle.

  Over the next four days, team members were issued with clothing, backpacks, and radio equipment they would need in Cuba. Obregon received a final communications briefing. Jerry introduced the team to a Cuban, recently arrived from the island, who would serve as their guide. Only the weapons remained to be distributed. They would leave for Cuba that weekend.

  On Friday afternoon, Jerry arrived at the safe house to announce that the infiltration operation had been unexpectedly put "on hold."

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Nukes

  6:00 P.M. FRIDAY, OCTOBER 26 (5:00 P.M. HAVANA)

  Although he had been in power for nearly four years, Fidel Castro still maintained many of his old revolutionary habits. He had no fixed schedule. He was on the move constantly, visiting military units, mingling with students, chatting with workers. He slept and ate at irregular intervals. The Soviet leader who knew him best, Anastas Mikoyan, was impressed by the "religious" intensity of Fidel's beliefs, but complained that he would often "forget his role as host." Like most Soviet politicians, Mikoyan was accustomed to three well-lubricated meals a day. But the man known to Cubans as el caballo frequently skipped lunch and had no use for alcohol. "The horse" seemed to sleep best in a moving car, rushing from one meeting to the next.

  By Friday afternoon, Castro had decided he could no longer tolerate the U.S. overflights of Cuba. He had seen the jets roaring over the outskirts of Havana and shared the rage and impotence of his troops. After meeting with his general staff, he drafted a communique to the secretary-general of the United Nations: "Cuba does not accept the vandalistic and piratical privilege of any warplane to violate our airspace, as this threatens Cuba's security and prepares the way for an attack on its territory. Such a legitimate right of self-defense cannot be renounced. Therefore, any warplane that invades Cuban airspace does so at the risk of meeting our defensive fire."

  Castro went to the Soviet military command post at El Chico, twelve miles southwest of Havana, to inform his allies about his decision. The Soviet commander in chief, General Pliyev, was listening to reports from his subordinates on the state of readiness of their units. Castro listened as each officer stood to attention as he delivered his report.

  "Motorized rifle units in combat readiness."

  "Air force regiment in combat readiness."

  "Antiaircraft units ready."

  Finally, it was the turn of Igor Statsenko, the commander of the missile troops. Five out of six R-12 batteries had reached full combat readiness, and could unleash a barrage of twenty warheads against cities and military bases across the United States. The last remaining battery had an "emergency operational capability," meaning that at least some of its missiles could be launched, perhaps not very accurately.

  "Missile units ready for combat."

  Castro complained that the low-level planes were demoralizing Cuban and Soviet troops. The Americans were in effect conducting daily practice sessions for the destruction of Cuba's military defenses.

  "We cannot tolerate these low-level overflights under these conditions," Castro told Pliyev. "Any day at dawn they're going to destroy all these units."

  Castro wanted the Soviets to switch on their air defense radars so they would be able to detect incoming American planes. The radars had been inactive most of the time to avoid giving away details of the network. Castro was now convinced that an American air raid was imminent. "Turn on the radars," he insisted. "You can't stay blind!"

  He had two other recommendations for the Soviet commanders. He urged them to move at least some of their missiles to reserve positions to make it impossible for the Americans to destroy them all in a single raid. And he wanted the forty-three thousand Soviet troops on the island to take off their checkered sports shirts--and put on military uniforms.

  If the yanquis dared attack Cuba, they should be given a worthy reception.

  All day, crowds had been gathering on the waterfront in old Havana to cheer the first Soviet ship to pass through the American blockade. The skipper of the Vinnitsa entertained them with stories of the armada of U.S. warships, helicopters, and planes that had failed to stop his little ship. Clutching a Cuban flag and a portrait of Castro, Captain "Pedro" Romanov described how he had braved gale-force winds and the imperialists to deliver oil to "freedom-loving Cuba."

  "Fidel, Khru'cho', estamo' con lo do'" ("Fidel, Khrushchev, we are with you both"), shouted the demonstrators, swallowing many of the word
s in the Cuban manner.

  Another popular chant celebrated the ideological alliance between Cubans and Russians, and the powerlessness of the United States to do anything about it. In Spanish, the words had an insolent rhyme that made them easier to chant.

  Somos socialistas pa'lante y pa'lante

  Y al que no le guste que tome purgante.

  We are socialists forward, forward

  If you don't like it, swallow a laxative.

  It was the zenith of the Cuban love affair with the Soviet Union. Cuban parents were naming their sons after Yuri Gagarin, watching Soviet movies, reading Yevtushenko's poems, and lining up to buy tickets for the Moscow Circus. But the admiration for the distant superpower was tinged with condescension. Even as they cheered the arrival of Soviet ships and hugged Soviet soldiers, Cubans could not help noticing the smell that the Russians brought with them--an amalgam of noxious gasoline fumes, cheap cigarettes, thick leather boots, and body odor. They even had a name for this strange aroma, "the grease of the bear."

  And then there was the drunkenness. Even Castro complained about the wildness of the Russian soldiers when they were drunk, and the need for "stronger discipline." The thirst for alcohol led to a huge barter business. Poorly paid Russian soldiers would trade anything--food, clothes, even an army truck--for beer and rum. Military police tried to keep order as best they could, rounding up drunken soldiers and beating them to a pulp.