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

by Michael Dobbs

  From the cockpit of the U-2, Anderson could see the sandy white beaches of Cayo Coco and Cayo Guillermo, one of Hemingway's favorite fishing spots. His flight would take him on a diagonal slant across Cuba over the town of Camaguey. He would make a left turn over the SAM site at Manzanillo on Cuba's southern coast, and follow the Sierra Maestra Mountains past Guantanamo to the eastern tip of the island. He would then make another sharp left turn, heading back toward Florida.

  As Anderson entered Cuban airspace over Cayo Coco, his U-2 was picked up and tracked by Soviet air defenses. Soviet officers made a note of the time he entered--9:12 local time--and alerted the rest of the air defense system.

  Anderson switched on his camera as he headed for the first SAM site outside the little town of Esmeralda. He could feel a familiar series of thumps from the camera bay beneath him as the camera swung back and forth from horizon to horizon, clicking away furiously. Making a photo run was similar to making a bombing run: the pilot's main task was to keep the "platform" as steady as possible as he flew over the target. The camera was a monstrous piece of equipment, with a focal length of thirty-six inches. When fully loaded, it contained roughly a mile of film. In order to maintain the balance of the aircraft, the film was sliced into two nine-inch-wide strips that were spooled in opposite directions and later reassembled.

  Thump, thump, thump went the camera, as the U-2 passed over Esmeralda at 9:17 local time. In Washington, it was 10:17.

  10:18 A.M. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27

  The morning ExComm session had been under way in the Cabinet Room of the White House for just seven minutes when Anderson entered Cuban airspace. It began, as usual, with an intelligence briefing from McCone. There was a brief discussion about stopping the Grozny. McNamara then began outlining a plan for round-the-clock surveillance of the Soviet missile sites. Eight U.S. Navy Crusaders would take off shortly from Key West; another eight would be dispatched in the afternoon. These flights would be followed by the first nighttime reconnaissance mission by U.S. Air Force planes, which would illuminate the missile sites with brilliant flares.

  An aide handed the president a flash news item that had just been torn off the Associated Press ticker. He scanned it quickly, and read it aloud:

  BULLETIN

  MOSCOW, OCT. 27 (AP)--PREMIER KHRUSHCHEV TOLD PRESIDENT KENNEDY IN A MESSAGE TODAY HE WOULD WITHDRAW OFFENSIVE WEAPONS FROM CUBA IF THE UNITED STATES WITHDREW ITS ROCKETS FROM TURKEY.

  27 OCT 1018A

  "Hmmm," objected a startled Bundy, the national security adviser. "He didn't."

  "That's how it's read by both of the associations that have put it out so far," said Ted Sorensen. The Reuters bulletin was timed 1015, three minutes earlier. It was worded almost identically.

  "He didn't..."

  "He didn't really say that, did he?"

  "No, no."

  As was often the case, Kennedy was one step ahead of his aides. Khrushchev had made no mention of a possible Cuba-Turkey swap in the private message that he had sent the previous day via the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. But it was quite possible that this was an entirely new proposal. The Soviets might have just upped the ante. That would change everything.

  "He may be putting out another letter," Kennedy speculated. He called out to his press secretary. "Pierre? Pierre?"

  Pierre Salinger stuck his head around the door.

  "That wasn't in the letter we received, was it?"

  "No, I read it pretty carefully. It doesn't read that way to me."

  "Well, let's just sit tight on it." As the ExComm members waited for more news from the wire services, Kennedy turned his attention back to the surveillance flights. He had some doubts about the nighttime mission, the first of its kind over Cuba. It was difficult to predict how the Soviets and Cubans would react to the Air Force pyrotechnics. Bundy and McNamara thought it was important to "keep the heat" on. Work on the missile sites was continuing day and night. Swayed by the arguments of his aides, JFK gave tentative approval to the proposed night flights.

  "It's all right with me," he said finally.

  But he quickly injected a qualification. "I think we might have one more conversation about it, however. At about six o'clock, just in case during the day we get something important."

  "All right, sir," agreed McNamara.

  10:22 A.M. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27 (9:22 A.M. HAVANA)

  The Soviet air defense system for eastern Cuba was headquartered in Camaguey, an old colonial town known as "the Maze" because of its intricate street pattern. The division staff had moved into expropriated church buildings in the city center. Their combat command post was about a mile outside town, in a two-story mansion built as a sports and hunting club for the local business elite prior to the revolution.

  The ground floor of the command post was dominated by a huge screen, about fifteen feet high and thirty feet wide. The screen had been blank for weeks. Air defense units had been instructed to keep their radars turned off in order to avoid revealing their positions and capabilities to the Americans. When the radars were finally switched on, late Friday night, the screen at the command post lit up with potential targets. Air defense officers could see U.S. Navy planes taking off and landing at Guantanamo Bay and U.S. Air Force planes patrolling the periphery of the island.

  As the night wore on, the atmosphere became increasingly tense. Word had filtered down from headquarters in El Chico that an American attack was likely overnight, probably before dawn. All SAM missile sites were placed on a six-minute alert, meaning that they had to be able to launch their missiles within six minutes of receiving an order. Duty officers were issued with personal firearms, helmets, ammunition, hand grenades, and dry rations. The senior officers of the division all spent the night at the command post, ready for immediate action. Everybody was dressed in civilian clothes. Most of the officers wore white shirts, black pants, and boots; ordinary soldiers wore checkered shirts.

  The division commander, Colonel Georgi Voronkov, left the command post for his headquarters around eight in the morning. There was still no sign of an American attack, and he needed to get some breakfast and some rest. He remained in touch with his subordinates via radio and a scrambled telephone connection.

  Air defense radars had located an American U-2 entering Cuban airspace in the Cayo Coco area shortly after nine. The plane was flying in a southeasterly direction. It passed directly over Camaguey at 9:22 a.m., but was flying too high to be easily visible from the ground.

  The American plane showed up as a pulsating dot on the large screen. It failed to respond to a "friend or foe" identification challenge. Air defense controllers labeled the plane "Target Number 33."

  10:30 A.M. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27

  Kennedy had guessed right. The Soviet premier had written a second letter, posing a new condition for the withdrawal of his missiles from Cuba. Unlike the earlier message, this one was being broadcast to the world over Radio Moscow.

  The mere mention of the Jupiter missiles in Turkey irritated the president. He was angry at Khrushchev for cynically raising the stakes at the very moment when the two superpowers seemed to be groping toward a solution to the crisis. But he was also angry with his aides for failing to prepare the Turks for the possible removal of the Jupiters, and making a shibboleth out of NATO solidarity. And he was angry at himself for having agreed to deploy the already obsolescent weapons in the first place.

  Everybody acknowledged that the Jupiters were "a pile of junk," in McNamara's phrase. The missiles themselves were squat and fairly short. From Cigli Air Base on Turkey's western coast, the missiles could land a 1.44-megaton nuclear warhead--one hundred times the power of the Hiroshima bomb--on Moscow in just under seventeen minutes. The problem with the Jupiters was that they were deployed above the ground, on unprotected sites. Before they could be fired, they had to be fueled with liquid oxygen, a procedure that took at least fifteen minutes. Unlike the Soviet missiles in Cuba, they could not easily be moved to new launch positions. This made them eas
y targets for a preemptive strike, if the Kremlin suspected that the United States was about to go to war.

  It had taken four years, and a lot of diplomatic arm-twisting, to find a home for the Jupiters. Since their range was limited to 1,700 miles, there was no point deploying them in the United States. Eisenhower felt in retrospect that "it would have been better to dump them in the ocean instead of trying to dump them on our allies." Eventually, Turkey and Italy agreed to accept them, and they became fully operational in March 1962.

  Unlike the Italians, who only accepted the missiles as a favor to Washington, the Turks regarded the outdated Jupiters as a symbol of national prestige. U.S. Air Force officers retained control over the warheads, but the missiles themselves were transferred to Turkish custody on October 22, the very day that Kennedy went on television to announce the blockade of Cuba. Turkish crews were trained to fire them. The weapon's gleaming white facade bore a Turkish flag and a not-very-subtle depiction of a mushroom cloud with an arrow through it. Shielded at the base by large metal skirts, the Jupiters resembled giant minarets.

  Kennedy was so concerned about the Jupiters that he issued a secret instruction to American officers to destroy or physically disable the missiles rather than risk their use without his authorization. The Jupiters were meant to serve as a nuclear trip wire, linking the security of Turkey and other NATO countries irrevocably to the security of the United States. But Kennedy worried that a Soviet attack on the missiles might trigger nuclear war automatically, without any presidential input. A senior Pentagon official, Paul Nitze, assured him that this was not the case, but he remained skeptical. "I don't think we should take the Chiefs' word on that one, Paul," he had insisted.

  The ExComm had considered the possibility of a Turkey-Cuba missile trade almost from the start. Kennedy agreed with McNamara that Khrushchev's "price" for withdrawing his missiles from Cuba was likely to be the removal of American weaponry from Turkey and Italy. He had even asked Sorensen to draft a letter offering Khrushchev such a deal; but it was never sent. The president did not want to be seen to bargain under duress, and his advisers began raising political objections. The Friday letter from Khrushchev, combined with the unofficial Soviet approach to John Scali, led everybody to hope that a swap would not be necessary.

  With his finely tuned political antennae, Kennedy sensed immediately that Khrushchev's formal offer of a Turkey-Cuba missile trade would be greeted favorably by European public opinion. His advisers believed it would be politically disastrous to abandon the Turks. The president found himself in a minority of one on the ExComm, with only tepid support from Bobby.

  "We're going to be in an insupportable position on this matter if this becomes his proposal," Kennedy told his aides. "He's got us in a pretty good spot here. Because most people would regard this as a not unreasonable proposal."

  "But what most people, Mr. President?" Bundy wanted to know.

  "I think you're gonna have it very difficult to explain why we are going to take hostile military action in Cuba, against these sites...when he's saying, 'If you get yours out of Turkey, we'll get ours out of Cuba.' I think you've got a very tough one here."

  "I don't see why we pick that track, when he's offered us the other track in the last twenty-four hours."

  Kennedy interrupted his national security adviser impatiently. "Well, he's now offered us a new one!"

  Taylor came to Bundy's support. "You think the public one is serious when he has a private one?"

  "Yes! We have to assume that this is their new and latest position, and it's a public one."

  Nitze speculated that Khrushchev might be pursuing two tracks at once: a private track "related solely to Cuba," and a public track designed to confuse public opinion "and divide us with additional pressures."

  "It's possible," JFK conceded.

  Bundy was emerging as the spokesman for the hawks. He warned that the U.S. position would "come apart very fast" if "we accept the notion of the trade at this stage." Talking to the Turks about withdrawing the missiles was tantamount to "trying to sell our allies for our own interests."

  "That would be the view in all of NATO," Bundy lectured. "Now it's irrational and it's crazy, but it's a terribly powerful fact." Besides, "the problem is Cuba. The Turks are not a threat to the peace."

  Kennedy cut the discussion short. Before deciding how to respond to Khrushchev, the White House should issue a statement drawing attention to contradictions in the Soviet position. He was still concerned that "you're going to find a lot of people who will find this is a rather reasonable position."

  "That's true," acknowledged Bundy.

  "Let's not kid ourselves."

  In Moscow, the official government newspaper Izvestia was rolling off the presses. The editors had remade the front page at the last moment to include Khrushchev's latest message to Kennedy acknowledging the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba, and offering to withdraw them, if the United States withdrew its missiles from Turkey.

  "Keeping the peace is the main goal of the government of the USSR," the newspaper declared.

  Unfortunately for Izvestia's credibility, there was nothing to be done about the commentary on page two, which had gone to press many hours in advance. The writer accused the United States of concocting stories about Soviet missile bases in Cuba. He poured scorn on the notion of a Turkey-Cuba missile swap as a cynical public relations initiative by the "Pentagon propaganda machine."

  11:16 A.M. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27 (10:16 A.M. HAVANA)

  The Soviet generals on duty in the underground command post at El Chico had been following the tracking reports on "Target Number 33" with mounting concern. After overflying Camaguey, it had made a 130-degree left turn over Manzanillo on the southeastern coast of Cuba. From there, it had flown along the northern foothills of the Sierra Maestra toward Guantanamo Bay. The island's highest mountain range had been a refuge for Castro and his barbudos during the war against Batista and still bristled with secret fortifications, artillery positions, and armed camps.

  The spy plane had almost certainly photographed the forward cruise missile positions near Guantanamo now equipped with tactical nuclear warheads aimed at the American naval base. The latest tracking data showed that the U-2 had made a sharp left turn at the eastern end of the island, and was flying along the northern Cuban coast back toward Florida. If the intruder was permitted to exit Cuban airspace, the Americans would soon possess up-to-date intelligence on Soviet military positions in eastern Cuba, including the plan to wipe out Guantanamo.

  General Pliyev had left the command post to get some rest. In his absence, decisions were being taken by two of his deputies. Lieutenant General Stepan Grechko had overall responsibility for Soviet air defenses; Major General Leonid Garbuz was the deputy commander in chief for military plans. Both men knew that Pliyev had informed Moscow of his intention to shoot down American planes if an attack seemed imminent. They also knew that Castro had ordered Cuban anti-aircraft batteries to open fire on low-level planes. It was getting difficult to distinguish between reconnaissance flights and the start of an American bombing raid. A devastating U.S. attack was expected at any moment. The standing rules of engagement appeared to authorize the use of any weapons short of nuclear missiles to defend Soviet troops on Cuba.

  "Our guest has been up there for over an hour," Grechko complained. "I think we should give the order to shoot it down, as it is discovering our positions in depth."

  "We mustn't allow our military secrets to fall into the hands of the Pentagon," agreed Garbuz.

  The two generals tried to call Pliyev by phone, but he could not be reached. In the meantime, the tracking reports showed that the U-2 had turned toward the north, and would soon be leaving Cuban airspace. There was not a moment to lose.

  "Very well," said Grechko. "Let's take responsibility ourselves."

  They dispatched a coded order to the air defense division based in Camaguey, three hundred miles to the east. It was timed 10:16 in Havana, 11:16 a
.m. in Washington.

  "Destroy Target Number Thirty-three."

  In Washington, at the White House, the president had stepped out of the Cabinet Room to make some telephone calls. In his absence, other members of the ExComm were speculating about the reason for the sudden shift in signals from Moscow. It was difficult to explain why Khrushchev was now demanding the removal of American missiles from Turkey after his emotional-sounding letter on Friday fretting about "the knot of war."

  "We had one deal in the letter, now we've got a different deal," complained McNamara. "How can we negotiate with somebody who changes his deal before we even get a chance to reply?"

  "There must have been an overruling in Moscow," speculated Bundy.

  Other ExComm members reasoned that the impulsive Khrushchev had probably written the first letter himself and sent it "without clearance" from his colleagues. Perhaps there had been some kind of coup in the Kremlin, with the relatively moderate Khrushchev replaced by hard-liners or forced to do their bidding. Over at the CIA, officials noted that the premier had not been seen in public for two days. Nobody guessed the truth, which was that Khrushchev himself had detected a wavering in the U.S. position and decided to exploit it.

  One thing was certain, said Llewellyn Thompson, the ExComm's in-house Kremlinologist. The latest missive from Khrushchev was the official position of the Soviet leadership.