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

by Michael Dobbs

  Even as he prepared for war, Kennedy was attempting to salvage the peace with a series of fallback positions. In addition to his informal promise to Khrushchev to withdraw American missiles from Turkey, he had privately agreed to a suggestion by Dean Rusk on a discreet approach to the secretary-general of the United Nations. It would be easier for the United States and its allies to accept a dramatic last-minute plea for a Cuba-Turkey trade from U Thant than from Khrushchev. With Kennedy's consent, Rusk telephoned a former UN official named Andrew Cordier, who was known to be close to U Thant. If Khrushchev rejected the secret deal outlined by Bobby to Dobrynin earlier in the evening, Cordier would get the secretary-general to publicly call for the removal of missiles from both Cuba and Turkey.

  But first the allies had to be prepped to accept such a deal. The Turkish government in particular regarded the Jupiters as a symbol of its international manhood and was loath to give them up. Rather than withdraw the missiles unilaterally, Kennedy wanted America's NATO allies to fully understand the probable military consequences of rejecting "a Cuba-Turkey connection." The alternative to a deal was a U.S. attack on Cuba, followed by some kind of Soviet attack on Turkey or on Berlin. If this happened, Kennedy did not want the allies to say, "We followed you, and you bitched it up."

  The timetable for diplomacy was getting very tight. The Pentagon was calling for air attacks on Cuba to begin by Monday, October 29, in the absence of firm evidence that the Soviets were dismantling their missile sites. A meeting of the NATO Council had been called for Sunday morning in Paris. There was practically no time for NATO ambassadors to get instructions from their governments. Kennedy proposed pushing the military schedule back a few hours to give everybody a "last chance" to come up with something. Under the president's revised timetable, the bombing of Cuba would begin on Tuesday, October 30, followed by an invasion seven days later.

  After Kennedy left the Cabinet Room, a few ExComm members lingered behind, exchanging desultory conversation.

  "How are you doing, Bob?" RFK asked McNamara with forced jocularity.

  The defense secretary did not want to admit his exhaustion. "Well," he replied. "How about yourself?"

  "All right."

  "You got any doubts?"

  "No, I think we're doing the only thing we can do."

  McNamara's brain was still clicking away, thinking ahead. "We need to have two things ready," he told the others. "A government for Cuba, because we're gonna need one after we go in with five hundred aircraft. And secondly, some plans for how to respond to the Soviet Union in Europe, 'cause sure as hell they're gonna do something there."

  RFK was dreaming of revenge. "I'd like to take Cuba back. That'd be nice."

  "Yeah," agreed John McCone. "I'd take Cuba away from Castro."

  Someone else joked about putting the Mongoose crowd in charge.

  "Suppose we make Bobby mayor of Havana," kidded one of the Boston Irishmen.

  The tension dissolved into laughter.

  The question of who should form the next government of Cuba was also on the minds of Cuban experts at the Department of State. Earlier in the day, the coordinator for Cuban affairs had signed off on a three-page memorandum proposing the creation of a "Junta for an Independent and Democratic Cuba." The Junta would serve as an advisory body to a military government during "the combat phase of operations," becoming a "rallying point" for all Cubans opposed to Castro.

  The experts warned against any attempt to return Cuba to the discredited Batista era. Instead, the Junta should stress the idea that Castro had betrayed the revolution and the Cuban people now had "a real chance to carry out the original revolutionary program." The State Department's list of "prominent Cubans" aligned neither with Batista nor with Castro was headed by Jose Miro Cardona.

  With his large spectacles, thinning hair, and trim mustache, Miro looked like the lawyer and university professor he had been before becoming a politician. The former president of the Cuban Bar Association had served as figurehead prime minister of Cuba after the triumph of the revolution in early 1959, lasting for fifty-nine days before being replaced by Castro. "I cannot run my office while another man is trying to run it from behind a microphone," he explained to a friend. With his moderate conservative views and anti-Batista, anti-Castro credentials, he was Washington's perennial choice to head a new Cuban government.

  The role of Cuban leader-in-waiting was frustrating and thankless. Miro had seen his hopes rise and fall many times as his American sponsors bickered, schemed, and prevaricated over how to get rid of Castro. The most bitter disappointment had come in April 1961 when the CIA persuaded Miro and his friends to support the Bay of Pigs invasion. As the guerrillas waded ashore, Miro and other members of the Revolutionary Council were spirited away to a safe house in Miami by their CIA handlers, ready to move to the first available chunk of "free Cuba." The call never came. Instead of returning home as heroes, the exile leaders were kept locked up in the house for three days, unaware of the disaster unfolding on the beaches. When it was all over, many of them broke down and wept. Among the 1,180 men captured by Castro's forces at the Bay of Pigs was Miro's own son.

  The exile leaders were flown to Washington to meet with the president. "I know something of how you feel," Kennedy had told them. "I lost a brother and a brother-in-law in the war." He assured them that his commitment to a free Cuba was "total." There would be other opportunities. Miro met with the president several times over the next year and a half, coming away with a different impression every time he left the Oval Office. The discovery of Soviet missiles on Cuba persuaded him that the day of liberation had finally arrived.

  Miro spent much of Saturday meeting with U.S. government officials in Miami. They told him that Cuban refugees serving in the armed forces were being kept at "maximum readiness," pending orders to land in Cuba. With an invasion apparently only hours away, they discussed "final details concerning the establishment of a Cuban belligerent government on liberated territory." After returning home, the exile leader asked an aide to draft a proclamation celebrating the island's "new dawn of freedom":

  We do not come with impulses of vengeance, but with a spirit of justice. We do not defend the interests of any sector, nor do we intend to impose the will of any ruler. We come to restore the right of the Cuban people to establish their own laws and to elect their own government. We are not invaders. Cubans cannot invade their own land....

  Cubans! Throw off the hammer and sickle of Communist oppression. Join the new battle for independence. Take up arms to redeem the nation, and march resolutely on to victory. Our sovereign flag proudly waves its splendid colors, and the island rises with the stirring cry of liberty!

  In CIA safe houses around Miami, seventy-five guerrilla fighters were waiting impatiently to hear when they would be leaving for Cuba. They were organized into twenty separate teams, most with two to five members. One group had twenty members. The infiltration operation had been mysteriously put "on hold" on Friday afternoon following Bobby Kennedy's confrontation with Bill Harvey at the Mongoose meeting in the Pentagon. Nobody seemed to know what was happening, but some fighters were beginning to wonder if the Kennedys had lost their nerve again.

  The reports of dissent in the ranks filtered up to Washington via the CIA station chief in Miami. After eight months in Florida, Ted Shackley had come to view the Cubans as a "volatile, emotional, expressive people." He worried what would happen if the operation was called off altogether and the teams disbanded. Cubans being Cubans, there was a great risk that the disillusioned fighters "would talk and their experience would sweep [the] exile community like wildfire." If that happened, the story would inevitably "hit press." Shackley outlined his concerns in flawless agency bureaucratese, describing "nuts and bolts intelligence realities based on clinical objective appraisal our situation." He began by emphasizing that his men were at "highest possible pitch of motivation and state of readiness" following "equipment checkout, commo briefings, discussion infil routes."
He continued in a darker vein:

  Human psychology and stamina being what they are, this high peak of proficiency cannot be maintained indefinitely because fighters of all types go stale as is so well documented in pugilistic annals and all other competitive fields where combat readiness is required....

  While this [is] well known Headquarters believe fluctuations in go and stop orders over past seven days have been such that prudent judgment dictates that you be personally appraised that we are sitting on explosive human situation which could blow at any time within next forty-eight hours. Wish assure you that while full gamut of leadership tradecraft psychology and discipline will be harnessed to prevent any human explosion we cannot guarantee that it will not happen.

  On the other side of the Florida Straits, in Havana, the Soviet ambassador was doing his best to calm down an indignant Fidel Castro. The Cuban leader had been outraged to learn from the radio that morning of Nikita Khrushchev's proposal for a Cuba-Turkey missile swap. His naturally suspicious mind interpreted this as a signal that his country could become a pawn in some kind of grand bargain between the superpowers.

  "Friends simply don't behave in this way," he raged to Aleksandr Alekseev, when the ambassador called on him on Saturday evening with an official explanation of the latest Soviet position. "It's immoral."

  After three years of dealing with Castro, Alekseev was accustomed to defusing his anger. He was constantly looking for ways to avoid offending his host while carrying out the instructions of his own government. It was a tricky balancing act. He sometimes reworded messages from Moscow to make them more acceptable to the explosive Cuban. His approach this time was to put his own reassuring spin on a message that had managed to set alarm bells ringing in Washington, Havana, and Ankara.

  "As I see it, Nikita Sergeyevich is not posing the question of a trade," the ambassador said soothingly.

  Alekseev depicted Khrushchev's letter as a negotiating ploy, designed to expose the hypocrisy of the American position. The United States claimed it had the right to deploy missiles around the borders of the Soviet Union, but denied a similar right to Moscow. It was most unlikely that Kennedy would accept Khrushchev's offer. Nikita's maneuver would make it easier to justify the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba to international public opinion.

  Though still not satisfied, Castro began to soften. He told Alekseev that the first news reports on the letter had "confused" certain sections of Cuban public opinion, including the military. Some officers had asked him whether Moscow was reneging on its commitments to Cuba. He would do his best to explain the logic behind the proposal to the Cuban people.

  Castro was not as nervous as he had been the previous night, when he appeared at the Soviet Embassy in Vedado and announced that a U.S. attack was imminent. As Alekseev later reported to Moscow, "He began to assess the situation more calmly and realistically.... He nevertheless continues to believe that the danger of a sudden attack still exists as before."

  Despite his frustration with Khrushchev, Castro was delighted that his Soviet comrades had shot down an American spy plane. He told the ambassador that the Cuban authorities had collected the wreckage of the plane, along with "the corpse of the pilot." Without knowing the military details, Alekseev assumed that the U-2 had been downed by the Cubans, not the Soviets. His subsequent report to Moscow sidestepped the question of responsibility, but emphasized that Fidel felt fully justified in ordering his forces to respond to any American overflights.

  "Castro said that in the event of an [American] attack, full fire would be turned against the aggressor, and that he was sure of success," Alekseev cabled.

  9:52 P.M. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27

  Valentin Savitsky had finally concluded that the only reasonable choice left open to him was to come to the surface. The commander of submarine B-59 had been tempted to use his nuclear torpedo to blast his tormentors out of the water, but his fellow officers had persuaded him to calm down. He made the decision to surface jointly with the chief of staff of the flotilla, Vasily Arkhipov. As soon as they were able to raise the radio antenna, they sent a message to naval headquarters, giving their location and recounting what had happened.

  As B-59 rose to the surface with a giant gurgling sound, the Soviet sailors were startled to find the whole area floodlit. They had surfaced in the midst of four American destroyers. Helicopters hovered overhead, illuminating the sea with powerful searchlights. Bobbing up and down on the waves were dozens of sonobuoys used by the Americans to pinpoint the location of the submarine, easily identifiable by their flickering navigation lights. It seemed as if the dark sea was ablaze with fire. U.S. Navy logs recorded the time as 9:52 p.m.

  Savitsky went up to the bridge, accompanied by Arkhipov and several other officers. It was 30 degrees cooler up here than down below. They drank in the night air like drowning men gasping for breath. One officer "almost fell into the water from the sensation of gulping down so much fresh sea air." As they caught their first glimpse of the sailors on the decks of the American warships in their neatly pressed uniforms, the Soviet officers felt even more uncomfortable and humiliated. They were dirty, dispirited, and exhausted. Their submarine was in terrible shape. But they also felt a defiant pride. They had undertaken a 5,000-mile odyssey, to seas that no Soviet submariner had sailed before. They had endured physical hardships that their smartly dressed enemies could barely imagine. It was the machines that had failed, not the men of B-59.

  Savitsky ordered his men to run up the Soviet flag. Not the blue-and-white pennant of the Soviet navy, but the crimson red flag of the Soviet state, with the hammer and sickle emblazoned in the corner. It was his way of signaling that his battered vessel was under the protection of a mighty superpower. One of the American destroyers sent a message by flashing light asking if he needed assistance. "This ship belongs to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics," Savitsky replied. "Halt your provocative actions."

  American S2F tracker planes made repeated low-level runs at B-59, taking photographs and dropping more sonobuoys, recording devices, and flares. The flares dropped several hundred feet before igniting in a brilliant incendiary display. Each flare had the power of 50 million candles. From the bridge of B-59, it seemed as if the planes were making practice bombing runs. Lookouts reported that the Americans were spraying the sea with machine-gun tracer fire.

  After an hour or so, a radio message arrived from Moscow instructing B-59 "to throw off your pursuers" and move to a reserve position closer to Bermuda. But that was easier said than done. Everywhere he looked, Savitsky could see American warships and planes. The sea was a cauldron of blazing light.

  11:00 P.M. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27 (10:00 P.M. HAVANA)

  Americans went to bed on Saturday night in a state of high uncertainty, not knowing what the next day would bring. The White House was almost deserted. Kennedy dismissed most of his aides, telling them to go home to their wives and families and get some rest. The one person he kept by his side was Dave Powers, Camelot's court jester. The wry little Irishman had the job of boosting JFK's spirits when they were low. On any given day, Powers was usually the first staffer to say good morning to the president and the last to wish him goodnight. His duties included ensuring a plentiful supply of clean shirts and cool drinks. He often arranged for women to visit his boss when he was traveling or Jackie was away.

  An inveterate womanizer, Kennedy told cronies that he was prone to migraines if he did not get a "piece of ass every day." His libido certainly did not take a break because of the heightened risk of nuclear war. He was still seeing a longtime lover, Mary Pinchot Meyer, the wife of a senior CIA official, Cord Meyer. Artistic, sophisticated, and intelligent, Mary was different from the usual string of presidential girlfriends with nicknames like "Fiddle" and "Faddle." Kennedy had known her since his boyhood, and often turned to her at moments of high stress and tension. He had invited her at the last minute to a family dinner at the White House on the evening of Monday, October 22, at which Jackie's sister, Le
e Radziwill, and her dress designer, Oleg Cassini, were also present. Mary telephoned Jack in the Oval Office on Saturday afternoon. Unable to reach him immediately because he was tied up in discussions, she left a contact number in Georgetown, where she lived.

  Dave Powers makes no mention of Meyer or any other presidential girlfriend in his hagiographic memoir of JFK. By his account, the president spent part of Saturday evening writing a letter of condolence to the widow of Major Anderson. He then went to the White House movie theater to watch one of his favorite actresses, Audrey Hepburn, in Roman Holiday. Before going to bed and turning off the light, he reminded his aide of the schedule for the following morning.

  "We'll be going to the ten o'clock mass at Saint Stephen's, Dave. We'll have plenty of hard praying to do, so don't be late."

  Other officials grabbed what rest they could. At the Pentagon, there was a flurry of late-night excitement about the Grozny, the Soviet ship heading full speed for Cuba. It looked as if the tanker would reach the quarantine line by dawn, shadowed by two American warships. The president would then have to decide whether to stop her or let her go. The choice boiled down to risking a confrontation with Khrushchev before he was really ready or being viewed around the world as weak and vacillating.