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

by Michael Dobbs

  The captain of the Lowry tried a new approach. He assembled the destroyer's jazz band on deck, and told them to play some music. Strains of Yankee Doodle floated across the ocean, followed by a boogie-woogie number. The Americans thought they could see a smile on the face of one of the sailors. They asked if there was any particular tune he would like to hear. The Soviet sailor did not respond.

  The Americans on board the Lowry were dancing in tune to the music, and ostentatiously enjoying themselves. They threw some packets of cigarettes and Coca-Cola cans at the Soviet submarine, but the packages fell into the water. The B-59 skipper, Savitsky, told his men to "behave with dignity." The Russians photographed the Americans and the Americans photographed the Russians. When Savitsky spotted one of his men on the bridge discreetly tapping his foot in time with the jazz band, he ordered the sailor below deck.

  It was a relief to know that World War III had not broken out. Even so, there would be no fraternizing with the Americans.

  B-59 managed to break away from its pursuers after two days of continuous surveillance. Savitsky waited until his batteries were recharged, took his vessel down to five hundred feet, switched course by 180 degrees, and made his escape. Shortly afterward, the USS Charles P. Cecil was able to force another Soviet submarine, B-36, to the surface. A third Foxtrot, B-130, had to be towed back to the Kola Peninsula by tugboat after failing to repair its broken diesel engines. Only one submarine, B-4, under Captain Ryurik Ketov, managed to complete its mission without the humiliation of having to surface in front of American warships.

  The submarine commanders returned to Murmansk at the end of December to a frigid reception from their superiors. No allowances were made for the technical shortcomings of the Soviet vessels or the superiority of U.S. naval forces. As usual, the failure of the mission was blamed on the men who had risked their lives to implement it rather than the admirals and apparatchiks who made a mess of the planning. The deputy minister of defense, Marshal Andrei Grechko, refused to listen to the skippers when they tried to describe the difficulties they had encountered. At one point, he became so angry that he removed his glasses and smashed them against the conference table. They promptly broke into small fragments.

  Grechko seemed unable to understand that a submarine had to come to the surface in order to recharge its batteries. "The only thing he understood was that we violated the secrecy requirements, were discovered by the Americans, and that for some time we stayed in close contact with them," recalled Aleksei Dubivko, the commander of B-36.

  "It's a disgrace," the marshal fumed. "You have shamed Russia."

  The moment had arrived that Chuck Maultsby had been dreading ever since his safe return to Alaska. General Power wanted to see him. The SAC commander had a reputation for being a harsh taskmaster, intolerant of the slightest mistake. His associates believed he derived a perverse pleasure from stripping subordinates down in public. A top deputy would later recall that Power "enjoyed ridiculing people and heckling people, and he was an expert at it. He delighted in getting a group in his office for a briefing and then making an ass out of the briefing officer." If a wing commander was summoned to brief the general about an accident, "nine times out of ten he was going to go home fired."

  The circumstances of Maultsby's debriefing could scarcely have been less propitious. He had almost fainted at Kotzebue Airfield when told that six Soviet MiGs had attempted to shoot him down. "Shit, oh dear!" was his first reaction. "I'm glad I didn't know it at the time...Whew!" He then "stumbled over to a chair and took the weight off, fearing my legs were about to give out." A special C-47 military transport plane was dispatched to Kotzebue to take him back to Eielson Air Force Base, while his unit commander recovered the U-2. From Eielson, another plane, a KC-135, flew him to SAC headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska. He was the only passenger aboard.

  An Air Force colonel escorted him to Power's underground command post beneath Building 500. It was a hive of activity. People were "running from place to place as if their lives depended on it." The colonel took him to a briefing room next to the command post, and announced that CINCSAC would be with him shortly. At the head of the briefing table was an aeronautical chart plotting Maultsby's route to the North Pole. A sheet of paper was taped over the portion of the chart that illustrated his overflight of the Soviet Union.

  General Power finally entered the room, followed by "eight other generals who looked as if they hadn't been out of their uniforms for days." It had been a nerve-wracking twenty-four hours for Power and his colleagues. One U-2 pilot had got lost over the Soviet Union; another had been shot down over Cuba; all high-altitude air-sampling flights had been canceled until further notice; SAC had reached a level of mobilization never before achieved in its sixteen-year history. Maultsby stood to attention nervously while the generals took their seats around the conference table. General Power sat directly across the table from him. Unlike some of the other generals, he wore a clean uniform and was cleanshaven, but looked "extremely tired."

  "Captain Maultsby, how about briefing us on your flight yesterday?" said Power, after everyone was seated.

  Maultsby stood next to the navigation chart, describing the air-sampling mission and indicating his planned route to the North Pole. He mentioned the effects of the aurora borealis and the difficulty he had taking fixes.

  "Captain Maultsby, do you know where you went after leaving the Pole?" CINCSAC finally interrupted.

  "Yes, sir," replied Maultsby, as the other generals "squirmed in their seats," looking as if they were "sitting on tacks."

  "Show us please."

  Maultsby lifted the paper from the classified portion of the map, and showed the generals his flight route with a pointer. He had seen a similar map at the military radar station in Kotzebue soon after his return, so he knew where he had been. But he had no idea how the Air Force had been able to track his flight, and could not understand why he had not been "given a steer" before blundering over Soviet territory.

  "Gentlemen, do you have any more questions?" asked Power, after Maultsby finished.

  Nobody had any questions.

  The general smiled.

  "Too bad you weren't configured with a system to gather electromagnetic radiation. The Russians probably had every radar and ICBM site on maximum alert."

  Power ordered Maultsby not to discuss his overflight with anyone. It was not the first time that a SAC plane had gone badly off track in the vicinity of Chukotka. In August, a B-52 bomber fully loaded with nuclear weapons got lost as it was returning to Alaska from Greenland. The B-52 was heading directly toward the Soviet Union and was within three hundred miles of the Chukot Peninsula when ground control finally ordered it to switch course. It appears to have been following a similar track to that followed by Maultsby. According to the official SAC history, the incident "demonstrated the seriousness of celestial computation errors in the polar region." Since it was twilight, the navigator had been unable to take accurate readings from the stars--just as Maultsby was confused by the aurora borealis.

  The generals left the briefing room in order of rank. The last to leave was a one-star. On his way out of the briefing room, the brigadier general turned to Maultsby in amazement.

  "You are a lucky little devil. I've seen General Power chew up and spit out people for doing a helluva lot less."

  Miguel Orozco and Pedro Vera had recovered their catamaran from the mangrove swamp of Malas Aguas on the northwestern coast of Cuba. They had been trying to contact the CIA mother ship that was meant to bring them back to Florida for several hours, without success. The stomach pains that had plagued Miguel for the past three days were causing him agony. The two men would make further attempts to make contact with their CIA rescuers by radio on October 29 and 30. Their increasingly frantic messages went unanswered.

  Gradually, the truth sank in: they had been abandoned.

  The CIA later said that it "heard nothing" from the two agents after the successful infiltration on the night of Oc
tober 19-20. Harvey claimed in a memo that it had been "operationally infeasible" to provide Orozco and Vera with communications equipment "in view of the operational timing, the terrain [and] the distance to be traveled." But his version of events, and the accompanying chronology of the Matahambre operation, appears to have been primarily designed to protect his own, severely damaged reputation. Forty-five years later, Vera was taken aback when told Harvey's account, which he dismissed as "nonsense." He himself had lugged the radio over the mountains after Orozco fell ill with appendicitis. The radio was their lifeline. "They knew we were trying to call them," he insisted. Vera's memory is more convincing than Harvey's official chronology. CIA records show that previous agent teams dispatched to Matahambre were equipped with radios.

  In an apparent attempt to create a bureaucratic alibi for himself, Harvey would draw attention to a formal halt to "all action, maritime and black infiltration operations" from October 28 onward. A temporary stand-down had been imposed two days earlier, on October 26, following the Mongoose meeting at the Pentagon. Already in trouble with Bobby Kennedy for the unauthorized dispatch of agent teams to Cuba, Harvey did not have the stomach to challenge the stand-down order. Orozco and Vera were expendable.

  On the morning of Tuesday, October 30, Vera finally concluded that they could wait no longer. "The boat had not come back, Miguel was dying, and nobody was answering our calls." He was a tough, wiry little man nicknamed el cojo--"the lame one." (Four years earlier, a truck had run over his foot, leaving him with a permanent limp.) He helped his friend onto the catamaran, originally intended to take them to the mother ship, and set out to sea. Using the stars to navigate, he headed northward, in the direction of the Florida Keys.

  Waves were soon battering the little boat from all sides. The constant motion caused Orozco to cry out in pain. As land was disappearing below the horizon, a huge wave capsized the catamaran, washing their ruck-sacks into the sea. They managed to get it back upright, but the motor was useless. Their only usable equipment was a paddle that they had somehow salvaged. There was no way they could reach Florida. They began paddling back in the direction of Cuba.

  Orozco and Vera were arrested by Cuban militiamen on the night of November 2 after approaching a peasant for help. A U.S. Navy reconnaissance plane overflew the Matahambre area earlier that same day. It was clear from the photographs of the mine and aerial tramway--which were both intact and functioning--that the latest CIA sabotage mission against Cuba had ended in failure.

  9:00 A.M. SUNDAY, OCTOBER 28 (5:00 P.M. MOSCOW, 8:00 A.M. HAVANA)

  Soviet officials worked on the text of Khrushchev's message to Kennedy until the very last moment, cleaning up the rough draft and translating the finished version into English. At 3:00 p.m. Moscow time, the Foreign Ministry called the U.S. Embassy and told them to expect an important message "within 11/2 to 2 hours." Everybody was very conscious of the five o'clock deadline, when the president was expected to address the American people.

  With time running out, several copies of the letter were entrusted to the Communist Party secretary in charge of ideology, Leonid Ilyichev, who had responsibility for mass media. He ordered his chauffeur to drive as fast as he could to the headquarters of Radio Moscow, a forty-minute drive with little traffic. The black Chaika sped along the winding forest road connecting Novo-Ogaryevo to the center of Moscow, up the vast expanse of Kutuzov Avenue, past the Triumphal Arch commemorating Napoleon's defeat in 1812, and across the Moscow River. When the militiamen saw the curtained Kremlin limousine approach, they waved other vehicles to the side of the road with their long white nightsticks. By disregarding all traffic regulations, Ilyichev reached the radio station in record time.

  At the station, the announcers wanted more time to go over the script. They were used to getting scripts hours, sometimes days in advance, so they could perfect their delivery, striking the appropriate balance of pathos and ideological conviction. Known as diktors in Russian, the newsreaders were the voices of the Soviet state. Most of them were accomplished actors, trained by the famous Stanislavsky School in what was known as the Method. In order to seem sincere, an actor must completely live the part. If he can convince himself that he is hopelessly in love, he can convince his audience. Their voices dripped with pride as they recited five-year plans and steely indignation as they recounted the misdeeds of the imperialists.

  The most famous diktor of all was Yuri Levitan. To hear his dulcet, authoritative voice was like listening to Big Brother himself. He had brought the Soviet people news of triumph and tragedy, victory and defeat, persuading them to put their faith in the Communist Party, whatever the circumstances. Levitan had announced the start of the war with Nazi Germany in June 1941 and the defeat of Nazism four years later. He had broken the news of the death of Stalin in 1953 and Yuri Gagarin's space flight in 1961. It now fell to him to proclaim the end of Khrushchev's great Cuban gamble.

  Since the deadline was fast approaching, Ilyichev insisted that the diktors go on the air live, with no time to rehearse. Khrushchev's message would be broadcast simultaneously in Russian and English.

  "Govorit Moskva," Levitan began--"This is Moscow speaking." It was 5:00 p.m. in Moscow, 9:00 a.m. in Washington. He told his listeners he would read from a letter written by Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, first secretary of the Presidium of the Communist Party and chairman of the Council of Ministers, to John Fitzgerald Kennedy, president of the United States of America.

  The Soviet government, in addition to earlier instructions on the discontinuation of further work on weapons construction sites, has given a new order to dismantle the weapons you described as offensive, and to crate and return them to the Soviet Union.

  Levitan managed to make this sound like yet another triumph for Moscow's peace-loving foreign policy over warmongering imperialists. The supremely wise, always reasonable Soviet leadership had saved the world from the threat of nuclear destruction.

  Khrushchev's son Sergei had been waiting for his father at the family dacha when he heard the announcement over the radio. He was half-relieved, half-stunned by the turnaround. He would come to view his father's decision in a much more positive light, but at this moment it sounded to him like a "shameful retreat."

  "That's it," he thought to himself. "We've surrendered."

  Other Soviet citizens were grateful that the nightmare was over. When Oleg Troyanovsky finally returned to his apartment after a week on duty at the Kremlin crisis center, he was shocked to discover that he had lost five pounds. When he told his wife what he had been doing, she gently reprimanded him. "If possible, the next time you want to lose some weight, find a safer way to do it."

  The five o'clock deadline turned out to be a false alarm. No new presidential address had been planned for that time. One of the American television networks had simply decided to rerun Kennedy's October 22 speech. Khrushchev had been misinformed by his intelligence people.

  The bells began going off on the news agency teletypes in Washington soon after 9:00 a.m. on Sunday morning. McGeorge Bundy was having breakfast in the White House Mess, down the corridor from the Situation Room, when an aide rushed in with a bulletin torn off the printer. He called Kennedy on an internal phone. The president was in his bedroom, getting dressed to go to church, as his national security adviser read the item from the Foreign Broadcast Information Service:

  Moscow Domestic Service in Russian at 1404GMT on 28 October broadcast a message from Khrushchev to President Kennedy stating that the USSR had decided to dismantle Soviet missiles in Cuba and return them to the Soviet Union.

  28 Oct 0908A

  "I feel like a new man now," JFK told Dave Powers after digesting the news. "Do you realize that we had an air strike all arranged for Tuesday? Thank God it's all over."

  Other members of the ExComm were equally ecstatic. John McCone was on his way back from nine o'clock mass when he heard the news over the car radio. "I could hardly believe my ears," he later recalled. The Soviet about-face was as
unexpected as it was sudden. Donald Wilson "felt like laughing or yelling or dancing." After several nights with little sleep, wondering if he would see his family again, he was suddenly lighthearted, almost giddy.

  It was a gorgeous fall morning in Washington. The leaves on the trees had turned a brilliant red and the city was bathed in golden sunshine. Arriving at the White House, George Ball was reminded of a Georgia O'Keeffe painting of "a rose growing out of an ox skull." Life had magically emerged from the shadow of death.

  Bystanders noticed an extra spring in the president's step as he leapt out of his black limousine at the Church of St. Stephen eight blocks from the White House. Just hours earlier, he had been calculating the odds of nuclear war, putting them at somewhere between "one in three and even."

  Photo Insert Three

  A Soviet motorized rifle regiment stationed near Remedios parades in civilian clothes. Operation Anadyr was nicknamed Operation Checkered Shirt by Russian soldiers because they were issued very similar civilian clothes in hope of disguising their true identities. [MAVI]

  Previously unpublished U.S. Marine reconnaissance photograph of Tarara beach, east of Havana, renamed Red beach in the invasion plan. The Marines were expecting around five hundred casualties during the first day alone, an estimate that assumed the enemy would not use tactical nuclear weapons. [USNHC]

  Contemporary photograph of Tarara beach. Note the concrete bunker constructed in 1962 against a possible U.S. invasion of Cuba, now used as a lifeguard post for foreign tourists. [Photo by author]

  Previously unpublished photograph of the Bejucal nuclear storage site, taken from raw intelligence film shot by U.S. Navy Crusaders on Blue Moon Mission 5008 on October 25. Note the circular road, nuclear warhead vans, single security fence, and lax security at the main gate. See inset of vertical photograph of nuclear warhead vans, shot on the same mission. [NARA]