In April 1962 JFK and the visiting Shah of Iran inspected Lantphibex-62, a vast amphibious exercise off Puerto Rico involving 40,000 troops and eighty-four warships. Developments in Cuba itself were also giving Khrushchev concern. Moscow’s Cuban Communist friends were losing ground to those like Guevara who were attracted by the vicious élan of Mao’s China. To the simple-minded or wilfully ignorant, the Great Leap Forward – a crash collectivization and industrialization programme initiated by Mao in the late 1950s which caused a catastrophic famine – was an example to be followed in the creation of the ‘new man’. The Soviet Union seemed part of the problem of imperialism rather than the solution, against which the Chinese appeared to offer the revolutionary solidarity of Third World proletarian nations. The looming split with China might be inevitable, given Mao’s determination to be recognized as the Communist world’s ‘Great Master’ in succession to Stalin. But ideological deviation among the satellite countries, among which Khrushchev (but not Castro) counted Cuba, posed a threat to the forward defence of the Soviet heartland.
In fact, to the chagrin of the stolid old men in the Kremlin, their charismatic new Cuban friends effortlessly assumed the role of the revolutionary socialist vanguard supposedly reserved for the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Romantic style once again trumped ideological substance, and the Russians found themselves under attack from the left, when all their mental processes were geared to dealing with the comparatively arcane deviationism of Yugoslavia’s Tito. Castro and Guevara were also reckless, training guerrilla fighters to create trouble even for Latin American countries that had not joined the OAS boycott of Cuba.12
All of these factors explain why Khrushchev decided to invest in Cuba more heavily than the arms shipments promised but only partially delivered because of the competing claims of Nasser’s Egypt. Stalin had been contemptuous of revolutionaries in the undeveloped world, but his successors were compelled to be more respectful of the revolutionary potentialities unleashed by colonial struggles, and to pay more attention to the educated elites in the civil service or the military in the Third World. Khrushchev decided that the USSR should ride the doctrinally unpredicted wave or else be left behind in what could well be the Marxist-Leninist dream of world revolution. To do so involved co-opting the Cubans, who had won enormous prestige by defeating the Americans, in order to halt their drift towards the perfidious Chinese and to curb the Castro–Guevara combine’s pretensions to becoming an autonomous ideological force in their own right.
On 12 April 1962 Khrushchev stopped prevaricating about deliveries of both Surface-to-Air (SAM) missile batteries and the Sopka coastal defence cruise missile system to Cuba, adding ten Ilyushin IL-28 medium bombers that Castro had not requested. Accompanying the weapons were Soviet military technicians to train the Cubans in their use – but also to guard them against misuse. These were purely defensive weapons, fully justified by the ongoing aggression of Operation Mongoose. But, as Mikoyan acknowledged after his first trip to Havana, Castro reminded aged Bolsheviks of when they had been young and daring. It was time for Khrushchev to show daring himself.13
Later in April Khrushchev said to his defence chief, Rodion Malinovsky, ‘Why not throw a hedgehog at Uncle Sam’s pants?’ Malinovsky answered that, whereas the Soviets had no SS-7s to spare, they had medium- (MRBM) and intermediate-range missiles in relative abundance. The IRBMs were comparable with the US Army Jupiter missiles that the US had recently installed in Italy and Turkey, and with the US Air Force Thor missiles installed in Britain. The Soviets were not to know that the rival missile systems had already caused a huge bureaucratic row, which had been resolved by the Solomonic decision to phase out Jupiter and Thor in favour of the submarine-based Polaris system. The deployment of Jupiter to Turkey and Italy had been little more than a counter to the view expressed by de Gaulle that the US would never use nuclear weapons to defend Europe, and that the continent should develop its own.
Khrushchev’s seemingly casual exchange with Malinovsky marked the beginning of a policy shift from defending Cuba to a projection of Soviet nuclear power into the Western hemisphere. There is little doubt that the Soviets would not have embarked on it were they not convinced that JFK was a weak man who would back down again if challenged robustly. The underhand and mean little pin-pricks of Operation Mongoose also indicated a ruler deficient in moral courage. In geostrategic terms the prize seemed well worth the risk. Putting the M into MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) by situating a formidable nuclear arsenal ninety miles from the coast of Florida, outflanking the north-facing US early-warning system, would greatly strengthen Khrushchev’s hand in negotiations over West Berlin and a whole range of other issues.14
Khrushchev’s Cuban launch platform would have included forty missiles with one-megaton warheads – R-12 MRBMs and R-14 IRBMs with respective ranges of 1,000 and 2,000 miles – and warheads in the low-kiloton range for eighty cruise missiles with a range of a hundred miles. In addition over 50,000 Soviet technicians and troops would buttress the island’s defences, though in the event only 41,000 were sent. A Soviet naval fleet would permanently operate from Cuban waters, including seven submarines carrying R-13 nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles based in the great natural harbour of Cienfuegos.15 The deployment was in flagrant violation of the formal guarantees Khrushchev had given in April 1961 that the Soviet Union did not have any bases in Cuba and did not intend to establish any. In August 1962, Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin assured Bobby Kennedy that Khrushchev would not cause trouble during the imminent US mid-term elections, and that he would never arm a third party with the means to wage a nuclear war.
As past masters of maskirovka (military camouflage and deception), the Soviets expected to be able to complete the deployment undetected, as they had done with a similar force projection into East Germany in 1959. Operation Anadyr was named after an obscure river on a Siberian peninsula, and KGB-controlled CIA watchers sent back reports of trainloads of fur hats and felt boots apparently heading towards the Arctic. Not even ships’ captains were told of their destination until they were at sea, but there was a surprisingly glaring lapse in the order to stop shaving given in June to the troops that were to be embarked. The idea was that they should blend in with their Cuban comrades on arrival. Pallid Slavic skins were also exposed to the sun in the vain hope of acquiring local colour during the long sea voyage; they peeled and glowed red instead.16
General Issa Pliyev flew to Havana in July, to prepare the launch sites, although maskirovka was to prove inadequate to conceal the equivalent of a major circus in a small town. From mid-July, eighty-five ships were en route to Cuba, some passing by intelligence-gathering nodes such as Gibraltar. While large numbers of troops sweltered below deck, a select few cavorted on deck for the benefit of reconnaissance aircraft. On 30 July, after one spy plane had flown so low that it crashed into the sea, Khrushchev piously asked JFK to suspend reconnaissance flights over Soviet ships in the Caribbean ‘for the sake of better relations’. The demands of maskirovka aside, the Soviets lacked the necessary shipping to deliver whole systems simultaneously, and missiles and warheads were despatched at considerable intervals, in the event allowing the US some scope to respond short of war.17
CIA chief John McCone did not believe it, and after U-2 flights had detected the positioning of top-of-the-range SA-2 SAM batteries on 29 August he sent JFK a memo speculating that they might have been deployed to protect more dangerous systems. However, he did not follow it up and went on a long honeymoon instead. Republican Senator Kenneth Keating was the sole voice warning that the Soviets were up to something destabilizing, but JFK dismissed him as ‘a nut’.18
US intelligence efforts redoubled as the ships began arriving in Cuba. It was the hurricane season and bad weather hampered aerial reconnaissance, but the fundamental problem was that, from fourteen miles above, U-2 cameras could not conclusively distinguish between a SAM and a ballistic missile under a tarpaulin on a trailer. Ye
t, as each day passed, the density of SAM coverage made low-level passes over Cuba more perilous, and as the CIA had discovered with the downing of Gary Powers, even the U-2s were threatened. Photographs taken at a slanting angle by aircraft skirting the island were even less revealing. Agents on the ground, however, reported that some of the trailers were so long that they damaged houses and knocked down telegraph poles when they made sharp turns, firmly indicating that they were carrying something bigger than a SAM.
On 4 September JFK issued a press statement warning the Soviets of the gravest consequences should they be giving Cuba ‘significant offensive capability’, specifying Soviet bases, Red Army troops and ballistic missiles. This let the Soviets know the US was aware of their game, and that the American public would now know too. The tension ratcheted up. By the end of the month he ordered the Pentagon to plan air strikes to knock out any ballistic missiles that might be identified, and/or to pave the way for an invasion. Later that month a CIA agent reported that the SAMs were being positioned in a trapezoid manner, the known configuration for defending a ballistic missile installation. It was decided to risk a low-level overflight when weather permitted.
On Monday 15 October, JFK received Algeria’s Ahmed Ben Bella in the White House. When Ben Bella probed JFK about his intentions towards Cuba, the President said that he would have to invade the island if the Soviets turned it into an offensive base, or if Castro tried to incite revolution in the Western hemisphere. But, JFK added, he might be able to reconcile himself to a ‘national Communist’ regime akin to those in Poland or Yugoslavia.19 Hours after Ben Bella had left, analysis of U-2 film taken the day before revealed fixed concrete slabs, and images of R-12 ballistic missiles before their trailers had time to scuttle beneath the palm trees. When JFK was told, he exclaimed, ‘He can’t do that to me!’ When Bobby was shown the briefing boards, he said, ‘Oh shit! Shit! Shit! Those sons of bitches Russians.’20
Blissfully unaware of this, Ben Bella flew on to Havana, where he was equally warmly welcomed. Algerian war orphans given sanctuary in Cuba cheered him on the airport tarmac. During the visit the Cubans agreed to send a team of doctors to make up the gaps in Algeria’s medical services left by the departing French. Everything seemed normal. At the official dinner on 17 October, Ben Bella reported JFK’s words to Fidel, and must have been startled by the ostentatious nonchalance with which his friend responded by boasting of his plans to export ‘the Revolution’ to the whole of Latin America.21
Soviet and Cuban intelligence failed to report on how Washington was responding. US options were thrashed out in an Executive Committee of the National Security Council, known as ExComm, though of course all major decisions were JFK’s alone. It would take only ninety seconds for his military aides to bring the ‘football’ containing the nuclear launch codes. ExComm’s members included the Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Maxwell Taylor; the CIA’s McCone; the National Security Advisor McGeorge ‘Mac’ Bundy (brother of William Bundy) and Ted Sorenson from the White House; and Dean Rusk, George Ball, Llewellyn Thomas and Charles Bohlen from the State Department. Dean Acheson and Adlai Stevenson, who also attended as elder statesmen, represented the two poles of Democrat foreign policy thinking. Bobby Kennedy was a permanent presence to cover for his brother, who had to maintain his normal schedule in the run-up to the mid-term elections; McGeorge Bundy proved to be ExComm’s weathercock, veering from air strikes to blockade and back again, although Acheson was implacably in favour of sending in the bombers. Valued advice came from outside ExComm, when JFK consulted ex-President Eisenhower by telephone. The Vice President was present at many sessions too, but did not say much. When he did it was along the lines of ‘All I know is that when I was a boy in Texas, and you were walking along the road when a rattlesnake reared up ready to strike, the only thing to do was to take a stick and chop its head off.’ Among the most hawkish, Vice President Johnson would be excluded from an inner ExComm cabal that settled the eventual deal with the Soviets.22
All participants were encouraged to maintain their regular public duties, and took effective measures to avoid attracting the attention of journalists. They car-pooled so that there should be no giveaway cavalcade of black automobiles entering the White House and took to using a tunnel from the Treasury building into the White House bomb shelter. Several ExComm members slept in their offices, not just for convenience but to avoid having to lie to their wives. George Ball broke cover by telling his wife to convert their basement into a bomb shelter, with canned food, bottled water and even a Bible for their pious black cook. McGeorge Bundy’s wife appears to have been fully aware of what was going on and impressed on him that a violent solution was not necessary. The general climate was caught by Tom Lehrer’s song:
Oh, we will all fry together when we fry
We’ll be French fried potatoes by and by
There will be no more misery
When the world is our rotisserie
Yes, we will all fry together when we fry
ExComm’s undisciplined, unstructured discussions took their toll on all involved. It was not unusual for sessions to go on for thirty hours at a stretch, fuelled by black coffee, sandwiches and cigarettes. Exhaustion manifested itself in short fuses, notably after Adlai Stevenson suggested something that smacked of appeasement. Minds sometimes switched off in the face of a maze of unsatisfactory options. JFK remained serene – according to the official history, relaxing in the evenings by watching films such as Roman Holiday with Audrey Hepburn. It is highly improbable that a man who claimed that he got headaches if he went without sex for a day would have sought any other form of relaxation. Possibly his nod to confidentiality was to limit himself to the services of Mary Pinchot Meyer, with whom he may have previously experimented with LSD and who was the ex-wife of Cord Meyer, head of the CIA’s International Organizations Division.
There was disagreement about the means, but none about the non-negotiable demand that the ballistic missiles must be removed from Cuba. Bobby Kennedy set the tone by declaring that ‘If we go in, we go in hard,’ at one point floating the idea of faking an attack on the US base at Guantanamo to give a pretext for invasion, just as Hitler did with Poland in 1939.23 Taylor was the only serving military officer on ExComm, but throughout the deliberations the other Joint Chiefs of Staff were asked their professional opinions. The easy assumption that civilian doves had to overcome military hawks should be resisted. In fact, there were plenty of civilian hawks, as well as hawkish doves and dovish hawks.24 Added tension came from the fact that several of the civilians had been subordinates of the Chiefs of Staff during the Second World War, notably McNamara, who had served as a statistician for the strategic bombing offensive conducted by General Curtis LeMay, and had in fact recommended him for the job of air force chief of staff in June 1961.
On one occasion, McNamara was told by General Thomas Power of the Strategic Air Command (SAC) that ‘the only way to deal with these barbarians was to blow them all up and I said, “But who’s going to win that?” And he said, ‘I would be satisfied if there were just two Americans left and one Russian – that would be . . . we would have won.” And I said, “Well there’d better be one of them a woman.”’25 The failure of the Joint Chiefs to warn him about the military nonsense of the Bay of Pigs operation had also taught JFK ‘to avoid feeling that just because they [generals] were military men their opinions on military matters were worth a damn’.26
JFK had an intriguing interaction with LeMay. Every time the two met, JFK ‘ended up in a sort of fit’. When Kennedy imagined himself in Khrushchev’s shoes, he conjured up a Russian air force general as relentless as LeMay urging the Soviet leader to destroy the US. This helped him appreciate Khrushchev’s domestic dilemmas. When Le May exclaimed, ‘You’re in a pretty bad fix, Mr President,’ JFK first asked him to repeat himself and then shot back, ‘You’re in there with me – personally.’27 Bu
t at the same time JFK appreciated the value of having at his side an air force commander with LeMay’s proven ruthlessness should it come to all-out war. There would be no doubt or hesitation there.28
ExComm was one of the first high-level policy discussions to be secretly recorded by devices activated by a button under JFK’s desk. What began as freewheeling seminar-type discussions, or what Acheson contemptuously called ‘a floating crap game’, gained greater focus. In perhaps the most remarkable personal transformation, the Kennedys set aside their obsessions with bringing down Castro.
Initially JFK was in favour of taking the missile sites out, and teams were formed to game out the options when discussions deadlocked, with participants required to play devil’s advocate against their own preferred strategy, as the NSC under Bobby Cutler had done for Eisenhower. The first discussions rapidly established that there was only one option with regard to such a ‘fast track’, because air strikes limited to the missile sites would almost certainly escalate to a more general air assault. It was most unlikely that the CIA had been able to identify all the sites; indeed the full effectiveness of maskirovka in Cuba was not learned until much later. Post-Second World War analysis of the effects of strategic bombing were not reassuring about the ability of the bombers to win a campaign outright, and once an all-out air assault took place an invasion would follow. Maxwell Taylor’s gloomy estimates of the likely loss of US lives in any such endeavour dampened enthusiasm for a pre-emptive strike, as it became clear that a ‘graded’ military response was a chimera. Conflicting advice from the Joint Chiefs made it very far from their finest hour. Moral qualms did not surface until the high probability of uncontrollable escalation became apparent, with George Ball warning of the negative effects of the US committing its own Pearl Harbor in the Caribbean. Bobby concurred, joking, ‘My brother is not going to be the Tojo of the 1960s.’29
Small Wars, Faraway Places: Global Insurrection and the Making of the Modern World, 1945-1965 Page 53