by Tim Weiner
The president flicked on his tape recorder. More than forty years went by before an accurate transcript of the Cuban missile crisis meetings was compiled.
“THAT’D BE GODDAMN DANGEROUS”
The president stared at the pictures. “How far advanced is this?” he asked. “Sir, we’ve never seen this kind of an installation before,” Lundahl said. “Not even in the Soviet Union?” Kennedy said. “No, sir,” Lundahl replied. “It’s ready to be fired?” asked the president. “No, sir,” said Graybeal. “How long have…we can’t tell that, can we, how long before they fire?” Kennedy asked. No one knew. Where were the warheads? asked Defense Secretary McNamara. No one knew. Why had Khrushchev done this? wondered the president. No one knew. But Secretary Rusk had a good guess: “We don’t really live under fear of his nuclear weapons to the extent that he has to live under ours,” he suggested. “Also, we have nuclear weapons nearby, in Turkey and places like that.”
The president was only dimly aware that those missiles were in place. He had all but forgotten that he had chosen to keep those weapons pointed at the Soviets.
JFK ordered three strike plans prepared: number one, to destroy the nuclear missile sites with air force or navy jets; number two, to mount a far bigger air strike; number three, to invade and conquer Cuba. “We’re certainly going to do number one,” he said. “We’re going to take out these missiles.” The meeting broke up at 1 p.m. after Bobby Kennedy argued for an all-out invasion.
At 2:30 p.m., RFK cracked the lash at the Mongoose team at his enormous office in the Justice Department, demanding new ideas, new missions. Passing on a question posed to him by the president ninety minutes earlier, he asked Helms to tell him how many Cubans would fight for the regime if the United States invaded. No one knew. At 6:30 p.m., the president’s men reconvened in the Cabinet Room. Thinking of the Mongoose missions, President Kennedy asked if the MRBMs, the medium-range ballistic missiles, could be destroyed with bullets. Yes, General Carter told him, but these were mobile missiles; they could be moved to new hiding places. The problem of targeting mobile missiles has remained unsolved to this day.
The president now contemplated the question of a nuclear war over Cuba. He began to grasp how little he understood the Soviet leader. “We certainly have been wrong about what he’s trying to do,” the president said. “Not many of us thought that he was gonna put MRBMs on Cuba.” Nobody save John McCone, Bundy muttered. Why had Khrushchev done it? the president asked. “What is the advantage of that? It’s just as if we suddenly began to put a major number of MRBMs in Turkey,” he said. “Now that’d be goddamn dangerous, I would think.”
A moment of awkward silence fell. “Well, we did it, Mr. President,” said Bundy.
The talk then turned to secret warfare. “We have a list of sabotage options, Mr. President,” said Bundy. “…I take it you are in favor of sabotage.” He was. Ten teams of five Mongoose agents were authorized to infiltrate Cuba by submarine. Their orders were to blow up Soviet ships with underwater mines in Cuban harbors, to attack three surface-to-air missile sites with machine guns and mortars, and perhaps to go after the nuclear missile launchers. The Kennedys were swinging wildly. The CIA was their blunt instrument.
The president walked out of the meeting, leaving two military options on the table: a sneak attack on Cuba and a full-bore invasion. His parting words were a request to see McCone the next morning before leaving for a campaign trip to Connecticut. General Carter, McNamara, Bundy, and a few others stayed behind.
Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Marshall Carter was sixty-one years old, short, squat, bald, and sharp-tongued. He had been chief of staff of NORAD, the North American Air Defense Command, under Eisenhower. He knew the nuclear strategies of the United States. Now, with the president out of the room, the CIA man voiced his deepest fear: “You go in there with a surprise attack,” Carter said. “You put out all the missiles. This isn’t the end; this is the beginning.” It would be the first day of World War III.
“THE COURSE WHICH I HAD RECOMMENDED”
The next day, Wednesday, October 17, John McCone and John Kennedy met at 9:30 a.m. “President seemed inclined to act promptly if at all, without warning,” McCone noted in his daily memo for the record. The president then asked McCone to drive to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to brief Dwight D. Eisenhower. McCone arrived at noon carrying U-2 photos of the medium-range ballistic missiles. “Eisenhower seemed to lean toward (but did not specifically recommend) military action which would cut off Havana and therefore take over the heart of the government,” McCone noted.
The director drove back to Washington and tried to pull together his thoughts. He was weary; he had been to the West Coast and back in less than forty-eight hours. The six single-spaced pages of notes he produced that afternoon were declassified in 2003. They reflect a search for a way to rid Cuba of the missiles without a nuclear war.
Given his background as a master shipbuilder, McCone understood the military, political, and economic power of ships at sea. The notes he drew up included the idea of imposing “an all-out blockade” on Cuba—“the interruption of all incoming shipping,” backed up with the threat of an attack. In meetings with Bobby Kennedy, McNamara, Rusk, and Bundy that went on until nearly midnight, he elaborated on the blockade strategy. McCone’s notes show that the idea received no evident support from the president’s top advisers.
At 11 a.m. on Thursday, October 18, McCone and Art Lundahl went to the White House with new U-2 photos. These showed a new set of bigger missiles, each with a range of 2,200 miles, capable of hitting any major American city save Seattle. McCone said the missile bases were run by Soviet troops; McNamara pointed out that a surprise air strike on the bases would kill several hundred Soviets. Attacking them was an act of war against Moscow, not Havana. Then Undersecretary of State George Ball voiced what the CIA’s Marshall Carter had said two nights before: “A course of action where we strike without warning is like Pearl Harbor.”
The president said, “The question really is what action we take which lessens the chances of a nuclear exchange, which obviously is the final failure…. You have the blockade without any declaration of war. You’ve got a blockade with a declaration of war. We’ve got strikes one, two, and three. We’ve got invasion.”
That day, McCone picked up two votes in favor of his argument for a blockade backed with threats of attack. One was Eisenhower’s. The other was RFK’s. They both had shifted to McCone’s stance. They were still in the minority, but they turned the tide. The president told himself, sitting alone in the Oval Office at about midnight, speaking directly to the hidden microphones, that “opinions had obviously switched from the advantages of a first strike.” The president called McCone at home on Sunday to say, as the director noted with satisfaction, that “he had made up his mind to pursue the course which I had recommended.” The president announced that decision to the world in a televised address on Monday night, October 22.
“I WOULDA BEEN IMPEACHED”
The morning of Tuesday, October 23, began at the White House with a briefing by McCone. Intensely alert to the political damage the director could cause them as the only man in Washington who had accurately forewarned them of the threat, the Kennedys put McCone on spin patrol, briefing members of Congress and columnists. They also wanted him to stiffen the spine of Ambassador Adlai Stevenson, who needed to argue the American case at the United Nations.
From the White House, McCone called Ray Cline, his chief intelligence analyst, and told him to fly to New York with copies of the U-2 photographs. Stevenson’s team was “in some difficulty putting together a convincing case to the Security Council,” McCone explained. “See, they’re in a little bad spot because at the time of the Bay of Pigs, why, Stevenson showed some fake pictures and they later turned out to be fake.”
President Kennedy’s twelve top national-security men then met to talk about how to manage the blockade, set to begin the next morning. It was technically an act of
war. McCone reported corridor chatter at the United Nations, relayed by Ray Cline, suggesting that the Soviet vessels en route to Cuba might try to run past the American warships.
“Now what do we do tomorrow morning when these eight vessels continue to sail on?” asked President Kennedy. “We’re all clear about how”—a beat of silence, a nervous chuckle—“we handle it?”
No one knew. Another brief silence fell.
“Shoot the rudders off ’em, don’t you?” McCone replied.
The meeting broke up. Kennedy signed the quarantine proclamation. He and his brother were then alone for a few minutes in the Cabinet Room.
“Well, it looks like it’s gonna be real mean. But on the other hand, there’s really no choice,” said the president. “If they get mean on this one—Jesus Christ! What are they gonna fuck up next?” His brother said: “There wasn’t any choice. I mean, you woulda had a—you woulda been impeached.” The president agreed: “I woulda been impeached.”
At 10 a.m. on Wednesday, October 24, the blockade took effect, the American military went on its highest alert short of nuclear war, and McCone began his daily briefing at the White House. The director of central intelligence at last was serving as his charter commanded, bringing all of American intelligence to the president into a single voice. The Soviet army was not on full alert, but it was increasing its readiness, he reported, and the Soviet navy had submarines in the Atlantic trailing the fleet headed for Cuba. New photoreconnaissance showed storage buildings for nuclear warheads, but no sign of the warheads themselves. McCone took pains that day to point out to the president that the blockade would not stop the Soviets from readying the missile launching sites.
McNamara began to lay out his plans for intercepting the Soviet ships and submarines. Then McCone interrupted. “Mr. President, I have a note just handed me…. All six Soviet ships currently identified in Cuban waters…have either stopped or reversed course.” Rusk said, “Whaddya mean, ‘Cuban waters’?” The president asked, “The ships leaving Cuba or the ones coming in?” McCone got up, said, “I’ll find out,” and left the room. Rusk muttered: “Makes some difference.”
McCone returned with the breaking news that the Soviet ships had been heading for Cuba, more than five hundred miles from the island, but had either stopped or reversed course. This is the moment when Rusk is supposed to have leaned over to Bundy and said: “We are eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked.”
The first part of McCone’s strategy was working: the quarantine on Soviet shipping would hold. The second part would be much harder. As he kept reminding the president, the missiles were still there, the warheads were hidden somewhere on the island, and the danger was growing.
At the White House on October 26, Adlai Stevenson said it would take weeks, perhaps months of negotiations to get the missiles out of Cuba. McCone knew there was no time for that. At midday, he took the president aside (Bobby, if present, never spoke) for a private meeting, with only himself and the photo interpreter Art Lundahl, in the Oval Office. New photoreconnaissance showed that the Soviets had introduced short-range battlefield nuclear weapons. Newly camouflaged missile launchers were almost ready to fire. The missile sites each were manned by up to five hundred military personnel and guarded by three hundred more Soviets.
“I’m getting more concerned all the time,” McCone told the president. “They could start at dark and have missiles pointing at us the next morning. For that reason, I’m growing increasingly concerned about following a political route.”
“What other way?” asked the president. “The alternative course is we could do the air strike or an invasion. We are still gonna face the fact that, if we invade, by the time we get to these sites after a very bloody fight, we will have—they will be pointing at us. So it still comes down to a question of whether they’re gonna fire the missiles.”
“That’s correct,” McCone said. The president’s mind now swerved from diplomacy to war. “I mean, there’s no other action that, other than diplomatic, that we can take, which does not immediately get rid of these,” Kennedy said. “The other way is, I would think, a combination of an air raid and probably invasion, which means that we would have to carry out both of those with the prospect that they might be fired.”
McCone cautioned against an invasion. “Invading is going to be a much more serious undertaking than most people realize,” he told the president. The Russians and the Cubans had “a hell of a lot of equipment…. Very lethal stuff they’ve got there. Rocket launchers, self-propelled gun carriers, half-tracks…. They’ll give an invading force apretty bad time. It would be no cinch by any manner or means.”
That night, a long message from Moscow arrived at the White House. The cable took more than six hours to transmit and receive, and it was not complete until 9 p.m. It was a personal letter from Nikita Khrushchev decrying “the catastrophe of thermonuclear war” and proposing—so it seemed—a way out. If the Americans would promise not to invade Cuba, the Soviets would pull out the missiles.
On Saturday, October 27, McCone began the 10 a.m. White House meeting with the grim news that the missiles could be fired in as little as six hours. He had barely concluded his briefing when President Kennedy read a bulletin ripped from the Associated Press news ticker, datelined Moscow: “Premier Khrushchev told President Kennedy yesterday he would withdraw offensive weapons from Cuba if the United States withdrew its rockets from Turkey.” The meeting went into an uproar.
No one bought the idea at first—except the president and McCone.
“Let’s not kid ourselves,” Kennedy said. “They’ve got a very good proposal.”
McCone agreed: it was specific, serious, and impossible to ignore. The arguments over how to respond dragged on all day, punctuated by moments of terror. First a U-2 strayed into Soviet airspace off the coast of Alaska, prompting Soviet jets to scramble. Then, at about 6 p.m., McNamara suddenly announced that another U-2 had been shot down over Cuba, killing Air Force Major Rudolf Anderson.
The Joint Chiefs now strongly recommended that a full-scale attack on Cuba should begin in thirty-six hours. Around 6:30 p.m., President Kennedy left the room, and the talk immediately became less formal, more brutal.
“The military plan is basically invasion,” McNamara said. “When we attack Cuba, we are going to have to attack with an all-out attack,” he said. “This is almost certain to lead to an invasion.” Or a nuclear war, Bundy muttered. “The Soviet Union may, and I think probably will, attack the Turkish missiles,” McNamara continued. Then the United States would have to attack Soviet ships or bases in the Black Sea.
“And I would say that it is damn dangerous,” said the secretary of defense. “Now, I’m not sure we can avoid anything like that if we attack Cuba. But I think we should make every effort to avoid it. And one way to avoid it is to defuse the Turkish missiles before we attack Cuba,” McNamara said.
McCone exploded: “I don’t see why you don’t make the trade then!” And the ground shifted.
Other voices shouted out: Make the trade! Make the trade then! His anger rising, McCone went on: “We’ve talked about this, and we’d say we’d be delighted to trade those missiles in Turkey for the thing in Cuba.” He pressed his point home. “I’d trade these Turkish things out right now. I wouldn’t even talk to anybody about it. We sat for a week and there was—everybody was in favor of doing it”—until Khrushchev proposed it.
The president returned to the Cabinet Room at about 7:30 p.m., and suggested everyone take a dinner break. Then, in the Oval Office, he and his brother spoke with McNamara, Rusk, Bundy, and four other trusted aides. McCone was excluded. They discussed his idea, which was what the president wanted. Everyone in the room was sworn to secrecy. Bobby Kennedy left the White House and met with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin in his office at the Justice Department. He told Dobrynin that the United States accepted the quid pro quo on the missiles, provided it was never made public. The Kennedys could not be see
n to be cutting a deal with Khrushchev. The attorney general deliberately falsified his memo of the meeting, deleting a drafted reference to the trade. The swap was kept a deep secret. John McCone said a quarter century later: “President Kennedy and Attorney General Bobby Kennedy insisted that they at no time discussed the missiles [in] Turkey with any representatives of the Soviets and that there was no such deal ever made.”
For many years thereafter, the world believed that only President Kennedy’s calm resolve and his brother’s steely commitment to a peaceable resolution had saved the nation from a nuclear war. McCone’s central role in the Cuban missile crisis was obscured for the rest of the twentieth century.
The Kennedys soon turned against McCone. The director let it be known throughout Washington that he had been the sole sentinel on the Cuban missiles; he testified to the president’s foreign intelligence board that he had told the president about his hunch back on August 22. The gist of the board’s report on the “photo gap” appeared in The Washington Post on March 4, 1963. That day, Bobby Kennedy told his brother that the CIA must have leaked the information to wound him.
“Yeah,” said the president, “he’s a real bastard, that John McCone.”
“TO ELIMINATE FIDEL, BY EXECUTION IF NECESSARY”
At the height of the missile crisis, McCone had tried to put a leash on Mongoose and focus its considerable energies on gathering intelligence for the Pentagon. He thought he had succeeded. But the CIA’s Bill Harvey concluded that the United States was about to invade Cuba and ordered his Mongoose saboteurs to attack.
When Bobby Kennedy, who had pushed the hardest for the Mongoose missions, found out about that dangerous failure of command, he went into a rage. After a screaming match, Harvey was banished from Washington. Helms sent him to Rome as chief of station—though not before the FBI took note of a drunken farewell meal Harvey had with Johnny Rosselli, the Mafia hit man he had hired to kill Castro. In Rome, the hard-drinking Harvey became unhinged, driving his men as Bobby Kennedy had driven him.