NSA was also continuing to maintain a close watch on Russian merchant shipping traffic between the Soviet Union and Cuba. On September 13, CIA director McCone reported to the White House that according to COMINT and collateral maritime surveillance data, there were at least twenty-six Russian merchant ships on the high seas headed for Cuba.55On September 17, the CIA reported that since late July, Russian passenger ships had made nine unscheduled and unpublicized round-trips to Cuba, and that two more Russian passenger ships were then en route there. The CIA estimated that these ships carried some forty-two hundred Russian military technicians.56On September 25, NSA reported that another thirteen Soviet merchant ships had been confirmed by COMINT as being en route to Cuba.57
Then in late September, the first indications began to appear in NSA’s intelligence reporting that there were Soviet military personnel in Cuba above and beyond the trainers and military advisers that the Russians had maintained in Cuba since 1960. A declassified study of the Cuban Missile Crisis notes, “An intercept of the Soviet Air Force link in Hungary on 14 September stated that ‘volunteers for the defense of Cuba’ ” were expected to “hand in applications [to volunteer].” Another message on the same link requested the number of volunteers who had applied. Similar intercepted calls for volunteers went out to Soviet military units stationed in Eastern Eu rope.58
The Missiles of October
On Thursday, October 4, 1962, Attorney General Robert Kennedy convened a special meeting of the team of CIA and other U.S. government officials who were running Operation Mongoose. Bobby Kennedy lit into the assembled officials, telling them that he had just discussed the efforts to unseat Castro with his brother, President Kennedy, who was “dissatisfied with [the] lack of action in the sabotage field” inside Cuba. The attorney general was angry that “nothing was moving forward” and demanded that the CIA redouble its efforts to cause havoc inside Cuba.59
Against this backdrop, NSA continued to plug away at what it could hear inside Cuba. On October 8, General Blake told Secretary McNamara that NSA was making excellent progress in its efforts to exploit Soviet and Cuban communications traffic inside Cuba.60The next day, an air force radio intercept unit in southern Florida intercepted the first Cuban radar tracking broadcasts, which indicated that the Cuban radar network and air surveillance system was now operational.61On October 10, NSA reported that Cuban radar stations had just begun passing radar tracking data to higher headquarters and to the various MiG air bases in Cuba in exactly the same manner as the Soviet air defense system.62And on October 11, NSA reported that thirteen more Soviet cargo ships were en route to Cuba.63
But on October 14, everything changed literally overnight. A CIA U-2 reconnaissance aircraft conducted a high-altitude overflight of Cuba and brought back the first clear pictures of six Russian SS-4 medium-range ballistic missiles at a launch site outside the town of San Cristóbal.64NSA played no part in launching this recon mission. Declassified documents show that it was a combination of CIA agent sources inside Cuba and interrogations of refugees in Florida that triggered the flight.65As incredible as it may sound, on October 16, the same day that President Kennedy and his top policy advisers were briefed on the presence of Soviet ballistic missiles in Cuba, Attorney General Kennedy, in a meeting at the Justice Department, again lambasted the men running Operation Mongoose. Opening the meeting by telling them of the “general dissatisfaction of the President” with their progress (or lack thereof ), he announced that he was taking personal command of Mongoose to ensure that operations against Cuba were stepped up dramatically.66
At Fort Meade, the discovery of the SS-4 missiles in Cuba led to a week of unadulterated hell for the intelligence analysts. Every one of the agency’s consumers was screaming for more information on the missiles in Cuba. “I could not believe all the demands for information that were coming in from everywhere,” a former manager who worked in Juanita Moody’s office recalled. “The U-2 had just discovered the damned missiles inside Cuba, and everyone expected us to have somewhere in our filing cabinets the answers to why they were there, what their targets were, how were they protected . . . But we had nothing in our files, zip, which was very hard for us to admit.”67
To handle the massive new workload, on October 19 the head of NSA’s Production Directorate, Major General John Davis, transferred over one hundred veteran Russian linguists and intelligence analysts from Herbert Conley’s A Group, which handled the “Soviet problem,” to Moody’s office. Among them was Lieutenant Colonel Paul Odonovich, the deputy chief of the Office of Soviet Ground Forces Problems, who was ordered to take charge of Moody’s Latin American Division, which was responsible for Cuba. Odonovich was not happy about his new job because, as he later admitted, he “didn’t know [Cuba] from scratch.” After the arrival of Odonovich and the dozens of analysts sent down from A Group’s offices on the third floor of the NSA operations building, all of the elder ly ladies who had run the Cuban shop since the end of World War II “kind of disappeared and went off to the side,” recalled Harold Parish, one of the newly arrived A Group analysts.68
The Oxford was ordered to remain on station, monitoring Cuban internal telephone traffic around the clock. The USAF was ordered to increase the number of airborne reconnaissance missions it was flying off the coast of Cuba to monitor the rising volume of Soviet and Cuban air force and air defense radio traffic.69
But despite the added staff and increased collection resources at their disposal, Odonovich’s analysts were still unable to find any communications links coming from inside Cuba that could be clearly identified as supporting the Russian ballistic missiles, which was what U.S. war planners desperately needed if they were ordered by the White House to destroy the Soviet missile launchers. This lack of success meant that the U.S. Intelligence Board’s Guided Missile and Astronautics Intelligence Committee was compelled to report to President Kennedy and his advisers on October 18 and 19 that the command-and-control communications links for the Soviet ballistic missiles in Cuba had “not yet been found.”70
Senior U.S. military commanders, who were preparing air strikes against military targets inside Cuba, were also asking NSA for any information about whether the air defense system in Cuba had become operational. When Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General Taylor asked CIA director McCone at a White House meeting on October 18 whether NSA had detected any electronic emissions from the Soviet SA-2 SAM radars in Cuba, the answer he got was a qualified no, although the CIA’s analysts believed that some of the SAMs in Cuba would become operational in a week. Unfortunately, this guesstimate was wrong. The very next day, an American reconnaissance aircraft orbiting off the northern coast of Cuba intercepted emissions from a Russian Fan Song radar associated with the SA-2 SAM— the first of the Soviet SAM air defense sites was now operational. General Taylor had to bring the bad news to President Kennedy.71
On October 21, the day before Kennedy publicly announced the presence of Soviet ballistic missiles in Cuba, NSA’s General Davis declared a formal SIGINT alert, SIGINT Readiness Condition BRAVO, the equivalent of the U.S. military’s DEFCON-2 . Moody and Odonovich shifted immediately to a sleepless 24-7 work schedule. For the next several weeks, nobody went home except to shower or occasionally catch a meal before heading back to their office in the Ops 1 building at Fort Meade. Even that was a rarity. Odonovich recalled, “For six weeks I never had supper at home, everything was sent up here.” Moody said that she managed to catch a few hours of sleep every day on a cot that was set up in her office. When General Blake came to her and asked if he could help, she requested some additional staff to bear the crushing workload. The next thing she heard was Blake on the telephone talking to off-duty employees: “This is Gordon Blake calling for Mrs. Moody. Could you come in to work now?”72
Maximum Effort
At seven p.m. on Monday, October 22, 1962, President Kennedy, in a nationally televised broadcast, informed the American people that the Soviet Union had placed offensive nuclear-armed miss
iles in Cuba that were capable of striking targets throughout most of the United States. The president also declared an immediate quarantine of Cuba and ordered the U.S. Navy to stop and search any ships suspected of carry ing weapons there. At the same moment that Kennedy began his speech, all U.S. armed forces around the world went to DEFCON-3 alert status. For the next two days, the world seemed to teeter on the brink of nuclear disaster.
October 23 was a day that no one who was then working at NSA would ever forget. Within hours of Kennedy’s speech, the Russian military forces in Cuba began to communicate openly among themselves and with Moscow.73Shortly after midnight on the morning of October 23, NSA detected two high-level enciphered radioteletype links carrying communications traffic for the first time between the Soviet Union and a Russian military radio station in Cuba located near the town of Bauta, outside Havana. The first link appeared to be primarily associated with Russian naval radio traffic, while the second link, the analysts concluded, was reserved for high-level communications between Moscow and the commander of the Soviet forces in Cuba.74At almost the same time, a Soviet air defense radio network inside Cuba suddenly appeared on the airwaves, which intercepts showed linked the commander of the Soviet air defense forces in Havana with all Soviet radar stations, SA-2 Guideline SAM sites, and AAA batteries throughout Cuba.75NSA also intercepted a high-precedence message from the Soviet air force headquarters in Moscow asking if the navigational beacons at a number of Soviet strategic-bomber dispersal bases in the Arctic were in proper working order. The intercept caused chills in Washington, because the Russians never deployed strategic bombers to the Arctic dispersal bases except for exercises or during periods of heightened alert, and this was definitely not an exercise.76There was also a sudden and dramatic increase in Cuban military radio traffic immediately following the president’s speech, with one intercepted message confirmed that the Cuban armed forces had just been placed on the “highest degree of alert.”77
At one fifty-seven a.m., the Morse intercept operators at the U.S. Navy listening post in Cheltenham, Mary land, intercepted the first of a series of high-precedence messages sent by the Soviet merchant marine’s main radio station, outside Odesa, to each of the twenty-two Soviet merchant ships or tankers heading for Cuba. The messages were apparently a warning for the ship captains tostand by to receive an extremely important message from Moscow. Twenty-five minutes later, at two twenty-two a.m., the intercept operators heard the first Morse code preamble of a high-priority enciphered message being sent from Moscow to all twenty-two ships. After finishing copying the lengthy message, the intercept operators immediately put it on the teletype and sent it to NSA headquarters at Fort Meade to see if the analysts could read it. Unfortunately, NSA’s cryptanalysts could not read the cipher used with the message, but given that this particular cipher system was only used in emergencies, it appeared that whatever Moscow had told the Russian ships approaching the quarantine line that the U.S. Navy was manning around Cuba was important. So the American, Canadian, and British radio intercept operators at listening posts around the Atlantic periphery, together with the intelligence analysts at Fort Meade, got themselves ready for what they knew was going to be a very eventful day to come.78
They did not have long to wait. Starting at about five a.m., NSA’s listening posts situated around the periphery of the Soviet Union began reporting that the level of Soviet military communications traffic throughout Russia and Eastern Eu rope was rising rapidly, indicating that the Soviet military had moved to a higher alert status. That afternoon, the U.S. Navy listening post in Key West, Florida, intercepted an order from the commander of Cuban naval forces instructing patrol boats to immediately take up patrol stations off the eastern Cuban coast at Banes and Santiago Bay.79
As the day progressed, the two dozen or so U.S. Navy, British, and Canadian direction-finding stations ringing the Atlantic continuously monitored every radio transmission going to or from the twenty-two Soviet merchant ships approaching the Cuba quarantine line, in order to track the movements of the Russian ships. By twelve noon, the U.S. Navy’s direction-finding stations began reporting to NSA that their tracking data indicated that some of the Russian merchant ships had stopped dead in the water, and that it seemed that at least eight of the ships had reversed course and were headed back toward Russia. The SIGINT data, however, had not yet been confirmed by visual observation, so ONI did not forward the information to the White House, the Pentagon, or the CIA.80
The information about the Soviet ships would have certainly affected the discussion at a six p.m. meeting at the White House between President Kennedy and his national security advisers. As far as an increasingly apprehensive Kennedy and his advisers knew, the Soviet merchant ships were all still sailing straight for Cuba. But thanks to NSA, the president knew that something was afoot. Attorney General Kennedy later wrote in his memoirs, “During the course of this meeting, we learned that an extraordinary number of coded messages had been sent to all the Russian ships on their way to Cuba. What they said we did not know then, nor do we know now, but it was clear that the ships as of that moment were still straight on course.”81
Later that evening, the director of ONI, Rear Admiral Vernon Lowrance, was informed of the latest intelligence about the courses of the Soviet merchant ships approaching Cuba, but for reasons not easily explained he decided not to inform the White House, the Pentagon, or the CIA until the reports had been verified by U.S. Navy warships and reconnaissance aircraft. CIA director McCone was awakened in the middle of the night by a telephone call from the CIA duty officer and was told that ONI was sitting on unconfirmed intelligence indicating that the Russian freighters had turned about before reaching the quarantine line.82
Wednesday, October 24, did not start well. At two thirty a.m. the Morse intercept operators at Cheltenham and other intercept stations began picking up the first parts of an extremely urgent message being sent from the Soviet merchant fleet’s primary radio station at Odesa to all twenty-two Soviet cargo vessels and tankers sailing toward Cuba. A few minutes after the message ended, the captains of the Soviet vessels received another message from Odesa telling them that from that point onward “all orders would come from Moscow.”83
At about the same time that this was happening, U.S. Navy listening posts picked up a series of burst radio transmissions from Moscow to a number of Soviet submarines operating in the North Atlantic, along with the replies from the submarines themselves. A “burst transmission” is one in which the message is compressed electronically and the information packed into the “burst” takes only seconds to be transmitted and received. NSA had been tracking the radio transmissions of these submarines since September 27, when SIGINT detected four Soviet Foxtrot-class attack submarines departing Northern Fleet naval bases on the Kola Peninsula for what was then thought to be a naval exercise in the Barents Sea.84But three weeks later, the subs reappeared. Not in the Barents Sea, but several hundreds of miles to the south, in the North Atlantic, escorting the Soviet merchant vessels approaching Cuba. Although NSA could not unscramble the transmissions, by examining the taped signals and direction-finding data, a team of analysts in NSA’s Soviet Submarine Division headed by a talented cryptanalyst, Lieutenant Norman Klar, were able to ascertain that there were three or four Russian attack submarines operating in close proximity to the Soviet ships.85
At nine a.m., ONI finally informed the chief of naval operations, Admiral George Anderson, that preliminary direction-finding data coming from NSA indicated that some of the Russian merchant ships in the North Atlantic had either stopped dead in the water or reversed course. As incredible as it may sound, Anderson decided not to tell Secretary McNamara of this new intelligence for the same reason given earlier by Rear Admiral Lowrence of ONI—it had not been confirmed by visual sightings. A declassified Top Secret U.S. Navy history of the Cuban Missile Crisis states, “About 0900Q, [Secretary of Defense McNamara] received astandard merchant ship briefing. At the same time, Flag Plo
t in the Pentagon received the first directional fix report that some Soviet vessels bound for Cuba had reversed course. This information was inconclusive and Mr. McNamara was not informed.”86
At President Kennedy’s ten a.m. meeting at the White House with his senior national security advisers, the news delivered by CIA director McCone was not good. New U-2 imagery showed that the Russians had accelerated their work on completing the ballistic missile sites in Cuba, and the latest intelligence showed that twenty-two Russian merchant ships were still steaming toward the quarantine line. Inside the USSR and Eastern Eu rope, all indications appearing in SIGINT showed that the Russians were still bringing some but not all of their military forces to a higher state of readiness. NSA intercepts showed that Soviet air force flight activity was at normal peacetime levels, although Soviet strategic bomber flight activity was significantly below normal operating levels, and there were additional indications that the Russians were about to deploy a unit of strategic bombers to Arctic forward staging bases. Earlier that morning, a U.S. Navy listening post in southern Florida intercepted a directive from Cuban armed forces headquarters in Havana to all Cuban air defense units instructing them not to fire on American aircraft flying over Cuban airspace except in self-defense.87
It was not until noon that Admiral Anderson finally told Secretary McNamara that the latest direction-finding tracking data coming out of NSA had revealed that fourteen of the twenty-two Soviet merchant ships bound for Cuba had suddenly reversed course after receiving extended high-precedence enciphered radio transmissions from Moscow. By the end of the day, SIGINT and aerial surveillance had confirmed that all of the Soviet merchant ships bound for Cuba either had come to a dead halt in the water or had reversed course and were headed back to the Soviet Union.88When McNamara was told that the navy had sat on this critically important information for more than twelve hours without telling anyone, an NSA history reports, the secretary of defense “subjected Admiral Anderson, the Chief of Naval Operations, to an abusive tirade.” Why the navy did not pass on this vital information remains a mystery. But the retreat of the Soviet merchant ships did not end the crisis.89
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