“The president sincerely wants to avoid conducting these nuclear tests and wants an agreement on this issue with Premier Khrushchev,” explained Robert Kennedy.31 Privately the White House wanted Khrushchev to know that these tests did not have to happen. The Kennedys offered Moscow a deal through Bolshakov. In a few hours the president would be telling the world that U.S. testing would resume in the atmosphere on April 15. Robert Kennedy explained that the president was ready to meet with Khrushchev “at any time” to conclude an atmospheric test ban. This partial test ban would not require any form of on-site inspection because national air sensors could easily determine cheating. The attorney general explained that his brother was “eager” to reach an agreement.
Once again President Kennedy’s effort at back channel diplomacy made things worse by angering Khrushchev. The Soviet leader considered this attempt at deal making little more than blackmail and not only refused to consider a partial test ban but canceled the one minor concession on disarmament that he had presented to Kennedy at Vienna. The Soviet delegation at Geneva was told to withdraw the standing offer of two to three on-site inspections a year. Khrushchev even added a personal snub. For two months U.S. and Soviet representatives had been negotiating simultaneous television broadcasts by the two leaders in each other’s country. Khrushchev informed Washington that these broadcasts were incompatible with the spirit of Kennedy’s planned announcement of a nuclear test series in April.
In this period Khrushchev received some highly dramatic information from Soviet military intelligence that stirred fears that the Americans were eager to capitalize on their strategic advantage. The GRU, in two reports dated March 9 and March 11, 1962, reported to the Kremlin that days after the Vienna summit in June 1961, the Pentagon had given serious consideration to a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union. According to the source, who was described as being in the U.S. national security bureaucracy, what had averted disaster was the U.S. appreciation of Soviet power following the resumption of nuclear testing in September.32 Alone this intelligence would have been taken as highly doubtful, but in the context of Kremlin anxiety and disappointment over the sterility of both the Berlin negotiations and the disarmament talks, such lurid images of U.S. ambition seemed more plausible.
In his last meeting with Khrushchev before leaving in mid-March for Washington as the Soviet Union’s new ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin experienced the heat of the Soviet leader’s personal anger toward Kennedy. Speaking “emotionally and at length,” Khrushchev cited Berlin as the major problem dividing the two superpowers. He followed with a diatribe against Kennedy for seeking to use strategic superiority against the Soviet Union, citing some intermediate-range ballistic missiles that NATO had just deployed in nearby Turkey. The Americans are “particularly arrogant,” concluded Khrushchev.33
In February Khrushchev had vented his disappointment with American actions by causing trouble in the Berlin air corridors. In March, though his fighters played that game again for a few days in the middle of the month, his primary effort to needle Kennedy occurred in Southeast Asia.34 For months the Soviets had been trying to encourage the Pathet Lao and their Chinese and North Vietnamese patrons to give the peace process a chance. But the Asian Communists had been eager to wipe out U.S.-backed Phoumi Nosavan’s garrison at Nam Tha, the main town in the northernmost province of the same name. Although lightly inhabited, Nam Tha was next to the principal airfield used by U.S. aircraft to supply Phoumi Nosavan’s forces in the north. Moscow had been unhappy with the plan, which it considered the product of Chinese influence on the Pathet Lao and their main patrons, the North Vietnamese. To head this off, Khrushchev had invited Prince Souphanouvong, the leader of the Pathet Lao, to Moscow to meet with him in January. The Soviet Foreign Ministry, in preparing for this visit, had indicated that the Pathet Lao and the North Vietnamese had just begun “a series of offensive actions of a counterattacking character against the Boun Oum–Nosavan brigands.”35
The Pathet Lao and the Vietnamese had told the Soviets that their operations in Nam Tha Province were designed to compel Phoumi Nosavan to the negotiating table.36 But Moscow had had its doubts. Officials in the Kremlin had feared that the joint Communist offensive would give Phoumi Nosavan a pretext to end all negotiations with Lao’s neutralist leader, Souvanna Phouma, which in turn would allow the Pathet Lao, the Vietnamese, and the Chinese “to use this as justification for their policy of a military resolution of the Laotian question.”37 The Soviets had intended to use the summit with Souphanouvong to send Mao the message that regardless of Chinese desires and Chinese dogma, “the USA and the USSR did not intend to go to war in Laos in the name of China.”
The January discussions with the Pathet Lao leader seemed to have the desired effect. The Pathet Lao momentarily backed away from intensifying its military campaign in Nam Tha Province. In early February, Souphanouvong assured Ambassador Aleksandr Abramov in Laos that despite the fact that the capture of Nam Tha could be accomplished in “the course of a few hours” and was “a matter of political prestige,” the Pathet Lao would not do it “in order not to give any cause for a provocation.”38
By early March, however, Khrushchev had decided to unleash the Pathet Lao as part of the policy of increasing international pressures on the United States. This was not an official reversal of the policy of peaceful coexistence in Laos; Soviet representatives continued to encourage the Pathet Lao to work toward a coalition government headed by Souvanna Phouma. What changed was that the Soviets stopped lecturing Souphanouvong and his Asian allies on the need to avoid a military clash at Nam Tha. At a summit of the four main Communist parties in the region March 7 to 9, the Soviet representative agreed to turn a blind eye to the ongoing military preparations in northern Laos. The Soviets also agreed to continue the secret support to the Pathet Lao outside what flowed to them as part of an agreement with Souvanna Phouma.39
In future conversations with Pathet Lao representatives, Ambassador Abramov abstained from making any comments on the spring offensive that the Pathet Lao, the North Vietnamese, and the Chinese were evidently planning. In return, the Laotians promised that this military campaign would be reasonable. On March 20 Souphanouvong reported to the Soviet ambassador that the Pathet Lao intended to pursue a policy of “active defense” that involved attacks on enemy strongholds in the “liberated areas” of Laos. The Pathet Lao wanted Moscow to understand that these operations were conducted “reasonably, so as not to cause a widening of the military conflict.”40 The next day Abramov flew to Hanoi to tell Ho Chi Minh personally that the Soviets would let the North Vietnamese, the Chinese, and the Pathet Lao determine what practical steps were required in the region.41
With Khrushchev stepping back to let the Pathet Lao give the Western-backed forces in Laos a bloody nose, the Chinese proceeded with a deployment of 2,149 soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army, 1,772 civilian workers, 203 motor vehicles, and 639 horses and mules to carry military supplies to the Pathet Lao.42 These men and supplies were to come south from the Chinese military command in Kunming into the province of Nam Tha. Phoumi Nosavan’s garrison in the provincial capital had grown to 5,000 men, and the Pathet Lao and its North Vietnamese military advisers believed that the reinforcements from China were required to make the future offensive a success.
THE ONE REGION of the world where Khrushchev did not want to test U.S. power in the spring of 1962 was Latin America and the Caribbean. Kennedy’s comments to Khrushchev’s son-in-law reawakened concerns that the U.S. government might attempt a second invasion of Cuba.43 Indeed, by the end of 1961 the United States had resumed a program of covert action against the Castro regime. In late November Robert Kennedy and Richard Goodwin, the chief Latin American adviser in the White House, had successfully lobbied the president for a more active policy against Fidel Castro. Called Operation Mongoose, the program included a range of measures—subversion, espionage, and sabotage—designed to raise the political temperature
on the island enough to bring about Castro’s removal by coup or counterrevolution.44
Soviet intelligence did not pick up the exact details of Mongoose planning, but in February Khrushchev received reports of a more active U.S. program of subversion against Castro that reinforced the impression that Adzhubei had received of Kennedy’s determination to solve his Castro problem.45 While ordering the testing of the Western air corridors and giving the green light to his Asian allies to make trouble in Laos, Khrushchev chose to go on the defensive in Cuba. He revived the $133 million military aid package for Havana that had been frozen in October 1961 and placed it on the Presidium’s agenda in early February for rapid approval.46 He also ordered a review of Soviet military assistance to Castro to determine if more was needed.
The Soviet military review came not a moment too soon. While Khrushchev was distracted by the Berlin crisis of 1961, the Soviet-Cuban relationship had cooled. The held-up aid package was not the only source of tension in that relationship. Castro’s efforts to consolidate his power by merging the July 26 Movement and the Cuban Communist Party (PSP) into a united revolutionary front had intensified his rivalry with the old-line Cuban Communists. The PSP and the Fidelistas disagreed over revolutionary strategy. Castro and Che Guevara found the PSP leadership staid and politically irrelevant. Most of them had been hard-line Stalinists that believed that third world countries had to pass through a stage of bourgeois capitalism to achieve communism. Castro could not forget that this type of thinking had discouraged the PSP from supporting his own efforts in the Sierra Maestre in the mid-1950s. As he confided to the KGB chief in Havana, Aleksandr Alekseyev, “With regard to the policy of peaceful coexistence, I am generally not against it, as in the cases of those countries, like Italy and France, where the peaceful path to socialism is possible…. But in general in Latin America there aren’t the necessary conditions for such an approach.”47
No one personified this theoretical disagreement for Castro more than Anibal Escalante, the principal organizer of the PSP. “Escalante,” Castro complained to Alekseyev, “was the leader of those who believed in the peaceful coexistence approach for Latin America.”48 He was also a political threat at home. Escalante may not have been an energetic revolutionary abroad, but in Cuba he was a tireless political worker with grand ambitions for himself in the new Cuban revolutionary front, the Integrated Revolutionary Organizations (ORI). Tired of the theoretical disagreements and threatened by Escalante’s ambitions, Castro purged him from the ORI and allowed him to flee the country.
Castro turned against Escalante just as the Soviet military was completing its review of its assistance to Cuba. The Kremlin had had a much longer relationship with Escalante than with Castro, and when relations between these men went from bad to worse in early April 1962, the Kremlin worried about the implications. Moscow had two major concerns. The first was that perhaps under the influence of Che Guevara, who seemed to embrace Mao Zedong’s theories of permanent revolution, the Cuban regime might side with China in the struggle to define socialism. The other was that Cuba might adopt a more independent line in dealing with Moscow, much as Yugoslavia had done.
Besides Castro’s handling of Communists at home, the Kremlin had other evidence that April that the Cubans were eager to show their independence of Moscow. While on a long-delayed visit to Moscow, Castro’s chief of intelligence, Ramiro Valdés, asked the KGB for assistance in setting up a headquarters in Cuba for training Latin American guerrillas for revolutionary activity in the Western Hemisphere.49 The Cubans had reason to believe that Moscow might be interested. In August 1961 the Presidium had approved a plan for working with the Cubans and the Nicaraguan Sandinistas to support revolutionary movements. Three months later the KGB authorized the formation of a training center in Honduras to prepare a group that could organize a “partisan detachment on Nicaraguan territory.”50
Despite what it had already done with the Nicaraguans, the KGB disingenuously told the Cubans in April 1962 that it was merely an intelligence-collecting organization. “We do not help national-liberation movements,” Valdés was told.51
Without knowing it, the Cubans were probing to the outer limits of the risks Khrushchev was prepared to take even with the meniscus strategy. He was not yet ready to challenge the United States in its own backyard. The Nicaraguan operation was very small—the KGB invested only twenty-five thousand dollars into it between 1961 and 1964—and probably stillborn, whereas what the Cubans had in mind would be more expensive and attract a lot of attention.52 Khrushchev’s Southeast Asian allies were allowed to move on a pro-Western stronghold because the balance of forces favored the Soviet bloc in the border region of Laos. Cuban provocations were a different matter altogether. The United States retained an overwhelming superiority in the Caribbean. Castro’s commitment to revolutionary activity seemed suicidal in the light of Kennedy’s evident preoccupation with the regime.
The strong case for prudence did not reduce the Kremlin’s concern that restraining the Cuban secret services might hurt Soviet-Cuban relations and push some of Castro’s inner circle closer to Beijing. To reassert the USSR’s position as Cuba’s chief socialist ally, Khrushchev moved rapidly to eliminate any doubts that Castro might have about his support. Moscow had permitted Anibal Escalante to enter the country as an exile, but within a week of his arrival he was denounced in Izvestia for his “sectarianism.” Castro, as Khrushchev had hoped, read a translation of this article and was pleased. Meanwhile the Soviets indicated to Havana that they would supplement the September 1961 military package to include Soviet troops, one Sopka shore missile launcher, and ten Il-28 Beagle bombers.53 The bombers could fly as far as Miami. The amounts of the first two items were not as large as Castro had requested, twenty-five hundred troops instead of ten thousand and only one battery instead of three. However, the gesture was designed to ensure that Castro knew that the Soviet Union would not interfere in his internal political affairs. A Soviet general was sent to Havana to discuss the regime’s further military needs.
IN EARLY MAY Khrushchev received very discouraging military and economic information that threatened his entire foreign strategy. When he made his secret announcement in the Kremlin of the meniscus policy in January 1962, he believed that Moscow would not have to wait a long time to be strong enough to force a Berlin settlement on the United States and then agreements banning nuclear tests, achieving disarmament and perhaps a superpower nonaggression pact. Indeed, in February he had hinted to Walter Ulbricht that the corner would be turned in the peace treaty and Berlin campaigns in 1963.
Bad news about the status of work on the R-9 and R-16 long-range nuclear missile programs reached Khrushchev in the late winter. Although flight testing of the R-16 was on schedule, it was a major disappointment. The missile had been designed to provide the Soviet Union with a reliable second-strike capability in the event the United States launched a first strike. But the device turned out to be so primitive that unless the Soviets were planning to be the first to launch nuclear-tipped missiles—and in the Khrushchev period there were never enough missiles to make this feasible—the weapon was useless. In February 1962, Khrushchev had been told that the R-16 was no match for the second-generation U.S. missile system, the Minuteman, the first of which was due to be deployed sometime in 1962.54 Soviet commanders needed a few hours to prepare a missile for launch, whereas the U.S. rocket could be prepared for launch in a few minutes. “Before we managed to move the R-16 and lift it into place, nothing would be left of us,” Khrushchev was told by the chief of his rocket forces.55
The R-16’s main weakness was the volatility of its fuel. Khrushchev’s protégé Marshal Mitrofan Nedelin, the first chief of the new Soviet strategic rocket forces, was one of a hundred technicians and observers who had died in October 1960, when an R-16 caught fire and exploded during a prelaunch sequence.56 The fuel in the R-16 was also highly corrosive. Once a missile was fueled it had to be either used immediately or drained of its contents within a
few days and sent back to the factory for cleaning and recalibration. The U.S. Minuteman, however, was powered by solid fuels that allowed the missile to be deployed in a ready position for years. The progress reports on the R-9, the R-16’s competition to be the next generation of Soviet ICBM, were even worse. Flight tests of this rocket were turning up a series of flaws.57
Quantitative comparisons were no kinder to the Soviets. The first of a few dozen R-16s were deployed in early 1962. The R-9 was not yet near deployment. In 1962, however, the U.S. ICBM deployments began to reflect the earlier overreaction to the missile gap scare. Between the fall of 1961 and the spring of 1962 the number of U.S. ICBMs more than doubled, from thirty to seventy-five. From published reports the Soviets could know that by the end of the year the U.S. arsenal, with the addition of the first Minuteman missiles, would grow to more than two hundred ICBMs. Deployment of the Minuteman system, the greatest strategic threat to Soviets, was due to begin in the fall. There was talk of eventually deploying a thousand of these solid-fuel monsters.
Meanwhile Khrushchev was also given disappointing economic news. The spring of each year brought the start of the Soviet government’s budgetary cycle. Between March and the summer government planners would work with members of the Presidium to come up with the actual production numbers that would be presented to the entire Central Committee at the fall plenum as the basis for future planned production. Record keeping was never very good in the Soviet Union, but in 1962 the figures Khrushchev received indicated agricultural and industrial shortfalls. The statistics were so bad that the Kremlin had to consider raising consumer prices on domestic staples, a move never before attempted in the Khrushchev era. As if this were not enough, recent wage increases were also proving difficult to sustain.
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