Sharaf Rashidov, a candidate member of the Presidium from Uzbekistan, ostensibly led the Soviet delegation that arrived on the island in late May 1962. The Cubans, however, quickly understood that the military representative, Marshal Sergei S. Biryuzov, held the real power in the group. Castro explained to Rashidov and Biryuzov that the Soviet offer was flattering. He knew of no other instance in which the Soviets had considered deploying nuclear missiles outside their country. But he was not prepared to believe that it was concern about the defense of Cuba that had motivated the Kremlin’s unexpected generosity. In his estimation, the Sopka, the SAMs, and the Soviet troops would be enough to defend the island. Repeating Khrushchev’s official justification for the offer, the delegates denied that the Soviet leader had any objective in mind besides defending Castro’s regime.
Castro would have been excused if he found Moscow’s initiative ironic. For years the Soviets had been telling the Americans that they were wrong to fear that Cuba would become an extension of Soviet power. Just before the Bay of Pigs, Khrushchev had sent Castro a confidential snippet from a conversation with the U.S. ambassador. “We disagree with the U.S. conception of Cuba,” Khrushchev had lectured Thompson. What the Soviet leader had in mind was Washington’s tendency to view Cuba in the same way it viewed the countries that bordered the USSR. “The USA, for some reason, believes that it has the right to put military bases along the borders of the USSR. [Yet] we do not at the same time have a military base in Cuba, but friendly relations.” As a way of ridiculing U.S. concerns in 1961, Khrushchev had even indulged in sarcasm: “And in the U.S. there has already been the criticism that the USSR is building a rocket base on Cuba.”1 A year later it now looked to Castro as if reality would replace sarcasm.
The Soviet delegation failed to persuade the Cuban leader that the missiles would be coming just to defend his revolution, but he saw no reason to reject an offer that would likely tie the Soviet Union to the defense of his country. Castro told his visitors that Cuba would accept the strategic missiles.
Once he heard the good news, Khrushchev lifted some of the veil of secrecy between the two countries. He was never completely open with the Cubans about the reasons that had prompted him to take the risk of his career, but in a letter thanking Castro, he allowed that more than the defense of Cuba was at stake. Castro’s agreement, he wrote, represented “a further fortification of the victory of the Cuban revolution and of the greater success of our general affairs.”2
THE RASHIDOV DELEGATION returned to Moscow on June 8, 1962, and Khrushchev convened an unusual Sunday morning meeting of the Presidium two days later to hear its reports and formally approve the Cuban missile operation.
What Khrushchev had in store for his colleagues was much more than a plan to send a couple of nuclear missiles to Cuba. At the June 10 meeting Soviet Defense Minister Malinovsky outlined an audacious plan to build a powerful Soviet military base ninety miles from the U.S. coast. Under Operation Anadyr—a cover name drawn from the name of a Siberian river to confuse the uninitiated—the Soviet Union would dispatch forty nuclear missiles divided into five nuclear missile regiments, three with medium-range R-12s and two with intermediate-range R-14s. Atlanta, Georgia, was in range of a medium-range missile launched from Cuba, whereas an intermediate-range missile could hit the U.S. strategic missile bases in the Midwest and Washington, D.C. These missiles represented a major augmentation of Soviet strategic power. As of mid-1962, the Soviets had only about twenty strategic rocket launchers with missiles that could reach the United States, and they all were intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) located in the USSR.3
According to Khrushchev’s and Malinovsky’s plan, the strategic missiles were the centerpiece of what was to become an extensive Soviet military presence in Cuba. Protecting the missiles in Cuba would be four motorized regiments, two tank battalions, and a MiG-21 fighter wing, some antiaircraft gun batteries, and twelve SA-2 surface-to-air missile detachments (with 144 launchers). Each tank battalion would be outfitted with the T55, the newest Soviet tank. The total deployment of Soviet forces would be 50,874, of which 10,000 would be deployed in the four motorized regiments. Additional nuclear striking power would come from forty-two Il-28 light bombers, which could reach Florida and were given six nuclear bombs, and two cruise missile (FKR) regiments, comprising eighty nuclear-tipped missiles positioned opposite likely U.S. landing beaches. Besides this impressive land and air component, the Soviet armed forces intended to establish a submarine base on Cuba, which would simplify the logistics of maintaining patrols of the North American coastline. A massive flotilla that would establish a naval presence for the Soviet Union around the island would accompany these submarines.4
“I think we will win this operation,” Khrushchev exclaimed after listening to Malinovsky’s description of what power the Soviet Union would soon be able to project from Cuba.5 The Soviet leader could hardly contain his excitement, but the records left of this extraordinary 11:00 A.M. Sunday meeting of the Presidium suggest that he did not explain what “winning” meant. Was it that he assumed that with Soviet power staring Washington squarely in the face, the United States would finally have to take Moscow seriously as an adversary? It is difficult to know with any certainty how clearly Khrushchev had thought through the implications of his new Cuban base in early June.
What new, formerly top secret Soviet information reveals, however, is that by early July he had developed an increasingly ambitious sense of what the Cuban deployment could mean for Soviet strategic policy. In the three weeks since Castro’s acceptance of the missiles Khrushchev thoroughly revised his foreign policy objectives for 1962. This was supposed to be the year of no new diplomatic initiatives. Now he hoped to keep the Americans off-balance, allowing international affairs to be as unstable as the meniscus on a glass, until Soviet power reached a point where deals could be struck on issues like Berlin, the test ban, and Southeast Asia.
On July 1 Khrushchev unveiled his ambitious new agenda to his Presidium colleagues. The meeting was ostensibly to discuss a Soviet-Cuban defense agreement. The Cuban defense minister, Raúl Castro, was expected in Moscow the next day, and Havana wanted to sign a pact of sorts. Khrushchev used the occasion to introduce some ideas that he had on matters in an area that had never before been linked to Cuba.6
The Soviet leader announced that he wanted to renew the push for a settlement on West Berlin. He proposed delaying the removal of the eleven thousand Western troops from the city in a way that would not harm Soviet prestige. Immediately upon the signature of a peace treaty between the Western powers and the two Germanys, Western garrisons would be cut in half and then remain under the UN flag. On the second anniversary of the peace treaty the remaining fifty-five hundred Western soldiers would be replaced by non-Western UN troops. Four years after that—or six years in total following the signature of the peace treaty—all UN troops would leave. Under this plan there would be nothing like the international access authority that Kennedy had suggested as a way to guarantee that Western planes and trains could continue to cut across East Germany to reach West Berlin. “An international organ is unacceptable,” Khrushchev announced at the July 1 session.7 The UN’s role would be limited to providing troops to satisfy American anxieties that West Berlin might be attacked by the Soviet bloc. He wanted a letter to go out to Kennedy with these proposals.8
Khrushchev conveyed to his colleagues that this proposal was to be Moscow’s bottom line, and the Americans were to be forced to accept it, even if it meant taking the “path of aggravating things.”9 In January the Soviet leader had disavowed making 1962 the year of Berlin. “Really, is such an issue on the agenda now?” he had asked his colleagues before answering his own question. “No, on the contrary, we don’t have this issue at all, because, if not now, then it will be tomorrow. And if it’s not now, but tomorrow, is this worse? What, will it undermine our foundation? No, not in the least. On the contrary, our strengths are increasing, our influence in the world is i
ncreasing, our impact is increasing. So why should we take such a drastic step?”10
Now Khrushchev declared to his Kremlin colleagues in secret session that it was time to take that drastic step. Why? The notes of the July 1 Presidium meeting are fragmentary, but there are clues that the prospect of a substantial Soviet missile force ninety miles from the United States, in effect tripling the number of Soviet strategic nuclear missile launchers within range of North America, was just part of the story. Equally important was Khrushchev’s anger at what he considered yet another act of hubris by the Kennedy administration. Two weeks earlier Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had given a speech on U.S. nuclear policy at the University of Michigan commencement. It was a public restatement of a revolution in Western nuclear strategy he had secretly unveiled at a NATO conference in Athens in May. Soviet intelligence had apparently missed the NATO speech, but Khrushchev could easily read about the Ann Arbor speech, which was covered around the world. What McNamara said irritated the Soviet leader because the secretary of defense explained that in the future NATO should consider targeting Soviet military installations instead of cities. The U.S. government was making this argument because it wanted to discourage the French, the British, and the West Germans from building their own nuclear forces, which were inefficient and hard to control and bred Soviet concerns. Only the U.S. force was technologically sophisticated enough to hit Soviet missile silos.11 But what Khrushchev heard was that McNamara was somehow trying to make nuclear war seem less bloody and therefore more acceptable. Minutes after outlining a new Berlin offensive, Khrushchev railed against McNamara at the July 1 meeting: “Not targeting cities—how aggressive! What is their aim?”12 he asked. Answering his own question, as he often liked to do, Khrushchev replied, “To get the population used to the idea that nuclear war will take place.” McNamara was even suspect for having announced in Michigan that U.S. and Soviet nuclear arsenals were essentially equal. “They are not equal.” Khrushchev reminded his Kremlin listeners, who, like him, knew the Soviet nuclear force to be inferior. He suspected a trick by McNamara, who might be trying to lay the ground for a rapid increase in American nuclear forces. “How many bombs do they need?” Khrushchev asked.
Khrushchev’s impulse to lash out at U.S. power recalled his overreaching in November 1958. At that time the imminent deployment of Soviet nuclear missiles in East Germany had steeled his determination to do something to curb NATO’s nuclear alliance with West Germany and the alliance’s presence in Berlin. In 1959 he had found he lacked the power to compel Dwight Eisenhower to give in, so he dropped his ultimatum. This time, however, he expected to be powerful enough to get his way, and he hinted to his colleagues at the form this new confrontation might take. Khrushchev mused about taking the issue to the United Nations, where either the Soviets or a neutral country would raise the German problem once the Cuban missiles were deployed in November. He did not spell out how this would happen, but he assured his colleagues that this would have to occur in the midst of a crisis atmosphere. He also seemed to assume that after scoring points in the ensuing debate at the UN, Moscow could then force its way to get what it wanted.
In laying out this new Berlin strategy, Khrushchev informed his colleagues that he intended to try out traditional forms of diplomacy before launching a new world crisis. He would make one more direct appeal to Kennedy to accept his reasonable proposals on Berlin before going to the UN in the fall. And although it seems Khrushchev did not mention Southeast Asia in this discussion, there is ample evidence that on July 1 he also had in mind seeking a diplomatic agreement to neutralize Laos in Geneva, if possible, that summer. On June 11 the princes Souvanna Phouma and Souphanouvong had reached agreement on a coalition government and called for a reconvening of the Geneva Conference to formalize Laotian neutrality.13 The U.S. envoy to those discussions, Averell Harriman, was due to meet with Soviet Foreign Ministry officials on July 2 in Moscow to reaffirm Kennedy’s desire to seek the peaceful demilitarization and political neutralization of Laos, and Khrushchev planned to assure Washington that this remained his goal as well.14
The tension between Khrushchev’s willingness to use diplomacy in Laos and his taste for brinkmanship over Berlin was apparently left unexplored at the July 1 meeting. The Presidium did spend some time discussing Cuba before the meeting ended, though its connection to the coming confrontation over Berlin was also left unstated. Foreign Minister Gromyko read a draft Soviet-Cuban defense agreement to the members, which they approved. The Presidium also formally designated Khrushchev, Malinovsky, and Gromyko to take part in the negotiations with Raúl Castro. Meanwhile Khrushchev assured the rest of the Presidium that all the components of Anadyr would be shipped by November 1 and that he was working to find a way to get the Americans to stop their close air surveillance of ships on the high seas, which endangered the ships and the secrets of their cargo.
Khrushchev got everything that he asked for from his colleagues on July 1. This time, unlike in 1958 and 1961, he was able to bring about a radical shift in Soviet Berlin strategy without any debate. Mikoyan, the Presidium’s resident skeptic on the wisdom of launching Berlin crises, was not at the meeting, and his absence may explain the lack of opposition on July 1. If Mikoyan later expressed any doubts when he returned to the Kremlin, those reservations either were not noted or had no discernible effect. The confrontational course was firmly set.15
RAÚL CASTRO ARRIVED in Moscow a day or two later. It was his second time in the Soviet capital. His visit two years earlier had sealed the first Soviet commitment to defend Cuba. Back then Khrushchev could give only a rhetorical promise to use nuclear weapons if the United States dared invade the revolutionary island. The Cuban defense minister had a different mission this time. In the wake of Khrushchev’s offer of strategic nuclear weapons, Castro wanted to hammer out in detail the Soviet defense commitment.
Accompanying the Cuban defense minister on the special Cubana Airlines flight from Havana was Major General A. A. Dementyev, the commander of the Soviet military mission in Cuba. Dementyev had tried to warn his superiors in Moscow that American U-2 spy planes would make it difficult, if not impossible, to keep the operation secret once the missiles started arriving on the island. He had been ignored in May but raised the issue again during Raúl Castro’s visit.16
The details of Castro’s two conversations with Khrushchev on July 3 and July 8, 1962, remain elusive. If Russian notes were taken, they cannot be found. Meanwhile, in a vestige of the Cold War more than four decades later the Cuban account remains sealed. However, Khrushchev’s public statements in the days that followed and his statements in highly classified settings reveal that Castro’s trip altered his planning of the Cuban facet of the 1962 strategic offensive. The Cubans and General Dementyev convinced him that the security of the operation required the shipment of surface-to-air missiles to precede the delivery of the medium-range and intermediate-range rockets. According to the original Soviet military plan, the SAMs were to be delivered in two installments, the first was that July and the second in August.17 The Cubans apparently requested that the missiles arrive the same month.
In making their request, the Cubans had differentiated between weapons necessary for their defense and strategic weapons that Khrushchev wanted on the island for his purposes. Khrushchev accepted this distinction. In explaining the change of plan to his colleagues at the Presidium on July 6, following his first meeting with Raúl Castro, he said that the “defensive” weapons would go first and that the weapons that were part of his offensive plan, the strategic missiles, would follow.18
The Cuban request had a second consequence, the significance of which became apparent only in the fall. Originally Malinovsky and the planners at the Soviet Defense Ministry had projected that all the nuclear missiles would be sent to Cuba in the first part of July. They were to leave in two shipments, one carrying the medium-range missiles, the other, the intermediate-range missiles.19 Now that the Cubans wanted their SAMs first, the mis
sile shipments had to be delayed because of the shortage of Soviet ships to carry them. According to the Anadyr plan, the Ministry of Marine, responsible for transporting everything but the nuclear warheads, which were to be handled by the Soviet Navy, had only so many ships. The Defense Ministry still believed that the entire plan could be implemented by November 1, as Khrushchev had hoped, but instead of the missiles arriving while the launch facilities were being built, they were now expected to arrive later.
Between meetings with Raúl Castro, Khrushchev approved a threatening letter to President Kennedy on Berlin. “International developments, especially those in and around West Berlin,” Khrushchev wrote on July 5, “prompt the conclusion that further delay in solving the questions connected with a German peace settlement would involve such a threat to peace which must be averted already [sic] now when it is not too late.”20 The letter contained an even stronger demand than that which Khrushchev had outlined to his colleagues on July 1. Kennedy was told that Moscow wanted an immediate 50 percent cut in the Western contingent in West Berlin, with replacement troops coming from the Warsaw Pact and from neutral and some small NATO countries like Denmark. His original proposal said nothing about putting socialist soldiers in West Berlin. In the letter Khrushchev promised that the combined NATO–Warsaw Pact–Neutral contingent of eleven thousand troops would then serve under the UN flag. Over the course of four years the entire UN contingent would gradually be phased out, with proportional reductions of the Western and non-Western portions. In his July 1 proposal to Kremlin leadership Khrushchev had shown a willingness to accept a six-year transition to a demilitarized West Berlin. Evidently his confidence in what he could soon get in the new international environment was rising.21
Khrushchev's Cold War Page 60