Khrushchev did not coordinate this new proposal with East Germany. Relations with Ulbricht were little improved from the difficulties of 1961, when Khrushchev rescinded the ultimatum he had handed Kennedy at the Vienna summit. Of this new effort, Ulbricht was told only that the Soviet Union and the United States were about to head into some very serious negotiations on Berlin, and Khrushchev sent along the suggestion that if the East Germans wanted to tighten border controls, now was the time to do it.22
WHEN KENNEDY READ Khrushchev’s letter on July 5, he immediately foresaw serious trouble ahead. The new demands signaled an unwelcome resumption of Soviet pressure for an immediate settlement of the future of Berlin and yet another test of Kennedy’s resolve in Central Europe, an issue that should have been resolved by his actions in 1961. The president knew of no international developments that might have prompted this dramatic change in tone. Complicating matters was not merely the renewed hostility of Khrushchev’s letter—the Soviet leader was famous for blowing hot and cold, and now he was blowing hot—but that the terms it offered were the worst to have come out of the Kremlin since 1958. Khrushchev must have known, thought Kennedy, that these terms would be unacceptable. But if there was any doubt in the Soviet leader’s mind, Kennedy wasted no time in explaining to the Soviet leadership through Ambassador Dobrynin in Washington that no U.S. president could accept this deal.23
In handing Dobrynin the letter containing his government’s formal reply to Khrushchev on July 17, Kennedy emphasized the dangerous turn that U.S.-Soviet relations were taking.24 Using carefully chosen language, he explained why compromise along the lines Khrushchev had suggested was impossible. Maintaining the troops in West Berlin was a “vital interest of the United States.” Therefore, “none of the Soviet proposals for alternative arrangements,” he said, “could be accepted.” To remove the troops would be “a major retreat.” Historically, great powers did not accept retreats except at the point of a knife. If he were to accept Khrushchev’s terms, Kennedy added, “Europe would lose confidence in U.S. leadership. It would be a major victory for the Soviet Union and a major defeat for the West.” Kennedy’s rejection could not have been clearer.
Two days after transmitting his response to Moscow, the president met with his Berlin team to discuss contingency planning for the now expected crisis. He was very dissatisfied with NATO’s current military plans, which would take days to initiate once a crisis started. If the Soviets or East Germans were to deny Western access to West Berlin by closing any of the routes to the city, Washington might be faced with the decision to use nuclear weapons immediately because of the glacial pace by which U.S. allies would be able to get sufficient troops to the area. The U.S. plan was no better. Known as National Security Action Memorandum 109, or Poodle Blanket, it envisioned a sixty-day diplomatic and mobilization period before U.S. forces could attack. When Kennedy had routinely asked in June for the status of any of these plans, he was told that none of them could be implemented for at least another few months.25
A few days after this sobering meeting Kennedy received more bad news from Moscow. On July 25 Khrushchev met for five hours with Ambassador Thompson, about to leave his post in Moscow and return to the United States to become Kennedy’s chief Sovietologist. The meeting began in the morning at Khrushchev’s office in Moscow and ended at his dacha outside the city. Khrushchev offered a dark assessment of the state of U.S.-Soviet relations. He admitted to having little hope of achieving any agreement to ban nuclear tests. “[H]e did not think the Pentagon wanted it,” Thompson reported to Washington.26 But this was not the section of the conversation that caused concern in the White House. As the ambassador was about to leave, the Soviet leader said that he had an unpleasant subject to discuss. He told Thompson that it was evident from Kennedy’s reaction to his Berlin proposals that Washington was prepared to wait indefinitely to resolve this problem, a scenario that was not acceptable to Moscow. Khrushchev recalled that the United States often referred to issues, especially Berlin, as matters of prestige but never seemed to take Soviet prestige into account. It was a matter of Soviet prestige, he explained, that the Berlin situation be resolved very quickly and the appropriate peace treaties be signed.
Khrushchev spoke calmly and, despite the ominous topic, was remarkably cordial. Thompson sensed that he was determined to move ahead but “was deeply troubled.”27 At one point Khrushchev asked the U.S. ambassador to ask President Kennedy personally if he wanted matters to come to a head over Berlin before or after the November 6 congressional elections in the United States. Khrushchev said he wanted to “help him,” presumably to win seats for Democrats; but he left his meaning unclear, and Thompson did not press him on it.28
Despite Khrushchev’s professed interest in helping him, Kennedy was convinced that a major crisis was brewing. He had been in office eighteen months, and already he had dealt with the consequences of a failed covert action in Cuba, the seemingly unsolvable puzzle in Laos, and tension over Berlin a year before. But compared with all of these foreign policy challenges, this new one had the earmarks of something worse.
As the president confronted the likelihood of another Berlin crisis, someone, possibly his brother Robert, handed him a copy of Barbara Tuchman’s latest book. The Guns of August detailed the tortuous path taken by the great powers before the outbreak of the First World War.29 The story left its mark on Kennedy, who was struck by how almost casually the elite of the Edwardian age had drifted into war. An exchange involving Imperial Germany’s prewar chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, was what impressed him most. To the question “Oh, how did it happen?” Bethmann-Hollweg could only answer, “Oh, if we ever knew.” According to his brother Robert, John F. Kennedy was “not going to have that legacy left while he was President.”30
John Kennedy decided he owed it to himself and to history to collect a better record of the decisions that he was about to make and the information upon which they were based. Telling Secret Service officer Robert Bouck that he was concerned about recent changes in U.S.-Soviet relations, he ordered the installation of a secret taping system in the Oval Office and the Cabinet Room and upstairs in his private quarters. Although Kennedy’s very first professional ambition had been journalism, he had not kept a diary since he entered elective office. The crafty Joseph Kennedy had told his boys, “Never write it down,” and Kennedy had heeded that advice.31 The tapes were to fill that void in the record. Kennedy had correctly perceived that Khrushchev was determined to have a confrontation over Berlin in 1962, and he wanted to document the steps that he took to avoid nuclear war.
As the taping system was installed, U.S. intelligence began to notice an unsettling development much closer to home. Dozens of Soviet merchant ships with undisclosed cargoes were headed toward Cuba. NATO reconnaissance planes spotted the ships as they left the Barents Sea in the north and the Black Sea in the south. They were then picked up by U.S. planes over the Atlantic. It was the largest Soviet sealift to Cuba, and the timing seemed unusual.
Amid the growing uncertainty in Washington about Soviet intentions, Robert Kennedy heard from the GRU officer Georgi Bolshakov that he had a message to deliver from Moscow. It was only the second time that the Kremlin had used Bolshakov to send a message. When the attorney general informed him of Bolshakov’s request to meet him, the president decided to participate in the meeting, which was scheduled for July 31 in the Oval Office.
Khrushchev had mentioned to the Presidium on July 1 his concern about NATO’s spying on the Anadyr convoys, and he opted to use Bolshakov to ask Kennedy directly to stop the intrusive overhead reconnaissance of Soviet shipping. The NATO flights were very low-level, between 150 and 300 feet over the ships.32 In one case the plane came so close to the ship that the pilot lost control and crashed 150 yards from the ship.33 It was a risky request by Khrushchev, who was thereby drawing attention to the armada headed to Cuba with nuclear weapons, but Moscow wanted to see if Kennedy would unintentionally help them keep the secret
.
The president agreed to Khrushchev’s request and used the meeting as an opportunity to send a message to the Kremlin through the Bolshakov back channel. Concerned about the sudden urgency in the Berlin negotiations, he asked Khrushchev to put the issue “on ice” for the moment.34
A few days later Bolshakov sent back Khrushchev’s reply. He thanked the president for his “order to curtail US planes’ inspections of Soviet ships in open waters” but refused to reward Kennedy by stopping his push for a Berlin settlement. Khrushchev “would like to understand what John F. Kennedy means by ‘placing the Berlin question on ice,’” Bolshakov was instructed to say.35
The mixed signals confused Kennedy. In late July the United States and the Soviet Union signed the multiparty Geneva Agreement to neutralize Laos, which stipulated the withdrawal of foreign forces from the country. After achieving this breakthrough in superpower relations, why was Khrushchev now making trouble in Berlin and perhaps in the Caribbean? On August 1 analysts at the CIA warned that Khrushchev had chosen to resume putting pressure on the West because “the Soviets are probably convinced that no important change in the Western position [on Berlin] can be obtained without greatly increased pressures.”36 But the agency also suggested that there was a limit to the risks Khrushchev was willing to take. It anticipated nothing more than renewed harassment of Western airplanes in the air corridors or perhaps an attempt to prevent Western military traffic from entering East Berlin under the four-power agreement. The reason, the CIA assured Kennedy, was that the Soviets “almost certainly recognize that the balance of military power has undergone no change which would justify this [abandoning the traditional Soviet caution in situations involving a direct East-West confrontation].”
Unsure of why under these circumstances Khrushchev would want a second crisis over Berlin, Kennedy turned to the American who had met with and studied Khrushchev the most, Llewellyn Thompson, who had just ended his four-year tour at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.
At their meeting on August 8 Thompson revealed more frustration and uncertainty than insight. “It’s like dealing with a bunch of bootleggers and gangsters,” he said without any apparent irony to the man whose father had sold liquor during Prohibition.37 Thompson had picked up a useful tidbit, however, before leaving Moscow. He had heard that Khrushchev was likely to plead his case on Berlin before the United Nations and suggested that the United States start working to ensure that the neutral countries did not support him.38
The conversation ranged over Khrushchev’s recent actions. Kennedy asked Thompson to explain the Russian’s behavior at the Paris summit in 1960. Thompson told the president he thought it was an effort by Khrushchev to save face after he had concluded that he would not be getting a deal on Berlin at the meeting. Kennedy also wanted to rehash his own experience at Vienna. “It was educational for me,” he said, “but…he was so sort of tough about Berlin….”39 In response Thompson suggested that Khrushchev had taken that stand because he had to prove his toughness to the Chinese. Kennedy did not buy it. His hunch was that Khrushchev characteristically pressed forward when he perceived American weakness. “Do you think that the Cuba thing and the fact that we hadn’t gone into Laos,” asked Kennedy, “might have given him the impression that we were going to give way in Berlin?”40 Thompson did not think so. “He’s always felt he had us over a barrel in Berlin,” said Thompson. “Yeah. I think he does,” said the president with a nervous chuckle.41
IN MOSCOW the Soviet Union’s German experts were preparing for a fall crisis. On July 25 the Foreign Ministry’s European Department began sending out letters to Soviet ambassadors in the Middle East and the Congo for detailed information on UN forces. Bodrov in Israel and Erofeev in Egypt were each asked to report within two weeks on the deployment pattern, procedures, and mission of UN forces along the truce line in the Sinai.42 In addition, the department, which had never shown an interest in this subject before, requested copies of all legal documents establishing the UN presence in the Middle East. The same day a similar instruction went out to the Soviet ambassador in the Congo.
Meanwhile the Foreign Ministry wrote to Soviet embassies for information about previous instances in which foreign military bases in sovereign states had been closed. On July 28 the Soviet ambassadors in Tunisia, Syria, Lebanon, Morocco, and Iraq received similar letters requesting information on the liquidation of foreign military bases in their region.43 The Soviets lacked an embassy in Saudi Arabia, so Ambassadors Barkovsky in Damascus, Kornev in Beirut, and Vavilov in Baghdad were instructed to find out whatever they could about how the United States had dismantled its air base in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. From the embassies in Tunisia and Morocco, Moscow wanted to know how the French had gone about removing their North African bases. In each case the Soviet ambassador was told that Moscow needed this information by mid-August but not told why.
What the Foreign Ministry did not tell its ambassadors was that this information was required to prepare background documents for Khrushchev’s November initiative at the United Nations. Moscow evidently wanted to prepare a detailed proposal for the withdrawal of NATO forces and their replacement by a UN force in West Berlin.
KHRUSHCHEV’S NOVEMBER strategy had the character of the classic children’s game of Mousetrap: So much had to go right for it to work. Most important, not only did the missiles destined for Cuba have to reach their destination safely, but their installation had to be cloaked in secrecy. Consistent with the code name of the operation—Anadyr, a river in Siberia—the military rank and file were told they were being deployed to the Soviet north.
Maintaining the secrecy of these deployments was largely the KGB’s responsibility, but the Soviet foreign intelligence service monitored the progress only of the merchant marine vessels, leaving security on the navy ships to the GRU and the military security services. Soviet intelligence devised a complicated procedure to keep the destination of the ships a secret from the captains, crews, and passengers as long as possible. The captain of the wide-hatched transport Poltava, for example, was to learn his destination officially only after the ship had rounded Gibraltar. At that point he opened a sealed package in the presence of the ship’s KGB supervisor. Besides his destination, the captain was informed that under no circumstances was he to allow any intruders onto his vessel. If an unfriendly boarding seemed likely, the ship was to be scuttled.
Despite these precautions, the destination of the cargo became the subject of accurate speculation within the Soviet armed services. The KGB reported instances of frankly bewildered ship’s captains who found when they came on board their respective billets in late July that all the male passengers were sporting facial hair and suntans, as if they expected to join Fidel Castro in the Sierra Maestre. On the troopship Mednogorsk the KGB officer discovered that most of the soldiers and even their officers were wearing sideburns, beards, and mustaches. The facial hair was a tipoff because the crew members were trying to fit in among Castro’s revolutionary forces, who were world famous as the barbudos, the bearded ones. When the Soviet crews were asked why they had stopped shaving, they explained that about two months earlier, in early June, they had received an order to grow facial hair if they hadn’t any already. It meant, reported the KGB officer, “that even earlier the personal staff of this command knew that they were being sent to Cuba.” The same was true on the Poltava, where the KGB reported on an entire boat of suntanned and bearded Russian technicians, all of whom seemed to know where they were going.44
ALTHOUGH NONE of these bearded sunbathers turned out to be a covert source for the CIA, U.S. intelligence nevertheless could deliver an alarming picture of this sealift to the White House. Despite his assurances to Khrushchev in late July, Kennedy had not suspended U.S. overflights of Soviet shipping in the Atlantic. By late August the evidence was accumulating that the Soviets had initiated a major supply effort for the Castro regime. In spite of lapses in Anadyr’s security, U.S. intelligence could not determine with any confidence what
was on board these ships while they were on the high seas. U-2s flying high above Cuba, however, were able to photograph some of what came off the ships at Cuban ports. On August 29 the White House was informed that a large number of SAMs had reached the island.
The unknowns of the Soviet sealift to Cuba caused deep divisions in Washington over the assessment of Khrushchev’s objectives. Dean Rusk and McGeorge Bundy assumed this was a conventional arms buildup, much as the Soviets had done for its other third world allies. They also believed that Berlin was currently the focus of Khrushchev’s aggressive actions and should therefore be the United States’ main concern in the summer of 1962. Robert Kennedy and the new CIA director, John McCone, who had replaced Allen Dulles in November 1961, however, saw something ominous in the deployment of SA-2 missiles. McCone, who had spent most of his government career studying the nuclear arms race, was convinced that the SAMs were there to protect ballistic missiles. He believed that a Soviet missile base on Cuba would make up for Soviet failures to build a competitive intercontinental force. Robert Kennedy had worried about a Soviet missile deployment to Cuba as far back as April 1961. By early September 1962 he and McCone were advising the president to issue a warning to deter Khrushchev from deploying nuclear weapons to the island. Sharing Bundy’s and Rusk’s concerns about Berlin, Kennedy, however, was inclined to avoid any action in the Caribbean that the Kremlin might consider provocative.
At a meeting of the national security team on September 4, the attorney general made a speculative leap in an attempt to open his brother’s eyes to the possibility that there might be something big behind the developments in Cuba: “I don’t think that this is just a question about what we are going to do about this [now]. I think it’s a question of Cuba in the future…. There’s going to be…three months from now, there’s going to be something else going on, six months from now…. That eventually it’s very likely that they’ll establish a naval base there for submarines perhaps, or that they’ll put surface-to-surface missiles in.”45 In view of this threat, the attorney general wanted the president to announce that the United States would never tolerate the placement of Soviet strategic weapons on the island of Cuba.
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