Meanwhile Kroll realized that his warnings were not being taken seriously by his own government, let alone by West Germany’s allies. On September 28 he went public. FINAL FIGHT FOR BERLIN IN FOUR WEEKS was the headline in the conservative Deutsche Soldaten-Zeitung und National-Zeitung above a lengthy interview with the former West German ambassador to the USSR.62 Kroll predicted that Khrushchev planned a “dramatic development” after the midterm congressional elections in the United States. He expected the Soviets to sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany and to end immediately NATO access to West Berlin. Kroll admitted that the source of his predictions was his conversation with Khrushchev.
Curiously, it appears that none of Khrushchev’s socialist allies, including East Germany, received anything close to this kind of tipoff about the November strategy. In the fall of 1962 Khrushchev and Ulbricht were exchanging letters on ways to improve East German agriculture.63 The socialist who may have received the clearest warning of the complexity of the fall offensive was Prince Souphanouvong, who visited with Aleksei Kosygin on September 28, while Khrushchev was on a tour of Central Asia. The Pathet Lao had always suspected that Moscow would trade it for some advantage in Berlin, and the Kremlin wanted to set its mind at ease. “We are in for more battles with the American imperialist in the diplomatic arena,” Kosygin revealed to the Laotian partisan. “It will involve, in particular, the Berlin question, Cuba and other issues.”64
IN MID-SEPTEMBER the Soviet Navy responded to Khrushchev’s request for more security for the Cuban missile operation. Khrushchev had asked for special protection for the ships carrying nuclear warheads. On September 18 the Soviet Defense Council supplied him with an ambitious plan to send a convoy to Cuba, involving seven Golf missile submarines and four Foxtrot torpedo submarines, two cruisers, two cruise missile ships, two destroyers, and a host of auxiliary ships. The goal was for most of the flotilla to reach Cuba on November 9. Given that it would take the submarines twice as long to reach Cuba as the surface ships, the submarines would leave the Kola Peninsula on October 7. Besides providing defense for Cuba, they would be responsible for protecting the ships carrying the R-14 missiles and warheads. The bulk of the surface ships would leave around October 20 and were to catch up with the submarines south of Bermuda, where the Soviet Navy wanted to hold a three-day naval exercise at the beginning of November. The ships carrying the R-14 missiles and their nuclear warheads, as well as their submarine escorts, were due to arrive earlier than November 9.65
The Soviet Navy knew that if the Americans detected that some of the ships had submarine escorts, Washington might discover the importance of the cargoes. Foxtrot submarines had diesel engines that required them to surface periodically to run those engines and recharge the batteries that the submarines used when submerged. Consequently, the navy recommended that they stay submerged during the day and surface only at night.
Another important change was that in the original plan the Golf and Foxtrot submarines were not intended to carry nuclear weapons. In the Defense Ministry’s new plan, the submarines were to be armed with nuclear weapons, and the commanders of the Golf submarines were to receive a special target list so that “upon the signal from Moscow [they could] launch an attack on the most important coastal targets of the US.”66
Khrushchev’s level of anxiety in mid-September was far too high for him to approve Malinovsky’s revised naval plan in its entirety. A few days earlier the military had reported to the Presidium that in the first twelve days of September alone, the United States had flown fifty reconnaissance flights over fifteen different Soviet ships. With the United States and NATO keeping such a tight watch on his Cuban convoys, Khrushchev feared the international reaction to the movement of two cruisers and two destroyers to Cuba. He also considered the recommended submarine force too large and instructed Malinovsky to drop the idea of sending the seven Golf submarines with their nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles to Cuba. In their place Khrushchev approved sending only the four Foxtrot-class diesel subs with nuclear-tipped torpedoes.
The Indigirka, with the warheads for both the Luna missiles, and the short-range FKR cruise missiles, a nuclear system that had been included in the original Anadyr plan, had left the USSR on September 16, before the revision of the Soviet Navy plan.67 According to the previous plan, it had not been provided with a submarine escort. So that it would be protected once it neared U.S. waters, the navy suggested dispatching one of the its lone ballistic missile submarines, the Zulu-class B-75, to meet up with the Indigirka near Bermuda. At that moment the B-75 was on patrol along the U.S. coastline, waiting for an order to launch its two R-11f nuclear missiles against coastal targets.68
These military decisions allayed much of Khrushchev’s concern, and by the end of September his attention had returned to ending the Cold War in November. On the twenty-eighth he sent the White House a letter proposing a new basis for a test ban treaty.69 With agreement unlikely on how to verify compliance with a ban, Khrushchev said he would accept a treaty that banned all tests in the atmosphere, in space, and underwater that did not require inspection on Soviet soil. He stipulated, however, that the three nuclear powers—Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union—would also have to observe a five-year moratorium on all underground tests while negotiations on this issue continued. If agreement on a permanent ban on underground testing could not be reached in five years, the parties would then be free to reconsider the atmospheric test ban treaty. He ended the letter with an ominous reference to the superpower disagreement over West Berlin, describing it as a “dangerous hot-bed.”70 He added: “We on our part again say to you that we will do nothing with regard to West Berlin until the elections in the U.S. After the elections, apparently in the second half of November, it would be necessary in our opinion to continue the dialogue.” He then hinted that he was eager for another summit with Kennedy to discuss all these issues, perhaps as early as November. “Of great importance for finding ways to solve both this problem [Berlin] and other pressing international problems,” he wrote, “are personal contacts of statesmen on the highest level.”71
GEORGI BOLSHAKOV, the Kennedy family’s favorite Russian, had been out of touch while visiting the Soviet Union for a few weeks. He returned to the United States with a special message for the president from Khrushchev. On October 8 he met with Bobby Kennedy to ask that a meeting be set up for him with the president.72
Bolshakov found his friend quite downcast that day. He “was in an unusually gloomy mood,” he later reported to Dobrynin at the embassy. Robert Kennedy stressed how concerned he was by the turn taken in Soviet-American relations while Bolshakov had been away. “Speaking candidly,” said Kennedy, “the Soviet Union’s most recent steps regarding Cuba have angered the president, and we take them to be measures directed against us.” He added that the president had to be especially sensitive to these changes because of the midterm election.
Kennedy did not ask what Khrushchev’s motives were, and Bolshakov offered nothing but the remark that the Soviet leader had stressed that “in order to resolve the issues in a reasonable fashion we must proceed from the real correlation of forces, to respect the sovereign right of other countries, not interfering in their domestic affairs.” Khrushchev had not revealed to Bolshakov the Anadyr secret and why by November he would be very comfortable with the “real correlation of forces.”
Robert Kennedy had some bad news for the Soviets regarding the prospects for negotiations. He told Bolshakov that the president was writing a response to Khrushchev’s September 28 letter that would probably disappoint the Kremlin. It was impossible for Kennedy ever to agree to remove all Western troops from West Berlin, as Khrushchev had stipulated taking place over four years after the signature of an agreement. It was also impossible for the president to agree to a five-year moratorium on underground testing in return for an atmospheric test ban.
Kennedy asked Bolshakov if Khrushchev intended to come to the United Nations that fall. It i
s doubtful that the go-between knew any details of Khrushchev’s coming political offensive. However, his response to the attorney general left open the possibility of some kind of special visit. “Khrushchev does not intend to come to the General Assembly of the United Nations before the congressional elections,” said Bolshakov. “However, if the need arises for Khrushchev to speak before the General Assembly, then he could come to New York after the elections.” Kennedy refused to comment.
The next day, October 9, President Kennedy shared his concerns with the French foreign minister, Maurice Couve de Murville, about what Khrushchev might have in store for November. The question, he said, was “how much risk they [the Western powers] were prepared to take.” Kennedy thought it “not unlikely” that Khrushchev would come to the United States in November “under cover of the General Assembly in order to talk over Berlin with the President.” Ominously, the president concluded that “as a result of the Soviet actions on Cuba,” by which he meant a defensive weapons buildup, “there was much less prospect of reaching agreement on Berlin.” “Khrushchev,” Kennedy added, “might try to force something.”73
KHRUSHCHEV’S EXACT scenario for November, if it was ever spelled out on paper, has not been found. But the elements were coming together. By November 6 the missiles would be in Cuba and operational, and his Foreign Ministry would have prepared boilerplate for formal agreements on the establishment of a UN presence in West Berlin and the withdrawal of Western troops. In addition, he would have a draft test ban treaty that he could offer Kennedy as a sweetener once the president had swallowed the retreat from Berlin.74 So long as the secret deployment to Cuba could hold for another five weeks, Khrushchev believed that John Kennedy would have no choice but to accept Soviet terms for ending the Cold War in 1962.
CHAPTER 19
CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS
THE UNRAVELING OF Khrushchev’s grandest ploy began with a flight of an American U-2. Once again U.S. technology proved the Soviet leader’s undoing. One week after Attorney General Kennedy’s meeting with Bolshakov in early October 1962, McGeorge Bundy brought bad news to John Kennedy along with his morning newspapers. Bundy had been one of those who had advised Kennedy in September that it was highly unlikely that Khrushchev would install strategic weapons in Cuba. Now, on October 16, he carried photographs of what photo interpreters at the CIA believed were medium-range ballistic missile sites in Cuba. Oleg Penkovsky, the CIA’s agent in the GRU, who had proved so useful in the Berlin crisis a year earlier, had turned over manuals on the R-12s that helped the analysts make sense of the photographs. There was really no doubt in their minds. Bundy made clear to the president that there should be no doubt in his either.
Kennedy immediately decided that the United States could not accept the deployment of Soviet missiles to Cuba. Although Secretary of Defense McNamara assured him that these missiles would not erode America’s advantage in the strategic balance of power, the president sensed that the missiles might tip the psychological balance in Khrushchev’s favor. Just one month earlier the United States had warned of the unacceptability of any deployment of Soviet offensive weapons to Cuba and had singled out missiles as an offensive weapon. The Kremlin had subsequently promised in public and through back channels that its military supply program in Cuba did not include missiles. American allies, let alone the American people, would doubt the credibility of the U.S. president’s word if he suddenly turned around and accepted the missiles as a fait accompli.
Over the next six days Kennedy met secretly with his Cuban team, a group centered on the attorney general, the vice president, McNamara, Bundy, John McCone of the CIA, Secretary of State Dean Rusk and his undersecretary, U. Alexis Johnson, Treasury Secretary C. Douglas Dillon, General Maxwell Taylor, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Kennedy’s speechwriter, Ted Sorensen, and his chief Sovietologist, Llewellyn Thompson. Ultimately called the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, or Excomm, this group discussed and occasionally debated how to go about removing the missiles.
Kennedy’s initial preference was for a surprise air strike that cleaned out the missiles before they became a threat to the United States. U.S. intelligence believed they were not yet operational. The weaknesses of this response became apparent to Kennedy as the discussion proceeded. “How effective can the takeout be?” he asked on October 16.1 “It’ll never be a hundred percent, Mr. President, we know,” replied General Maxwell Taylor. “We hope to take out a vast majority in the first strike.” No military commander could promise Kennedy that all the sites that had been found could be destroyed in a single attack, and no one dared suggest that all the Soviet sites had been discovered. The other military option, a massive invasion of Cuba with ground forces, was no more attractive. The Pentagon estimated it would take a week to get all the necessary troops into position for an invasion, and it did not wish to start moving any troops until after an air strike had removed the missiles. Any earlier movement would eliminate the element of surprise.
There was an additional telling argument against a surprise attack. Robert Kennedy reminded his brother that nothing defined treachery for their generation more than the Japanese decision to launch a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. President Kennedy, who kept pushing for some certainty that an air strike alone would work, came to agree that Moscow would have to get some kind of warning.
The risks associated with each attack scenario were so great that Kennedy also began to consider how the issue might be resolved diplomatically. On October 18 he had his favorite speechwriter, Theodore Sorensen, begin drafting a letter to Khrushchev that would offer negotiations.2 But in the end neither Sorensen nor, more important, Kennedy found a way to begin the process diplomatically without appearing weak. Instead Kennedy became increasingly fond of a suggestion that came from his defense secretary, Robert McNamara. A naval blockade or quarantine of Cuba would put pressure on the Soviets while giving Khrushchev the opportunity to consider if he wanted to plunge the world into war.3 Initially the blockade could do nothing about the missiles already on the island, so Kennedy believed U.S. military preparations would have to continue in the event an attack against the existing launch sites became unavoidable. The United States would meanwhile seek the support of its allies in the hemisphere and in NATO to present a united front to Khrushchev.
THE INTENSIVE POLICY discussions in the White House passed completely unnoticed by the Kremlin until October 22. While it was already afternoon in Moscow, both the local KGB and GRU stations began reporting on unusual activity at the White House and the Pentagon that morning.4 A few hours later, at 1:30 P.M., eastern daylight time, Pierre Salinger announced to the press that the president would be making a speech to the nation at 7:00 P.M. about “a matter of national importance.”5 Soviet intelligence could not divine on which foreign policy problem Kennedy would speak. “The press emphasizes,” wrote the GRU resident from Washington, “that the reasons for this official activity remain top secret. It is assumed that this has to do with the possibility of new measures regarding Cuba or Berlin.”6
Khrushchev reacted quickly to the news from Washington, concluding that whatever the American president had to say would affect his grandiose plans for November. He also suspected that Kennedy would have something to say about Cuba. Just a few days earlier Khrushchev had read reports on Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko’s recent meetings with Kennedy and Rusk. These had taken place on October 18 in Washington as Gromyko made his way home to Moscow from a session at the United Nations. In these reports Khrushchev detected a hardening of the U.S. position on Fidel Castro.7
Khrushchev had fellow Presidium member Frol Kozlov arrange a special night session of the Presidium. Kozlov shared Khrushchev’s belief that the Kremlin was about to face a crisis over Cuba. When Mikoyan asked for the reason behind this unscheduled meeting, Kozlov answered, “We are awaiting Kennedy’s important speech on Cuba.”8 Both the Soviet defense minister, Marshal Malinovsky, and Colonel General Ivanov, the chief of the
main operational department of the Soviet general staff, were invited to the meeting. In keeping with Khrushchev’s main preoccupation, Malinovsky collected whatever information he could on the status of U.S. forces in the Caribbean, and Ivanov prepared a briefing on the status of Soviet forces in Cuba.
Khrushchev's Cold War Page 63