Despite the convictions of some of the top men in the Kremlin, the agenda item for this meeting—“further actions regarding Cuba and Berlin”—betrayed the deep uncertainty in the Kremlin about the crisis to come.9 A month earlier Khrushchev had confidently told the West German ambassador Hans Kroll that he would be the one to choose when the next crisis in U.S.-Soviet relations took place. With news of the impending speech by Kennedy, Khrushchev had to recognize that he had lost control of events.
THE PRESIDIUM MEETING that started at 10:00 P.M., Moscow time, on Monday, October 22, 1962, was arguably the most tense of Khrushchev’s career. “It has become known,” the Soviet leader began in opening the meeting attended by all twelve members of the Presidium, “that Kennedy has prepared some kind of speech.”10 He said he believed the coming crisis involved Cuba. The Soviet press service TASS was already reporting, inaccurately as it turned out, “a concentration of ships of the U.S. Navy with marines.” It was 3:00 P.M. in Washington, with four hours to go before Kennedy was to speak.
Khrushchev gave the floor to Malinovsky, who reassured the members of the leadership that the United States was not preparing a preemptive strike of any kind. “Lightninglike actions,” he said, were unlikely. “If Kennedy announces an invasion,” he assured the Kremlin, “there will still be enough time for us to prepare.”11 The GRU team in Havana was responsible for watching Florida. That morning it redoubled its long-standing efforts to intercept U.S. military communications.12 It had picked up a new concentration of forces in Florida, but there still was no evidence that an attack on Cuba was likely in the near future. Consequently, Malinovsky reported that he was quite convinced that the Presidium would have some time to deal with whatever Kennedy had to say. If anything, the Soviet defense minister seemed a little cocksure. “Kennedy’s radio address will be some kind of preelection trick.” Malinovsky did not believe it was as yet necessary to put the Soviet R-12s in Cuba, which had arrived there in late September, in a higher state of readiness.
General Ivanov of the general staff followed Malinovsky to report on the status of Soviet forces in and around the island. Following Khrushchev’s Pitsunda decision, Ivanov had formalized the operational procedures for the Soviet Group of Forces in Cuba. In September he instructed General Igor Statsenko, the commander of the R-12 and R-14 missile detachments, to await a signal from Moscow before launching the missiles.13 Ivanov explained to the Presidium that some of the R-12s on Cuba were operational.14 All their warheads had arrived on the Indigirka before the crisis started. However, because of the changes to the Anadyr plan in September, the missiles and warheads for the longer-range R-14 missiles were not on the island. They were still en route, and it would be some time before they could be deployed. The ships carrying the R-14 missiles, the Kasimov and the Krasnodar, were not even halfway to Cuba.
The short-range or tactical missiles that Khrushchev had requested in September were also on the island. The Indigirka had also delivered twelve Luna missiles and forty-two FKR cruise missiles and their nuclear warheads. By the time of the meeting on October 22 the Luna had been integrated into the Soviet infantry units, and the cruise missiles deployed to coastal sites as well as near the Cuban border with the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo. The infantry units and the coastal installations were designed to protect the island and the Soviet long-range missiles against any attempt by the United States or Cuban émigrés to invade. Moscow retained control over the Lunas’ and the FKRs’ nuclear warheads, which were at a special warhead facility under the control of General Nikolai Beloborodov and some miles away from the infantry units and coastal installations.
Despite this impressive display of Soviet might already on the island, Khrushchev was depressed by the prospect of Kennedy’s speech. A rumor reached KGB headquarters that he had been heard saying, “Lenin’s work is destroyed,” much as Stalin is said to have feared the collapse of the Soviet Union in the first hours of the German attack in June 1941.15 Khrushchev realized that his effort to alter the strategic balance might actually lead to the one thing he most wished to avoid, a nuclear war. Khrushchev betrayed his inner turmoil to the men in the room: “The point is we didn’t want to unleash a war. All we wanted to do was to threaten them, to restrain them with regard to Cuba.”16 The United States had missile bases all around the Soviet Union that “have restrained us,” he acknowledged. Why could the USSR not have one of its own?17
Although he said that he “agreed with Comrade Malinovsky’s conclusions,” the Soviet leader did not share his defense minister’s confidence that Kennedy wasn’t about to launch an attack on Cuba. Since the Bay of Pigs Khrushchev had increasingly acted on the assumption that John Kennedy was not fully in control of the U.S. government. In Khrushchev’s opinion, the militarists and the imperialists swirling around the White House were able to influence Kennedy to a larger extent than, in retrospect, they had shaped Eisenhower’s actions abroad. Khrushchev reminded his colleagues of Kennedy’s statements to Gromyko on October 18. “Kennedy chose his words very carefully when speaking about Cuba,” he concluded from reading the Soviet transcript.18 Even more disquieting was what the U.S. secretary of state had said. “During the meeting,” Khrushchev said, “[Rusk] led and got drunk on the discussion about Berlin, while actually alluding to Cuba.” He added with unease, “Rusk told Gromyko that Cuba was for the United States as Hungary was for us.”19 This was exactly the same simile that had first worried Khrushchev earlier in the year, when his son-in-law, Aleksei Adzhubei, reported on his January 30 conversation with Kennedy.
Khrushchev believed that the United States had been looking for a pretext to attack Cuba for some time and that the impending speech meant the Americans had found one. “The tragedy is that they can attack, and we shall respond. This may end in a big war.”20 Khrushchev concluded pessimistically, “Our problem is that we didn’t deploy everything we wanted to and we didn’t publish the treaty.” For reasons he did not explain at the meeting, Khrushchev believed that the twenty-four R-12 nuclear-tipped missiles that were already on the island were not enough of a deterrent to protect the Cubans. Instead of suggesting that Moscow immediately declare that it already had nuclear missiles in Cuba, a military fact that might deter the Americans from taking any further action against Cuba, Khrushchev was wringing his hands because he had not taken the advice of the Cubans in late August and published the Soviet-Cuban defense agreement. Somehow he believed that this agreement would make a deeper impression on Kennedy than the half-completed Anadyr operation. Curiously, as Khrushchev explained himself that night, he never seemed to consider using Soviet power anywhere else in the world to prevent an attack on Cuba. At no point, for example, did he suggest threatening NATO’s vulnerable outpost in West Berlin.
Newly available minutes from the meeting clarify how Khrushchev viewed the alternatives that night. After expressing his anxieties, he laid out a series of options in rapid sequence. “We could announce on the radio that there is already a [Soviet-Cuban defense] agreement regarding Cuba,” said Khrushchev. He then asked himself, “How would the United States react to this?” Khrushchev estimated the three most likely outcomes: “They could announce a blockade of a Cuba and do nothing else; they could seize our ships that are on their way to Cuba; or they could stop thinking about attacking Cuba.”21
Khrushchev felt it prudent that the Kremlin prepare itself for how it would respond in case Kennedy launched an invasion of Cuba. He wondered aloud whether it would be useful, if the worst came to pass, to transfer control of the nuclear weapons to the Cubans. “In the case of an attack, all means could be with the Cubans, who will announce that they will respond.”22 Otherwise he told his colleagues that the Soviet forces would have to be prepared to use the tactical nuclear weapons to defend their position and the Castro regime, though “not for the time being the strategic weapons.”23
With these options outlined, Khrushchev called for a five-to ten-minute break, “so that comrades could consider and express their ow
n opinion.”24 There is no evidence that the Kremlin leadership had ever before taken the time to think through how they might use the force that had been sent on their orders twelve thousand miles to Cuba. In May they had been asked to endorse the deployment for purely political reasons. In September Khrushchev alone had decided to add the Lunas to the force. Soviet military doctrine accepted the use of tactical weapons on the battlefield—it was also accepted NATO doctrine—but there was no specific plan for how these might be used in Cuba. An order that would have assigned responsibility to the Soviet commander in Cuba to determine whether or not to use them depending on the situation had never been signed at the Soviet Defense Ministry. The other tactical weapons, the FKR cruise missiles, had belonged to the original plan in May, but it seems that here too their use was never considered by the Soviet Union’s political leadership until around eleven on the night of October 22.
AFTER THE SHORT RECESS the Kremlin leaders received two useful bits of information. From the Foreign Ministry came news that the U.S. State Department had informed Ambassador Dobrynin that the Soviet Embassy would receive a copy of Kennedy’s remarks an hour before the speech, at 1:00 A.M. Moscow time. The Defense Ministry added that a report had just come in from Soviet military intelligence sources in Moscow of consultations taking place among the European ambassadors of the NATO countries and those of South American countries.
After hearing the reports, Anastas Mikoyan and fifty-nine-year-old Mikhail Suslov, longtime members of the Presidium, expressed anxiety about the deteriorating situation in the Caribbean and their belief that a U.S. attack on Cuba was imminent. Khrushchev did not disagree. This was the reason he had wanted his colleagues to consider what to do in extremis. It was time, he believed, to consider the instructions that Moscow would send to its commander in Cuba, General Issa Pliyev. Khrushchev already had something in mind. “Bring [the units] to a condition of military readiness,” he dictated. “At first do not deploy the atomic [weapons] with all the forces.” In his current frame of mind a cautious instruction like this would not be enough for him. “If there is a [U.S.] landing,”—Khrushchev continued to dictate—“[use] the tactical atomic weapons, but [not] the strategic weapons until [there is] an order.”25
According to Anastas Mikoyan, the Soviet defense minister Malinovsky had prepared his own draft instruction, which authorized General Pliyev to use all available means to defend the island. When Malinovsky read it aloud, Khrushchev replied angrily that this instruction seemed to imply using the long-range nuclear missiles and that “would mean the start of a thermonuclear war.”26 Malinovsky then stumbled in his reply.27
Concerned about what he was witnessing, Mikoyan once again—as he had at key moments since 1958—tried to steer the Kremlin further away from the brink of war with the United States. Mikoyan criticized Khrushchev’s earlier suggestion of transferring control of the missiles to the Cubans, either now or later in the crisis.28 “If the Americans were to understand that the missiles are under our control, they would proceed from the assumption that we would not attempt some kind of [nuclear] adventure since we know what the consequences would be.” But this would not be so if Washington thought Castro had his finger on the button. “If they found out that the missiles belonged to the masters of the island, then they would take it as some kind of provocation.” Mikoyan believed Washington might calculate that the Cubans were capable of firing off the missiles. In this moment of maximum peril, Mikoyan wanted to eliminate any doubt the Americans might have that the missiles were and would remain under Soviet control.*
With the elevation of many of his protégés in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Khrushchev had grown more powerful than he had been in November 1958, when Mikoyan had forced him to back down from unilaterally ending U.S. occupation rights in West Berlin. Nevertheless, the wily forty-year Kremlin veteran still commanded respect, especially on matters of foreign policy. In 1961 he had successfully discouraged Khrushchev from shooting down a Western airplane over East Germany to demonstrate his impatience at the slow progress of negotiations over Berlin. Mikoyan’s words this night put Khrushchev on the defensive.
“We’ll keep the missiles as Soviet property under our exclusive control,” said Khrushchev, who accepted Mikoyan’s point about not provoking Washington by handing them over to Castro. However, he refused to give in on the larger issue of whether Moscow’s nuclear weapons should be used at all to save the Castro regime. “If we do not use nuclear weapons,” said Khrushchev, “then they could capture Cuba.”29 If Khrushchev had hoped for backing from his handpicked defense minister at this crucial moment, he did not get it. “The forces that the Americans have in the Caribbean,” said Malinovsky, “are not enough to seize the island.”30 Even given this more optimistic assessment from his defense chief, Khrushchev was not prepared to concede the point on using tactical nuclear weapons. “The Americans could shell from their rocket carriers [destroyers and missile sites in Florida],” he argued, “without sending any airplanes.”31
At this point in the discussion another senior Presidium member, First Deputy Premier Aleksei Kosygin, intervened. His contribution appears lost to history. Neither of the Presidium scribes at that meeting, Vladimir Malin and Aleksandr Serov, noted it down. However, after Kosygin spoke, the focus of the discussion shifted dramatically. Whatever he said had persuaded the group to stop thinking about when to use nuclear weapons and to start thinking about how to control events so that the situation did not escalate into a nuclear war. Even if the strategic missiles were not used, nuclear war could begin after Moscow fired its tactical force to defend against a U.S. landing. Each of the Luna tactical missiles deployed with the Soviet military in Cuba had a range of thirty-one miles and a 2-kiloton nuclear warhead, enough to irradiate an area a thousand yards from the center of the blast. The thirty-six FKR cruise missiles already deployed to the island were even more powerful. These missiles, which pointed out to sea and were designed to destroy invasion armadas, had a hundred-mile range and carried warheads that varied in destructive power between 5.6 and 12 kilotons of TNT. The Soviets already had enough of them on the island to blow apart a U.S. carrier group.32
Khrushchev gave in to the concerns of his colleagues. Vowing that nothing would be done to provoke “the use of nuclear weapons against Cuba,” he called for a revision of the instructions to the Soviet commander on the island. This time they read that in the event of a U.S. attack, the Kremlin authorized Pliyev to use “all means except those controlled by Statsenko [Major General Igor D. Statsenko, the commander of the rocket units] and Beloborodov [Colonel Nikolai K. Beloborodov, the controller of the atomic warheads].”33 Pliyev could use the short-range Luna and the FKR cruise missiles, but only with conventional warheads. Moscow had backed down from using all means at its disposal to fight a battle in Cuba. Once again the cautious Mikoyan had helped prevent the Cold War from turning hot.
Fearful that if U.S. intelligence intercepted this order, the Pentagon might exploit Soviet weakness, Malinovsky suggested that perhaps the instruction not be sent to Pliyev until the Kremlin had had a chance to look at a copy of Kennedy’s speech, which the U.S. government had promised to hand over to the Russians at 1:00 A.M. “Otherwise,” he said, “they might be given a pretext to use the atomic weapon.”34
Despite Malinovsky’s reservations, the Kremlin decided not to wait to see the text of Kennedy’s speech. At five minutes to midnight the Defense Ministry sent the order to Cuba. For the next hour the Presidium held its collective breath. Then, at 1:15 A.M., V. V. Kuznetsov of the Foreign Ministry brought the leadership a Russian translation of Kennedy’s speech. In it, the U.S. president demanded that the Soviet Union withdraw its nuclear missiles from Cuba and announced a naval blockade of the island, but for the moment no other military action. “It seems to me that by its tone,” said Khrushchev, who had quickly scanned his copy, “this is not a war against Cuba but some kind of ultimatum.”35 The room relaxed. Khrushchev then suggested that the session be
suspended until the morning, so that they all could get some sleep. He decided to stay in the Kremlin, where he would sleep on a couch in his office and be available for any emergency.
The Presidium broke for the night before making any decision on what to do about the Soviet ships and submarines heading toward the U.S. Navy. Kennedy had not established a blockade zone or line in his speech, vowing only that “all ships of any kind bound for Cuba from whatever nation or port will, if found to contain cargoes of offensive weapons, be turned back.”36 There was some very valuable Soviet offensive weaponry on the high seas. The ships with the R-14s and their warheads were in the North Atlantic steaming south, while the four Foxtrot submarines, which had left their home port on October 1, were nearing Cuba. Each diesel-electric Foxtrot carried a nuclear-tipped torpedo.
The submarines were a little behind schedule. They all had been expected to arrive at the Cuban port of Mariel between October 21 and October 23. The closest to its destination was the Foxtrot later designated C-23 by NATO, which was north of the Bahamas, a two-day sail away.37 The others were spread in an arc that extended south from Bermuda. The C-18 and C-19 were both more than three hundred miles south of Bermuda, a hard three-day journey away from Cuba, and C-26 was trailing behind the Soviet ship Aleksandrovsk, more than two hundred miles northeast of Cuba near the Turks and Caicos Islands. C-26 was protecting the Aleksandrovsk, which carried nuclear warheads.38
KENNEDY HAD NO IDEA of the discussion going on in Moscow. He spent the hours before his speech gathering political support for a step-by-step approach to getting the missiles out of Cuba. Having ruled out a military attack as an opening move, he needed to still any domestic concerns that he was not doing enough while assuring his European and Canadian allies that he was not doing too much. His aides arranged a meeting for him with the leaders of Congress just before he was to appear on television and radio.
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