Khrushchev's Cold War

by Aleksandr Fursenko

  The meeting with the congressional leadership took a toll on Kennedy. Senator Richard Russell, the legendary power broker and the formidable chairman of the Armed Services Committee, questioned the administration’s decision to buy time at this stage. “My position is that these people have been warned,” said Russell. The words brought a tense exchange with the president. “[By waiting to attack,] you will only make it sure that when the time comes, when if they do use these MiGs to attack our shipping or to drop a few bombs around Miami or some other place, and we do go in there, that we’ll lose a great many more men than we would right now—” Kennedy responded: “But, Senator, we can’t invade Cuba…. [I]t takes us some while to assemble our force to invade Cuba.” And just so neither the senator nor anyone else in the room doubted his determination, the president added, “We are now assembling that force, but it is not in a position to invade Cuba in the next 24 or 48 hours.”39 Kennedy now made a dire prediction: “Now, I think it may very well come to that before the end of the week.”40

  THE SPEECH ITSELF had been ready for a day. Sorensen had incorporated phrases from the State Department and the attorney general. A barometer of the twists and turns in the debate among Kennedy’s advisers, the drafting process had taken the better part of a week.

  At 7:00 P.M. on October 22, 1962, President Kennedy began a speech that an entire generation later remembered as the start of a week filled with fear and concern. “Good evening, my fellow citizens. This government, as promised, has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet military buildup on Cuba.” Kennedy was adamant that the missiles could not stay in Cuba. Calling the deployment “a deliberately provocative and unjustified change in the status quo,” Kennedy took a page from history to demonstrate his determination. “The 1930s taught us a clear lesson: Aggressive conduct, if allowed to grow unchecked and unchallenged, ultimately leads to war.” In announcing a blockade against all ships that were carrying “offensive military” cargoes to Cuba, Kennedy cautioned that this was probably only the first step in what might turn out to be a protracted and bloody crisis. “No one can foresee precisely what course [the crisis] will take or what costs or casualties will be incurred…. But the greatest danger of all would be to do nothing.”41

  KENNEDY’S CODE BREAKERS in the National Security Agency were soon scanning the airwaves in search of information about the Soviet response to Kennedy’s speech. They did not have to wait long. At 11:15 P.M., Washington time, on October 22 (or 6:15 A.M., October 23, in Moscow), less than four hours after Kennedy’s speech, the Soviet ships on the high seas were sent what appeared to be an alert telling them to prepare for a special instruction. The messages were sent in a cipher the NSA could not break; however, because the call signs of the message were in the clear, the NSA figured out that something special had been sent. Up to that point the southern port of Odessa had been the originating point for all the messages sent to the Soviet ships plying their way to Cuba. But this time the call sign for Moscow was substituted for Odessa. The American listeners straining to hear these sounds therefore understood that something important was coming. The instruction came in at 12:05 A.M., October 23 (or 7:05 A.M. in Moscow). It seemed to be sent to individual ships and the first dispatch was directed at seven of them. The message went unbroken by the United States. But within less than two hours, through analysis of call signs, the NSA started detecting the ships responding one by one.

  It was just a few minutes past dawn on the first day of this international crisis. The first light allowed U.S. ships and airplanes to see what the code breakers could not determine on their own: whether the Soviet ships were staying on course or turning around.42

  Electronic and aerial snooping was Kennedy’s most reliable guide to the developing crisis. On the eve of the crisis the CIA had lost its only mole in the Soviet defense administration. Just before the Presidium met on October 22, the KGB had pounced on Oleg Penkovsky. The day after his arrest Penkovsky signed a letter promising full cooperation. He undertook to provide every detail of his meetings with MI6 and the CIA and offered to work on behalf of the KGB in a sting operation to entrap the Western intelligence services.43

  As a free man Penkovsky would have been very useful to the Americans in this crisis. There might have been less tension in Washington in the days that followed had the Kennedy administration known that Khrushchev was already looking for a way to avoid war.

  THE PRESIDIUM RESUMED its discussions at 10:00 A.M., Moscow time, on October 23 with the mood still tense but the leaders relieved that the most dire scenario, a U.S. invasion of Cuba, had not yet played out. Overnight the Soviet Foreign Ministry had studied Kennedy’s speech very carefully and then drafted three documents for consideration by the leadership.44 The first was a general declaration by the Soviet government on the situation in Cuba; the second, a set of instructions for the Soviet ambassador to the United Nations, Valerian Zorin; and the third, a resolution to present to the Security Council condemning the U.S. action. Soviet representatives were instructed to rally the third world by denying the U.S. charge that there were nuclear missiles in Cuba.

  After the Presidium approved these drafts, its first order of business was to draft something to send directly to President Kennedy. Khrushchev took the floor and suggested they offer Kennedy a chance to reconsider the blockade. The U.S. president should be invited to “show prudence and renounce actions pursued by you, which could lead to catastrophic consequences for peace throughout the world.”45 Khrushchev also decided that he would take a slightly different position in his dealings with Kennedy from that which the Soviet Union took publicly. Rather than deny that there were nuclear missiles in Cuba, he suggested language that would assure Kennedy that the weapons were there only for defensive reasons. “Regardless of the weapon’s class,” Khrushchev dictated, “it has been delivered. [And] it has been delivered to defend against aggression.”46 In July, before this very group, Khrushchev had described the missiles as offensive weapons. Now he hoped that he could convince Kennedy and the world that their only purpose in Cuba was to defend Castro’s revolution.

  Despite his relief that Kennedy had not announced an attack on Cuba, Khrushchev believed that the Soviet Union would have to revise the Anadyr operation. He was not inclined to test the U.S. blockade for two reasons. Besides wanting to avoid a confrontation that might escalate, he did not want to give the United States the opportunity to capture any of the strategic technology loaded on some of the ships. The two large-hatch ships bearing the R-14 missiles, the Kasimov and the Krasnodar, were still very far from Cuba.

  Khrushchev wondered aloud whether all the ships carrying weapons should not be ordered to return immediately. In the end he decided that the ships already in the Atlantic should go no farther than the approaches to Cuba until the situation was clearer.47 Ships still in the Mediterranean were to return to their Black Sea ports immediately. But there remained the question of the Aleksandrovsk, the ship carrying warheads for the R-14s and some of the shore-based FKR cruise missiles. It was a day away from Cuban shores. The Presidium decided to take a risk on bringing it to shore as quickly as possible.48

  Aware that these changes in the operation might upset the Cubans, Khrushchev recommended telling Castro that the operation “was halfway successful.” He wanted to let the crisis die down, and then, “if necessary, it will be possible to send the [R-14] missiles again.” Khrushchev wanted Havana to understand that his immediate priority was to stabilize the situation in the area and establish, through the UN, Cuba’s right to have whatever weapons it deemed necessary to defend itself.

  Khrushchev thought the submarine escorts were a different matter from the surface ships. He believed the submarines might still be of use in defending Cuba, and he also believed they could travel undetected to the Cuban port of Mariel. The records of the October 23 meeting are fragmentary.49 From these fragments and Mikoyan’s recollections it appears that the Soviet leadership had not been briefed on even the basics of U.S
. antisubmarine capabilities. As almost every Soviet submariner knew, even the quietest submarine in 1962—and they were veritable jukeboxes compared with what was to be commissioned by both navies later—emitted an array of sounds and impulses, from the dropped teaspoon on board to the grinding of the propulsion screws to the electric impulses of the batteries that kept everything working. On any given day, specially outfitted U.S. Navy Orion planes crisscrossed the Atlantic and the Caribbean, listening for these sounds, using sensors dropped into the water. Whenever they thought they heard something, they reported it to a ship, which began using sonar, a process called pinging by U.S. sailors and throwing peas by their Soviet counterparts. The sonar was very effective at locating the noisy Foxtrots.

  Indeed, after October 16 the Soviet submarines had begun reporting home that they could hear a lot of ship activity.50 Although the Soviets did not yet know why, the discovery of the missiles by the U-2s on October 14 had led to a massive increase in the U.S. Navy presence in the very waters the Foxtrots had to navigate. By October 23 the sustained presence of U.S. naval vessels had forced at least one of the Foxtrots to stay underwater so long that its batteries were running very low.

  It appears that Malinovsky reported none of this to the Presidium. If he had told Khrushchev about it beforehand, the Soviet leader had chosen to ignore the information in the meeting. However, Khrushchev’s chief foreign policy critic, Anastas Mikoyan, worried that letting the submarines test the U.S. blockade would be a mistake. Khrushchev did nothing but watch as Mikoyan tried to put Malinovsky on the spot.51 The defense minister refused to give an inch when Mikoyan insisted that it was risky to let these submarines into the blockade zone. He was convinced that the U.S. Navy could detect them. Moreover, the Kremlin had to assume, Mikoyan explained, that since the United States would be able to detect these four noisy diesel submarines, it would interpret their continued movement into the blockade zone as a hostile act.

  Malinovsky refused to accept the premise of Mikoyan’s argument. Despite the fact that some of the Foxtrots had likely been detected, the Soviet defense minister still insisted in front of the Soviet leadership that the subs would be able to approach Cuban shores without being seen or heard. In reply, Mikoyan told his colleagues that this was nonsense and would simply create a new danger for the Soviet Union, but this time he had no seconders. Khrushchev, Kozlov, Brezhnev, and the rest of the Presidium either decided that Malinovsky knew what he was talking about or at least chose to remain silent. When Mikoyan proposed that the group order the submarines to hold at the approaches to the island, he was overruled. Then the group broke for lunch.

  During the lunch break Mikoyan approached Khrushchev to make a private appeal that the Presidium revisit the submarine issue in the afternoon. “I strongly believed [in my concerns],” he told Khrushchev, “and I consider that we must return to this question of the submarines because I consider that it was a mistake to turn down my proposal.”52 Khrushchev would raise the question after lunch.

  TWO HOURS LATER the Presidium reconvened to hear Mikoyan’s plea. Once again he warned his colleagues that these old Soviet submarines would be detected as soon as they violated the U.S. blockade. Once again Malinovsky insisted that the four boats could “reach the shores of Cuba undetected.” The Soviet defense minister prevailed a second time.

  The group gathered again after dinner. At this point, Mikoyan’s warnings on the submarines were taken seriously but only because, twenty-four hours into the crisis, a senior naval officer was finally invited to make his views known on the submarine issue. Ironically, it was Malinovsky who brought the commander in chief of the Soviet Navy, Admiral Sergei Gorshkov, the country’s specialist on submarine warfare, to the meeting. Tensions existed between the Ministry of Defense and the Soviet Navy, and yet Malinovsky inadvertently offered Admiral Gorshkov an opportunity to show up his ministry in front of the Presidium. Gorshkov knew that the U.S. Navy could easily detect Foxtrot-class submarines, which were not the latest in Soviet submarine technology.*

  At the evening session, the third time the Presidium met on October 23, Gorshkov turned the submarine debate. A map of the waters around Cuba was placed in front of the Presidium. Gorshkov very carefully explained that it was extremely difficult to bring submarines close to Cuban shores. The waters got very shallow the nearer you came to Cuba. There were also a great number of tiny islands that you would have to maneuver around. “To approach the main island, the vessel must follow a very narrow channel, which is under the control of the radars from [nearby] U.S. naval bases…in other words it would be impossible to negotiate this channel undetected.” Just as Mikoyan hoped and expected, Gorshkov recommended keeping the four Foxtrot submarines at a perimeter, a two-to three-day sail from Cuba.

  Mikoyan thought he had won. “With his incompetence revealed,” Mikoyan recalled later, “Malinovsky could not possibly object.” Khrushchev seemed to agree and supported a new instruction to the submarine captains ordering them to stay a distance of two days’ sail away from Cuba.

  CAPTAIN NIKOLAI SHUMKOV knew nothing about the debate in the Kremlin over his orders. He had a crew of about seventy-five men on his Foxtrot C-18.* At three hundred feet long and just twenty-six feet wide, the boat could travel eighteen knots on the surface and sixteen knots when submerged. Designed for cold-water running, these submarines were neither air-conditioned nor battery-cooled. If the batteries became too hot, they would release hydrogen gas, a real hazard in a confined space.53

  Besides the crew, food, and fuel, each Foxtrot was equipped with twenty-two torpedoes, one of which carried a nuclear warhead. Commanders were told to use their weapons only in self-defense. As Shumkov recalled, “we couldn’t use our weapons independently.” But all the submariners knew that in a battle situation, it might be impossible to check with Moscow. “We could only get in touch with our commanders at certain times,” Shumkov recalled. “The Americans were on the surface and could keep in touch with their base all the time…. So it could have happened that the Americans were ordered to use arms and we would not have known anything about it…that was our disadvantage.”

  Late on October 23, C-18, like the other Soviet submarines, surfaced for the day’s news. Chebrasov, the chief radioman on C-18, said, “We found out about the American blockade from the commander.” Shumkov announced to his crew that “in our path stood an American fleet, in particular antinaval boats, but we were going to continue to carry out our mission that we would carry on through to Cuba.”54

  Despite the concerns in the Kremlin, none of the submarines altered its course to stay out of harm’s way. Either Khrushchev and Malinovsky had decided to ignore Gorshkov and Mikoyan, or the Soviet Navy could not communicate with its own submarines. Either finding underscores a flaw in Khrushchev’s effort to reduce the risks of war in the crisis.55 Were there any doubt that the United States intended to intercept submarines, this should have been dispelled on October 23. While the Presidium was debating what orders to give its submarines, the U.S. Embassy delivered to the Soviet Navy a note from the U.S. Department of Defense that detailed its procedures for identifying submarines that attempted to violate the blockade.56

  At 10:00 A.M., Washington time, October 24, the U.S. blockade went into effect. A line of U.S. ships was strung along the outer edge of the West Indies. And Soviet submarines were still steaming toward them.

  WASHINGTON PICKED UP early on October 24 that Soviet surface ships were stopping. At 2:30 A.M. the NSA had intercepted another urgent message from Odessa directed at all Soviet ships. Still another indicated that all future messages would come from Moscow.57 Eight hours later, during the late-morning Excomm meeting, Kennedy was told that the Office of Naval Intelligence had detected that all six Soviet ships in Cuban waters had “either stopped or reversed course.”58 For some time the White House was unsure whether these ships had been outbound from Cuba and were just returning their Cuban cargo or were part of the Soviet weapons buildup. While this was being cleared up,
Defense Secretary McNamara explained to Kennedy the procedure the U.S. Navy planned to follow if it had to intercept a Soviet submarine. The navy had detected three Soviet submarines and thought it had found a fourth. After the State Department had sent its message to Moscow the night before, McNamara had decided to alter the rules of engagement for U.S. destroyers. “Here is the exact situation,” he said. “[W]e have depth charges with such a small charge that they can be dropped and they can actually hit the submarine, without damaging the submarine.” Asked if these were “practice depth charges,” he replied that because it was assumed the Soviets would not be able to pick up any warnings sent in sonar, “it is the depth charge that is the warning notice and the instruction to surface.” When President Kennedy heard that his secretary of defense had unilaterally ordered the U.S. Navy to deviate from standard international practice for surfacing unidentified submarines, which did not involve dropping depth charges, he experienced what Robert Kennedy later called “the time of greatest worry by the President.” The president’s hand, his brother noted later that day, “went up to his face & covered his mouth and he closed his fist. His eyes were tense, almost gray, and we just stared at each other across the table.”59

  “At what point do we attack him?” Kennedy asked moments later. “I think we ought to wait on that today. We don’t want to have the first thing we attack as a Soviet submarine. I’d much rather have a merchant ship.”60 McNamara disagreed: “I think it would be extremely dangerous, Mr. President, to try to defer attack on this submarine in the situation we’re in. We could easily lose an American ship by that means.” Faced with McNamara’s concerns, Kennedy decided not to alter the navy’s instructions.61 But he worried about what Khrushchev’s reaction would be if the Soviets lost a submarine or a ship. He expected the Soviets to respond where they enjoyed a geographical advantage: “[T]hey would say that there’s no movement in or out of Berlin—a blockade.”62 The prospect was deeply worrying to him, “What is then our situation? What do we do then?” This was not the last time in those difficult days that Kennedy worried that forceful action by the United States in the Cuban crisis might be met by a Soviet reprisal against Berlin.