Kennedy, however, was sure that the Jupiters were not worth the price of a nuclear war. He sent his brother to make a private offer to the Soviets. Bolshakov had by this time been superseded by Dobrynin, who now seemed to be a better channel to the Kremlin. Late Saturday evening Robert Kennedy met with the Soviet ambassador. Kennedy announced that the president found Khrushchev’s offer to withdraw the missiles in return for a U.S. commitment not to invade “a suitable basis for negotiating the entire Cuban affair.”83 Asked about Khrushchev’s additional demand that the Jupiter missiles be removed, Kennedy replied, “If that is the only obstacle to achieving the regulation I mentioned earlier, then the president doesn’t see any insurmountable difficulties in resolving this issue.” He promised the missiles would be removed in “four to five months” and asked that the Soviet understand that “the greatest difficulty for the president is the public discussion of the issue of Turkey.” Moscow got the message. The Jupiter concession would have to be kept secret.
KHRUSHCHEV GATHERED his advisers and the entire Presidium at his dacha outside Moscow around noon on October 28. It was early in the morning in Washington, where the White House had known about his Jupiter demand for less than twelve hours. Nevertheless, Khrushchev sensed that he could wait no longer to end the crisis, even if that meant missing the opportunity to get the Americans to dismantle their missile base in neighboring Turkey. The recent intelligence from Cuba was, if anything, even more threatening than the invasion rumors he had received on October 26. A Soviet commander had used a SAM to shoot down an American spy plane without specific authorization.84 It also appeared that Castro was becoming irrational. Khrushchev knew that the Cuban leader had spent the night of October 26–27 dictating a letter to Ambassador Alekseyev. In it he advocated a nuclear war, if necessary, to defend the honor of Cuba and the socialist cause. “[I]f they actually carry out the brutal act of invading Cuba,” he wrote, “that would be the moment to eliminate such danger forever through an act of legitimate defense, however harsh and terrible the solution would be.”85
Until the opening of the Kremlin’s archives, it had been assumed that Kennedy’s decision to give in to Khrushchev’s last-minute request for the removal of the missiles in Turkey had clinched the diplomatic settlement. Vladimir Malin’s Presidium notes, however, leave no doubt that Khrushchev had decided to agree to the first proposed deal well before he received word that John Kennedy, through his brother Robert, had offered to dismantle the Jupiter missiles in Turkey.86 Khrushchev had actually dictated his concession speech, which was to take the form of a letter to the U.S. president, before he knew of Kennedy’s own concession. When news of Robert Kennedy’s talk with Dobrynin reached the meeting hall, Khrushchev was delighted and likely relieved, for he knew that the removal of the Jupiter missiles symbolized a grudging American acceptance of a parallel between what he had attempted to do in Cuba and what the Eisenhower administration and its successor had sought to achieve in the lands around the Soviet Union. Perhaps sweeter because it had been so unexpected and unnecessary, the concession was for Khrushchev a form of justification.
Khrushchev did not change his dictated letter. Robert Kennedy had asked that the concession be a secret held between the world’s two most powerful leaders, and Khrushchev agreed. His greatest concern was to get the general message that the crisis was over to the U.S. government as quickly as possible, and a radio broadcast would be the best means to do this.
The Cubans had played no role in Khrushchev’s negotiations with Kennedy. In the final days of the crisis Khrushchev had not bothered to confer with Castro, even as he vacillated between feeling he had gained the upper hand and depths of anxiety over the imminent approach of war. Castro later described this lack of consultation and Khrushchev’s sudden decision to remove the ballistic missiles as one of the great “betrayals” of the Cuban Revolution. What most irked Castro was that Khrushchev had been willing to deal away a measure of Cuban sovereignty to save his own skin. The Soviets knew that Castro would not allow inspectors into his country, yet Khrushchev had unilaterally offered Kennedy in his letters of October 26 and October 27 some form of inspection of the missile bases to assure the Americans the weapons were gone. At the October 28 meeting where he assembled the final package to resolve the crisis, Khrushchev discussed the possibility of involving the Red Cross in the inspections without even giving a thought to the possibility that the idea of inspection would be unacceptable to his Cuban ally. This was the kind of brazen disregard of the interests of an ally that Khrushchev had criticized Stalin for, and now he had committed the same sin himself.
Curiously, Khrushchev did find time during the crisis to assuage the concerns of one important ally. Walter Ulbricht apparently was not party to the preparations that had been made for Khrushchev’s November trip to the United Nations and in all likelihood had not been told about Anadyr. Relations with East Germany had gotten frosty as the fall progressed. Once again the East Germans had proposed what the Soviets considered an irresponsible five-year economic plan. In the midst of everything else on October 23, the Kremlin had considered a report on the East German economic situation.87 The story was not unfamiliar. Yet again Ulbricht wanted to buy more abroad and cause the Soviets to sell gold and spend hard currency to make this possible. Khrushchev blamed his ambassador in East Germany, Pervukhin, for the East German unwillingness to see economic reason. Probably worried about what concessions Kennedy might be able to wring out of Khrushchev on Berlin to end the Cuba crisis, Ulbricht had requested a visit with Khrushchev for October 27.88
Agreeing to the request, Khrushchev and quite a few of his Kremlin colleagues met with a large, high-ranking East German delegation, led by Ulbricht. It is unknown what the men said to each other, but Ulbricht left satisfied. Unlike Castro, Ulbricht was able to settle his concerns with Khrushchev face-to-face. With the failure of Khrushchev’s Cuban bid for strategic gains, economic reforms were even more important as a guarantee of East Germany’s future.
KHRUSHCHEV’S AGREEMENT to settle the Cuban crisis was greeted with relief in Washington on October 28. The news had reached the White House by midmorning, East Coast time.89 John Kennedy assumed that it was the Turkish offer that had sealed the agreement. Not wishing to let on that he had made this last-minute concession, the president and the attorney general confined this knowledge to a small group of advisers.
Unaware that the missile gambit had been a crucial element of a larger Kremlin offensive, Kennedy had no idea of the extent of his success in the crisis. Khrushchev’s effort to alter the balance of power in one stroke had failed. He had taken this risk to make future gains in Central Europe and Southeast Asia more than he had done this to protect Fidel Castro. Since the Suez crisis of 1956, Khrushchev had believed that only the projection of nuclear power could bring the political settlement he sought throughout the world. He had harbored no real desire to fight to remove Western troops from West Berlin, to bring Jordan, Iraq, and Syria to the Soviet side or to end U.S. support for the Phoumi Nosavan group in Laos. In each case he had hoped to scare the United States into accepting the Soviet conception of an equitable outcome. After some confusion in January 1962 over when to make his move, by the late spring Khrushchev had decided that this would be the year of what he called the final fight.90
The negotiated settlement of October 28 was not the outcome he had intended. Once the missiles left Cuba, what had he gained from this operation? Was he any closer to strategic parity with the United States? Did he get a disarmament agreement or Kennedy’s acquiescence to a free city of West Berlin? No. What he got was a U.S. promise not to invade Cuba, an invasion Khrushchev had not really expected until at least 1964, and a secret U.S. promise to remove some missiles from Turkey.
The Soviet leader could rejoice in the fact that John Kennedy for a few days had seemed worried. But the U.S. president had not panicked. It was Khrushchev who had been forced to admit to colleagues that his foreign policy initiative had become too risky. Even
ts had confirmed the wisdom of Mikoyan’s concerns in May and his continued caution in October. Khrushchev now better understood that there were limits to how much the Kremlin could control events in a crisis. A disastrous encounter between the Foxtrot submarines and the U.S. Navy had been only narrowly averted. On the tensest day of the crisis, when Moscow was hoping for a diplomatic settlement, a local Soviet commander had shot down an American U-2 over Cuba without authorization.
Although Kennedy worried on October 28 about the political costs of his Jupiter concession if the secret ever got out, it would be Khrushchev who had greater reason to be concerned about the lingering effects of this crisis on his ability to lead. The Cuban missile crisis proved to be a turning point in Khrushchev’s handling of Soviet foreign policy and, as a result, the Cold War.
CHAPTER 20
“LEAVING FEAR ASTERN”
IN THE WAKE of the Cuban missile crisis Nikita Khrushchev would have to rethink his entire approach to contesting U.S. power in the Cold War. November 1962 was supposed to bring an end to the foreign policy reversals that had plagued him since 1958. Instead he faced the challenge of negotiating a dignified retreat from his missile base in Cuba.
The exchange of letters between Kennedy and Khrushchev at the end of October had lowered the temperature considerably, ending the tensest period of the missile crisis, but the agreement between the leaders was incomplete. All that Khrushchev had in return for his promise to withdraw the strategic missiles was what Kennedy had written in his letter of October 27, 1962. “We, on our part, would agree—upon the establishment of adequate arrangements through the United Nations to ensure the carrying out and continuation of these commitments—a) to remove promptly the quarantine measures now in effect and b) to give assurances against an invasion of Cuba.”1 The president’s language was more conditional than Khrushchev would have liked, but he had accepted it. Besides this written promise, Khrushchev had extracted an oral agreement conveyed by Robert Kennedy on October 27 that within four to five months the United States would withdraw the fifteen Jupiter intermediate-range missiles that it had stationed in Turkey earlier in 1962. With the crisis subsiding, the Kremlin wanted to nail down these U.S. commitments.
Khrushchev had no choice but to involve Castro in this diplomacy. Up to now the Soviet leader had excluded the Cubans from the crisis negotiations. But in his letter of October 27 Khrushchev had promised Kennedy “to reach agreement to enable United Nations representatives to verify the dismantling of these means.”2 Cuban approval of some kind of on-site inspection regime would be required to satisfy this promise. While Khrushchev had his own phobias about letting foreign inspectors into the Soviet Union, he believed the Cubans had to accept a violation of their own sovereignty for the sake of a peaceful end to the crisis.
From the Americans, Khrushchev sought a formal pledge not to attack Cuba ever, which could be submitted to the United Nations in the form of a treaty. He also wanted the United States to curtail the high-and low-altitude reconnaissance flights that violated Cuban airspace several times a day. Settling these points held Khrushchev’s attention for the next three weeks.
Neither Castro nor Kennedy made this process easy for the Kremlin. On October 28 Castro publicly announced five demands that the United States had to accept before he would consider the Cuban crisis over: The United States had to end its economic sanctions against Cuba, including the trade embargo; it would have to cease all subversive activities; Washington would have to prevent all “piratical attacks” from the continental United States and Puerto Rico; U.S. planes would have to stop violating Cuban airspace and territorial waters; and the hardest of all, the United States would have to withdraw from its naval base at Guantánamo and cancel its perpetual lease. If these demands were not troubling enough for the Soviets, who had assumed the Cuban leadership would accept the diplomatic settlement arranged by Khrushchev, Castro added that he would not allow UN inspectors into Cuba under any circumstances.
Castro was lashing out at both superpowers. He felt betrayed by Khrushchev and deeply mistrusted Kennedy. Ambassador Alekseyev, who had visited the Cuban leader after the superpower deal was announced on October 28, told Moscow that he had never seen him look so depressed and irritated.3 The Soviet ambassador had the sense that Castro believed that the withdrawal of the Soviet strategic missiles was just the first step and that ultimately Khrushchev would abandon the defense of Cuba. The Cuban feared that despite Kennedy’s promises, the Americans would take advantage of any weakness in the Soviet commitment to Cuba to attack the island. Especially offensive to Castro was the Soviet offer to permit international inspection of the withdrawal of their missiles. Castro believed Khrushchev should never have put that promise in his letters to Kennedy without at least checking with Havana first.
On October 31 Castro told Alekseyev that “it is not that some Cubans cannot understand the Soviet decision to dismantle the missiles, but all Cubans.”4 Meanwhile Moscow was receiving worrisome evidence from Soviet intelligence representatives on the island that this was not an exaggeration, that the anger and suspicion within the regime extended to the Cuban military and intelligence services.5 Without exception Cuban officials were telling the Soviets they had been naive to accept any deal from John Kennedy.
To manage the Cubans, Khrushchev sent Mikoyan, the only Presidium member ever to have visited Cuba, to Havana on November 2. His task was extremely difficult. Somehow he would have to talk Castro down from these demands while enlisting his support for a verifiable agreement with the Americans.
On the day Mikoyan flew to Cuba the U.S. government further complicated the picture for the Soviets. Kennedy sent word to Khrushchev through his UN ambassador, Adlai Stevenson, that the ballistic missiles were not the only weapons that he expected the Soviets to remove from Cuba. When Khrushchev promised on October 27 to withdraw “the means which you regard as offensive,” he had meant only the medium-range ballistic missiles.6 Stevenson explained that his government also considered the Il-28s, called Beagle bombers by NATO, offensive weapons because they were capable of dropping nuclear bombs on southern Florida. The military value of these airplanes, which were not the latest generation of Soviet medium-range bombers, was slight compared with the missiles, but the addition of another weapons system to withdraw complicated Khrushchev’s effort to nail down the final diplomatic settlement. It also seemed a gratuitous effort to magnify his humiliation.
Two days after Kennedy raised the issue of the bombers, Khrushchev tried to discourage the president from pressing too hard for this Soviet concession. This demand, he wrote privately to Kennedy “can lead not to the betterment of our relations but, on the contrary, to their new aggravation.”7 The effort failed. “I assure you,” Kennedy replied on November 6, “that this matter of the Il-28s is not a minor matter for us at all.”8
AS IF AN EMBOLDENED Kennedy and an irritated Castro were not enough of a challenge for the Kremlin in the immediate aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis, the Chinese had decided to make themselves a nuisance. Initially the Chinese had maintained an official silence after the announcement of the Khrushchev-Kennedy deal, though their displeasure was thinly veiled. Chinese publications reported Khrushchev’s offer to dismantle the missiles in small type, while quoting Chinese leaders lavishly praising Castro’s resistance to imperialist forces.9
On October 31, Mao Zedong and the Chinese leadership changed tactics and started using the front page of the chief Communist newspaper, the People’s Daily, to assail Khrushchev for giving in to “the United States’ imperialist attempt to browbeat the people of the world into retreat at the expense of Cuba.”10 According to Beijing, Kennedy’s noninvasion pledge was “nothing but a hoax.” In the days that followed, Chinese newspapers kept up a drum-beat of criticism of Khrushchev’s handling of the crisis, describing it as a betrayal of Marxist-Leninist principles. At the same time, Beijing endorsed Castro’s five demands as the only acceptable bases for ending the crisis.11
T
o further dramatize its opposition to the proposed Cuban settlement, the Mao regime sponsored four days of massive demonstrations in Beijing. Each day tens of thousands people marched to the Cuban Embassy in a show of solidarity.12 By November 6 Chinese newspapers were comparing Khrushchev’s actions to Neville Chamberlain’s efforts to appease Adolf Hitler at Munich. “The attempt to play the Munich scheme against the Cuban people who have already stood on their own feet,” editorialized the People’s Daily, “is doomed to complete failure.”13 When the Soviet ambassador tried to toast Khrushchev on November 7 at a party to celebrate the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, his Chinese guests stayed silent.14 China’s little ally in the Balkans added to the pressure. Albania’s official radio station attacked Khrushchev for “contemporary revisionism” and asserted that communism could not prevail over capitalism “by bargaining and making concessions to imperialism.”15
CASTRO’S INDIGNATION, Chinese criticism, and even new demands from Washington did not shake Khrushchev’s determination to formalize his settlement with Kennedy. In Havana, Mikoyan paid lip service to Castro’s five points and pressed the Cuban leadership to accept some form of inspection. At his first meeting with Castro on November 3, Mikoyan tried to sugarcoat the concession that Moscow wanted from Havana. “What we are speaking of,” he said, “is not a broad inspection, but a verification of the sites known to the Americans due to aerial photography and which have been the locations of the strategic missile launchers.”16 Mikoyan assured Castro that the USSR was not expecting Cuba to accept any permanent or general inspection, something Khrushchev himself would never have accepted on Soviet soil.
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