THE WORLD DID NOT stand still as Khrushchev and Kennedy looked for points of superpower agreement. On February 8, 1963, elements of the Ba’ath Party had overthrown and murdered ‘Abd al-Karim Qasim. The CIA had been scheming to remove Qasim since the late 1950s, and its precise role in orchestrating the events of February 1963 remains murky. “We did not stage this coup…[though] we covered it very well,” recalled James Critchfield, who was running the CIA’s operations in the Middle East at the time.65 But a main Iraqi participant, Ali Saleh Sa’adi, the secretary-general of the Ba’ath Party, described a very different role for U.S. intelligence: “[W]e came to power on a CIA train.”66 Besides using its station in the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad as a point of contact with the leaders of the coup, the CIA apparently operated a secret radio station in Kuwait to send its instructions.67 The CIA certainly had agents among the plotters; however, Abdel Salam Aref, the most active of the lot, who would soon become the Iraqi president, was not among them.68 Whatever the role of the CIA in the coup, it was extremely bloody, and the United States was pleased with the outcome. Qasim, whose lifeless body was dumped into the Tigris, ceased being a threat to American interests in the Middle East.
At first Moscow knew nothing of the new regime’s connections to the United States and held out hope that this political upheaval would not mean a complete loss of its investment in that country. Qasim had not been a perfect client. Although he had gladly accepted an enormous amount of Soviet aid—Iraq was the third-largest recipient of aid after Cuba and Egypt—he had maintained a much tougher line against the Iraqi Communist Party than the Soviets had expected. In April 1960 the Kremlin had sent Mikoyan to Baghdad to remind Qasim that Iraqi Communists were among his strongest supporters. The Iraqi had responded with a barely polite admonition that the Soviet Union should not meddle in Iraqi internal affairs.69 The Kremlin leadership knew that the new government would repair relations with Nasser, but the real question was whether a government that portrayed itself as neutral, nationalist, socialist, and anti-Communist would be any different from the Egypt that had developed good relations with Moscow in 1955. Willing to take a chance, the Soviet Union joined the Western powers in recognizing the new government only days after the coup.70
Within ten days, however, horrific reports reached Moscow that the new regime was violently anti-Communist. With Iraqi tanks rolling through the streets to create panic, the Aref government hunted down the country’s Communists. Seven thousand people, alleged to be Communist, were arrested, and it is estimated that an equal number were killed.71 The Kremlin felt powerless to do anything about the Ba’athist attack. On February 19 the Soviet Red Cross appealed to the International Red Cross to “use its prestige and authority to stop the blood bath.”72 Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich, poet Ilya Ehrenburg, and other members of a Soviet Peace Committee also demanded an international crusade against the killing. At the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow (originally the Freedom University) students protested the action and carried signs denouncing “Fascism in Iraq.” These appeals went unheeded.
It was troubling to Moscow that Egypt said nothing as the Ba’ath Party continued its persecution of Iraqi Communists. On February 23, Iraq accused “some socialist states” of attempting to provoke the Kurdish tribes in northern Iraq to overthrow their regime.73 The next day the Iraqis arrested the first secretary of the Iraqi Communist Party, Husain Ahmad ar-Radi, and two other top leaders, killing a fourth leader who resisted arrest.74 With the Iraqi party decimated and Nasser an apparent accomplice, there seemed to be nothing left of Khrushchev’s Middle East policy.
Khrushchev had not expected the bloodshed in Iraq, and it took some time for the foreign policy debacle there to become apparent to him. He seemed his buoyant self on February 9, when he sat for an interview with the international press baron Roy H. Thomson (later Lord Thomson of Fleet). When Thomson presented Khrushchev with a battery-powered watch for himself and a diamond wristwatch for Mrs. Khrushchev, the Soviet leader joked: “Thank you very much. It looks like some infernal machine that the capitalists have dreamed up to blow up the Communist world. I will tell my wife to try them on first.” Then he added, “The Yugoslavs have a saying that they are all in favor of equality for women, so when they cross a minefield they let the women go first.”75 Privately, however, Khrushchev was sickened by the reports from Iraq. “The Ba’athists borrowed their methods from Hitler,” Khrushchev later told a visiting Egyptian military delegation. “In Iraq they are persecuting not only communists and other progressive elements,” he added, “but even Arab nationalists and peace advocates.” Thinking back to Soviet motives for supporting the fallen Qasim regime, Khrushchev lamented, “we hoped that the revolution would develop in a progressive way.”76
ORDINARILY KHRUSHCHEV responded to major events in the third world by striking out at the United States or the international system in one form or another. In 1956 and again in 1958 he had challenged Anglo-American power in the Middle East to provide some shelter to both the Egyptian and the Iraqi revolutions. In 1960 he had threatened Washington and demanded huge structural changes at the United Nations to ensure the survival of the Castro and Lumumba regimes. In 1962 the U.S. deployment near Laos had added significantly to his sense of encirclement and may have been the ultimate trigger for the decision to put missiles in Cuba. When the Iraqi Revolution turned sour in February 1963, however, Khrushchev did not react with his usual fire. The loss of Iraq and the suspicions Nasser was helping Aref move Iraq away from Moscow might well have provoked an earlier Khrushchev to do something. Instead there was a hint of passive acceptance in the Kremlin.
In the winter and spring of 1963 Khrushchev received reminders at home that it was not the right time to go on the offensive against the United States. In the first months of 1963 there was new evidence that the Soviet economy was even weaker than the Kremlin had been led to expect at the end of 1962. On February 27, in a speech to an audience in Kalinin, a city northwest of Moscow, Khrushchev tried again to prepare the Soviet people for the likelihood that their standard of living would not rise as rapidly as promised. He hinted that the cost of keeping up with the United States in the Cold War was largely to blame and asked that Soviet citizens “give us time” to provide consumer goods.77 In early March the Soviet government published a collection of Khrushchev’s speeches on agriculture that did not include any reference to the catch and surpass campaign of 1957. Having just issued data showing that meat production in 1962 was only 40 percent of what he had called for by the early 1960s, the Kremlin had no desire to remind Soviet citizens of the promises that had been made.78 In mid-March Khrushchev fired his minister of agriculture.
Khrushchev was deeply concerned about the effect of his regime’s inability to satisfy domestic needs. In the first three months of 1963 he gave three major addresses on ideology.79 In openly expressing his concerns about the effect of bourgeois influences on Soviet life, he was certainly speaking to his left-wing critics in Beijing, in Tirana, and elsewhere in the socialist bloc, whom he wanted to reassure that any search for compromise with Washington did not mean a weakening in Communist discipline. But his main focus was at home.
Nothing dramatized this concern as much as the sudden shift in Khrushchev’s position on the space program. Earlier in the year he had indicated to the visiting Roy Thomson that the Soviet Union might be dropping out of the space race. To Thomson’s question about which year the Soviet Union would put a man on the moon, Khrushchev had replied with disarming candor, “Quite sincerely I’d say I don’t know—I don’t want to pose or indulge in empty chatter…. [It is] not imminent. Neither is it the main theme of our life. Let those make haste to get to the moon who lead a bad life on this earth. We have no intentions of doing so.”80 With the Soviet economy in a downward spiral, it made no sense to be pouring money into the moon bid.
In March Khrushchev decided the Soviet people and the socialist bloc needed a psychological lift, whatever the cost. The space program was
an area where the Soviets were equal to the Americans, and in those days of Sino-Soviet tension it was also useful as a way to show up the Chinese. Mao would not have his own space program for some years. “It is not right to stop the construction of the Vostok [the Soviet manned spacecraft],” Khrushchev announced at a Presidium meeting on March 21 before he left for the south.81 He also insisted that the Soviet space program in 1963 include a female astronaut, the first woman to go into space.
YET FOR ALL these troubles at home and the challenge in Iraq, Khrushchev had decided not to undermine his post-Cuban effort to lessen tensions with the United States. In mid-March, as he had promised, the Soviet military withdrew additional troops from Cuba. Khrushchev’s desire to help Kennedy was not the sole reason why these troops were removed. The Cubans had complained about the lack of discipline among some of the men, and incidents of drunkenness had grown to an alarming number.82 But the Soviets understood the benefits for Kennedy and the need to reduce right-wing pressures on him. Recent reports from the KGB conveyed the by now familiar picture of an American president who was being pressured to resume the U.S. crusade to overthrow Castro.83 The Soviets also wanted to ensure that Kennedy would make good on his promise to remove the Jupiter missiles from Turkey.
Later in March Khrushchev’s faith in Kennedy seemed to be rewarded. Since Robert Kennedy made the offer on behalf of his brother in October, the Soviet government had kept a close watch on the status of the Jupiter missiles in Turkey. The KGB had reported in February that the Turkish government strongly opposed the removal of missiles, which were near Izmir.84 Nevertheless, by late March all the missiles had been removed, and the U.S. government informed Moscow that it had fulfilled its obligation. The Turks also made a point of inviting the local Soviet ambassador to visit the abandoned missile bases. “Only goats roamed that vacant land,” Ambassador N. S. Ryzhov later recalled, “and the concrete structures that remained had been taken apart by the local peasants.”85 Ryzhov, who visited the site with the Soviet military attaché, was nevertheless concerned by the presence of some metal rods that had presumably served some purpose at the dismantled U.S. missile base. Upon his return to the Turkish capital that night, he asked the Turkish prime minister if these rods indicated a plan to reintroduce ballistic missiles at a later date. The next day the Turkish government ordered the rods destroyed.86
At the end of March Khrushchev went south to his home at Pitsunda for some rest. Before he left, he prepared something for the Chinese. On March 9 Beijing had finally responded to Khrushchev’s olive branch by suggesting that Khrushchev himself visit Beijing. It would be the Soviet leader’s first visit in four years.87 Khrushchev did not want to go to China, however, although he was prepared to see Mao in Moscow if the Chinese leader would make the trip. Khrushchev instructed his Foreign Ministry to prepare his response to Mao carefully. “Not in a polemical form,” he warned.88 Even in their letter offering a truce, the Chinese had seemed to want to pick a fight over Soviet policy toward Yugoslavia, which Mao considered too permissive of Tito’s violations of Communist orthodoxy. Khrushchev wanted his own letter to remind the Chinese, respectfully, that Moscow viewed Belgrade as an ally and Beijing should accept it.
In his first days at Pitsunda Khrushchev signed off on a new letter to Kennedy. With the Jupiter missiles out of Turkey, Khrushchev decided to apply a little pressure on the U.S. president to pay more attention to the outstanding issues between the two superpowers. This was not a return to the brinkmanship of 1962. He merely wanted to remind Kennedy of the December initiatives and provoke some creativity in Washington. His lack of subtlety meant that the tone of this letter ultimately seemed more threatening than insistent. Despite this, Khrushchev was determined not to have another crisis with Kennedy.
I N THE SPRING OF 1963 the Kennedy administration wondered if the sixty-nine-year-old Khrushchev was on the verge of retirement. A CIA source in Moscow reported in late March that Khrushchev would resign as chairman of the Council of Ministers on his birthday, April 17. “The reason suggested by the source,” explained the report, “was that Khrushchev’s colleagues felt that it would be embarrassing for him to conduct in person the forthcoming talks with the Chinese.”89 The U.S. government considered this information significant enough to share it with the British, who had nothing to add. “We have no certain knowledge of anything that goes on inside the Soviet Praesidium,” a British official noted in a paper that was sent to Prime Minister Macmillan.90
Although CIA analysts in Washington and the diplomatic staff at the embassy in Moscow downplayed the rumors of Khrushchev’s impending retirement, arguing that he was not the type to leave when he was on the defensive, the White House received reports from various additional sources suggesting that “a quiet but deep crisis was under way in the USSR.”91 A high-level paper substantially written by Walt Rostow, chairman of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, looked to a post-Khrushchev Soviet Union. Rostow was not a Soviet expert, however, and the administration’s chief Kremlin watcher was much less optimistic. Llewellyn Thompson worried that in response to Chinese pressure, Khrushchev might embrace a harder line toward the West. “I am becoming increasingly concerned,” Thompson wrote Rusk in the first days of April, “that the Soviets may be tempted to shoot down one of our many flights along the periphery of the Soviet Union.”92
In the midst of this Washington discussion over Khrushchev’s future, Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin unexpectedly requested a private meeting with Robert Kennedy on April 3.93 The same afternoon Dobrynin arrived at the Justice Department with a message from Khrushchev wrapped in a newspaper. Not only was the way it was delivered unusual, but the document itself was twenty-five pages long and lacked the formalities of a letter between leaders. The Russians called it a “talking paper,” and it was clear from the style who had done the talking. As the attorney general read the message, his concern grew. “It was full of poison,” he later confided to his brother.94 The message appeared to be a tough reiteration of Khrushchev’s standard arguments against U.S. positions on the test ban, Berlin, and Cuba. Robert Kennedy was startled at how little the Soviet understanding of the United States had changed in the two years that he and his brother had been dealing with Khrushchev. “It was as if a person had come down from Mars and written this,” Kennedy believed.95
The brothers met privately to discuss this message before consulting the rest of the government. The president saw the document as the clearest sign to date that the Cold War was at a tipping point. As early as November 1962, he had asked his advisers to think through the possibility that because of Sino-Soviet tensions, Khrushchev had a choice to make between confrontation and coexistence with the West. Now Kennedy considered a dramatic gesture to influence Khrushchev’s decision. He plotted with his brother for Robert to take an urgent trip to Moscow and meet Khrushchev. The attorney general’s mission would be to try to correct the Soviet leader’s misunderstanding of the White House’s intentions.96
The mission never happened. When the president raised the idea in discussions with his foreign policy advisers three days later, it found no takers. Rusk and Bundy politely, but firmly, discouraged a special mission by the attorney general. The president tried hard to persuade them that his brother would make a useful emissary but then gave in and approved Rusk’s suggestion that former U.S. Ambassador to the USSR Averell Harriman be the one to make the trip to Moscow. Harriman was expected to leave by the end of the month.97
Norman Cousins, the independent peace activist, was already scheduled to make a return trip to Moscow in a few days, and President Kennedy decided to use him to send a personal message to Khrushchev. “Dean Rusk has already spoken to you of our hope that we can get the test ban unblocked,” the president told Cousins on the eve of his departure.98 Kennedy wanted Khrushchev to understand that the United States would never be willing to accept an agreement that specified only three on-site inspections. “I believe there’s been an honest misunderstanding. See if you can
’t get Premier Khrushchev to accept the fact of an honest misunderstanding.” Cousins left the United States on April 10.
“WHENEVER I HAVE a big egg to hatch,” Khrushchev told his American visitor, “this is where I come.” Khrushchev had brought Cousins to Pitsunda on April 12 after only a night in Moscow. He told Cousins that he had worked on his speech to the Twentieth Party Congress and his proposals for the Twenty-second Party Congress at Pitsunda, and now, he said, “I’ve got something else growing inside me.” He said he planned to announce whatever it was at the party plenum in mid-May.99
“When I come here to hatch eggs, this is all I do.” Khrushchev told Cousins that in the three weeks he had already spent at Pitsunda he had seen only three guests. His life followed a comforting routine: He exercised in the morning, played badminton with his trainer or his doctor, then went for a massage and a long walk and took a swim in the pool. “Then I go out to think for a bit, come back and dictate, then I get tired, go out again, and dictate again.” At the end of the day Khrushchev got another massage.
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