A Look Over My Shoulder

by Richard Helms

  Chapter 20

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  FACING OFF

  Is it true, Dick?” Bob Kennedy had asked. He spoke before I had got halfway across his expansive office.

  “Yes, Bob, it surer than hell is absolutely true,” I said. It was a quarter past nine o’clock on Tuesday, October 16, 1962, when I came into the attorney general’s office. Kennedy was in shirtsleeves, his suit jacket draped over the back of a leather chair. A new collection of his children’s watercolor paintings was posted along the wall at the side of Bob’s document-littered desk.

  Kennedy got up from the desk and stood for a moment staring out the window. He turned to face me. “Shit,” he said loudly, raising both fists to his chest as if he were about to begin shadow boxing. “Damn it all to hell and back.”

  These were my sentiments exactly. The fact that late on October 15 we had established positive proof that Khrushchev, despite his earlier assurances to President Kennedy, was installing and probably arming medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBM) in Cuba spoke for itself. The essence of this proof was photographs taken by a U-2 aircraft and confirmed by agent observations on the ground. Within the Directorate for Plans, knowledge of the U-2 product was restricted to me, my deputy, Tom Karamessines, and a handful of senior officers.

  Bob and I spent a few minutes sorting out a legal problem that Anatoli Golitsyn, a recent KGB defector, had encountered before Bob had to leave for a meeting of the Executive Committee and briefing on the U-2 data at the White House. EXCOM, as it was called, was the highest-level committee in Washington. Only the President, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy were regular members. At the meeting that morning, Bob told me, the roster would read like a who’s who in the Kennedy administration—Vice President Lyndon Johnson, General Maxwell Taylor, Douglas Dillon, George Ball, U. Alexis Johnson, Chip Bohlen, Ted Sorensen, Roswell Gilpatric, and Paul Nitze. General Carter would represent McCone, who was on his way back from California.

  My immediate business with the attorney general finished, I hurried back to the Agency for an update on the gathering Cuba crisis, and to prepare for the meeting of the Special Group (Augmented) that afternoon. Bob had decided to go ahead with the session rather than risk alerting any outsiders to the likelihood that a crisis was on the boil before the President made a public statement. The only topic on the SPGA agenda was a review of the year’s progress on Operation MONGOOSE. Aside from my preoccupation with the U-2 data and concern for Julia in the New York hospital, there was reason enough not to look forward to the meeting.

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  We had been busting our britches on the MONGOOSE operation, but aside from a marked improvement in intelligence collection—which was a considerable achievement—there was damn-all to show for it. Despite our maximum effort we had not inspired any resistance activity worth the name in Cuba; the—in my opinion, ill-advised—sabotage operations were but pinpricks. The political emigration was less than unified. Propaganda was, at the least, ongoing. It was the ouster of Castro and his unelected government that interested the President; the increase in intelligence was a by-product, no matter how helpful it was to the all-important production of sound National Intelligence Estimates.

  The Agency’s operational arm was stretched taut and thin. Our response to President Kennedy’s demands had already resulted in what must have been the largest peacetime secret intelligence operation in history—some four to five thousand staff and contract personnel, acres of real estate, and a flotilla-size private navy.

  Tales of Soviet weapons being seen on the island were crowding the press and electronic media. Senator Kenneth Keating of New York fueled the President’s blazing frustration by repeatedly asserting on the Senate floor that offensive missiles were arriving in Cuba. Despite direct questions, the senator refused to disclose his alleged sources.

  We had for some time been receiving reports that army personnel, heavy military equipment, and—at least allegedly—missiles of one variety or another were being off-loaded from Soviet ships. Other data indicated military installations were under construction in Cuba. There were so many reports that it was all but impossible to sort the imagined or fabricated information from the valid material. A mass of information came from debriefing refugees at our interrogation center in Opa-locka, northwest of Miami. Some of the data came from observers who had legal and plausible reason to visit the island; other reports originated with agents in place in Cuba. Literally thousands of these reports continued to flash and flicker across the horizon. Were they harmless like heat lightning or high-voltage, potentially lethal lightning bolts? We needed hard, checkable data against which we could test our product.

  As always, agents resident in a denied area present difficult handling problems. Snags that would easily be resolved in an occasional face-to-face meeting were vastly more difficult to untangle in the brief radio messages or even in secret writing communications. In rural areas near the military bases and airfields we were attempting to keep under surveillance, the local people had little daily occasion to write anything, least of all something as taxing as an intelligence report. If we asked too detailed questions in following up on reports from agents in the field or even refugees at the interrogation center, we risked leading our sources, and inadvertently convincing them that they had seen the things we expected them to view. We also chanced the possibility that if our questions were too urgent, a source’s imagination might be roused and his judgment dampened. Others might be moved to tell us what they thought we wanted to hear and, to enhance their reputation—in some cases perhaps income—be moved to fake a few observations. Incoming data had to be checked against every fact at our command.

  I recall a report claiming that underground submarine pens had been constructed at Matanzas. Our analysts checked the geological structure of the shoreline and the crucial depths of the bay. There was water aplenty for an outboard-powered launch, but it was too shallow for even the smallest submarine. Another report alleged that light bombers were being stored in a cave. The analysts pulled our comprehensive speleological surveys of Cuba off the shelf and were able precisely to locate the cave in question. The survey showed that the cave curved sharply a few yards inside the entrance. There was room enough for a Jeep to maneuver, but no way an aircraft might negotiate even the first bend.

  A merchant seaman provided a detailed description of what he thought might be a rounded concrete dome covering missiles. His report came with complete range and compass bearings taken from the pier at which his ship was docked. The analysts checked the sailor’s data. The facts were perfect; the sailor’s attention to detail was an unexpected treasure. It took a map of Havana and a recent city directory to establish the fact that the suspect dome covered a relatively new movie theater.

  John McCone was increasingly sure that unless the President acted promptly, communist control of Cuba would soon reach a level that nothing short of a full-fledged military invasion would remove Castro from office. This was not a view that the President wanted to hear. As far as Kennedy was concerned, it was up to the CIA-sponsored sabotage and propaganda operations, and the indigenous Cuban resistance forces, to inspire open revolt. Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara were uneasy about any dramatic moves against Cuba; both were concerned about possibly dramatic Soviet initiatives in West Berlin, or against the Jupiter medium-range ballistic missiles the United States had earlier installed in Turkey.

  Meanwhile our reports continued to show ships unloading military personnel, crated cargoes, and civilians, said to be “technicians,” at Cuban ports. It was now without question that the Russians had installed surface-to-air missiles in Cuba. Despite this evidence, the consensus of the Soviet specialists in every pertinent Washington office was that the buildup was defensive—the surface-to-air missiles were merely antiaircraft weapons. In the experts’ opinion, Khrushchev had not violated his promise to Kennedy that only defensive weapons would be provided to Ca
stro. There was only one dissenting voice.

  All of the expert opinion notwithstanding, John McCone simply did not believe that Khrushchev would commit the newest version of his highly successful surface-to-air missiles, the SA-2, to Castro unless there was something vital to be protected. As McCone saw it, only the need to protect the medium-range ballistic missile sites would balance this equation. McCone’s deductive logic was one thing, proof positive was another.

  For some time the Agency had been authorized to fly occasional, relatively low-level photoreconnaissance missions as long as the aircraft remained a relatively safe fifteen miles off the Cuban shore. The rationale for this near-crippling caution was that if an aircraft were to be shot down, it could be said that the plane was a bit off course, but still over international waters. At best, the resolution of oblique photographs was far less productive—important targets were often hidden behind mountains or other structures—and much more difficult to interpret than direct, overhead pictures.

  The high-altitude U-2 photography presented no such problems. But each U-2 mission over Cuba had to be authorized by the President. We tried to keep to a monthly schedule for these flights, but cloud cover and occasional equipment problems meant that some flights had to stand down. When this happened, President Kennedy insisted that we wait for the next scheduled mission. We were also enjoined to stay well away from what we called the business end of the island—the western area where the SA-2 surface-to-air missiles were most heavily concentrated.

  After making another strong representation to President Kennedy to remove some of the restraints on operations over Cuba, and to review actions that might be taken before Khrushchev installed missiles in Cuba, McCone left for California. In his absence, General Marshall Carter was in charge.

  Short of an operational windfall in the nature of an extraordinarily well placed agent, our best means of testing the flood of reports was high-altitude photography. As late as September 10, CIA flights were restricted to international waters and the relatively unrewarding Cuban areas less heavily protected by well-emplaced SA-2s.

  From early September our various sources and U.S. Navy observation of the numerous Soviet ships en route to Cuba continued to show military buildup. With strong Pentagon support, General Carter pressed McCone’s request for permission to conduct overflights of the most heavily protected areas of the island. In the White House, the recent loss in China of a U-2 plane flown by Chinese Nationalists and the inadvertent straying of an Air Force manned U-2 over the USSR added a measure of sensitivity to the possible flights over Cuba. To my considerable satisfaction, it was a report from a spy that triggered permission for the U-2 to undertake its history-making mission.

  On September 12 an observer agent, the lowest man in the secret intelligence hierarchy, reported that missiles were being moved into a roughly sketched trapezoid area reaching from San Cristóbal in the southeast to San Diego de los Baños in the southwest, and from Consolacíon del Norte in the northwest and Las Pozas in the northeast. At first the report seemed like another well-meant but not very closely observed collection of bits and pieces. After extensive examination, the agent’s information proved to square with other reports from the area—notably considerable military traffic, and long, canvas-cloaked trucks moving like scythes, toppling telegraph poles along narrow village street corners before disappearing into restricted areas in the nearby countryside. Cuban country roads and the Red Army’s seventy-foot trailer trucks were highly incompatible.

  This was the spur the White House needed, and U-2 overflights of the San Cristóbal area were authorized. It was four days before the weather cooperated, but minutes before midnight, on October 13, a U-2 took off from Edwards Air Force Base in California and headed for San Cristóbal, Cuba. If everything went according to the flight plan, and it was the hurricane season, Major Richard S. Heyser, the pilot, would be some 70,000 feet—roughly fourteen miles—above his target by 7:30 a.m. on October 14. At that altitude, the remarkably high-definition film permitted resolution to some thirty inches—not quite enough to limn a football, as some press accounts have suggested, but quite good enough to spot a Soviet soldier perched on an open privy a discreet two hundred yards from an MRBM site in Cuba.

  For all of its technical marvels, the U-2 was an extremely delicate aircraft—“an eggshell with wings”—and at its best, very difficult to fly. Before qualifying for six months of special U-2 training, a pilot had to have had at least a thousand hours’ flight time in single-engine jet aircraft. Despite its altitude capability, the U-2 was vulnerable, as we had learned over the USSR, to the Soviet SA-2 surface-to-air missile. Turbulence, through which a conventional photoreconnaissance aircraft might pass while merely jostling the pilot, was known to have snapped the wing from a U-2.

  Major Heyser reached the Isle of Pines at 7:31 a.m. EST, a few seconds off schedule. Twelve minutes later, he switched off the cameras and headed for McCoy Air Base in Orlando, Florida. It was, as he put it, a “milk run.” Given the developing crisis, it might also be counted as one of the most significant reconnaissance missions in history.

  In the tradition of a tired pony express rider flinging saddlebags to a colleague on a fresh horse, the film—an entire roll being five thousand feet long—was rushed to a waiting aircraft and hustled to the Naval Photographic Intelligence Center in Suitland, Maryland.

  While the highest level of foreign policy, defense, and intelligence officials—and a relative handful of their most senior staff officers who were cleared for U-2 product—waited for the results of this mission, others continued to deal with the more routine aspects of the developing crisis.

  It was mid-morning on the sixteenth before President Kennedy had his first glimpse of the U-2 photographs. What most of us might have identified as the early digging of a cellar for a private home was in the view of the photo-analysts a part of the unmistakable footprint of an SS-4, medium-range ballistic missile (MRBM) launching site. Later, when the Russians had further developed the launching area, Bob Kennedy remarked that it looked “like a football field badly in need of new turf.”

  Arthur C. Lundahl, whom Dick Bissell had brought into the Agency in 1953 to organize a photographic intelligence center, had begun his work in aerial photography in Alaska during World War II. Art was not only an outstanding scientist, but also had great skill in presenting vastly complicated scientific data to nonspecialists. Standing to one side as the President bent over to study the photographic evidence—prepared in some forty-eight hours of around-the-clock work by the photo center staff—Art answered the President’s first question.

  “Are you sure these are MRBM sites?”

  “Yes, Mr. President,” Lundahl said. “I am as sure of this as a photointerpreter can be of anything.”

  As the briefing continued, Lundahl was able to answer each of the President’s questions. How long will it be before the rockets are ready to fire? (Three days.) This answer gave the President a good idea of how much time he had left to negotiate before possibly taking military action to neutralize the weapons. What is the range of the SS-4? (About one thousand nautical miles.) How accurate are they? (The CEP—circular error of probability—is from a mile to a mile and a half.) Can more than one missile be fired from the same platform? (Two and perhaps three can be fired from one launcher. Refire time is five hours.) How many sites are there? (As of this morning, three sites with four launchers on each have been identified. We think more will be found.) What is the throw weight of the SS-4? (From twenty-five kilotons to two megatons.)

  There was one final glum observation. The U-2 photographs revealed two SS-5 intermediate-range missile sites under construction. These weapons had a range of over two thousand miles, sufficient to reach many major cities in the continental United States, and much of eastern Canada and northern South America.

  Lundahl’s answers were based on the entire spectrum of information available to the Agency—the debriefing of defectors and refugees, communications inte
rcepts, analysis of press and scientific literature, diplomatic reports, overhead photographic reconnaissance, and agents in place in Cuba and the USSR. A more telling example of the interplay between analysis and human and technical sources could hardly be found.

  I am scarcely an impartial observer, but in looking back at the exhausting thirteen days when a single misstep might have led to a nuclear confrontation and possibly war, I confess to a certain pride in the CIA’s operational role. From the Cuban farmer’s first signal to the Agency, to the revolutionary U-2 aircraft and fabulous photographic equipment that Dick Bissell had brought to life, to the CIA agent in Moscow who had access to the innermost secrets of the Soviet nuclear arms and missile programs, CIA had served its purpose.

  The intense intelligence, diplomatic, political, and military activity that followed the briefing of the President have been dissected and analyzed to a fare-thee-well, and the results published in scores of books and articles. Still, it seems to me that one important element in the face-off between the two nuclear powers has been slighted in the retelling. McGeorge Bundy, President Kennedy’s national security advisor, and the one person in the White House who was most directly concerned with the intelligence services, is a case in point.

  Sometime after the October 16 briefing of President Kennedy, Ray Cline (later the CIA deputy director for intelligence) became convinced that the U-2 photographs of the surface-to-surface missiles (SS-4s) at San Cristóbal were the key to the successful resolution of the crisis.

  When the crisis subsided, Ray asked both Bob Kennedy and McGeorge Bundy if they would tell him “how much that single evaluated piece of photographic evidence [the San Cristóbal SS-4 sites] was worth … they each said it fully justified all that CIA had cost the country in all its preceding years.”* The key word in the question Ray posed is “evaluated.” Without the data supplied by Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, code name HERO, an agent in place in Moscow, the photographs could not have been evaluated in detail, and the precise capability of the SS-4 MRBM and other missiles could not have been made known to the President. Nor would the President have known how much time he might have to negotiate before taking military action to destroy the missiles.†