Night Fighter

by Hamilton, William H. ; Sasser, Charles W. ;

  I flew into Amsterdam that morning and held a return ticket for the evening. This was my first foray into the “secret war” of the spy game. Seemed simple enough.

  “It’s not cloak-and-dagger,” Shackley agreed. “Do exactly what you’re supposed to do, then hop the next plane home. Anybody can do it. Rather, anybody we trust can do it.”

  “So you needed a dummy, is that what you’re saying?”

  Shackley grinned in that twisted-lip smirk of his. “Call it a decoy.”

  He said the contact in Holland was apprehensive about rendezvousing with his customary handlers and demanded a new face. I was nothing, I supposed, if not a new face. I wondered if I might not actually be a decoy used to confuse Soviet counterintelligence while the real mission took place elsewhere. I didn’t know whether to be offended or not.

  I wore unpressed slacks and a short leather jacket and carried a box underneath my arm containing a pair of souvenir wooden shoes I’d purchased from a specific shop in Dam Square. The shoe box was a signal to my unknown contact that I was who I was supposed to be.

  I checked my watch. Two thirty-five p.m. I paused in the street, inconspicuously, I hoped, to light a cigarette. I glanced casually about for anyone who looked more suspicious than I felt. Which was probably impossible.

  I felt as though someone were watching me. Perhaps with a silenced weapon and a license to kill.

  Christ! I had been reading too many James Bond thrillers.

  The park bench was exactly where it was supposed to be: next to the sidewalk between the flat fronts of fourteenth-century Dutch architecture and the green-brown water canal where used condoms floated. Two bicycles, one red and the other blue, were chained together to a lamppost next to the canal, also exactly where they were supposed to be.

  Other bicycles up and down the street were double-chained to fixtures to keep potheads from stealing them. The street was beginning to crowd up with single men, mostly sex tourists, I assumed, pervs like me frequenting the sex shops and girly shows that operated between coffee shops that openly sold marijuana. Prostitutes, even this early in the day, displayed their wares behind plate glass windows—“kamers”—where red lights glimmered in highlights on their near-naked bodies. I wondered what twisted sense of humor prompted Shackley, and perhaps the DCI, to send a “newby” to this part of Amsterdam.

  Two elderly men occupied my designated bench nibbling pastries from a common bag while pigeons pecked up crumbs dropped at their feet. They weren’t supposed to be here. They weren’t part of my prescribed scenario.

  Between two thirty and three local time, I was told.

  I dared not stand there on the street with my face hanging out. I eased into the nearest coffee shop, where I ordered a coffee and found a table near the window where I could keep an eye on the park bench while I sipped my drink with forced nonchalance.

  What happened if those old farts caused me to miss my contact time? Perspiration erupted through my skin. Maybe this wasn’t cloak-and-dagger, but it was close enough for me. I was an amateur at this stuff.

  At two fifty I had to make my move before it was too late. I called the waitress over. After determining that she spoke English, I pointed at the two old men on my park bench and offered her a handful of guilders.

  “Will you please give this to those old guys and tell them someone’s buying them a dinner?” I said. “There’s also something in it for you. Tell them there are tickets for the show down at The Pink Pussy if they’ll come on in here and eat right now.”

  I peeled off some more guilders and left them on the table.

  The waitress went out to the bench and bent over the two old men. The geriatrics sprang up like they’d been hot-wired. A pigeon fluttered down to search for crumbs. I picked up my coffee and made for the bench in an unhurried hurry before someone else claimed it.

  The whole thing appeared rather sloppy. But maybe that was the way this game was played.

  I sat down and placed the wooden shoes in their box next to me. A watery sun broke through cloud cover. I sipped coffee and smoked another cigarette as the long and harrowing minutes dragged by. People walked past; no one paid attention to me. Even the pigeons flew off for more productive territory.

  Presently, a shortish man in an overcoat and mustache walked up and sat down on the bench next to me. He carried a box of wooden shoes identical to mine. He placed it on the bench between us, next to my box.

  The stranger smoked a cigarette. He gazed out over the canal. Then, without saying a word, without so much as looking in my direction—and I dared not look at him—he got up and left, leaving his box behind and taking mine with him.

  It was that simple and undramatic. I got out of town as fast as I could get to the airport. I relaxed only when my airliner touched down on U.S. soil.

  Over a year would pass before I learned the full story of Soviet Colonel Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky and the role I may have played with him in the Cuban affair.

  Penkovsky was a colonel with Soviet military intelligence who fought in World War II and became disillusioned with communism afterward. His CIA defector’s account revealed how he approached American students on the Moskvoretsky Bridge in Moscow in July 1960 and surreptitiously handed them a package without revealing his identity. The package contained contact information along with secret Soviet military data that only a Soviet insider could have accessed.

  The CIA delayed contacting him since they suspected their agents were under constant surveillance and that this Penkovsky, whoever he was, might be setting a trap. Discouraged, Penkovsky arranged a meeting with British spy Grenville Wynne during an authorized visit he made to London in 1961. Wynne subsequently became one of Penkovsky’s couriers—and it was likely Wynne who arranged the secret assignation in Amsterdam in which I participated.

  Penkovsky supplied a tremendous amount of intel to his handlers during the eighteen months in which he was active. Most significant was recent information about Soviet plans, descriptions of nuclear missile launch sites, and data on the Soviet nuclear arsenal. It seemed this arsenal was much smaller than previously assumed and that the fueling and guidance systems for their ICBMs might not be fully functional.

  Premier Khrushchev stood on weaker ground than most of the world knew. Information supplied by the Russian colonel may have reduced pressure on Kennedy to launch an invasion of Castro’s island and instead select an alternative and saner method of confronting Khrushchev. I never learned whether the box of wooden shoes I brought back from the Netherlands, obtained from whomever I encountered that day, was crucial to all this or not. And, naturally, I never asked; I had no need to know. I was the spy who stayed out in the cold.

  Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, the mole planted deep inside the Kremlin, was exposed and apprehended by the KGB in October 1962, the same day John F. Kennedy addressed the nation about the presence of Russian missiles off American shores.

  Although I had never met Penkovsky that I knew of, I was deeply saddened when I learned later of his execution. Another old Cold Warrior bit the dust.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  LIGHTS IN THE MASSIVE Pentagon building finally dimmed in the predawn. My eyes burned from lack of sleep as I stood only half-seeing at a window at the end of the corridor. Below in the circle drive a group of high-ranking military officers climbed into a staff car to be driven off. Two armed Marines watched from a respectful distance. To my surprise, my lips began moving in rote memory of “The Hollow Men,” a poem by T. S. Eliot, which concluded with: “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.”

  I hadn’t been home at all for the last three nights, since I had to be available to answer questions about the Navy’s unconventional capabilities through its amphibious force SEALs and UDTs. I snatched quick naps now and then on the sofa in my office with my legs dangling over the end arm. My dress blues were wrinkled and beginning to smell as I went about in a haze of disbelief, of near-shock at how rapidly things were unfolding.
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br />   Days and nights ran together into weary footfalls echoing along the corridors underneath the rotunda. Members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, heads of the various military departments and intelligence services, presidential advisors, national security representatives—CNO Admiral George Anderson, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, General Maxwell Taylor, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, once or twice even the president himself—all wore stunned looks on their faces.

  Uniformed Marines stood guard at locked doors behind which meetings buzzed day and night like green flies around a carcass.

  Mary called me on the phone. “I’m frightened,” she said. I imagined her and her poor little teenaged daughter huddling pale and bug-eyed on our sofa. “Is it true what I’m hearing on the TV? Do you think God is going to destroy us?”

  I was tired, so damned tired. “I think we’ll destroy ourselves first.”

  Great consolation, Hamilton!

  Day by day I watched as the world hung on the brink and two headstrong, contentious, and powerful leaders butted heads with the lives of millions at stake.

  On October 15, 1962, DCI John McCone notified National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy that U-2 intelligence and photos supplied by the Pinlon penetration of the bay at Havana had confirmed missile presence and construction to accommodate as many as forty Soviet ICBMs, each with a range of over a thousand miles. They could be expected to annihilate eighty million Americans within the first few minutes if released against the United States.

  Bundy briefed Defense Secretary McNamara at midnight. Together, they briefed the president at daybreak. The time had come for Kennedy to make good his promise that he would act “if Cuba should possess a capacity to carry out offensive actions against the United States.”

  At 6:30 p.m. on October 16, the president began formulating a response to Khrushchev’s blatant aggression by convening the nine members of the National Security Council and other key advisors. At the same time, he and his brother Robert established personal contact with Premier Khrushchev and Andrei Gromyko, Soviet minister of foreign affairs, in efforts to stem the tide of an impending clash.

  Four days later, after it became clear that diplomacy would not work, Kennedy placed U.S. armed forces around the world on full alert. Missile crews stood with fingers inches away from nuclear buttons. Troops moved into Florida and the southern United States. The Navy deployed 180 warships into the Caribbean. SAC—Strategic Air Command—dispersed its aircraft onto civilian airports around the nation to reduce their vulnerability. B-52 bombers loaded with nuclear weapons patrolled the skies; as soon as one plane landed for refueling, another immediately took its place. Air Defense Command redeployed nuclear-armed interceptors and B-52s within striking distance of the Soviet Union while nuclear submarines prowled coastal oceans within missile range of Moscow. The crisis was so real, the threat so imminent, that many minor political types in D.C. loaded up their families, abandoned ship, and fled north to Canada.

  Naval special warfare was assigned a major role to help put an end to this nasty business once and for all in the event the U.S. decided to invade Cuba. I received secret orders through the CNO for SEAL Teams One and Two to muster their combined 120 men in Key West. Their mission once “go” came down was to capture and hold Bahia del Mariel at Havana, keep it open in advance of an anticipated U.S. invasion.

  I offered to lead the operation, but CNO Anderson quashed it: “You’re more useful here.” As an alternative, I put Boehm in charge of the Key West mission. After all, he knew the lay of the land, having already sneaked into the bay area with John the Spook to take pictures of missiles arriving. Boehm and I, along with team commanders Callahan and Del Guidice, devised a two-pronged attack to seize the port if it became necessary. Part of the SEAL force would parachute onto the heights above the seaport near the Cuban military barracks, secure the surrounding terrain and the harbor, and seize any ships at the piers to prevent their being sunk at the mouth of the harbor to block it.

  At the same time, the rest of the SEALs would launch sixteen-foot gunboats from Florida, each armed with machine guns and 3.5-inch rocket launchers, to take up positions off the coast to defend the harbor against Soviet Komar patrol boats and waterborne security forces.

  On October 21, U.S. top advisors scrapped invasion plans and determined they had two options remaining: either air strikes against the Cuban missile bases or a naval blockade. Kennedy selected the blockade as the least risky and announced to the world that all shipping as of this date would be blocked from Cuban ports.

  Khrushchev received an “Armageddon” dispatch from Castro urging the use of nuclear force, no matter how “hard and terrible the solution.” Cuba, he noted, was willing to sacrifice itself in the cause of an international communist future. I always knew commies were nuts.

  Cuban defense minister Che Guevara took a more optimistic tack. While predicting that “direct aggression against Cuba would mean nuclear war,” he concluded with, “I have no doubt (America) would lose such a war.”

  President Kennedy took to the airwaves on October 22 to inform people of the crisis:

  “Let no one doubt that this is a difficult and dangerous effort on which we have set out,” he announced. “No one can foresee what course it will take or what costs and casualties will be incurred. Many months of sacrifice and self-discipline lie ahead, months in which both our patience and our will will be tried, months in which many threats and denunciations will keep us aware of our dangers. But the greatest danger of all would be to do nothing. … The cost of freedom is always high—but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender or submission.”

  The countdown to Armageddon continued. I still napped nights in the Pentagon, if I slept at all.

  On October 24, Pope John XXIII sent a public message to the Soviet embassy in Rome: “We beg all governments not to remain deaf to this cry of humanity. That they do all that is in their power to save peace.”

  That same evening, Khrushchev sent a telegram to Kennedy warning that “outright piracy” by the U.S. would lead to war.

  On October 25, the Chinese People’s Army promised that “650,000 Chinese men and women are standing by the Cuban people.”

  The situation intensified through events that seemed random and unplanned. On October 27, a Soviet surface-to-air (SAM) missile fired in Cuba took down an American U-2 piloted by Air Force Major Rudolf Anderson, killing him. Shortly thereafter, several U.S. Navy RF-8A Crusaders on a low-level photo-recon mission over Cuba took anti-aircraft fire.

  Patrolling off Russia’s east coast, a U.S. U-2 spy plane ventured over Soviet airspace in an unauthorized ninety-minute overflight. The Soviets responded by scrambling MiG fighters from Wrangell Island. Americans countered with F-102 fighters armed with air-to-air missiles.

  “What hope there is,” Robert Kennedy declared at an ongoing session in the Chiefs of Staff conference room, “rests on whether Khrushchev retains his course for the next few days.”

  His tie was loose and he was in his shirtsleeves. Sweat dropped from his forehead in beads.

  “We don’t have much hope,” he said. “We expect a military confrontation by as early as tomorrow.”

  The Russian tanker Grozny was about six hundred miles out and steaming toward Havana. Earlier, fourteen Soviet ships presumably carrying offensive weapons turned back rather than test the blockade. SecDef McNamara thought Grozny was approaching in order to challenge America’s resolve.

  “It has to be intercepted,” McNamara said. “We can’t back down now.”

  “Black Saturday” continued to unfold into an even blacker Sunday. A Soviet submarine at depth approached the blockade line armed with a nuclear-tipped torpedo and orders to use it if attacked. U.S. Navy destroyers dropped signaling depth charges on it; the very small hand-grenade-sized explosions were used only as warning shots.

  The sub rested underwater, surrounded by American
warships and running out of air. Captain Valentin Savitsky ordered his boat’s torpedo be made combat ready. That set off a heated debate between Savitsky and his two junior officers. The captain finally relented and saw the wisdom of backing down and pulling back.

  The Caribbean remained only minutes away from ignition as the Kennedys and McNamara on one side and Khrushchev and Gromyko on the other pursued discussions throughout the night to resolve the crisis. I finally called Mary.

  “Look,” I said. “Don’t ask any questions. Pack your bags, and you and your daughter get ready to leave when I give you the word.”

  I owed her that much.

  “Bill—?” She sounded frightened.

  “That’s all I can tell you. Just do as I say.”

  By this time I knew that one careless move was enough to set off the shot heard ’round the world. Only it wouldn’t be just a ball from a musket this time. I was beginning to lose hope for a solution outside nuclear war.

  I spoke with Lieutenant Boehm in Key West. His SEAL force was prepared to go in the event it was needed. Airplanes and gunboats stood by.

  “What’s happening in Washington, skipper?” he asked.

  An information blackout kept most units in the dark while still on alert.

  “I can’t tell you anything yet, Roy.”

  “Our SEALs have signed and initialized their last wills and testaments,” he said.

  “Roger that, Roy. Uh—”

  “I understand, sir.”

  The countdown was into the hours now instead of days. Shortly after midnight that fateful Sunday, the U.S. informed NATO that “the situation is growing shorter. … The United States may find it necessary within a very short time in its interest and that of its fellow nations in the Western Hemisphere to take whatever military action that may be necessary.”

  I swigged coffee and waited for the showdown. Silence hung over the Pentagon now like that of a wake at a funeral home. The important men were silent as well. They strode the corridors like ghosts and whispered together in shadows. Waiting. Like me.