A Fiery Peace in a Cold War

by Neil Sheehan

  The genesis of Khrushchev’s Cuban gamble seems to have been a meeting in February 1962 of the Soviet Union’s Defense Council, a gathering that included senior military commanders, leading missile designers like Korolev and Yangel, and members of the Presidium. Khrushchev was informed that it would take a number of years to provide him with a sizable force of reliable and accurate ICBMs. In the meantime, he would have to endure an American opponent in John Kennedy who possessed awesome nuclear superiority. By the end of the forthcoming October, for example, Khrushchev would possess a mere twenty unreliable ICBMs, along with a bomber force of fifty-eight Bison jets, limited to a one-way trip, and seventy-six Tu-95 turboprops, slow planes that were dead pigeons to the American jet interceptors and surface-to-air missiles. In contrast, Kennedy would flaunt ninety-six Atlas ICBMs, fifty-four Titans, ten Minutemen, forty-eight of the Navy’s new Polaris submarine-launched IRBMs hidden on station in the depths, and SAC’s bomber force of 1,741 B-47s, B-58s, and B-52s. Uncounted because of their joint control but also ready were the sixty Thor IRBMs in England, the thirty Jupiters in Italy, and the sixteen in Turkey.

  Khrushchev saw a way around this dilemma. The Soviet Union possessed plenty of well-tested IRBMs. If a substantial number of these were slipped into Cuba, their presence 90 miles from Key West would, as he put it in his memoirs, equalize “what the West likes to call ‘the balance of power.’” Soviet IRBMs this close would effectively neutralize much of SAC; there would be no time to get planes off the ground in the event of an attack. Besides, he had been particularly rankled by the Jupiters in neighboring Turkey ever since their deployment. “The Americans … would learn just what it feels like to have enemy missiles pointing at you; we’d be doing nothing more than giving them a little of their own medicine.” The range of the first-generation IRBM, the R-12, had been extended by 1962 from 1,250 to 1,292 miles and its warhead blast increased from 700 kilotons to the eighty Hiroshimas of a megaton. The R-12 would hold hostage all Eastern cities through Washington to New York, which was 1,290 miles from Cuba, and those as far west as Dallas and Oklahoma City. (During the crisis, the CIA designated the R-12 a medium-range rocket, or MRBM, but rocket historians refer to it as an intermediate-range missile because of its 1,000-mile-plus reach.) The second-generation R-14, at 2,500 miles, would threaten the whole of eastern and much of western Canada and virtually the entire United States out into Montana. The plan was to ship thirty-six R-12s to Cuba with twenty-four launchers for them and twenty-four R-14s with sixteen launchers. (Some of the rockets would be “reloads” for second firings.) The question was whether the missiles could be transported and emplaced in Cuba secretly. Khrushchev planned to complete deploying them on the island in October and then to tell Kennedy they were there after the midterm congressional elections in November, when he assumed the American president would be under less political pressure and more likely to accept the rockets without too much of a fuss. Anastas Mikoyan, like Khrushchev another of Stalin’s henchmen who had survived to be a better man in better days and was now Khrushchev’s closest friend and adviser in the Presidium, urged him to abandon the scheme. It was too dangerous, Mikoyan said. They would get caught in the act and a crisis would ensue. Khrushchev’s foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, who had considerable experience dealing with the Americans, warned him that “putting missiles in Cuba would cause a political explosion in the United States. I am absolutely certain of that.” Khrushchev heeded neither man. He seems to have had no conception that, however uncomfortable Russians might be over hostile missiles in adjacent Turkey, Russian sensitivities about Turkey were mild compared to those of Americans about Cuba and the Caribbean as a whole. Americans regarded the Caribbean as the Romans had regarded the Mediterranean. It was Mare Nostrum, Our Sea. Similarly, Cuba had come to be looked upon as an American possession and treated as American territory after the United States seized it from Spain in 1898. This was why there had been such an uproar when Castro had nationalized the American-owned businesses that virtually monopolized the island’s economy and declared himself a Communist. It was bad enough to have the Red Menace now just across the Florida Straits from Miami. No American president could withstand the political firestorm that would ensue if he acquiesced in the positioning of Russian nuclear missiles on the island.

  73.

  PALM TREE DISGUISES

  At the end of May, a high-level Soviet delegation flew to Cuba on a clandestine visit to obtain Castro’s assent. He had reservations but would not object if the Soviet leaders wanted to “buttress the defensive power of the entire socialist camp.” One member of the delegation was Marshal Sergei Biryuzov, who had succeeded the unfortunate Nedelin as commander of the Strategic Rocket Forces. Attired in civilian clothes and carrying a false passport that identified him as Engineer Petrov, Biryuzov, who, according to Mikoyan, “wasn’t very bright,” scouted the island for likely missile sites. On the delegation’s return to Moscow, he told Khrushchev that there wouldn’t be any problem concealing them from American aerial reconnaissance. The missiles, he said, could be disguised as palm trees. Mikoyan ridiculed Biryuzov’s leafy stratagem. Missile sites are extremely difficult to hide from aerial surveillance. Approach roads have to be cut out of the landscape, more earthmoving and the emplacement of a large concrete slab are required for the launcher, and the site is populated by a shelter tent for the missile, rows of tanker trucks with liquid oxygen and the Russian version of RP-1 rocket fuel, sundry other vehicles and equipment, and electrical cables running here and there. Mikoyan’s assessment of Biryuzov’s powers of intellect may have been correct, or Biryuzov may have decided to tell Khrushchev what Khrushchev wanted to hear. In any case, Khrushchev once more brushed aside Mikoyan’s warning and serious planning for his Cuban adventure began.

  At the time, the Soviet Union lacked an oceangoing fleet like the U.S. Navy, but the best was made of what it had. Between July and October, eighty-five freighters and passenger ships shuttled the thousands of miles, including 150 round-trips, between Soviet ports and Cuba with the missiles and with the men and the panoply of an elaborate task force to protect the rockets. Four motorized rifle regiments were dispatched, each with 2,500 men, thirty-four tanks, and associated arms and transport; three regiments of MK-6 surface-to-air missiles, the weapon that had brought down Francis Gary Powers’s U-2 in 1960, arrived to ring the island with 144 launchers to shield the missile sites against air attack; a regiment of thirty-three helicopters; a squadron of seventeen Il-28 light bombers, seven equipped to drop atomic bombs, an eleven-plane transport and communications squadron, and much else also came. Altogether 41,902 Soviet officers and men were dispatched to Cuba before the crisis broke. The voyages took eighteen to twenty days in the stifling holds of the freighters, the men allowed up on deck only at night in small groups. All thirty-six of the R-12 IRBMs arrived, along with their twenty-four launchers, and the nuclear warheads for them. Just as ominously, so did the tactical nuclear weapons with which Khrushchev armed the task force: two FKR cruise missile regiments wielding thirty-six missiles with a range of one hundred miles and warheads of 5.6 to 12 kilotons, the equivalent of the Hiroshima blast, each capable of wiping out an entire American invasion fleet; twelve Luna missiles with a range of thirty-one miles and a two-kiloton warhead to obliterate a beachhead of landing troops; and eight atomic bombs for the Il-28s. Khrushchev reserved permission to fire the IRBMs to himself, but he gave his commanding general in Cuba, Issa Pliyev, a cavalryman who had served with him during the Second World War, leave to employ the tactical weapons at Pliyev’s discretion against an American invading force.

  It is astounding in retrospect that the movement of so many men and so much armament all the way from Russia to an island in the Caribbean went undetected. One reason was the pathetic state of the CIA spy network in Cuba, if network it can be called. This had already been demonstrated the previous year during the CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs fiasco. The agency had predicted that a revolt would break out in the interio
r of the island as soon as the brigade of anti-Castro Cuban exiles it had trained landed there. Instead, nothing happened inland and all of the exiles were ringed around on the beach and captured by Castro. Since enduring the shame of that failure, John Kennedy and his brother and attorney general, Robert, had been exerting relentless pressure on the agency to do whatever was necessary to eliminate Castro. The Mafia was enlisted to assassinate him and there was a poisoning plot, all to no avail. The Soviets also took stringent security precautions. The officers and men were issued civilian trousers and plaid shirts. The Cuban population, which was not fooled, was told they were agricultural specialists. Radio silence was maintained, not only between Pliyev’s headquarters and Moscow but also between it and units on the island. Messages had to be hand-carried to and from the countryside.

  Another and critical reason for American ignorance was the temporary blinding of aerial reconnaissance. A U-2 on a routine twice-a-month spying mission at the end of August had photographed eight MK-6 surface-to-air missile batteries under construction in western Cuba. The presence of SAMs in Cuba was not in itself alarming. The Soviets had already given the antiaircraft missiles to allies like Nasser’s Egypt, Sukarno’s Indonesia, and Mao’s China. But in early September a U-2 strayed accidentally into Soviet airspace and a second U-2 being flown by a Taiwanese pilot was shot down over China. To avoid another incident, the administration banned U-2 flights over the island for five weeks in September and October. The president; Robert Kennedy; McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser; and a number of others at the top also simply did not believe that Khrushchev would be irrational enough to mount long-range missiles in Cuba.

  74.

  KEEPING THE MILITARY ON THE LEASH

  Finally, Khrushchev got caught. A mounting controversy in Washington over precisely what the Soviets were doing in Cuba had reached the point where the administration had to authorize a resumption of flights by the U-2s, which had just been transferred from CIA control to that of SAC. On Sunday, October 14, a U-2 piloted by Air Force major Richard Heyser made a twelve-minute camera run over western Cuba and the game was up. The 4,000 feet of film his cameras took was delivered the next morning in eight cans to the CIA’s National Photographic Intelligence Center in the top four floors of a nondescript office building in downtown Washington. Every missile, by its measurements and other characteristics and the equipment needed to fire it, makes its own distinct fingerprint on the earth. From previous aerial photos of R-12 sites in Russia, the CIA photo interpreters knew exactly what they were looking at. Kennedy, who had been out of town, got the news on the morning of the 16th, when he was shown the photographs at the White House and they were interpreted for him. “He can’t do that to me!” he exclaimed in his rage at Khrushchev. According to Max Frankel in his first-rate account of the drama, High Noon in the Cold War: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, Robert Kennedy’s reaction was more earthy. “Oh shit! shit! shit! Those sons of bitches Russians.”

  The president quickly got his anger against Khrushchev under control. He was also able to put himself in Khrushchev’s place and see the situation from the Soviet leader’s perspective. In the opening sessions of the ad hoc Executive Committee of the National Security Council, or ExCom as it came to be known, which he convened in secret session, he said it was clear that the sixteen Jupiters in Turkey would have to be one of the bargaining chips in any deal they made with the Soviet dictator to lever his missiles out of Cuba. He refused a unanimous recommendation from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, including his favorite general, Maxwell Taylor of the Army (Kennedy had brought him back on active duty as chairman of the JCS), and initially Robert McNamara as well, for immediate air strikes to take out the missile sites before the IRBMs could be erected on their launchers and nuclear warheads mounted. (McNamara conceded that the planes would miss at least 10 percent of the installations.)

  Kennedy reasoned that as a great power, the Soviet Union could not accept having Russian missile crews killed without retaliating. That retaliation, he feared, would come in a move against isolated and vulnerable West Berlin, which Khrushchev had been repeatedly menacing. Even after the perceived danger of the Soviet missiles grew at midweek as CIA interpreters, going over now constant U-2 photography, detected evidence of sites under construction for the 2,500-mile R-14s, which could reach Canada and virtually the entire continental United States, Kennedy maintained his sangfroid. (As it turned out, the R-14s never got to Cuba. They were still aboard ship hundreds of miles away when the crisis broke.) He decided on a naval blockade to turn around any ship carrying missiles or other military equipment to Cuba. It was to be carefully controlled and selective, referred to as a “quarantine” in public to avoid having to invoke formal blockade rules, and only gradually tightened into a full blockade of the island should Khrushchev not respond. He intended to announce the quarantine in a nationally televised speech the forthcoming Monday, October 22. He would sound as menacing as possible to spook the Russians, threatening ultimate military action if the missiles were not removed, but set no timetable. What he would be setting was a table for a bargain.

  When he met with his military chieftains on Friday to tell them of his decision, the meeting turned into a confrontation. They now wanted to hit the island with 1,000 air strikes by Air Force and Navy jets and to follow up the air assaults with a full-scale invasion by the Army and the Marine Corps. They scoffed at Kennedy’s blockade and negotiations strategy as just “political action” and “talk.” LeMay, who had succeeded to chief of staff after White’s retirement in June 1961, was particularly belligerent. He took a directly opposing position to Kennedy’s reasoning on Berlin. “If we don’t do anything to Cuba,” he said, “then they’re going to push on Berlin and push real hard because they’ve got us on the run.” He accused Kennedy of being another Neville Chamberlain, in short, a moral coward who, by his weakness, would bring on the war he was seeking to avoid. “This blockade and political action, I see leading into war.… It will lead right into war,” LeMay argued. “This is almost as bad as the appeasement [of Hitler] at Munich.” Kennedy responded that if the United States acted precipitately, “we’d be regarded as the trigger-happy Americans who lost Berlin.” LeMay was undeterred. “You’re in a pretty bad fix, Mr. President,” he said as the argument continued. Kennedy asked him to repeat what he had said and seemed amused at LeMay’s description of his predicament.

  The president held fast. Generals and admirals, even those as bullying as LeMay could be, did not intimidate John Kennedy. He had proven his courage in battle as the skipper of a fast torpedo boat in the South Pacific. He was worried about Berlin and he was also worried about inadvertently triggering a chain reaction that would end in nuclear war. He had been reading The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman’s cautionary tale on how the statesmen and generals of Europe had bumbled their way into the First World War, and did not intend to become a central character in The Missiles of October. He had anticipated the reaction of his military leaders. Shortly before the meeting he remarked to his longtime retainer and political aide Kenneth O’Donnell that “these brass hats have one great advantage in their favor. If we listen to them, and do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them that they were wrong.”

  75.

  “USE ’EM OR LOSE ’EM”

  Kennedy was more foresighted than he could know at the time. Had he displayed less strength of character and wisdom in this crisis and given in to his military, the world might well be a different place. The CIA and the military intelligence services believed that there were about 10,000 Russians on the island. They had no idea that the number was virtually four times that. It was assumed that the nuclear warheads for the missiles had arrived with the rockets, but the photo interpreters were unable to determine their location. It turned out that they were sitting in vans parked at the R-12 sites for quick mating to the rockets. No one on the U.S. side suspected the presence of the tactical nuclear weapons
or knew that Khrushchev had given Pliyev authority to fire them at an American invasion force. (The secret would not come out until years later.) On October 18, Khrushchev restricted permission to fire the two-kiloton Lunas to “an extreme situation,” such as when communication with Moscow was impossible, and then, on October 22, the day of Kennedy’s blockade speech, when he had grown more alarmed, he ordered Pliyev not to resort to any nuclear weapons without his personal consent.

  Khrushchev was still thinking in a crack-brained mode. He had committed the incredibly reckless act of placing a Soviet task force armed with nuclear weapons in a position of potentially extreme peril more than 6,500 miles from Moscow, with no hope of support or sustenance if attacked. Had the island been invaded, he would have lost control over the nuclear weapons and everything else he had in Cuba soon after the preliminary air bombardment began. Military communications in the early 1960s were not nearly as dependable as the space satellite relay systems that were to follow. They were mainly reliant on radio and so subject to atmospherics and blackouts. And among the first targets the planes would have struck, in addition to the missile sites, would have been suspected Soviet communications centers. (These can easily be located once they begin to transmit, if they have not already been spotted by the antennas at the sites.) With the horrendous destruction from the bombs of a thousand sorties crashing on his troops and installations, and Air Force and Navy fighter-bombers shooting up every vehicle caught out on a road, Pliyev in turn would probably have lost contact with many or most of his units. In the confusion, subordinate commanders would have been left to make their own decisions.