One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War

by M. Dobbs

  The Aleksandrovsk kept radio silence most of the way across the Atlantic, avoiding unwelcome attention. Communications with Moscow were handled by her escort ship, the Almetyevsk. The CIA located the Aleksandrovsk on October 19, four days out from Cuba, but listed her simply as a "dry cargo" ship of no particular significance.

  Like the Indigirka, the Aleksandrovsk had been scheduled to dock at Mariel. But she was nearly two hundred miles away from Mariel in the predawn hours of October 23 when she received Khrushchev's order to make for "the nearest port."

  The nearest port was La Isabela, an isolated, hurricane-prone village on Cuba's northern coast.

  Surrounded by salt marshes and mangrove swamp, La Isabela was a strange place to hide an enormously powerful nuclear arsenal, even temporarily. It was stuck out on a lonely peninsula, ten miles from the nearest town. La Isabela had enjoyed an economic boom during the early part of the century, thanks to a railroad connecting the port to the sugar plantations of central Cuba. Foreign ships unloaded machinery and wood, and took onboard vast quantities of sugar. But the port lost much of its importance with the decline in foreign trade after the revolution. Goats roamed the streets, which were lined mainly by single-story wooden shacks with tiled roofs.

  Because of its isolation, La Isabela had become a favorite place for armed raids by anti-Castro guerrillas, operating out of Florida and Puerto Rico. The sabotage operations approved by JFK on October 16 included "an underwater demolition attack by two Cuban frogmen against shipping and port facilities at La Isabela." The previous week, members of the insurgent group Alpha 66 had attacked the town after failing to place a magnetic bomb on the hull of a Soviet ship. The raiders later boasted that they had "bombed a railroad warehouse and shot twenty-two persons, including five Soviet Bloc personnel." They retreated after exchanging gunfire with Cuban militiamen.

  The Aleksandrovsk and the Almetyevsk sailed into a bay protected by sandy keys, reaching La Isabela at 5:45 a.m. Nuclear storage experts and KGB security units rushed to the scene as soon as they heard the news. Knowing that the Kremlin was concerned about the vessel's fate, the Soviet ambassador in Havana, Aleksandr Alekseev, used KGB channels to report the safe arrival of "the ship Aleksandrovsk… adjusted for thermonuclear arms."

  General Anatoly Gribkov, the Soviet General Staff's representative in Havana, went to La Isabela to greet the ship. "So you've brought us a lot of potatoes and flour," he joked to the captain.

  "I don't know what I brought," the captain replied, unsure who knew about his top secret cargo.

  "Don't worry. I know what you brought."

  There was little point unloading the twenty-four R-14 warheads. The intermediate-range missiles were still at sea and unlikely to reach Cuba because of the blockade. The warheads would be more secure if they remained in the air-conditioned hold of the Aleksandrovsk. The forty-four tactical warheads, however, would be unloaded and taken by armed convoy to two cruise missile regiments at opposite ends of the island, one in Oriente Province, the other in Pinar del Rio.

  The port soon became a hub of activity. Gunboats patrolled the entrance to the harbor. Frogmen constantly checked the hull of the Aleksandrovsk for mines. The nuclear warheads were unloaded at night. Floodlights lit up the wharf as the ship's cranes yanked the shiny steel containers, one by one, out of the hold and deposited them onto the dock. Nuclear safety officers held their breath nervously as the fissile material hovered precariously above the ship, aware that an accident could lead to the detonation of a huge nuclear arsenal.

  As with the atomic bombs, the best security for the latest batch of nuclear warheads was the incongruity of their location. Mariel had attracted some attention from the CIA photo interpreters, but nobody in Washington thought of La Isabela as a possible nuclear storage site. By October 23, the White House had already forgotten about the plan for an "underwater demolition attack" approved by Kennedy a week earlier.

  12:05 P.M. TUESDAY, OCTOBER 23 (11:05 A.M. HAVANA)

  If President Kennedy was going to make the case that Soviet missiles on Cuba were a menace to the entire world, he needed better pictures. Up until now, American intelligence analysts had been relying on blurry images captured by U-2 spy planes. The blown-up photographs had provided the first definitive proof of Soviet medium-range missiles in Cuba, but they were difficult for nonexperts to interpret.

  The first U-2 mission had been flown by Major Richard Heyser on the morning of Sunday, October 14. His flight route had been carefully planned to investigate reports of missile-related activity in a trapezoid-shaped area of western Cuba near the town of San Cristobal. CIA analysts had struggled for weeks to make sense of conflicting accounts of long, canvas-covered tubes rumbling through obscure villages and fincas as Cuban security forces closed off large tracts of countryside. Heyser took his photos from an altitude of seventy thousand feet.

  Now the Americans were back, barely above treetop level.

  The six RF-8 Crusader jets of Light Photographic Squadron No. 62 took off from the naval air station at Key West and headed south over the Straits of Florida. To avoid appearing on Cuban or Soviet radar screens, they skimmed over the ocean, flying so low that the spray from the waves sometimes splashed against the fuselage. They flew in pairs, a lead pilot accompanied by a wingman half a mile behind and slightly to his right. When they reached the Cuban coastline, the planes climbed to around five hundred feet and peeled off in three different directions.

  The squadron commander, William Ecker, flew directly over a SAM site near Mariel and headed southwest across the Sierra del Rosario Mountains toward San Cristobal MRBM Site No. One with his wingman, Bruce Wilhelmy. (The CIA had named four missile sites after the town of San Cristobal, but this particular one was closer to the village of San Diego de los Banos, twenty miles to the west.) James Kauflin and John Hewitt made for the SAM sites and military airfields around Havana. Tad Riley and Gerald Coffee turned eastward toward central Cuba and the missile sites around Sagua la Grande.

  Like the other missile encampments, the San Diego site was tucked away behind the mountains. Ecker made his approach from the east, sticking close to the pine-covered ridge line on his right. Wilhelmy kept a hundred feet behind him, a little to his left, closer to the open plain. When Ecker spotted the target, he popped up to one thousand feet and leveled off. One thousand feet was the ideal altitude for taking low-level reconnaissance pictures. Lower altitudes produced fuzzy photographs with insufficient overlap between the negatives; higher altitudes resulted in too much overlap and loss of detail.

  To save their limited supply of film, the pilots waited until the last moment to switch on the cameras. There were six in all: a large forward-firing camera beneath the cockpit, three smaller cameras mounted at different angles for horizon-to-horizon pictures, a vertical camera further back, and a tail camera for sideways shots.

  The two Crusaders flew over the palm trees at nearly 500 knots, giving the pilots a ten-second glimpse of the sprawling missile site. Their cameras clicked away furiously, shooting roughly four frames a second, one frame for every seventy yards traveled. The forward camera produced the most useful photographs, six-by-six-inch negatives that combined panoramic views of the countryside and details of missile launchers, trucks, and even individual soldiers. The vertical cameras recorded the most detail, a thin 150-yard wide chronicle of everything directly beneath the two planes.

  The missile erectors photographed by Heyser nine days earlier were shrouded in canvas, with cables leading to a command post in the woods. The missiles themselves were in long tents, several hundred yards from the erectors. Fuel tank trailers were stationed nearby. Young men stood by some of the trucks, seemingly undisturbed by the roar of jets overhead. After photographing the missile encampment to his left, Ecker flew directly over a large, hangarlike building being constructed out of white prefabricated slabs, which stood out against the predominantly green background. Workers were crawling across the roof of the building, hammering the slabs into
place. Photo interpreters would later identify the unfinished structure as a bunker for nuclear warheads.

  Banking away from the missile site, the Crusaders headed back to Florida, landing at the naval air station at Jacksonville. Technicians removed the film canisters from the bomb bays and rushed them to the photo lab. After each mission, an enlisted man stenciled a drawing of a dead chicken onto the fuselage, a sarcastic reference to Castro's September 1960 visit to the United Nations, when the Cuban delegation cooked chickens in their hotel rooms. "Chalk up another chicken" would soon become the ritual cry of pilots returning from low-level reconnaissance missions over Cuba.

  Commander Ecker flew on to Washington, where he was summoned, still in his flight suit, to brief the Joint Chiefs of Staff in their Pentagon conference room. Curtis LeMay was unhappy that the Air Force had been upstaged by the Navy, which was equipped with better cameras and generally considered to be better at low-level reconnaissance. When Ecker apologized for his rough appearance, the Air Force chief removed his cigar and scowled at him. "You're a pilot, damn it, you're meant to be sweaty."

  Fernando Davalos, the Havana University student mobilized the previous night, spotted the jets as his military convoy headed west, toward San Cristobal. It was a gorgeous morning, and the sun glinted off the wings of the planes, temporarily blinding him. He thought the planes must be Cuban, flying into a nearby air base.

  Valentin Polkovnikov had a similar reaction. The Soviet missile forces lieutenant was standing at a checkpoint at the San Diego site when he saw a plane with a white star emblazoned on its fuselage flash overhead. He knew that the Cuban air force used the white star emblem. The star was an American emblem as well, of course, but it was hard to imagine the imperialists being so brazen.

  It did not take long for phones to ring, and for higher-ups to demand greater "vigilance." Surprise quickly turned to shame. There was a huge psychological difference between high-level and low-level flights. For most Cubans, the U-2s were merely dots in the sky, distant and impersonal. The Crusaders were a national humiliation. It was as if the Americans were taking a sadistic delight in flying over Cuba whenever they wanted. Some Cubans saw ― or thought they saw ― the yanqui pilots rock their wings in derisory greeting.

  At the Soviet air force base at Santa Clara, MiG-21 pilots also expressed frustration about the overflights. "Why can't we retaliate?" complained one pilot. "Why are we stuck here like sitting ducks?" The generals pleaded for patience. They had orders not to fire. For the moment.

  There seemed little doubt that the Americans could bomb the missile sites whenever they wanted. It was practically impossible to disguise sixty-seven-foot-long objects. They could be covered with canvas and palm fronds, but the shape was still visible. Before deploying the missiles, aides had assured Khrushchev that they could be hidden among the palm trees. What a joke, thought Anatoly Gribkov, the General Staff representative. "Only someone with no military background, and no understanding of the paraphernalia that accompanied the rockets themselves, could have reached such a conclusion."

  The most Soviet commanders on Cuba could do was order a crash program to bring all the missiles to combat readiness as quickly as possible. Soviet soldiers were accustomed to Stakhanovite labor campaigns, organized bursts of mass enthusiasm designed to "fulfill and overfulfill the plan." Fortunately, the R-12 regiments were almost at full strength. By October 23, 42,822 Soviet soldiers had arrived in Cuba ― out of a planned deployment of around 45,000.

  Overnight, the missile sites swarmed with laborers. It took one regiment three and a half hours to erect the first semicircular beam for a nuclear warhead shelter. The pace picked up, and the entire shelter ― forty beams in all ― was completed in thirty-two hours. The shelters were designed to withstand a blast of 140 pounds per square inch.

  The Cuban topsoil was so rocky that much of the digging had to be done by hand. Touring the missile sites, General Gribkov was shocked to see soldiers using pickaxes and shovels to clear land that resisted the efforts of bulldozers and tractors. He noted bitterly that the Soviet Union had shipped "some of the most sophisticated military technology of the age" to Cuba, but remained "shackled" to the Russian soldier's proverb: "One sapper, one axe, one day, one stump."

  In the afternoon, the weather changed abruptly, and a cold north wind began to blow. The wind sent waves crashing across the Malecon in Havana, drenching marching militiamen with plumes of powdery spray. Soldiers were already erecting antiaircraft guns outside the venerable Hotel Nacional, where Lucky Luciano had once held summit meetings with other mafia bosses and luminaries from Winston Churchill to Errol Flynn had sipped daiquiris.

  All day, little groups of people gathered on the stone walls of Havana's seafront boulevard, gazing expectantly northward as they scanned the horizon for the silhouettes of American warships. Curtains of wind and the rain crashed down along the coast, emphasizing the island's isolation. Following Kennedy's quarantine speech and Castro's mobilization order, the island was effectively sealed shut. Only official vehicles were permitted on the main roads. Civilian air traffic had been suspended indefinitely, including the daily Pan American flight between Havana and Miami.

  For months, the Cuban middle classes had been lining up at Havana Airport to board the Pan Am plane, and make a new life for themselves in America. Dubbed "the ninety milers," the refugees were willing to abandon everything ― homes, cars, jobs, even their families ― to escape the revolution. Now even this lifeline had been severed, leaving opponents of the regime with a stifling sense of claustrophobia.

  "Other people are deciding my life, and there's nothing I can do," the Cuban intellectual Edmundo Desnoes would later write in Memories of Underdevelopment, a novel set against the background of the Cuban missile crisis. "This island is a trap."

  But most Cubans seemed unperturbed by the country's isolation. Overnight, tens of thousands of posters had appeared on the streets of Havana and other Cuban cities, showing a hand clutching a machine gun. A LAS ARMAS, the slogan read, in large white letters ― TO ARMS.

  "The poster ― one color, three words, one gesture ― summed up the instantaneous reaction of the Cuban people," wrote a sympathetic Argentinean eyewitness, Adolfo Gilly. "Cuba was one man and his rifle."

  FIDEL HABLARA HOY AL PUEBLO, blared the headline in Revolucion that morning. FIDEL WILL SPEAK TO THE PEOPLE TODAY.

  7:06 P.M. TUESDAY, OCTOBER 23

  The flashbulbs popped in the Oval Office as Kennedy signed the two-page proclamation authorizing the U.S. Navy to intercept, and if necessary "take into custody," Soviet ships bound for Cuba with "offensive weapons." He wrote his full name ― John Fitzgerald Kennedy ― with a smooth flourish. The quarantine would come into force at 10:00 a.m. Washington time the following day. To project a sense of international legality, Kennedy had delayed issuing the edict until his diplomats secured a 19 to 0 vote of approval from the Organization of American States (OAS).

  Seated behind the Resolute desk, a white handkerchief jutting out of his breast pocket, with the Stars and Stripes behind him, he was the image of presidential determination. But that was not how he felt. He had been questioning his advisers all day about what would happen when U.S. warships came head-to-head with Soviet vessels, and was disturbed by the thought of everything that could go wrong. If the U.S. Navy tried to board a Soviet ship and the Russians fired back, the result would likely be "quite a slaughter."

  Dean Rusk had mentioned the "baby food" scenario a few moments earlier. A Soviet ship comes along and refuses to stop. The Americans use force to board it, but a public relations disaster ensues when all they find is a shipment of baby food.

  "We shoot three nurses!" mused McGeorge Bundy.

  "They're going to keep going," the president reasoned. "And we're going to try to shoot the rudder off, or the boiler. And then we're going to try to board it. And they're going to fire a gun, then machine guns. And we're going to have one hell of a time getting aboard that thing…. You may have t
o sink it rather than just take it."

  "They might give orders to blow it up or something," his brother interjected.

  "It's this baby food thing that worries me," fretted Robert McNamara.

  An even bigger worry was Soviet submarines, reported to be tracking at least two of the missile-carrying ships. An aircraft carrier, the USS Enterprise, was in the vicinity. Kennedy wondered if that was wise. "We don't want to lose a carrier right away."

  After signing the proclamation, Jack met with Bobby in the Cabinet Room. With no advisers around, the two brothers were much more open about revealing their true thoughts. The president was irritated with his wife for organizing a formal dinner party that evening with the Maharaja of Jaipur, an unwanted distraction from the coming showdown with Khrushchev. For a brief moment, it seemed as if he might be having second thoughts, but he pushed them aside.

  "It looks like it's going to be real mean, doesn't it?" he told his brother. "But on the other hand, there's really no choice. If they get this mean on this one ― Jesus Christ! What are they going to fuck up next?"

  "No, there wasn't any choice," Bobby agreed. "I mean you woulda…you woulda been impeached."

  "Well, that's what I think. I woulda been impeached."

  Four blocks away from the White House, Soviet diplomats were hosting a caviar and vodka reception in their embassy, a farewell party for a departing naval attache. Guests crowded around anyone in a military uniform, demanding Moscow's reaction to the blockade. "I fought in three wars already and I am looking forward to fighting in the next," blustered the military attache, Lieutenant General Vladimir Dubovik, wiping his perspiring hands with a handkerchief. "Our ships will sail through."