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

by M. Dobbs

  In the meantime, Vera placed a bomb at the base of the tower. He linked it to a timing device, a pencil-shaped metal stick with an acid interior. The acid would slowly eat away at the metal until it set off an explosion, bringing the tower crashing down, along with the power cable leading to the copper mine. Although the bombs were not specifically intended to kill anybody, destruction of the power line would likely trap hundreds of miners below ground with no easy means of escape. The lack of power would also shut down the pumps that extracted water from the mine, causing serious flooding.

  Their mission almost accomplished, the two saboteurs headed back for the coast. The return trip would be easier as they knew the way and could see clearly where they were going. They had agreed to meet the CIA exfiltration team between October 28 and 30.

  By dawn, they were already well on their way back. The sea sparkled in the distance, across a line of pine-covered hills. Orozco was beginning to experience a sharp pain in his stomach, which made it uncomfortable to walk. It was nothing, he assured his friend.

  8:00 A.M. THURSDAY, OCTOBER 25 (7:00 A.M. HAVANA)

  At the Soviet Embassy in Washington, diplomats and spies were under pressure from Moscow to produce hard information about American invasion plans for Cuba. Agents counted the number of illuminated windows at the White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department, and struck up conversations with journalists in bars and parking lots. Military attaches tried to keep tabs on the movements of U.S. troop units.

  So far, they had little to show for their efforts. Much of the intelligence "information" transmitted to Moscow was culled from the newspapers. Some of it was wrong. A dispatch from Ambassador Dobrynin identified Defense Secretary McNamara as a leader of the hard-line faction on the ExComm, with Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon as a leading opponent of early military action. The reality was the reverse.

  The paucity of accurate intelligence was particularly frustrating to the KGB station chief in Washington, Aleksandr Feklisov. He remembered the glory days during World War II, when Kremlin agents succeeded in penetrating the highest levels of the American government. As a young spy in New York, working under cover as a Soviet vice consul, Feklisov had helped run one of the most successful intelligence operations in history: the penetration of the Manhattan Project and the theft of America's nuclear secrets. His agents had included Julius Rosenberg, who provided Feklisov with a proximity fuse, one of the most prized items of American military technology.

  It had been easy back then. Soviet prestige was high, particularly following the German invasion in June 1941. Many American left-wing intellectuals felt it was their duty to do whatever they could to help the country that was doing most of the fighting against Nazi Germany. Informants walked into the Soviet consulate in New York off the street, offering their services for purely idealistic reasons.

  The Cold War, Khrushchev's revelations about Stalin's crimes, and the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 made life much more difficult for Soviet spies in the United States. They could no longer rely on ideology as the primary inducement for persuading American citizens to cooperate. Money, and in some cases blackmail, had become the KGB's preferred recruiting tools, but they were not nearly as effective as old-fashioned political sympathy.

  The drying up of intelligence sources contributed to the Soviet leaders' many misconceptions about America. When Khrushchev visited the United States in 1959, he was insulted to receive an invitation to spend a couple of days at a place called Camp David with President Eisenhower. None of his American specialists knew anything about Camp David. Khrushchev's immediate reaction was that it must be some kind of internment center "where people who were mistrusted could be kept in quarantine." Considerable effort was required to establish that Camp David was "what we would call a dacha," and that the invitation was an honor, not an insult. In his memoirs, Khrushchev would laugh about the incident, saying it showed "how ignorant we were."

  When Feklisov returned to the United States in 1960 as KGB station chief, or rezident, in Washington, his sources consisted mainly of purveyors of low-level gossip. His agents prowled around the National Press Club, where reporters and diplomats swapped rumors. By keeping their ears open, Feklisov's men were sometimes able to come up with interesting information that had not yet made its way into the newspapers.

  On Wednesday evening, a KGB agent working undercover as a TASS correspondent had picked up a prize morsel of gossip in the club. The barman, a Lithuanian emigre called Johnny Prokov, had overheard a conversation between two reporters for the New York Herald Tribune, Warren Rogers and Robert Donovan. Rogers had been selected as a member of a pool of eight reporters to accompany the Marines in an invasion of Cuba, if and when there was one. He thought action was imminent, and told Donovan, his bureau chief, that "it looks like I'm going." Prokov relayed a garbled version of the exchange to the TASS reporter, who passed it to Feklisov, who passed it to Dobrynin.

  By this time, the information was third or fourth hand, but Soviet officials in Washington were desperate for anything resembling inside intelligence. In order to confirm the tip, Feklisov had another KGB agent "accidentally" bump into Rogers in a parking lot. The agent, whose cover was second secretary in the Soviet Embassy, asked the reporter if Kennedy was serious about attacking Cuba.

  "He sure as hell is," Rogers replied belligerently.

  Later that morning, Rogers received a call from the Soviet Embassy inviting him to lunch with a senior diplomat, Georgi Kornienko. He accepted the invitation, thinking it might lead to a story. Instead, Kornienko pumped him for information. Not knowing what was really going on inside the ExComm, the reporter depicted McNamara and Bobby Kennedy as the main advocates of an invasion. As Kornienko relayed the conversation to his superiors, Rogers stated that the Kennedy administration had already taken a decision in principle "to finish with Castro." U.S. invasion plans were "prepared to the last detail" and could be implemented "at any moment." The only thing holding up an invasion was Khrushchev's "flexible policy." The president needed a pretext for attacking Cuba that would satisfy both the American people and the international community.

  It was the tip the KGB had been waiting for. Both Dobrynin and Feklisov sent urgent telegrams to Moscow recounting the episode, which soon ended up on the desks of Khrushchev and other Soviet leaders. A hurried exchange in D.C.'s National Press Club had been elevated overnight into top secret intelligence information.

  The Matahambre mine resumed operations at dawn. Several hundred miners had descended deep below the surface of the earth in metal elevator cages and were crawling through subterranean tunnels toward the rock face. The machinery was in need of repair ― no new equipment had been imported into Cuba since the revolution ― but the mine still managed to produce around 20,000 tons of copper a year. Much of the output went to the Soviet bloc.

  A supervisor at the Santa Lucia end of the aerial tramway suddenly noticed that something was wrong. Felipe Iglesias had been operating the conveyor system for more than twenty years, from the period when the factory was still under American management. He was watching the conveyor buckets move slowly down from Matahambre when he spotted a strange object attached to the cable. If it went any further, it would get tangled in the machinery.

  "Stop the conveyor," he yelled into the intercom that connected the Santa Lucia terminal with the copper purification plant in Matahambre. "There is something strange on top of one of the buckets."

  "It looks like a bomb," shouted another worker, as he inspected the sticks of dynamite.

  Within minutes, a second bomb was discovered, this time at the Matahambre end of the tramway. Teams of securitymen then walked the six-mile length of the tramway, meeting at the breakover tower. They found the final bomb planted by Orozco and Vera shortly before it was due to explode.

  NOON THURSDAY, OCTOBER 25 (11:00 A.M. HAVANA)

  Lieutenant Gerald Coffee was on his second low-level reconnaissance mission over Cuba. He had taken pictures of the mediu
m-range missile sites near Sagua la Grande. Deep tracks were visible in the mud from the exercise of the previous night. His Crusader jet was headed east toward an intermediate-range missile site at Remedios that was still weeks away from completion when something caught his attention off the left nose of the aircraft.

  About two miles to the north of the missile site was a large military-style camp. Coffee could see rows and rows of tanks and trucks, many of them under camouflage. He had to make a split-second decision. As wingman to a more senior pilot, he was meant to fly in lockstep with the lead plane along a preassigned track. But the target was too tempting to miss. The military camp was unlike any he had previously seen in Cuba. He pulled his steering column to the left, leveled his wings, and began taking pictures. His camera recorded several sharp twists and rolls as he maneuvered for the best position, photographing the sky, horizon, and green cane fields in quick succession.

  The Crusader roared over the camp at nearly 500 knots, too fast for Coffee to get much sense of what he was photographing. He made a hard right, and fell back in behind his lead pilot. The pilots gave each other the thumbs-up sign, switched on their afterburners, and flew back northward across the Florida Straits.

  It would take many weeks for the young Navy lieutenant to realize the significance of what he had just photographed. In due course, a letter of appreciation arrived from the commandant of the Marine Corps commending Coffee's "alertness in a rapidly changing situation." The letter went on to praise "the most important and most timely information for the Amphibious forces which has ever been acquired in the history of this famous Navy-Marine fighting team."

  Coffee did not know it yet, but he had just discovered a new class of Soviet weaponry on Cuba.

  The overflight of the Crusader was merely the latest in a long string of setbacks for Colonel Grigori Kovalenko, commander of the 146th motorized rifle regiment. His unit possessed some of the most destructive weapons in the Soviet army: T-54 tanks, guided antitank missiles, multiple rocket launchers known as Katyushas, and nuclear-tipped Luna missiles. But Kovalenko's men were sick and exhausted. Almost everything that could go wrong had gone wrong.

  Their troubles began on the eighteen-day journey across the Atlantic, when half the soldiers came down with seasickness. Their misery was compounded by being trapped below decks in the boiling heat. After staggering off the boats, they were taken by truck to their deployment area, an abandoned chicken farm. The site was almost completely barren save for a few palm trees, bamboo huts, and a water tower that spewed out a brackish red liquid. Within a few days, soldiers were complaining of dysentery. There were a dozen cases at first, then forty, finally a third of the regiment. It was an epidemic.

  Not only was the water poisonous, there was not enough of it. Accustomed to making do with very little themselves, the Cubans assumed that a single well would provide enough drinking water for four thousand soldiers. But a motorized rifle regiment consumed 100 tons a day. Water was required not just for the men but also for the military equipment. There was insufficient time to dig wells. They would have to move somewhere else.

  It had taken the regiment a week to redeploy, to another desolate piece of land fifty miles to the east, near Remedios. During the move, a car carrying one of Kovalenko's senior officers crashed head-on with a Cuban truck, almost killing the passengers. The conditions at Remedios were not much better than in the first camp. Drinking water was trucked in from a spring fifteen miles away, but at least it was clean. The men cleared the snakes and large boulders out of the undergrowth, and pitched their tents. Then the rains began, drenching everybody and turning the red earth into a thick mud.

  The redeployment was just about complete when Kennedy announced his naval blockade. Kovalenko knew that his regiment was on the front line of a new Cold War crisis, but had difficulty extracting useful information from his superiors. Fortunately, one of his officers was fluent in English. By tuning in to Miami radio stations and the Voice of America, he was able to keep the colonel up to date with the latest news.

  The primary mission of the regiment was to protect the nuclear missile sites at Remedios and Sagua la Grande. Two other motorized rifle regiments had been deployed around Havana to defend the capital and the missile sites in Pinar del Rio Province. A fourth regiment was stationed in Oriente Province, in the east, to stop a breakout from Guantanamo. All the regiments ― with the exception of the one in Oriente ― possessed battlefield nuclear weapons.

  Mounted on a light tank chassis, the Lunas were easily maneuverable. It took about thirty minutes to prepare them for firing, and another sixty minutes to reload. The rockets could deliver a 2-kiloton nuclear warhead over a range of twenty miles, destroying everything within a 1,000-yard radius of the blast and spewing radiation over a much larger area. Exposed American troops targeted by a Luna would have been killed instantly by the heat and the pressure. Troops inside vehicles might survive a few days before dying of radiation.

  Kovalenko controlled two Luna launchers and four nuclear warheads. The Lunas were lined up neatly in the parking lot, alongside the Katyushas and the T-54 tanks, where they were photographed by Lieutenant Coffee.

  Three hundred miles to the east, in the hills above Santiago de Cuba, the capital of Oriente Province, a CIA agent named Carlos Pasqual encoded his latest report in groups of five characters. He pulled his radio set and generator out of their hiding place. Together, they weighed a cumbersome fifty pounds. Making sure that nobody was around, he cranked up the radio set, tuning it to the high-frequency wavelength he used for communicating with headquarters. He tapped a succession of blips and bleeps into the ether and hoped for the best.

  The message Pasqual wanted to convey to his superiors was not to expect much out of him over the next few days. They had been pestering him with requests and questions ever since the discovery of Soviet missiles on Cuba. The Cuban authorities had just announced they were commandeering private vehicles for the duration of the alarma de combate. Moving around the countryside without official permission had become practically impossible.

  The son of a former Cuban air force chief under Batista, Pasqual had left Cuba after the revolution and volunteered his services to the CIA. After being smuggled back onto the island by small boat at the beginning of September 1962, he had made his way to a coffee farm owned by anti-Castro dissidents. From there, he sent dozens of reports to Washington, recording the movements of troop convoys, the unloading of Soviet ships in the port of Santiago, and the construction of rocket bases in the mountains. His most recent report, the previous day, had described the transport of military equipment toward Guantanamo.

  It was nerve-wracking work. A tall man with very pale skin, Pasqual stood out from the black and mulatto peasants who had provided him with a place to stay. Everybody was scared, and he was unsure whom he could trust. A couple of weeks before, a relative of the owner of the farm had shown up unexpectedly, and had begun asking questions about the stranger. Pasqual spent the next few days hiding in the mountains, frightened that the militia were about to call. After that incident, he slept down in the cellar, curling up next to sacks of coffee beans. He made sure to leave the farm well before dawn so that no one would see him.

  Pasqual worked for a spy network code-named AMTORRID, one of two main groups of agents and informers that the CIA had managed to infiltrate into Cuba during recent months. The other network, code-named COBRA, was based in Pinar del Rio Province at the other end of the island. In addition to intelligence-gathering activities, the COBRA team had branched out into small-scale sabotage operations, and had been supplied with 2,000 tons of arms and explosives by the CIA. Its principal agent claimed twenty subagents and several hundred informants and collaborators.

  The CIA's problem in Cuba was the opposite of the KGB's problem in Washington: not too little human intelligence, but too much. In addition to COBRA and AMTORRID, the CIA also received intelligence tips from dozens of disaffected Cubans and refugees arriving in Miami on the
daily Pan Am flight. Reports had been streaming into Washington for months about mysterious tube-shaped objects trundling through obscure Cuban villages on giant trailers. Many of the reports lacked detail: untrained observers could confuse a thirty-foot missile with a sixty-foot missile. Some of the reports were demonstrably false as they described weapons systems that had still not arrived in Cuba at the time they were purportedly seen. There was an improbable Our Man in Havana quality to many of the rumors. Four years earlier, Graham Greene had written a best-selling novel about a vacuum cleaner salesman who was paid large sums of money by British intelligence for drawings of a "rocket-launching pad" in the mountains of Oriente. The "top secret information" turned out to be sketches of the inside of a vacuum cleaner. The movie based on the book was filmed in Havana in 1959 in the months after Castro's takeover.

  As they sorted through a mass of agent and refugee reports ― 882 such reports were disseminated in the month of September alone ― CIA analysts found evidence to support whatever hypothesis was most fashionable at the time. It was difficult to sort out which reports were accurate, which were exaggerated, and which were false. In the words of the CIA official who drafted The President's Intelligence Check List, analysts had "come to view all such reports with a high degree of suspicion." The predominant view in the agency, prior to the U-2 flight of October 14, was that the deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba was far too risky for the Soviets to undertake. A September 19 National Intelligence Estimate concluded magisterially that "the establishment on Cuban soil of Soviet nuclear striking forces which could be used against the U.S. would be incompatible with Soviet policy as we presently estimate it."

  Once the top CIA estimators had formally concluded that the deployment of Soviet nuclear weapons on Cuba was highly improbable, lower-level analysts were reluctant to challenge their opinion, even on the basis of eyewitness reports of missiles being unloaded from Soviet ships. On the night of September 19, just a few hours after the CIA issued its eagerly awaited Intelligence Estimate, a CIA informant was loitering on the dock at Mariel. He observed "large intercontinental rockets more than 20 meters [65 feet] long" being unloaded from a Soviet ship. His report made its way through a chain of agents to Miami and then to Washington, where CIA headquarters added the dismissive comment: "It is more likely that source observed [SAM] missiles being offloaded." In hindsight, the original report was extraordinarily accurate. An R-12 rocket packaged for transport without the nose cone measures sixty-seven feet in length, double the length of a V-75 SAM missile. Eight R-12 missiles had arrived in Mariel on board the Soviet freighter Poltava three days earlier.