One minute to midnight

by Michael Dobbs

  The USA is on a course for preparing and unleashing the third world war.

  American imperialism is trying to dictate its will to everybody else.

  We protest. All countries have the right to defend themselves and to conclude alliances.

  The USSR is also armed, we protest these piratic actions....

  Let the four submarines continue. The Aleksandrovsk should go to the nearest port.

  Send Castro a telegram.

  We have received Kennedy's letter.

  A crude interference in Cuba's affairs.

  Foreign Ministry officials worked on the draft letters overnight, transforming the premier's excited ramblings into bureaucratic prose. In the meantime, Khrushchev urged his colleagues to sleep in the Kremlin, to avoid giving the impression of undue alarm to foreign correspondents and any "intelligence agents" who might be "prowling around." He himself retired to a sofa in an anteroom of his office. He slept in his clothes. He had heard a story about a French foreign minister who had been "caught literally with his pants down" in the middle of the night during the 1956 Suez crisis. He wanted to avoid a similar indignity. As he later recalled, "I was ready for alarming news to come at any moment, and I wanted to be ready to react immediately."

  When Kennedy and his aides pondered Khrushchev's motives for sending missiles to Cuba, their standard explanation was that he wanted to change the balance of nuclear power. The Soviet Union was at a serious disadvantage in long-range rockets and planes--so-called "strategic" weapons--but had plenty of medium-range ballistic missiles, or MRBMs, targeted on Europe. Redeployed to Cuba, the MRBMs were magically transformed into strategic weapons, capable of hitting the territory of the rival superpower.

  Achieving strategic parity with the United States was certainly an important motivation for Khrushchev, who deeply resented American nuclear superiority. He was eager to get even with the Americans for both political and military reasons. But declassified Soviet records show that his emotions also played an important role in his decision making. Castro and his barbudos had stirred the romanticism of the tired old men in the Kremlin, reminding them that they, too, had once been revolutionaries.

  "He is a genuine revolutionary, completely like us," reported Anastas Mikoyan, after becoming the first Soviet leader to meet with Castro in February 1960. "I felt as though I had returned to my childhood."

  A "heroic man" was how Khrushchev described Castro when they first embraced on September 20, 1960, outside the Theresa Hotel in Harlem. Both leaders were in New York for a United Nations General Assembly meeting, but Castro had left his hotel in midtown to protest the management's "unacceptable cash demands." The six-foot-four Cuban bent down and enveloped the five-foot-three Russian in an effusive bear hug. "He made a deep impression on me," Khrushchev recalled later. Eventually, he would come to love Fidel "like a son."

  The Soviets had never been much interested in Latin America prior to Castro's rise to power. Moscow did not even have an embassy in Havana between 1952 and 1960. Totally unexpected by Soviet ideologists, the Cuban revolution permitted an encircled, economically backward colossus to feel that it could project its power to the very doorstep of the imperialist enemy. In 1960, the KGB began referring to Cuba by the code name AVANPOST, or "bridgehead" into the western hemisphere. From the Soviet point of view, the Cuban revolution was not merely an opportunity to annoy Uncle Sam but proof that the worldwide "correlation of forces" was moving in Moscow's direction.

  The Cubans were well aware of the effect they were having on the Soviets, and used it to their advantage. "Nikita loved Cuba very much," Castro would recall forty years later. "He had a weakness for Cuba, you might say." When Castro wanted to get something out of his Russian patrons, he posed a very simple question: "Are you or are you not revolutionaries?" Put like that, it was hard for Khrushchev to say no.

  Unlike Stalin, Khrushchev saw no limits to the extension of Soviet power and influence. Stalin's foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, had once said that big powers had to "understand that there are limits to everything, otherwise you can choke." But Khrushchev was more of a dreamer than his predecessor. In some ways, his idealism was the mirror image of Kennedy's: the Soviet Union would "pay any price, bear any burden" to defend the gains of socialism around the world. For Khrushchev, Cuba and Castro were as much a symbol of Soviet success as Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin.

  After the failure of the Bay of Pigs, Khrushchev was convinced it was simply a matter of time before the United States again attempted to overthrow Castro. He reasoned that "it would be foolish to expect the inevitable second invasion to be as badly planned and as badly executed as the first." Information was reaching Moscow all the time about American plots against Cuba, both real and imagined. Some of the alarming signals arrived directly from the White House. When Khrushchev's son-in-law, Aleksei Adzhubei, met with Kennedy in January 1962, he was startled to hear the president say that the United States could learn something from the way the Russians had dealt with the unrest in Hungary in 1956. To the suspicious Soviet mind, this could mean only one thing: Washington was preparing to crush the Cuban revolution by force.

  "One thought kept hammering away at my brain: what will happen if we lose Cuba?" Khrushchev would recall in old age. "It would have been a terrible blow to Marxism-Leninism."

  As Khrushchev saw it, sending nuclear missiles to Cuba would enable him to solve many of his problems at once. He would make the island invulnerable to American aggression. He would equalize the balance of power. And he would teach the imperialists a salutary lesson. "It was high time America learned what it feels like to have her own land and her own people threatened," he would write. "We Russians have suffered three wars over the last half century: World War I, the Civil War, and World War II. America has never had to fight a war on her own soil, at least not in the past fifty years."

  In April 1962, Khrushchev met with Malinovsky at his Black Sea retreat. He addressed the defense minister in the formal Russian manner, by name and patronymic. "Rodion Yakovlevich," he asked mischievously. "What if we were to throw a hedgehog down the pants of Uncle Sam?"

  6:40 P.M. MONDAY, OCTOBER 22 (5:40 P.M. HAVANA)

  The NORAD dispersal plan called for the F-106 squadron from the sprawling Selfridge Air Force Base outside Detroit to deploy to little-used Volk Field in Wisconsin. The pilots had practiced the short, thirty-minute hop many times, but never with nuclear weapons on board. Shortly before takeoff, the plan changed. Volk was shrouded in fog. They would fly instead to Hulman Field outside Terre Haute, Indiana.

  There was a last-minute scramble to find the right charts. Then came news that Hulman Field was undergoing repairs, and there was only seven thousand feet of usable asphalt runway. It was tricky, but doable.

  Flying with nukes was a signal to Dan Barry, a twenty-seven-year-old Air Force lieutenant, that "something big was about to happen." He and his fellow pilots knew that the president was scheduled to speak at seven o'clock that evening, but had no idea what to expect. As the six-plane squadron flew southwest across Ohio and Indiana, the pilots scanned the northern sky for incoming Soviet planes and missiles.

  The first five planes landed without incident, avoiding the rocks and debris at the beginning of the runway. The last F-106 was piloted by the flight leader, Captain Darrell Gydesen, known as "Gyd" to his fellow pilots. Just before touching down, he felt a sudden gust of tailwind. He released the drag chute to slow the plane down.

  The pilot chute deployed but failed to blossom properly. The drag chute remained in its canister. It took Gydesen only a fraction of a second to realize that his plane was hurtling at high speed toward the end of a shortened runway with a nuclear warhead in the rear of the missile bay.

  The first information to reach Fidel Castro on the gathering crisis had come from Cuban spies inside the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. Hundreds of Cuban service workers streamed through the Marine Guard checkpoints every day. It was a simple matter for Cuban intelligence to infiltrate its
own agents onto the forty-five-square-mile base. Reports of Marine reinforcements were soon followed by news that women and children were being evacuated.

  When Castro heard that the U.S. president was planning a televised address, probably connected with the situation in Cuba, he decided he could wait no longer. The regular Cuban army was 105,000 strong. By mobilizing the reserves, Castro could triple the size of his armed forces in seventy-two hours. His poorly equipped army might still be no match for the 1st Infantry Division but, with Soviet support, it could certainly make life very unpleasant for a yanqui invading force.

  Even before Castro issued the alarma de combate at 5:40 p.m. Havana time, twenty minutes before Kennedy was due to go on TV, his commanders had already been implementing Operational Directive No. 1. The eight-hundred-mile-long island was divided into three defense zones, as during the Bay of Pigs. Fidel sent his younger brother, Raul, to the eastern end of the island. Ernesto "Che" Guevara, the Argentine-born doctor turned guerrilla leader, took charge of western Pinar del Rio Province. Juan Almeida, the black army chief of staff, commanded the central sector, with his headquarters at Santa Clara. Fidel remained in the capital.

  Soon, militiamen were reporting to their posts all over the island. Artillery batteries took up positions along the Malecon, Havana's north-facing stone seawall. A pair of gunboats moved into the bay. At the university, high on a hill overlooking the Vedado district, known to all as la colina, professors handed out rifles to students who were chanting, "Cuba si, yanqui no." Twenty-year-old Fernando Davalos had just enough time to rush home to collect his uniform, his backpack, a towel, and a couple of cans of condensed milk, before reporting to the University Battalion. His father wanted to know where he was going. He had no idea.

  "The Americans," he said breathlessly. "Turn on the radio. We've been mobilized."

  Thirteen hundred miles away, Captain Gydesen applied the brakes as hard as he could to his runaway plane. As the F-106 screeched down the tarmac, he radioed the control tower that his drag chute had failed and he was "taking the barrier." A controller pushed a button, and webbing flipped up at the end of the runway. A few months earlier, an emergency stopping system had been installed in F-106s. In the event of a landing overshoot, a hook in the bottom of the fuselage latched onto the barrier.

  The landing gear of the F-106 engaged the cable, braking the plane sharply as it overshot the runway and skidded onto a rough blacktop extension. There was a loud popping sound from a bursting tire. The F-106 was still moving forward when it reached the end of the 750-foot overrun.

  As the plane left the overrun, its nosewheel sunk down into the grass, snapping off when it collided with a slab of concrete. The $3.3 million jet slid along on its damaged nosewheel strut for another hundred feet before finally coming to a halt.

  Shaken but happy to have survived, Gydesen climbed out of the cockpit. The F-106, widely considered the most beautiful interceptor ever designed, with its sleek fuselage and swept-back wings, teetered precariously on its nose. The tires were shot, the landing gear was badly dented, and the pitot tube--a pressure-measuring device that sticks out from the front of fighter jets--had broken off. Otherwise, the plane was only lightly damaged.

  The next morning, rescue workers arrived with cranes and heavy tractors to extricate the plane from the soft Indiana clay. The nuclear warhead, miraculously unscathed, was still in the missile bay.

  7:00 P.M. MONDAY, OCTOBER 22

  "Good evening, my fellow citizens."

  Kennedy looked into the camera, his jaw jutting grimly. His face was taut, lacking its frequent puffiness. "This Government"--slight pause--"as promised"--another slight pause--"has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet military buildup on the island of Cuba. Within the past week"--he pronounced the word "past" in a Boston twang, lingering on the vowel--"unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island."

  The Oval Office had become a television studio. Black fabric had been placed over the desk made from the oak timbers of HMS Resolute. Cables crisscrossed the canvas-covered floor. Furniture had been removed to make way for camera equipment, recorders, and a battery of lights. Sound technicians, neatly dressed in suits, knelt in front of the president. A dark board was placed behind him as a backdrop, together with the presidential flag.

  Alerted by hours of excited news flashes, more than 100 million Americans tuned in to the speech, the largest audience for a presidential address up until that time. Although he spoke more slowly and deliberately than usual, Kennedy betrayed none of the doubts and anguish that had been welling up inside him for the past week. His goal was to rally the American people and convey political will to his rival in the Kremlin. The crisis would only end if the Soviet missiles were withdrawn.

  The president expanded the Cold War doctrine of nuclear deterrence to embrace another two dozen countries, in addition to the United States and its traditional NATO allies: "It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union."

  Kennedy was America's first television president. Many thought he owed his razor-thin victory in the 1960 election to the televised debates with his Republican opponent, Richard M. Nixon. He came across as rested and handsome--in contrast to Nixon who sweated profusely and had big bags under his eyes. Soon after taking office, Kennedy allowed television cameras into his weekly press conferences. Some predicted disaster. "The goofiest idea since the hula hoop," said James Reston of The New York Times. But JFK liked being able to communicate directly with the American people over the heads of columnists like Reston. Thanks to a revolutionary communications satellite called Telstar, presidential news conferences could even be aired live in Europe.

  On this occasion, a network of ten private Florida radio stations had been patched together at the last moment to carry the presidential address live to Cuba, along with a simultaneous Spanish translation. Toward the end of the seventeen-minute speech, Kennedy addressed himself directly to "the captive people of Cuba": "Now your leaders are no longer Cuban leaders inspired by Cuban ideals. They are puppets and agents of an international conspiracy which has turned Cuba...into the first Latin American country to become a target for nuclear war...."

  Kennedy's sallow appearance during his big speech had little to do with Cuba. His weight varied sharply according to the medicines he was taking for his numerous ailments, which ranged from Addison's disease to colitis to a venereal infection he had picked up as a teenager that flared up intermittently. Over the weekend, his slender six-foot-one frame had dropped nearly five pounds, to 1671/2 pounds. He was constantly suffering from various aches and pains.

  "Patient too tired to exercise," read the medical notes on the president for October 22. "He had some pain in the left thigh and some tightness in the lower third of hamstrings." This was in addition to chronic pain in his lower back, caused in large part by excessive steroid therapy as a young man. His doctors were constantly arguing with each other over the best course of treatment. Some wanted to shoot him up with even more drugs; others prescribed a regimen of exercise and physical therapy.

  As he emerged from the Oval Office, Kennedy saw a little man waiting by the door. It was Hans Kraus, a New York orthopedic surgeon hired as a consultant by the pro-exercise faction. The former trainer of the Austrian Olympic ski team had flown down from New York, not realizing that he had walked into a major international crisis. He had been seeing the president once or twice a week for the past year, but was becoming exasperated with the court atmosphere at the White House. He wanted everybody to know that he was "ready to quit if not appreciated."

  There were several reasons for Kraus's frustration. He had been treating Kennedy free of charge. His attempts to interest the president in launching a national foundation on physical fitn
ess had received only a tepid response. He had wracked up $2,782.54 in travel expenses, shuttling between New York, Washington, and the Kennedy compound in Palm Beach, for which he had not been reimbursed. Finally, he was dismayed by the feuding between the president's various doctors. He felt it was vitally important to establish a clear chain of medical command. The president was so wrapped up in his speech that he barely recognized the unhappy Austrian. When he figured out who it was, he was apologetic.

  "I'm sorry, doctor. I just don't have the time today."

  The Strategic Air Command (SAC) had gone to Defense (Readiness) Condition Three (DEFCON-3) as the president addressed the nation. Two steps short of nuclear war, DEFCON-3 envisioned the launching of the country's entire nuclear bomber fleet within fifteen minutes of a presidential order. To ensure survivability in the event of a Soviet first strike, the bombers had to be dispersed to airfields all over the country. Even as Kennedy finished speaking, nearly two hundred planes began crisscrossing America with live nuclear weapons on board, headed in many cases for civilian airports.

  Among the units affected by the dispersal order was the 509th Bombardment Wing. Stationed at Pease Air Force Base in New Hampshire, the Wing had an illustrious pedigree. Planes from the 509th had dropped the atomic bomb first on Hiroshima and then on Nagasaki during the dying days of World War II, the first and only time that nuclear weapons had ever been used in combat. Nearly eighty thousand people were killed instantly in Hiroshima, forty thousand in Nagasaki. Almost every building within a two-mile radius of Ground Zero was destroyed. In recognition of its exploits, the Wing was the only Air Force unit authorized to include a mushroom cloud in its insignia.