One minute to midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the brink of nuclear war

by Michael Dobbs

  Together with the rest of SAC, the 509th now had the mission of obliterating dozens of military and industrial targets in Russia in the event of nuclear war. Its primary weapon was the venerable swept-wing B-47 Stratojet, an atomic-age workhorse that could be refueled in flight over the Mediterranean. Armed with two nuclear warheads, a single B-47 could deliver hundreds of times the destructive punch of the bombs that fell on Japan.

  It was a short twenty-minute hop from Pease to Logan Airport in Boston. The bombers had to be defueled before takeoff, as it was unsafe to land with a full tank of gas. Like many of his fellow pilots, Captain Ruger Winchester had never landed a B-47 at a busy civilian airport before and was initially confused by the bright lights of the city. It was difficult to pick out the runway, so he made a visual pass the first time around, and had radar guide him in on the second approach.

  Ground Control led the B-47s to an unused taxiway on a distant part of the field. The pilots, nuclear release documents hanging from their necks and .38 revolvers strapped to their belts, were taken to an Air National Guard office that would serve as their quarters. In the meantime, a convoy of service vehicles was driving down from Pease with maintenance crews and military police to guard the nukes.

  Logan was totally unprepared for Operation Red Eagle, and the hugely complicated logistics of hosting a strategic bombing force. Refueling the planes dragged out for fifteen hours because of incompatible equipment. An Air Force lieutenant colonel had to use his personal credit card to purchase fuel for the B-47s from the local Mobil station; other officers scoured local grocery stores for food. Cots and bedding did not show up until 2:00 a.m. Only one outside telephone line was available in the alert facility. Security for the nuclear weapons on board the cocked planes was inadequate. There was even a shortage of vans to transport the alert crews to their planes if the klaxons went off. Eventually, logistics officers hired the necessary vehicles from Hertz and Avis.

  The 509th would have had difficulty living up to its motto--Defensor-Vindex (Defender-Avenger)--had the Soviets attacked that first night. When the pilots inspected their planes the following morning, the wheels of the heavy six-engine bombers had carved deep ruts in the unstressed tarmac. Towtrucks were needed to pull the planes out.

  9:00 P.M. MONDAY, OCTOBER 22 (8:00 P.M. HAVANA)

  Fidel Castro marched into the office of Revolucion less than two hours after Kennedy finished speaking. The newspaper had been the clandestine organ of the guerrilla movement during the uprising against Batista, and was a refuge for Castro at moments of crisis, a place where he could both gather news and make news. Because of its history, Revolucion was permitted a little more independence than other Cuban press organs, much to the irritation of Communist Party bureaucrats surrounding el lider maximo.

  That morning, on its own initiative, Revolucion had come out with a banner headline stripped across the front page:

  Preparations for Yankee aggression

  More Planes and Warships

  Head Toward Florida

  At the time, the headline had seemed alarmist. "Irresponsible," muttered the bureaucrats. But Fidel himself was unperturbed. Quite the opposite, in fact. The prospect of war emboldened and invigorated him. Pacing up and down, he dictated the next day's front page:

  The nation has woken up on a war footing, ready to repulse any attack. Every weapon is in its place, and beside each weapon are the heroic defenders of the Revolution and the Motherland.... The revolutionary leaders, the entire government, are ready to die next to the people. From the length and breadth of the island resounds like thunder, from millions of voices, with more fervor and reason than ever before, the historic and glorious cry,

  PATRIA O MUERTE! VENCEREMOS!

  MOTHERLAND OR DEATH! WE WILL WIN!

  "We shouldn't worry about the Yankees," Castro told his entourage, in a fit of bravado. "They're the ones who should be worried about us."

  Before the revolution, the country estate at El Chico had belonged to a wealthy, pro-Batista newspaper publisher. The compound included a swimming pool, tennis courts, and a dozen bungalows. The most notable building was a two-story villa in the functional, boxlike style of American fifties architecture, with sliding doors leading out to a first-floor porch and a veranda above. Secluded, secure, only twelve miles southwest of Havana, it was an ideal location for Soviet military headquarters.

  Soviet commanders had been gathering all evening at Punto Dos (Punto Uno was reserved for Castro). They had been summoned to El Chico from all over Cuba to attend a previously scheduled meeting of the Soviet Military Council, but the session kept on getting postponed. Colonels and majors from missile regiments and antiaircraft batteries waited impatiently in the conference room exchanging rumors as generals met behind closed doors.

  Finally, General of the Army Issa Pliyev appeared, looking tired and ill. A fifty-eight-year-old cavalryman from Ossetia in the Caucasus Mountains, he had distinguished himself in World War II, leading the world's last great cavalry charge, against the Japanese in Manchuria. He had also demonstrated his loyalty to Khrushchev, commanding troops that put down food riots in the streets of Novocherkassk in southern Russia, a few months earlier. But he knew virtually nothing about missiles, and many of his subordinates had trouble understanding why he had been selected to command Operation Anadyr. Junior officers privately made fun of his misuse of military terminology. He would talk about "squadrons," as if he was still leading men on horseback, when he meant "batteries." He was known as an officer of the old school, who loved to quote from the Russian classics.

  Pliyev had accepted the Cuba post reluctantly, out of a sense of duty. He had protested vehemently when told he would have to adopt a pseudonym, Pavlov, for security reasons. Plagued with gallbladder and kidney problems, he was a sick man when he flew into Havana in July 1962 aboard a giant Tu-114 belonging to the Soviet airline Aeroflot. The tropical climate did not agree with him. His gallstones worsened and he spent much of his time in bed. By the end of September, he was in intense pain and on the critical list. Some of the other generals proposed sending the patient back to Moscow, but the commander refused to leave. Gradually, his condition improved. One of the Soviet Union's top urologists arrived in Havana in mid-October to treat Pliyev, just as the United States learned of the existence of the missile sites.

  The general explained the situation quickly. The Americans had imposed a naval blockade; he was declaring a full combat alert; everybody must return to their regiments immediately to repel a possible American paratroop drop.

  As the commanders left El Chico for the nighttime journey back to their regiments, the roads were already full of trucks and buses transporting Cuban reservists to their posts. There were checkpoints everywhere, but the companeros sovieticos were waved through to shouts of "Viva Cuba, Viva la Union Sovietica."

  "Cuba si, yanqui no," the militiamen chanted. "Patria o muerte."

  The whole country was suddenly on a war footing. As news spread of Kennedy's speech and the mobilization of the Cuban armed forces, bewildered Soviet soldiers realized that they might soon be at war with the United States over a thin slither of land on the opposite side of the world to their homeland.

  3:00 A.M. TUESDAY, OCTOBER 23 (10:00 A.M. MOSCOW)

  Forbidden by Khrushchev to leave the Kremlin, Soviet leaders spent an uncomfortable night in their offices on couches and chairs. They met again at 10:00 a.m. to approve the documents drafted overnight by Foreign Ministry officials, including the official Soviet government statement. Orders had already gone out, starting at 6:00 a.m., to sixteen Soviet ships to return home. The major piece of unfinished business was what to do with the four Foxtrot submarines.

  The submarines were still three days' sailing time from Cuba. They were scattered across the ocean, but the leading sub was nearing the Turks and Caicos Islands, at the entrance to the Caribbean. Anastas Mikoyan, the most cautious member of the Presidium, wanted to hold the submarines back. He feared their presence in Cuban water
s would only increase the risk of a confrontation between the U.S. and Soviet navies. If they continued their journey to Cuba, it was likely they would be detected by American warships. Malinovsky argued that the Foxtrots should proceed on course to the Cuban port of Mariel, where they were meant to set up a submarine base. Several Presidium members supported the minister of defense. Khrushchev let the debate swirl around him. He could not make up his mind.

  The argument was finally resolved by the head of the Soviet navy, Admiral Sergei Gorshkov. He was not present at the overnight Presidium meeting, but was invited to address a session later in the day. It was difficult to fault his expertise. Gorshkov had been personally selected by Khrushchev to create a modern navy capable of projecting Soviet power to the borders of America from what had previously been a largely defensive coastal force. He had joined the navy at the age of seventeen and became admiral during World War II at the age of thirty-one. Now fifty-two, he enjoyed a reputation for both dynamism and professionalism. He was known as a hard taskmaster.

  The admiral laid his naval charts out on the Presidium's baize-covered table. He pointed out the positions of the four Foxtrots, between 300 and 800 miles from Cuba. He then noted the chokepoints on the sea-lanes to the Caribbean. The direct routes to Cuba from the Atlantic all passed through a 600-mile chain of islands stretching in a southeasterly direction from the Bahamas to the Turks and Caicos. The widest passage through the archipelago measured only forty miles. The only way to avoid this thicket of islands was to skirt the eastern tip of Grand Turk Island, toward Haiti and the Dominican Republic, adding at least two days to the journey.

  Gorshkov sided with Mikoyan. He explained that the Americans controlled the narrow sea passages with submarine location equipment, and it was impossible to pass through them without being detected. He agreed that the submarines should be held back two or three days' sailing time from Cuba. In notes dictated shortly after the crisis, Mikoyan recalled that Malinovsky was "unable to object" to the navy chief's presentation. The admiral had performed "a very useful service": He had shown the defense minister to be "incompetent."

  Mikoyan breathed a sigh of relief. He congratulated himself on averting an immediate superpower confrontation. But the respite proved temporary. The U.S. Navy was already bearing down on the Soviet submarines.

  There was one more piece of urgent business falling to the KGB secret police. For the past year, a Soviet military intelligence officer named Colonel Oleg Penkovsky had been providing top secret documents to his British and American handlers. Among the documents now in the hands of the CIA was the technical manual for the R-12 missile system, together with the layout of a typical missile site and detailed descriptions of the various readiness levels. Penkovsky had been under suspicion for weeks, but the KGB delayed moving against him because it wanted to smash the entire spy ring.

  With the Cold War on the verge of turning hot, Penkovsky could not be permitted to feed any more information to the Americans. Plain-clothes agents burst into his apartment on the Moscow River and arrested him without a struggle. Because of the importance of the case, the head of the KGB, Vladimir Semichastny, decided that he would take personal charge of the interrogation. He ordered his men to bring the traitor to his third-floor corner office in the Lubyanka. They sat him down at the other end of a long conference table.

  Fearing torture or worse, Penkovsky immediately offered to cooperate with the KGB "in the interests of the motherland."

  Semichastny looked at him with distaste. "Tell me what harm you have inflicted on our country. Describe it all in detail, with the most pertinent facts."

  CHAPTER THREE

  Cubans

  6:45 A.M. TUESDAY, OCTOBER 23 (5:45 A.M. HAVANA)

  A week after the discovery of the Soviet missiles, CIA analysts were still unable to answer the president's most urgent question: where are the nuclear warheads? They had reexamined all the U-2 pictures to look for telltale signs of a nuclear storage site, such as extra security fencing and antiaircraft protection. Radiation detection devices were being supplied to U.S. ships enforcing the blockade to try to determine whether nuclear warheads were being smuggled into Cuba.

  The photo interpreters had identified several possible storage sites, including an abandoned molasses factory protected by an unusual system of double fencing. At several missile sites, construction was proceeding rapidly on bunkers made out of prefabricated aluminum arches, similar to nuclear storage facilities in the Soviet Union. Despite these promising leads, there was no firm evidence of the presence of nuclear warheads on the island.

  In fact, the Soviet nuclear arsenal on Cuba far exceeded the worst nightmares of anyone in Washington. It included not only the big ballistic missiles targeted on the United States but an array of smaller weapons that could wipe out an invading army or navy. There were nukes for short-range cruise missiles, nukes for Ilyushin-28 bombers, and nukes for tactical rockets known as Lunas.

  An initial shipment of ninety Soviet nuclear warheads had arrived in the port of Mariel on October 4, on board the Indigirka, a German-built freighter designed for transporting frozen fish. That shipment had included thirty-six 1-megaton warheads for the medium-range R-12 missiles, thirty-six 14-kiloton warheads for the cruise missiles, twelve 2-kiloton warheads for the Lunas, and six 12-kiloton atomic bombs for the IL-28s. The Aleksandrovsk was carrying another sixty-eight nukes: an additional forty-four cruise missile warheads, plus twenty-four 1-megaton warheads for the intermediate-range R-14 missiles. (A megaton is the equivalent of 1 million tons of TNT; a kiloton, 1,000 tons. The bomb that destroyed Hiroshima was around 15 kilotons.)

  For the Soviet soldiers and technicians responsible for this huge nuclear stockpile, the assignment was like nothing they had previously experienced. Back home, strict regulations governed the transportation and storage of nuclear weapons. Warheads were usually moved from one secure location to another by special train, with elaborate precautions taken to ensure the correct temperature and humidity. On Cuba, many of these rules were simply impractical. The transportation system was rudimentary and there were no climate-controlled storage facilities. Nuclear weapons had to be dragged in and out of caves on rollers and hauled up winding mountain roads in convoys of vans and lorries. Improvisation was the order of the day.

  Lieutenant Colonel Valentin Anastasiev was in charge of the six gravity bombs for the IL-28 airplanes, a plutonium-type implosion device similar to the "Fat Man" bomb dropped on Nagasaki in August 1945. When he arrived in Mariel with the Indigirka, he was told that a suitable storage place had still not been found for his weapons, nicknamed "Tatyanas" after the wife of one of the bomb engineers. The Tatyanas were an afterthought on Khrushchev's part. He had taken the decision to send them on September 7, at a time when he was worried that the United States might be preparing to invade Cuba. Although the IL-28s could reach Florida, their main function was to destroy U.S. warships and troop concentrations.

  Anastasiev was ordered to unload the Tatyanas from the Indigirka and take them to an abandoned military barracks ten miles down the coast toward the west, in the opposite direction from Havana. When he got there, he was shocked. The property was only partially fenced. It was isolated but, apart from a Cuban artillery post down the road, there was little security. The bombs, which were packed in big metal crates, were placed in a ramshackle shed, locked with a padlock and guarded by a single Soviet soldier.

  The Soviet technicians were assigned rooms in the single-story barracks, not far from a seaside cottage that had once belonged to Batista. The nights were stifling. To get some fresh air, they hooked a boat propeller up to an engine, and placed it near the window. The breeze brought some relief, but the motor made a terrible racket, and everybody had trouble sleeping.

  Cuba might be a tropical paradise--"the most beautiful land that human eyes have ever seen," in the words of Christopher Columbus--but for the average Russian soldier it was a strange, even terrifying place, full of wild animals, deadly grasses a
nd insects, and poisoned water supplies. One of Anastasiev's colleagues drowned after being attacked by a stingray.

  One day, to distract themselves, the Soviet guards captured a giant barracuda. They kept the fish in Batista's swimming pool, with a rope attached to its belly. When they were bored, they tortured and teased the animal, using the rope to yank it around the swimming pool as it bared its teeth helplessly. It was a "juvenile" form of relaxation, Anastasiev thought, but better than fighting the much bigger predator ninety miles away.

  Despite controlling an arsenal capable of killing millions of people, Anastasiev felt enormously vulnerable. If the Americans knew where the nuclear warheads were stored, they would go to extreme lengths to capture one. Armed only with a pistol, Anastasiev lived in constant fear of a U.S. commando raid or an attack by anti-Castro rebels.

  Ironically, the absence of security fences and armed guards proved to be the ideal camouflage for the Tatyanas. The Americans never did discover where they were hidden.

  Like the Indigirka, the Aleksandrovsk was loaded with nuclear weapons at a submarine support base in the Kola inlet of the Barents Sea. By crossing the Arctic rather than the Black Sea or the Baltic, the two ships were able to avoid the chokepoints of the Bosphorus and the Skagerrak Strait between Denmark and Sweden, both of which were closely monitored by NATO.