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

by Michael Dobbs

  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.

  It was not just CIA analysts who mistrusted reports of Soviet nuclear missiles until they were confirmed by overhead photography. Other experienced observers, along with the entire Western diplomatic corps in Cuba, were also skeptical. Britain's Man in Havana, Herbert Marchant, would later describe how he had picked up numerous rumors about "giant missiles, each one longer than a cricket pitch," being shipped to Cuba from the Soviet Union in the summer and early fall of 1962. He had dismissed the stories as "a wildly improbable sequel" to Greene's popular novel.

  One of the rare dissenters from the conventional wisdom was CIA director John McCone, a hawkish Republican. McCone could not understand why the Soviets had stationed surface-to-air missiles all around the island unless they had something very valuable to hide. The purpose of the SAM sites was obviously to discourage the United States from sending U-2s over Cuba, he reasoned. Vacationing in the South of France with his new wife, he sent a stream of worried messages back to Washington questioning the official CIA estimate and speculating about the deployment of Soviet medium-range missiles. The messages became known as the "honeymoon cables."

  As he tapped out his reports to Washington, Pasqual was unaware of the debate raging in the CIA about the value of human intelligence, or "Humint" as it was known in the trade. Recently, his AMTORRID network had picked up information about missile-related activity around the town of Mayari Arriba, in the Sierra del Cristal Mountains. Just two days earlier, on October 23, an AMTORRID message described a "convoy of 42 vehicles including seven missile carriers" heading up a newly built road to Mayari. There were also reports of "construction of underground installations" in the area.

  The analysts back in Washington were too preoccupied with figuring out what was happening in the confirmed missile sites in western Cuba to pay much attention to what was going on in an obscure part of Oriente. They were unaware of the nuclear menace hanging over the Guantanamo naval base.

  Western diplomats based in Santiago de Cuba had also taken note of a new road into the mountains and the frantic efforts to complete it. Driving through the area on the way to Guantanamo, the British consul noticed a "wide, unpaved, new road running North, curving over a low hill and disappearing from view." Cuban militiamen were dug in behind trees at the top of the hill, guarding the entrance to the road. Neither the consul nor any other foreigner had much idea what lay up the road.

  Somewhat belatedly, U.S. intelligence had managed to ferret out many of the most powerful Soviet weapons in Cuba, including the R-12 medium-range missiles, the Ilyushin-28 bombers, the short-range Lunas, and the SAM antiaircraft missile network. But there was much that the Americans had been unable to find. They suspected that the Soviets had nuclear warheads in Cuba, but did not know where they were stored. They had grossly underestimated the numbers of Soviet troops. And they had absolutely no idea about the weapons system that was key to Moscow's plans for defending the island against a U.S. invasion. The story of the nuclear-tipped cruise missiles would remain a secret for forty years and is being told in detail here for the first time.

  Had the Western diplomats been able to travel across the rolling hills past Mayari Arriba, they would have eventually come across a cruise missile base. The missiles were stored at a military barracks tucked away in the mountains. They looked like miniature MiG jets, about twenty feet long and three feet wide, with a stubby nose and folding wings. Some were still in their wooden crates; others were hidden under canvas in fields near the motor park.

  The warheads for the missiles were located a few hundred yards away from the barracks, in concrete vaults previously used for storing artillery shells. Each warhead weighed about seven hundred pounds and contained a fourteen-kiloton nuclear charge, roughly the power of the Hiroshima bomb. The vaults were hot and humid, not at all suitable for storing nuclear warheads. But the ever resourceful Cubans had a solution for that problem. They scoured Santiago for old American air conditioners, ripping them out of the numerous brothels that had been closed down in the aftermath of the revolution. Before hooking the equipment up to Soviet army generators, Soviet technicians had to adapt the electric circuits from the American standard of sixty cycles per second to the Russian standard of fifty cycles.

  Known by the Russian acronym FKR--frontovaya krylataya raketa, or "front-line winged rocket"--the cruise missiles were the descendants of the German buzz bombs that terrorized London during World War II. Nicknamed "flying bombs" or "doodlebugs" by the British, the German V-1 missiles were essentially unpiloted aircraft that dropped out of the sky when their fuel ran out. The Soviet trailer-launched miss
iles could hit targets up to 110 miles away, destroying everything within a radius of six thousand feet. A single FKR missile could devastate a U.S. aircraft carrier group or a major military base.

  The Soviets had brought two FKR regiments to Cuba. Each regiment controlled forty nuclear warheads and eight cruise missile launchers. One regiment was stationed in western Cuba, not far from Mariel, near a town called Guerra. Its mission was to defend the vulnerable stretch of coastline west and east of Havana, where the Americans were expected to come ashore. The other regiment, headquartered at Mayari, had been ordered to get ready "to deliver a blow to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay." The plans for GITMO's destruction were closely coordinated with Raul Castro.

  Raul was the quiet brother. For thirty-one years, he had lived in the shadow of his charismatic older sibling. He was small and scrawny, and had never been able to grow more than a few wisps of the beard that was almost part of the uniform of Cuban revolutionaries. He described Fidel as "the troublesome one" and laughed at his loquaciousness. He was as fanatical as his older brother, personally supervising the executions of many counterrevolutionaries, but he expressed his fanaticism in a different way. If Fidel was the visionary, Raul was the organizer.

  It made sense for Castro to dispatch his younger brother to Oriente immediately after declaring the alarma de combate on Monday afternoon. Raul knew the region around Mayari intimately. The village had served as his military headquarters during the later stage of the war against Batista. Fidel had sent him and sixty-five followers from the Sierra Madre on Cuba's southeastern coast to establish a second front inland in the Sierra del Cristal. Mayari consisted of twenty-four ramshackle huts when Raul arrived in a convoy of ten jeeps and pickup trucks. He set up a command post in one of the huts, seized more territory, built an airstrip for the rebel air force, and established schools and health services. Soon Mayari was the capital of a "liberated zone" that extended across the mountains toward the Castro family finca at Biran.

  Raul understood immediately that the cruise missiles would be crucial to preventing an American breakout from Guantanamo. Immediately after his arrival, he invited Soviet military commanders to his Santiago headquarters for consultations. Together, they reviewed plans for the destruction of the naval base. The commander of the local FKR regiment, Colonel Dmitri Maltsev, took out a map and briefed Raul on the positions of his troops.

  The Soviet officer responsible for the ground defense of Oriente was Colonel Dmitri Yazov. (He would later become Mikhail Gorbachev's defense minister and a leader of the failed August 1991 coup against Gorbachev.) Like Kovalenko in Remedios, Yazov had great difficulty finding a suitable camp for his motorized rifle regiment. The first site was in a forest filled with poisonous trees and bushes. Unaware of the danger, the troops had used branches from the trees to construct makeshift huts and even beds. The monsoon rains released poison from the branches, infecting an entire tank battalion with terrible skin lesions. Other troops suffered from dysentery caused by spoiled food. The regiment redeployed to an airfield outside the city of Holguin, but its combat readiness was much diminished.

  Soon after arriving in Oriente, Raul issued an order subordinating all manpower in the province to the Cuban army. Since he was minister of defense, this meant that every worker in Oriente was now under his personal command. Civilian jeeps and trucks became military vehicles that could not be driven without permission. Under the joint defense plan with the Soviets, Raul was also kept informed about the movements of Yazov's tanks and Maltsev's cruise missiles.

  Everything was in place for an attack on Guantanamo. Raul had toured the hills above the naval base with Maltsev and had inspected the launch positions for the FKR missiles. Soviet troops had spent weeks clearing openings in the forest for the missile launchers, sealing off the sites with trenches and barbed-wire fencing. The launch positions were well camouflaged and much more difficult to detect from the air than the medium-range missile sites. Some equipment, such as antennas and generators, was prepositioned, but most would be brought in at the last moment.

  Raul received regular intelligence updates from Cuban spies mingling with the workers who serviced the base, and commuted back and forth through the U.S. and Cuban checkpoints. The Cubans knew the numbers of Marine reinforcements and where they were deployed. The base was surrounded on all sides. If war broke out, the Soviet navy would mine the entrance to Guantanamo Bay while Yazov's troops blocked the land approaches. Several dozen heavy artillery pieces were stationed in the hills above the base.

  The Soviet commanders were confident that the Americans still had no idea about the cruise missiles or their nuclear warheads, despite several U-2 flights over the area. An initial shipment of warheads had arrived on board the Indigirka in the first week of October, and had been distributed to the FKR regiments. Nuclear control officers had made the twenty-hour trip to La Isabela over bad roads to meet the Aleksandrovsk, unload the warheads, and bring them back to Mayari. They took elaborate precautions to conceal the destination of the convoy, sending decoy trucks and vans in the opposite direction to create maximum confusion.

  In the meantime, trucks loaded with cruise missiles were already moving down the newly constructed road from Mayari in the direction of Guantanamo.

  Known to the Marines as GITMO, the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base looked like a heavily fortified slice of American suburbia plunked down on the edge of a tropical island. Jeeps stood outside pleasant little one-story bungalows with neatly trimmed lawns. Trucks dragging howitzers and mortars drove along streets lined with bowling alleys, grocery stores, sparkling swimming pools, and a roller-skating rink. Tanks were parked on the edge of the twenty-seven-hole golf course, near road signs reading: TEN M.P.H. ZONE. CHILDREN PLAYING.

  The relaxed, small-town atmosphere had disappeared the day Kennedy announced the discovery of nuclear missiles in Cuba. That morning, Marines went door to door, telling women and children they had an hour to pack and leave. By nightfall, 2,810 dependents had been evacuated. Their places were taken by five thousand Marine reinforcements, who fanned out across the fifteen-mile-long land border with Cuba. Naval gunfire ships moved offshore, ready to pound artillery positions in the hills above the naval base. A reconnaissance plane circled constantly overhead, identifying Soviet and Cuban military targets.

  On Tuesday morning, a few hours after the president's speech, a U.S. Navy cargo plane ferrying extra ammunition to GITMO crashed while coming in to land. Minutes after the accident, the ordnance on board the plane began detonating in the extreme heat, producing a series of massive explosions and scattering wreckage more than a mile away. It would take four days to clear the area and find the charred remains of the eight-man crew.

  Surrounded by protective mountains, GITMO offered the U.S. Navy one of the best natural harbors in the Caribbean. It was also a historical anomaly. The base agreement dated back to the days of Teddy Roosevelt, when Cuba was still under American protection. The fledgling Cuban government was compelled to lease the forty-five-square-mile enclave in perpetuity to the United States for an annual payment of $2,000 in gold coin, later converted to $3,386.25 in paper money. After the revolution, Castro denounced the base agreement as an "illegal" residue of colonialism and refused to accept the rent payments the Americans kept on sending. But he refrained from acting on threats to throw the gringos out of Guantanamo, knowing this would be treated as a casus belli by Washington.

  Desperate for cash and intelligence, Castro permitted several thousand Cubans to continue servicing the base. Cuban workers manned the grocery stores, repaired and unloaded ships, and even participated in joint American-Cuban police patrols. After streaming through Cuban and American checkpoints at the main Northeast Gate, they were taken to their workplaces by U.S. Navy buses. The Cuban authorities also sold the base all its fresh water, pumping seven hundred million gallons annually from the nearby Yateras River.

  As the naval blockade came into force, GITMO commanders braced for retaliatory acti
on by the Cubans. But nearly half the 2,400 Cuban employees reported for work on Tuesday, and even more showed up the next day. The water supply continued uninterrupted. Many of the Cubans had been working at the naval base for years and were opposed to Castro. They provided information about Cuban and Soviet troop deployments to the Marines and welcomed the prospect of a U.S. invasion. Others cooperated with the Cuban secret police. The intelligence flowed in both directions, making everybody happy.

  The Marines had good intelligence about troop movements and artillery positions in the immediate vicinity of Guantanamo. They had compiled a target list of dozens of key sites to be taken out in the first few hours of hostilities, including airfields, bridges, communications posts, military encampments, and suspected missile sites. But they attached little importance to the FKR missile base at Mayari Arriba, easily the biggest threat to GITMO. The Mayari area was described as a "low priority" military target in the joint operations plan.

  Some of the intelligence coming back from the front lines was of dubious value. The GITMO commander, Brigadier General William Collins, was at first perplexed by reports of a mysterious Cuban signaling system in Caimanera, half a mile north of the fence line. Marines freshly dug in on the American side of the front line reported a series of yellow, green, and red flashes from the Cuban side.

  Yellow, green, red. Red, yellow, green. Once he figured out the secret code, the general burst out laughing. His men had been observing a traffic light.