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

by Michael Dobbs

  Many Cubans detected a curious contradiction between the sophistication of Soviet weaponry and the backwardness of ordinary Russians. When the writer Edmundo Desnoes visited a Soviet military airfield outside of Havana with a delegation of Cuban intellectuals, he was struck by the "primitiveness" of the living conditions. While the pilots waited for the order to scramble their modern MiG-21 jets, their wives washed clothes by hand in wooden tubs. The intellectuals were provided beds for the night in the infirmary alongside gurneys already tagged with little tabs for the corpses that were expected shortly.

  Carlos Franqui, the editor of Revolucion, was amazed by how poorly the Russians dressed.

  They were years out of style; their clothes were ugly and badly cut; and their shoes! The man on the street began to wonder why, if socialism is in fact superior to capitalism, everything these Russians had was so shoddy. The women didn't even know how to walk in high heels. And there seemed to be great differences between various groups of Russians: the leaders, technicians, and officers had one style, and the soldiers and ordinary laborers had another--much inferior. People began to wonder about the question of equality under socialism.

  The Russians were less "overbearing" than the Americans, Franqui thought, and "pleasant" even when drunk, but they gave the impression of "the most absolute poverty."

  The alliance with Moscow had coincided with the sovietization of Cuban society. The revolution was losing its carnival spirit; the bureaucrats were taking over. Most Cubans still supported the goals of the revolution, but their revolutionary ardor had cooled. Communist Party functionaries now occupied key positions in the government. Cuba was turning into a police state, with informers and neighborhood watchdog committees cropping up everywhere. One of the last bastions of intellectual freedom, a weekly literary supplement called Lunes de Revolucion, had been closed down the previous year. Once vibrant newspapers had become government megaphones. Even the language of the Cuban revolution was becoming stultified, full of Marxist-Leninist slogans.

  The heavy hand of socialist rigidity was felt in the economy. Many economic decisions depended on Fidel's personal whim. When the comandante en jefe decreed that the countryside around Havana was ideal for coffee plantations, nobody dared contradict him, even though the land was completely unsuited for this purpose. A ban on private enterprise had led to chronic shortages and a thriving black market. A British diplomat described "a crazy wonderland" where "shoe shops sell nothing but Chinese handbags and most 'supermarkets' offer only a shelf of Bulgarian tomato puree." Confidential KGB reports complained that Cuban peasants were refusing to hand over their produce to the state and "a large number of gangsters are artificially aggravating the deficit in goods."

  Popular dissatisfaction with the regime was trumped, however, by the threat of foreign invasion. Few Cubans were willing to sacrifice themselves for an economic system that was already failing, but many were ready to die for the motherland. For the time being, ideological divisions and disappointments were forgotten in the spirit of patriotism. People might grumble about the impossible bureaucracy and the lack of food in the shops, but most supported Castro in his struggle against "yanqui imperialism."

  In the end, as one of Fidel's aides explained to Maurice Halperin, security and material goods were "not all that important" to the average Cuban. What mattered most were the traditional Cuban values of "honor, dignity, trustworthiness and independence," without which "neither economic growth nor socialism mean a damn." The regime did everything it could to exploit the national obsession with dignidad, whether individual dignity or national dignity. The British ambassador noted in his annual report that banners in the street proclaimed "paz con dignidad" ("peace with dignity"). Even Christmas card greetings came "con dignidad."

  "Their Spanish blood may be wearing thin but there is still of lot of Don Quixote" in Cubans, Marchant reported. "This starry eyed brand of national pride in the Cuban revolutionary is a characteristic no observer can afford to ignore in interpreting events."

  Confident in the level of their popular support, Fidel and his followers were busy preparing for a guerrilla war. Militiamen dug trenches around the Hotel Nacional on the Malecon. Arms were stashed all over Havana, in factories, apartment blocks, and government offices, from which weapons could be distributed at a moment's notice. If the yanquis came, they would meet an armed population. And even if the capital fell, the struggle would continue in the countryside and in the mountains.

  The irony was that the United States had chosen to challenge the flagging Cuban revolution at its strongest point, the issue of national sovereignty.

  A few minutes after 6:00 p.m., the teletype machines at the State Department in Washington began churning out a long message from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. It was the latest missive from Nikita Khrushchev. The Soviet leader began his rambling, almost pleading letter by raising the specter of nuclear devastation and chiding Kennedy for being too concerned with domestic political pressures.

  You are threatening us with war. But you well know that the very least you would receive in reply would be to experience the same consequences as those which you sent us.... We must not succumb to intoxication and petty passions, regardless of whether elections are impending in this or that country, or not impending. These are all transient things, but if war should indeed break out, then it would not be in our power to stop it, for such is the logic of war. I have participated in two wars and know that war ends when it has rolled through cities and villages, everywhere sowing death and destruction.

  The letter had been hand-delivered to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow at 4:42 p.m. local time, 9:42 a.m. in Washington. To speed transmission, American diplomats had chopped the letter into four sections, each one of which had to be laboriously translated into English, ciphered, deciphered, and typed. The first section had taken more than eight hours to reach the State Department. The final portion would not arrive until after 9:00 p.m. Washington time. World peace was hanging by a thread, but it took nearly twelve hours to deliver a message from one superpower leader to another.

  The world was in the throes of a half-finished information revolution. Artificial satellites could beam Kennedy's speeches around the world almost instantaneously, but he could not talk to Khrushchev in real time. He could pick up the phone and call the British prime minister whenever he wished, but it could take hours to reach the leader of Brazil. Navy communications vessels were bouncing messages off the moon, but high-priority traffic between the Pentagon and the warships enforcing the blockade was routinely delayed by six to eight hours. On Wednesday, in the middle of the "eyeball to eyeball" confrontation with Khrushchev over Soviet missile ships headed for Cuba, the president had devoted a precious hour to discussing ways to improve communications with Latin America and the Caribbean.

  The communications delays even extended to the emergency command posts that would be responsible for launching a nuclear war if the president was killed or a bomb dropped on SAC headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska. A Boeing EC-135 aircraft was in the air at all times, ready to order the destruction of Moscow or Kiev. When the missile crisis erupted, planners realized to their dismay that the "Looking Glass" planes lacked a device for authenticating emergency messages from the ground. On Thursday, they sent out a long top secret message describing how the authentication devices could be installed on board the airborne command posts. Many of the recipients of the message reacted skeptically.

  "This is a joke," the chief of naval operations scrawled over his copy of the proposal, pointing to a "4 to 9 hr delay in op immed msgs." By the time an execution order was authenticated, Washington would already be obliterated.

  The problem was even worse on the Soviet side. Some of their communications procedures were out of the nineteenth century. If the Soviet ambassador in Washington wanted to send a message to Moscow, it first had to be encrypted in groups of five letters. The embassy would then telephone the local office of Western Union, which would dispatch a courier on a bic
ycle to collect the cable. Soviet diplomats would watch the young black messenger cycling slowly down the street, and wonder if he would stop along the way to chat with his girlfriend. If all went well, the message would be transmitted to the Kremlin over a telegraph cable originally laid across the Atlantic a hundred years earlier.

  At the State Department, officials tore off the latest message from Khrushchev from the teletype, analyzing it paragraph by paragraph. The department's top Soviet expert, Llewellyn Thompson, who had served as ambassador to Moscow, was sure that Khrushchev himself had dictated the letter since it lacked diplomatic polish and sophistication. He was probably "under considerable strain." Under Secretary George Ball imagined the "squat, morosely unhappy Chairman facing a blank wall," pouring out his "anguish in every paragraph."

  The key paragraphs came toward the end. After insisting that the missiles had one purpose only--the defense of Cuba--Khrushchev suggested a way out of the crisis. If the United States recalled its fleet and gave a promise not to attack Cuba, "the necessity for the presence of our military specialists would disappear." He compared the international situation to a knot in a rope that became tighter and tighter the more political rivals tugged at either end.

  A moment may come when that knot will be tied so tight that even he who tied it will not have the strength to untie it. Then it will be necessary to cut that knot, and what that would mean is not for me to explain to you, because you yourself understand perfectly the terrible forces that our countries possess.

  Consequently, if there is no intention to tighten that knot and thereby doom the world to the catastrophe of thermonuclear war, then let us not only relax the forces pulling on the ends of the rope, let us take measures to untie the knot.

  For Ball, the message was a "cri de coeur." Over at the Pentagon, Curtis LeMay was less sentimental. He told his cronies that the letter was "a lot of bullshit." Khrushchev must believe "we are a bunch of dumb shits, if we swallow that syrup."

  7:35 P.M. FRIDAY, OCTOBER 26

  As Khrushchev's letter continued to come out of the teletype on Friday evening, Dean Rusk was closeted in his seventh-floor office at the State Department, listening to a television reporter named John Scali. The ABC News correspondent had a strange story to tell. Earlier that day, he had been invited to lunch by the KGB's Washington station chief, Aleksandr Feklisov, serving undercover as a counselor in the Soviet Embassy. Over pork chops and crab cakes at the Occidental Restaurant on Pennsylvania Avenue, Feklisov had floated a plan for resolving the Cuban crisis that appeared to echo the conciliatory tone of Khrushchev's latest message. As relayed by Scali, the proposal consisted of three points:

  * The Soviet Union would dismantle its missile bases on Cuba under United Nations supervision;

  * Castro would promise never again to accept offensive weapons of any kind;

  * The United States would issue a formal pledge not to invade Cuba.

  The proposal intrigued the secretary of state. If genuine, it could mark a breakthrough, a Soviet offer to end the crisis on terms that the United States could accept. The way in which the message had been delivered seemed a little odd: neither Feklisov nor Scali had previously been used as backchannel intermediaries between Moscow and Washington. But the Soviets presumably knew that Scali had good contacts at the State Department and was on particularly friendly terms with Rusk's intelligence chief, Roger Hilsman. By sending the proposal through a KGB man and a journalist, Khrushchev could disown the concessions if Kennedy refused to negotiate.

  According to Scali, Feklisov wanted a reply as soon as possible. He had provided his home telephone number so that he could be called overnight, if necessary. Rusk drafted a response on a yellow legal pad. He cleared the draft with the White House and handed the sheet of paper to the newsman. It contained a two-sentence message that Scali was authorized to convey to Feklisov at the earliest opportunity:

  I have reason to believe that the United States Government sees real possibilities in this and supposes that the representatives of the USSR and the United States in New York can work this matter out with [UN Secretary-General] U Thant and with each other. My definite impression is that time is very urgent and time is very short.

  Feklisov was still at the embassy when Scali called back. They agreed to meet in the coffee shop of the Statler-Hilton on Sixteenth Street. The hotel was three blocks from the White House, one block from the Soviet Embassy. By Scali's watch, it was 7:35 p.m. when they arrived. They sat at a table in the back and ordered two coffees. Scali delivered Rusk's message from memory, without revealing precisely who it was from.

  "Does this come from high sources?" Feklisov wanted to know, jotting down the points in his notebook.

  "The highest sources in the U.S. government."

  The KGB man thought about this for a moment, and then raised a new issue. He felt UN inspectors should be allowed into U.S. military bases in Florida and surrounding Caribbean countries to ensure that there would be no invasion of Cuba. Scali replied that he had no "official information," but his "impression" was that such demands would create political difficulties for the president. Right-wingers in Congress and the military were pushing for an invasion.

  "Time is of the essence," Scali stressed.

  Feklisov promised to convey the message to the "highest sources" in Moscow. He was in such a hurry to get back to the embassy, Scali later reported, that he paid for the coffee with a ten-dollar bill and did not wait for his change, most unusual behavior for a Soviet diplomat.

  The encounter between the KGB agent and the reporter was a classic example of miscommunication between Moscow and Washington at a time when a single misstep could lead to nuclear war. Scali may have thought that he was being used as an intermediary to resolve the crisis--he certainly convinced the State Department and the White House that this was the case--but this was not at all the way the Soviets saw it.

  Feklisov had been rummaging around for insights into U.S. government decision making since the start of the crisis. The onetime control officer for the Rosenberg spy ring was painfully aware of the pitiful state of Soviet foreign intelligence in the United States. He was under huge pressure from Moscow to come up with "secret information" from Kennedy confidantes. Since he lacked sources in the administration, he had to gather what crumbs he could from the outer rings of the circle. Well-connected reporters like Scali were the closest he could get to the Camelot court.

  He had been meeting the ABC correspondent over coffee and the occasional lunch for more than a year. If nothing else, the meetings were a way of improving his English. A voluble Italian-American, Scali was "an exuberant type" from whom it was relatively easy to extract information. Feklisov's standard technique was simply to raise a topic that interested him and then insist at a certain point, "No, it can't be." Eager to display inside knowledge, Scali would reply with a comment such as "What do you mean, it can't be? The meeting took place last Tuesday at four p.m., and I can even tell you it was on the eleventh floor." Feklisov was constantly probing his American contact for information, without providing very much in return. He would throw out ideas just to test his reaction.

  After leaving Scali at the coffee shop, Feklisov walked back to the embassy. Finally, he had some real information to transmit back to Moscow. He drafted a cable outlining the three-point solution to the crisis, emphasizing the fact that the reporter was speaking on behalf of "the highest authorities." But the two versions of the proposal differed in one crucial respect. By Scali's account, it was a Soviet initiative; Feklisov depicted it as an American one. What Scali and the Americans interpreted as a feeler from Moscow was in reality an attempt by his KGB contact to identify Washington's conditions for ending the crisis.

  Feklisov only had authority to send cables to his direct superiors. To reach Khrushchev, or a member of the Presidium, he needed the agreement of the ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin. After pondering the rezident's report for a couple of hours, Dobrynin refused to sign the cable. He explained th
at the Foreign Ministry had "not authorized the embassy to conduct this type of negotiation." Dobrynin, who had his own backchannel to Bobby Kennedy, was skeptical of KGB initiatives.

  The most Feklisov could do was to send his report to the head of foreign intelligence. By the time his cable landed in Moscow, it was already Saturday afternoon local time. There is no evidence that the cable played any role in Kremlin decision making on the crisis or was even read by Khrushchev. But the Scali-Feklisov meeting would become part of the mythology of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

  At the same time that Feklisov was meeting with Scali at the Statler-Hilton, down the street at the White House the president was venting his anger over a wire service story saying that U.S. officials were hinting at "further action." Kennedy felt that his careful attempts to manage public expectations about the crisis had been jeopardized by an ill-considered comment from the State Department spokesman. He picked up the phone to personally reprimand the midlevel bureaucrat.

  Of course, he knew that the spokesman had not meant any harm. Under pressure from reporters to feed them a little tidbit, Lincoln White had drawn their attention to a sentence in the president's address to the nation on Monday. In that speech, Kennedy had described the imposition of a quarantine around Cuba as a first step in a series of measures to oblige Khrushchev to withdraw his missiles. By singling out the phrase "further actions may be justified" if the Soviet continued "offensive military preparations," White had given the reporters a fresh news angle.