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

by Michael Dobbs

  Around 1:00 a.m., Khrushchev got a series of calls from his aides. A telegram had just arrived from the Soviet Embassy in Havana relaying the letter from Fidel Castro predicting an American attack on Cuba in the next twenty-four to seventy-two hours. It also contained a dramatic plea. Hearing the letter read to him over the phone, Khrushchev concluded rightly or wrongly that Castro was advocating a preemptive nuclear strike against the United States. He interrupted his aide several times to clarify certain passages in the text.

  Khrushchev viewed Castro's message as a "signal of extreme alarm." Earlier in the day, he had decided there was still time to negotiate a face-saving compromise with Kennedy. The Americans seemed to be wavering. A U.S. invasion of Cuba appeared unlikely at a time when Washington was responding to Soviet diplomatic feelers through the United Nations. But what if Castro was right? Khrushchev had instructed Soviet troops to come to the aid of their Cuban comrades in the event of an American attack. There would inevitably be many Soviet casualties. It would be very difficult, perhaps impossible, to limit the fighting to Cuba.

  Another factor to be considered was Castro's fiery personality. Khrushchev did not doubt that his Cuban friend was extraordinarily courageous, and willing to sacrifice his life for his beliefs. He liked and admired Fidel enormously, but he was also aware of his headstrong nature. Castro reminded the onetime Ukrainian peasant of "a young horse that hasn't been broken." It was necessary to tread very carefully with such a creature. The man Cubans called el caballo was "very spirited." He needed "some training" in order to turn him into a reliable Marxist-Leninist.

  The idea that the Soviet Union would be the first to use nuclear weapons was completely unacceptable to Khrushchev, however much he threatened and blustered. Unlike Castro, he had no illusions about the USSR's ability to win a nuclear war. The United States had more than enough nuclear weapons both to sustain a first strike and to wipe out the Soviet Union. The Cuban obsession with death and self-sacrifice startled Khrushchev, who had seen more than his share of destruction and suffering. He understood, perhaps for the first time, just how differently he and Castro "viewed the world" and valued human life. As Khrushchev saw it, "We are not struggling against imperialism in order to die" but to achieve the long-term "victory of communism." To be Red and dead was to miss the point.

  And yet here was this Cuban revolutionary talking blithely about launching a nuclear strike against the United States. Having lived through World War I, the Russian Civil War, and the Great Patriotic War, Khrushchev shuddered to think what would happen if he followed Castro's advice. America would obviously sustain "huge losses," but so would the "socialist camp." Even if Cubans fought and "died heroically," their country would be destroyed in the nuclear crossfire. It would be the start of a "global thermonuclear war."

  The jolt of Castro's letter was soon followed by another shock. At 6:40 p.m. Washington time, 1:40 a.m. Sunday in Moscow, the Pentagon announced that an American military reconnaissance aircraft had gone missing over Cuba and was "presumed lost." The Pentagon statement did not make clear whether the plane had been shot down, but the implications for the Kremlin were deeply disturbing. While Khrushchev had authorized his commanders on Cuba to fight back in self-defense, he had not ordered attacks on unarmed reconnaissance planes. He wondered whether Kennedy would be willing to "stomach the humiliation" of the loss of a spy plane.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Cat and Mouse

  5:59 P.M. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27

  By the afternoon of what was fast becoming Black Saturday, the U.S. Navy had located all four Soviet submarines. They were deployed in a large rectangle, measuring 200 by 400 miles, that stretched in a north-easterly direction from the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands. It looked as if two of the Soviet submarines had been assigned to protecting Soviet shipping along the northern route to Cuba across the Atlantic, while the other two were deployed along a more southerly route.

  The hunt for the Foxtrots took place in secret, unbeknownst to the American public. For the most part, Kennedy permitted the Navy to conduct its antisubmarine operations without much second-guessing. McNamara had warned that it would be "extremely dangerous" to interfere with the decisions of the commander on the scene, or defer an attack on a Soviet submarine that presented a significant threat. "We could easily lose an American ship by that means," he cautioned the president. The ExComm approved procedures to be used by American ships to signal Soviet submarines to come to the surface. The signals consisted of four or five practice depth charges, to be dropped directly on top of the submarines. Navy chiefs assured McNamara that the depth charges were "harmless." They were designed to produce a loud explosion beneath the water, but would supposedly cause no material damage to the Soviet vessel.

  Hunting Soviet submarines and forcing them to come to the surface was the ultimate game of cat and mouse. Arrayed against the submarines were four hunter-killer carrier groups, each one of which included an aircraft carrier, dozens of planes and helicopters, and seven or eight destroyers. In addition, long-range U.S. Navy P2V anti-submarine aircraft based in Bermuda and Puerto Rico were on constant patrol. The Foxtrots had an entire ocean in which to hide. But at least once a day, they were obliged to come out of their hiding places to communicate with Moscow and recharge their batteries.

  Earlier in the afternoon, the Americans had photographed a previously unidentified submarine, designated B-4 by the Soviets, 150 miles inside the quarantine line. It submerged immediately after being spotted. B-36, under the command of Captain Dubivko, was moving slowly eastward after being detected in the vicinity of Grand Turk with the help of underwater sonar techniques. A group of hunter-killer destroyers under the aircraft carrier Essex was pursuing the submarine B-130, skippered by Nikolai Shumkov and moving slowly eastward under the power of just one diesel engine.

  The most active chase under way on Saturday afternoon was for submarine B-59, known to the Americans as C-19. It was being led by the USS Randolph, a venerable aircraft carrier that had first seen action against Japan in World War II. Helicopters and twin-engined Grumman S2F trackers from the Randolph had been hunting the Soviet sub all day, dropping sonobuoys and triangulating the sound echoes. The search focused on an area three hundred miles south of Bermuda. It was an over-cast day, with the occasional heavy rainstorm.

  "Submarine to starboard," yelled the spotter on the tracker plane. The sub was heading north, attempting to hide behind a squall line. Several men were visible in the tower.

  By the time the S2F came round for a second pass, the Soviet sailors had disappeared and the decks of the Foxtrot were underwater. On the third pass, the sub was fully submerged. The Americans dropped practice depth charges to signal the Soviet sub to surface and identify itself. American helicopter pilots maintained sonar contact with the sub, and could hear the clanking of heavy machinery and the suction noise caused by a propeller. One pilot even heard the slamming of hatches from the area of the underwater explosion "leaving no doubt that we had a submarine contact." But B-59 remained below water.

  Three American destroyers arrived on the scene, circling the area where the Foxtrot was lurking. "Dropped five hand grenades as challenge to submarine for identification," recorded the logbook of the USS Beale at 5:59 p.m. "No response. Challenged submarine on radar. No response." The USS Cony dropped another set of five practice depth charges half an hour later.

  The purpose of the signals had been described in a Pentagon message transmitted to the Soviet government via the U.S. Embassy in Moscow on Wednesday. "Submerged submarines, on hearing this signal, should surface on easterly course." Both Kennedy and McNamara assumed that the Soviet submarine captains had been informed about the new procedures and understood the meaning of the signals.

  They were mistaken. The Soviet government never acknowledged receipt of the message about the underwater signals, and never relayed the contents to the commanders of the four Foxtrots.

  6:30 P.M. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27

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sp; While the American destroyers dropped hand grenades into the Sargasso Sea, a thousand miles away in Washington, Maxwell Taylor briefed the Joint Chiefs of Staff about the results of the afternoon ExComm session. "The president has been seized by the idea of trading Turkish missiles for Cuban missiles," he reported. "He seems to be the only one in favor of it. He has a feeling that time is running out."

  The other chiefs were suspicious of their chairman. They felt he was too "political," too close to the administration. Bobby Kennedy had even named one of his many children after the former D-Day paratroop hero. The president respected him as a soldier-scholar, very different from the no-nonsense military type personified by Curtis LeMay. Slightly deaf in one ear from an explosion, Taylor spoke Japanese, German, Spanish, and French. The word at the White House was that if you presented Max Taylor with a problem on the Middle East, "he would want to know how Xerxes had handled it."

  With his keen sense of history, Taylor was beginning to wonder whether there was a danger of getting "bogged down" in Cuba. He felt it was necessary to keep in mind the experience of "the British in the Boer war, the Russians in the last war with the Finnish, and our own experience with the North Koreans." He was worried about the latest intelligence information suggesting a much larger Soviet troop presence than previously suspected. The American invasion plan, code-named Operations Plan 316, seemed "thin" to him.

  The chairman had to straddle a delicate line between his loyalty to the president and his loyalty to his fellow chiefs. He shuttled back and forth between the two camps, conveying the views of the White House to the Pentagon, and vice versa. In the ExComm debates, he consistently spoke in favor of tough action against the Soviets, and had initially preferred air strikes to a blockade. But once the president made a decision, he implemented it loyally, and tried to explain the reasons behind Kennedy's thinking to his fellow generals.

  Taylor told the chiefs that he had passed on their unanimous recommendation for air strikes against the missile sites by Monday at the latest. "Then we got word of the U-2 loss." By now, there was little doubt in anyone's mind that Major Anderson had been shot down by a SAM missile. Electronic eavesdroppers on board the USS Oxford had intercepted a teletype message saying that the Cubans had recovered his body along with wreckage from his plane. The National Security Agency also possessed a couple of minutes of Soviet air defense tracking suggesting that the U-2 went down somewhere near Banes in eastern Cuba.

  "Should we take out the SAM site?" the chairman wanted to know.

  Some members of the ExComm, including Taylor himself, favored an immediate attack on one or more SAM sites in retaliation for the downing of the spy plane. The Pentagon had drawn up a plan, code-named FIRE HOSE, for attacks on three sites in the Havana area. But the other chiefs were opposed to strikes against individual SAM sites and "piecemeal" measures like the proposed drop of propaganda leaflets, which they dismissed as "militarily unsound" because it could lead to the pointless loss of the delivery plane. They preferred to wait another day and destroy all Soviet military installations in Cuba, beginning with the air defense system. The minimum acceptable response for the Joint Chiefs was the elimination of all the SAM sites, not just one or two.

  "We would only expose ourselves to retaliation," objected LeMay. "We have little to gain and a lot to lose."

  "I feel the same way," agreed General Earle Wheeler, chief of staff of the Army. "Khrushchev may loose one of his missiles on us."

  Like the other submarine skippers, Valentin Savitsky was near the end of his tether. The U.S. Navy had been chasing his submarine for the last two days. His batteries were dangerously low. He had been unable to communicate with Moscow for more than twenty-four hours. He had missed a scheduled radio session that afternoon because American airplanes had appeared overhead and he had been forced to make an emergency dive. For all he knew, World War III might have broken out while he was underneath the waves.

  The four-week journey had been physically and emotionally draining for the skipper of B-59. His vessel was not in quite as bad shape as that of his friend Nikolai Shumkov, which had lost two of its three diesel engines, but it was still plagued with mechanical problems. The ventilation system had broken down. The diesel coolers were blocked with salt, the rubber sealings were torn, and several electrical compressors were broken. Temperatures aboard ship ranged from 110-140 degrees. The presence of carbon dioxide was approaching critical levels and duty officers were fainting from a combination of heat and exhaustion. The men were falling "like dominoes."

  The hottest place in the ship was the engine room, next to the stern torpedo room. The noxious fumes from the three noisy diesels created an unbearably stuffy atmosphere. The electric batteries were housed in the adjoining compartment, together with the recharging equipment. Most of the crew had their bunks in the next compartment forward. The central part of the vessel was taken up by the command post, where the periscope was raised and lowered, a cubbyhole for the captain, and a radio room. The forward section consisted of the officers' quarters and the bow torpedo room. Men who were not on duty often lay down alongside the torpedo tubes, as far as possible from the suffocating engine room. This was also where the nuclear torpedo was located.

  A lieutenant commander was assigned full-time to look after the torpedo and service its 10-kiloton warhead. He even slept next to the shiny gray container. According to regulations, a nuclear torpedo could only be fired on receipt of a coded instruction from Moscow, unlike a conventional torpedo, which could be fired on the orders of the flotilla commander. In practice, however, there were no special locks on the weapon that blocked its unauthorized use. If the officer in charge of the torpedo and the captain of the submarine were in agreement, it was physically possible to launch it.

  B-59 was carrying several extra passengers, in addition to its regular seventy-eight-man crew. The passengers included the chief of staff of the submarine flotilla, Commander Vasily Arkhipov. Arkhipov and Savitsky were equal in rank, although Savitsky was captain of the ship and therefore ultimately responsible for it. A team of signals intelligence experts was also on board, charged with intercepting and analyzing American naval messages. To eavesdrop on the Americans, the submarine had to be close enough to the surface for its antenna to poke through the waves. Communications were interrupted whenever the sub went deep.

  The sub was several hundred feet down when loud explosions began popping off all around. All compartments were dimly lit. Savitsky had switched to emergency lighting to conserve his dwindling batteries. Men were groping around in the semidarkness. As the explosions got closer, they became more nerve-wracking. Soon they were going off right next to the hull. Crew members felt as if they were seated "inside a metal barrel that someone is constantly blasting with a sledgehammer." Nobody knew what was going on.

  Savitsky was in the control room, along with Arkhipov and the chief of the signals intelligence team, Vadim Orlov. He knew nothing about the signaling procedures introduced by the U.S. Navy. He had lost communications with Moscow and the other three Foxtrots. He knew only that he was surrounded by American warships and desperately needed to recharge his batteries. He could only guess at the fate awaiting him and his men. Judging by the deafening explosions, the Americans were doing their best to torment him. There was no greater humiliation for a submarine captain than to be forced to the surface by the enemy.

  Four decades later, Orlov would recall what happened next:

  The Americans hit us with something stronger than a grenade, apparently some kind of practice depth charge. We thought "that's it, that's the end." After this attack, a totally exhausted Savitsky became furious. In addition to everything else, he had been unable to establish communications with the General Staff. He summoned the officer who was in charge of the nuclear torpedo, and ordered him to make it combat ready. "Maybe the war has already started up there while we are doing somersaults down here," shouted Valentin Grigorievich emotionally, justifying his order. "We're going to blast t
hem now! We will perish ourselves, but we will sink them all! We will not disgrace our Navy!"

  7:30 P.M. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27

  In Washington, the president had ducked out of the Cabinet Room after more than two hours of tense, sometimes passionate debate to get his twice-daily dose of medicines. His doctors gave him an extra shot of hydrocortisone to compensate for adrenal insufficiency, in addition to the usual cocktail of steroids and antibiotics. Fifteen minutes later, he took a call from Jackie, who had taken the children off to their weekend retreat at Glen Ora in rural Virginia, away from the nuclear fallout zone around Washington.

  Forging a consensus in the ExComm was becoming increasingly difficult. Everybody seemed to have their own ideas for dealing with the Soviets. Bobby and Ted Sorensen had gone to the president's private office to try to merge the rival State Department and Adlai Stevenson drafts. Bob McNamara was working on a plan to pull the Jupiters out of Turkey unilaterally, to deprive the Soviets of an easy target in the event of American air strikes against Cuba. John McCone was drafting his own ultimatum to Khrushchev: another attack on U.S. surveillance planes and we'll destroy all your military installations on Cuba. Paul Nitze was composing a demand that Moscow agree to begin dismantling its Cuban missile bases by 5:00 p.m. Washington time on Monday or face the consequences.

  In the space of a few hours, alliances formed, fell apart, and reshaped themselves, as ExComm members agonized over various responses to Khrushchev. "There were sharp disagreements," Bobby would later recall. "Everyone was tense; some were already near exhaustion; all were weighted down with concern and worry." McCone joined forces with the veteran diplomat George Ball in attacking McNamara's plan for a unilateral withdrawal of the Jupiters. "If we're going to get the damn missiles out of Turkey anyway," Ball argued, let's trade them for the Soviet missiles and avoid "military action with enormous casualties and a great, grave risk of escalation."