The Cuban Missile Crisis
By August 22, 1962, the CIA concluded that photographic images from U-2 overflights showed that SA-2 surface-to-air missile sites were being installed in Cuba. For several weeks after Kennedy was briefed, the military and intelligence agencies watched carefully as more ships arrived in Cuba from the Soviet Union carrying Russian “technicians” and equipment. By mid-September, eight to nine thousand Soviet troops had been delivered to Cuba and hundreds of troops dressed in fatigues were seen in Havana and in convoys along the main highways.60 Throughout September more U-2 flights were approved to precisely identify the troop movements and site-preparation activities. The Soviets maintained that the arms and military equipment were strictly for Cuba’s defensive purposes. In one of their more brazen untruths, a press release stated, “The explosive power of our nuclear weapons is so great and the Soviet Union has such powerful missiles for delivering these nuclear warheads that there is no need to seek sites for them somewhere beyond the borders of the Soviet Union.” The Cuban press quickly claimed that Cuba had every reason to ensure its security through help from its friends.61
A flurry of political confrontations erupted during early September 1962. A running battle with Republican Senator Homer Capehart of Indiana had started at the end of August when he pressed Kennedy to do something about the Russians “pouring men and equipment into Cuba and the president was doing nothing about it. ‘How long will the president examine the situation?’”62 Kennedy was starting to get pressure from both ends of his own Democratic Party: From the left, Senator J. W. Fulbright had stated that if there were missile bases in Cuba, “I am not sure that our national existence would be substantially in greater danger than is the case today. Nor do I think that such bases would substantially alter the balance of power in the world today. What would substantially alter the balance of power in the world would be precipitate action by the United States resulting in the alienation of Latin America, Asia and Africa.”63 From the right, the well-respected Senator Kenneth Keating of New York pressed the same issues as the hated Senator Capehart had raised, enumerating the key issues that Kennedy had not addressed regarding the Soviet troops being deployed and why they were obviously not “technicians” as the administration had claimed.64 Although Keating would not reveal the source of his information, it has since become established that it was U.S. Army Col. Philip J. Corso, and his source was a Pentagon Army Intelligence officer who had obtained U-2 photographs from someone at the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC). Interestingly, Corso wrote about this episode in his 1997 book, The Day after Roswell, indicating that, since JFK was in Hyannis at the time, he considered taking the photos to Lyndon Johnson first, but then realized that the scuttlebutt around Washington was that Johnson was to be investigated for the Billie Sol Estes scandal, and his association with Bobby Baker, and that it was unlikely he would still be on the ticket by 1964. Clearly, Senator Keating—realizing that Johnson’s career was in jeopardy already and that he could no longer be trusted with releasing this information, even if he would have normally jumped at the chance to sabotage Kennedy—could not go to Johnson, so it was decided to leak the information to a newspaper columnist, Paul Scott. Keating had considered it vital that the information not be kept secret so that the White House couldn’t continue ignoring it while the Soviets kept installing missiles. It didn’t take long for the news of the Soviet Union’s massive installation of nuclear tipped missiles in Cuba to spread to both sides of Capitol Hill, and to both sides of the aisle. The first Democrat to break ranks with Kennedy over the issue was his longtime friend George Smathers of Florida, who backed an invasion of Cuba in conjunction with other countries in the Western Hemisphere. This infuriated the president, but by that time other senators were also calling for a stronger reaction.65
Khrushchev had expected to be able to have the missiles installed and the nuclear warheads ready to be deployed before any of it was discovered, presenting the United States with a fait accompli, and no realistic way to undo it. The Kennedy administration, he believed, would “swallow this bitter pill … I knew that the United States could knock out some of our installations, but not all of them. If a quarter or even a tenth of our missiles survived—even if only one or two big ones were left—we could still hit New York, and there wouldn’t be much of New York left.”66 While Khrushchev felt that he could bluster and intimidate Kennedy into backing down from a confrontation, Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin did not agree: “Had he asked the embassy beforehand, we could have predicted the violent American reaction to his adventure once it became known … Khrushchev wanted to spring a surprise on Washington; it was he who got the surprise in the end when his secret plan was uncovered.”67
Despite all the braggadocio regarding their military capabilities, the Soviets did not have a viable intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), but they did have medium-range (MRBM) and intermediate-range (IRBM) missiles. Their political leaders decided that given the reality of their capabilities, the best place for these missiles would be ninety miles off the coast of the United States, rather than thousands of miles away, where they were then placed. The military leaders were concerned with the enormous logistical problem of maintaining a supply line adequate to make and keep them functional, especially during a confrontation with the United States.68
By August, this activity had convinced DCI John McCone that all the Soviet/Cuba activity meant one thing: “If I were Khrushchev, I would put MRBMs in Cuba and I would aim several at Washington and New York and then I would say, ‘Mr. President, how would you like looking down the barrels of a shotgun for a while. Now, let’s talk about Berlin. Later, we’ll bargain about your overseas bases.’”69 Khrushchev had decided in July that the SA-2 air-defense missiles should be deployed first, so they could shoot down U-2s and prevent detection of the next installations, for medium- and longer-range missiles. The SA-2 missiles were operational by the end of September.70 Meanwhile, Khrushchev had Ambassador Dobrynin go to Robert Kennedy and attempt to stall him by deceit: He assured Kennedy that there would be no ground-to-ground missiles or any other offensive weapons based in Cuba and that the military buildup was not particularly significant. However, even as those assurances were being given, two ships carrying the first of the MRBMs were on their way to Cuba. Kennedy warned Dobrynin that the United States would continue watching closely but that if offensive missiles were found, there would be grave consequences. Kennedy reported this conversation to the president and Secretaries Rusk and McNamara, but no word of it was referred on to the intelligence community.71
As the U-2 flights and other reconnaissance missions continued into October, the military and intelligence community leaders saw the Soviet move into Cuba as a major effort to reverse the balance of power between the superpowers and could not be condoned. On October 16, 1962, Kennedy was given irrefutable U-2 photographic evidence of a Soviet ballistic site in Cuba. On October 17, a total of six U-2 missions over Cuba would be flown, collecting a massive number of photographic images. The images were processed and expedited to Washington for analysis.
Two weeks before the November congressional elections, at 7:00 p.m. on October 22, 1962, the president addressed the nation by television from the Oval Office, saying that the United States now had “unmistakable evidence” that offensive missile sites were being prepared in Cuba, for both MRBMs and IRBMs. This represented, the president said, an explicit threat to the peace and security of the Americas and was directly in contrast to the repeated assurances by Soviet spokesmen that the buildup in Cuba was of a defensive nature. He attacked Foreign Minister Gromyko for misrepresenting their intentions and demanded that the Soviets withdraw or eliminate the missiles. He stated that a “strict quarantine” was being imposed on all offensive military equipment being shipped to Cuba and warned that further actions would be justified if these shipments continued.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff, especially General LeMay, advocated a preemptive air
strike and an invasion of the island to destroy all missile installations. General Taylor and Dean Acheson, as a specially invited “old hand” of the newly created ExComm group maintained that U.S. prestige throughout Latin America would be undermined if the missiles were not removed; it was also contended that allowing the missiles would invite the Soviets to make similar moves elsewhere around the world, forcing the United States to have to make other multiple concessions if they let the missiles stand. Acheson went further, saying that the result would be damaging, “across the board—politically, morally, economically, and militarily.”72
In direct contradiction of his previous consistent and repeated aggressive actions toward Cuba, Robert Kennedy disagreed with the recommendations of the ExComm group. Now, he took the position that a direct military action against Cuba would make the United States “damned in the eyes of the world forever.” He compared such an action to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor and argued forcefully against any such provocation, saying that “he did not want his brother to go down in history as the American Tojo.”73 Dean Acheson was appalled that the advice of the president’s brother might carry the day; he felt that Bobby’s simplistic thinking was akin to clichés and sophomoric analysis. Secretary Rusk, who had invited Acheson to the deliberations, sat quietly throughout them “like a constipated owl,” afraid to confront either Kennedy or Acheson. The fear of the military and intelligence leaders regarding Kennedy’s argument for acquiescence was that the Soviets would finally achieve a measure of parity and they would then demand additional large concessions in other parts of the world, probably starting with Berlin. Although the message to the president was delicately crafted, the conclusion was unmistakable: “It is generally agreed that the United States cannot tolerate the known presence of offensive nuclear weapons in a country 90 miles from our shore, if our courage and our commitments are ever to be believed by either allies or adversaries.”74
The normal diplomatic channels had failed to respond effectively to the growing crisis and the president had begun thinking that they were actually impeding communication and negotiation. In fact, John and Bobby Kennedy had become disenchanted with Rusk and with the overall performance of the State Department, often referring to the bureaucratic maze there as “the fudge factory.” To the people engaged in evaluating intelligence, it was “the home of ‘the gray ladies’—elderly, well-read career women who were regarded as the mainstay of headquarters intelligence, and the ‘Jewish lawyers’—scholarly experts in the fields of international law, politics, protocol, and languages, usually preoccupied attending international conferences or writing research papers.”75 To some, the problem seemed to be caused by an overgrown bureaucracy that had become increasingly disconnected from real world events; to others, it was more of a systemic problem related to a culture populated more by scholarly academics than the people with their boots on the ground.
Nikita Khrushchev had begun secret, back-channel direct communication with John Kennedy in September 1961; it had been used by both leaders for one year as a means to communicate directly, around the normal diplomatic channels, and would now play an important part in the settlement of the crisis. In those days, back channels appeared to be extensively used: Another that was operative at the time was JFK’s link to Fidel Castro, via William Attwood and Carlos Lechuga at the UN. The ABC News reporter Lisa Howard—before she died of a drug overdose in a similar fashion as Marilyn Monroe and Dorothy Kilgallen—also participated as a direct link between Kennedy and Castro. As we will see, Lyndon Johnson had his own back channels, into both the military establishment and the intelligence community.
The Soviet back channel utilized a KGB agent, Georgi Bolshakov, whom Khrushchev trusted to keep secrets. Their correspondence started with a focus on the dilemma of Berlin, where the two leaders backed away from war but never reached a mutual understanding, much less formal agreement. But for several weeks during June and July of 1961, the situation in Berlin was just as dangerous as the Cuban Missile crisis the following year (even though it was downplayed for public consumption). After JFK met Khrushchev on June 4th in Vienna, where Khrushchev threatened to crush West Berlin, the situation deteriorated to the point that the hawks in JFK’s administration—led by former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and his own vice president—were advocating the use of tactical nuclear bombs if necessary to “protect” West Berlin. Again, in a shocking act of disunity—only a few months into the beginning of their administration, just weeks after having first challenged the president on his handling of the Bay of Pigs operation in April and then attempting to manipulate the president into taking more aggressive actions in Vietnam in May—the vice president of the United States was actively opposing the president’s policies and siding with the hawks who wanted to use the city of Berlin as the “line in the sand” to face down the Soviet Union. It was another hard lesson for John Kennedy as he tried to establish foreign policies which many in his own administration aggressively opposed. Fortunately, Kennedy’s determined efforts to find a peaceful outcome to Khrushchev’s antagonistic actions caused Berlin to become less and less of an issue, and finally disappear from the radar.76 Khrushchev’s first letter was twenty-six pages long and succeeded in establishing a direct communication link. Kennedy responded by telling Khrushchev, “Whatever our differences, our collaboration to keep the peace is as urgent—if not more urgent—than our collaboration to win the last war.”77 This personal communication between the two leaders would continue sporadically through 1962; paradoxically, it had not been invoked during the period in which Khrushchev was, simultaneously, planning the installation of the missiles in Cuba. Given the apparent duplicity in Khrushchev’s use of the back channel, it appears that he was really attempting to deceive Kennedy into believing that the Soviet motives were pure.
Then, in the middle of the crisis, when both leaders were under tremendous pressure by their respective military advisers to take aggressive actions, they would reconnect through their back channel after all of the conventional diplomatic channels had failed to produce a peaceful remedy. It proved to be the key tool that helped Kennedy and Khrushchev find a mutually acceptable solution to the crisis that avoided catastrophic results. On October 23, the Soviet defense minister, after meeting with Khrushchev, placed the Soviet armed forces on a war footing. At about the same time, Khrushchev wrote two letters to Kennedy and sent them through the back channel; the first was received by Kennedy on Friday evening, October 26, and the second the next morning. In the first one, Khrushchev offered to withdraw his missiles in exchange for a pledge from Kennedy to refrain from invading Cuba. The second added another caveat: a demand for a U.S. commitment to remove its missiles from Turkey. “Tit for Tat.”78 The second letter’s demand was a much more difficult pill to swallow for Kennedy, since it affected an ally’s defenses under a threat. That very morning, a Soviet surface-to-air missile (SAM) had shot down a U-2 reconnaissance plane over Cuba, killing the air force pilot, Major Rudolf Anderson Jr. The Joint Chiefs were pressing for an immediate retaliation to destroy the SAM launch sites. Kennedy held them back, even though he and his brother Robert felt “the noose was tightening on all of us, on Americans, on mankind and the bridges to escape were crumbling.”79
It was at this point that John Kennedy dispatched Robert to meet secretly with Ambassador Dobrynin to personally convey the president’s concerns. His message, according to Khrushchev, was that “the President is in a grave situation … and he does not know how to get out of it. We are under very severe stress. In fact we are under pressure from our military to use force against Cuba … We want to ask you, Mr. Dobrynin, to pass President Kennedy’s message to Chairman Khrushchev through unofficial channels … Even though the President himself is very much against starting a war over Cuba, an irreversible chain of events could occur against his will … If the situation continues much longer, the President is not sure that the military will not overthrow him and seize power.”80 The bac
k-channel diplomacy, which allowed Kennedy to negotiate directly with Khrushchev, ultimately worked because it allowed Kennedy to circumvent the very bureaucracy (the Pentagon, the CIA, and the State Department) that had thus far impeded any meaningful progress towards a peaceful resolution.
In a purely logical and theoretical—albeit cold-blooded—sense, LeMay and the Joint Chiefs might have been right in predicting that the Soviets would not have responded; fortunately, we will never know for sure. This game of nuclear chicken being played out between men of highly charged nationalistic fervor could have conceivably turned out in a number of ways, most of them too horrible to imagine. General LeMay was either brilliant and extremely prescient or the exact opposite of those adjectives; regardless, his lack of the more esoteric skills of nuance, grace, and discretion made him a very dangerous man to have held a high-level military position. But he wasn’t the only man in Washington to lack those characteristics. Throughout the highly pressurized discussions the Kennedys had with the diplomats, military chiefs and intelligence officers, though they did nothing to encourage Lyndon Johnson’s attendance, they had to endure his bullying talk about taking aggressive actions to invade Cuba, as if that course carried no possible risk of retaliatory action by the Cubans or Soviets. While the Kennedys tolerated Johnson’s militant manner—even though he did not produce any kind of detailed strategy—they regarded him as a nuisance. Bobby would later say that of the thirteen men in the cabinet room in the ExComm meetings of October 1962, if any of seven of them had been president of the United States, the world would have been blown up; Lyndon Johnson was one of those seven. As we will see in chapter 5, Bobby’s purpose in writing Thirteen Days was to warn Johnson that “I remember.”
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