7 David K. E. Bruce, America’s envoy to London from 1961 to 1969.
8 Each year following Vesper Lynd’s suicide in 1952, Bond returned to the casino at Royale for the last weekend of the season.
October
1 The Russian freighter in fact set off from Severomorsk, on the morning of 17 September 1962, under conditions of the utmost secrecy. Of the Kremlin leaders, only Khrushchev and Praesidium member Frol Sozlov were briefed. Neither captain nor crew knew their eventual destination. Carefully tucked inside the Indigirka’s hold was the first consignment of forty-five onemegaton nuclear warheads for R-12 MRBMs, as well as smaller warheads and bombs for tactical weapons and air-force bombers. In total, the ship carried the equivalent of over twenty times the explosive power that was dropped by Allied bombers on Germany throughout the entire Second World War. Until a conference in Havana in 1992, to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, it was widely believed by the West that the Soviets had not managed to deliver any warheads to Cuba.
2 Considered a magical and holy tree in Cuba. Legend has it that the first mass after Columbus’s landing in Cuba was said under a ceiba-tree in what is now central Havana, but, since Columbus never made it that far and had no priest on board his ship, this is unlikely.
3 Major-General Igor Stratsenko was in command of the missile-division headquarters outside San Cristóbal (A. L. Gribkov and W. Y. Smith, Operation Anadyr, (Chicago, 1994)).
4 Havana’s dramatic seafront boulevard.
5 Built in 1908 and inspired by the Alhambra Palace in Granada, the Sevilla quickly became – and remains to this day – one of Havana’s grandest hotels. Guests over the decades have included the famous and the infamous: from singer and dancer Josephine Baker (who was refused entry to the rival Hotel Nacional because of her mixed racial origins), boxer Joe Louis and opera singer Enrico Caruso, to mob leader A1 Capone, who took over the hotel’s entire sixth floor for his entourage of bodyguards and thugs.
6 The body responsible for analysing all photographs and images collected by the U-2 spy planes and from other clandestine operations. In 1962 the director of the NPIC was Arthur Lundahl, who took personal responsibility for analysing the photographs taken by Bond and JM, as well as other images collected of Cuba at that time. On 16 October, the day after receiving the films from London, he advised the White House that there was now hard photographic evidence that the Russians had offensive nuclear missiles in Cuba. A meeting was immediately convened of the President’s closest security advisers, a group referred to as the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, or EX-COMM. Over the next thirteen days, this group was in almost continuous session, debating and devising strategies to combat the nuclear threat.
7 This grand old dame of a hotel on Brook Street was so frequently used by distinguished foreign visitors that all rooms were permanently bugged.
8 In total, 36 R-12 MRBMS – with 24 launchers divided between 3 regiments – and 24 R-14 IRBMs had been shipped from the USSR to Cuba before the US realised the gravity of the situation.
9 Over the previous six weeks, a total of five planned U-2 missions had been forced to turn back empty-handed after encountering adverse weather conditions.
10 Among the documents that the Soviet double agent Oleg Penkovsy gave to his British handler was a manual entitled Protecting and Defending Strategic Rocket Sites. This contained detailed descriptions of the ‘footprints’ made by MRBMs, which helped the CIA’s photographic interpreters to confirm the existence, at the least, of sites in Cuba being readied for nuclear missiles.
11 Kennedy’s seventeen-minute address was broadcast live on 22 October at 7 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. Earlier that day, envoys from the State Department had informed America’s allies around the world of the President’s decision. US Senate leaders were summoned to Washington for a special briefing. Most were taken by surprise by the situation, and many openly doubted the wisdom of a quarantine – or blockade – calling instead for a pre-emptive air strike. In this, they were echoing the advice of the US Chiefs of Staff, who had urged the President from the beginning of the benefits of aggressive military action.
In advance of the President’s address, almost 300 US Navy ships had set sail for the Caribbean. In Guantanamo Bay, three marine battalions were brought in to reinforce the base, and military dependants were evacuated. Military alert was raised to DEFCON 3 (Defence Readiness Condition, summarising the state of US nuclear defence – with 5 being peacetime, and 1 imminent nuclear detonation), and instructions were given to the generals to be ready to launch missiles within minutes of the President’s speech. Twenty planes armed with nuclear bombs were also in the air in striking distance of the USSR.
A copy of Kennedy’s speech had been sent to Khrushchev several hours before it was broadcast. The Soviet leader’s reaction was swift: he regarded the ‘quarantine’ as an act of war, and gave instructions that Soviet ships on their way to Cuba should not stop. His reply to Kennedy was direct: ‘I must say frankly that the measures indicated in your statement constitute a serious threat to peace and to the security of nations … We affirm that the armaments which are in Cuba … are intended solely for defensive purposes … I hope the United States Government will display wisdom and renounce the actions pursued by you, which may lead to catastrophic consequences for world peace.’
In Cuba, Castro mobilised all his military forces. The air force was scrambled, the army and navy placed on full alert. On the Malecón, the missile-launchers were primed and ready.
12 At 10 a.m. EST. By the end of the day US ships had taken up position at regular intervals along the quarantine line, 800 miles from Cuba.
13 Since the situation had become public, American jets had been flying regular low-level reconnaissance missions over the missile sites. The photographs they brought back showed the Soviets readying the missiles for launch. Behind the scenes, there were frantic attempts at diplomacy. To give the Russians more time, Kennedy pulled the quarantine line back 500 miles, to a distance of 300 miles from Cuban shores. At the same time, he ordered the military alert status to be raised to DEFCON 2, the highest level in US history up to that point.
14 On Friday 26 October the US stepped up the pressure by increasing the frequency of low-level flights over Cuba to one every two hours. The following day a U-2 piloted by Major Rudolph Anderson was shot down over eastern Cuba. The US interpreted the action as a clear escalation of pressure by the Kremlin. (It later turned out that the order had in fact come from a Soviet commander in Cuba – without Khrushchev’s knowledge.) Both sides realised that they were teetering on the brink of nuclear war.
15 Behind the scenes, there had been an exchange of letters between Kennedy and Khrushchev, and a series of meeting between the Attorney-General and the Soviet ambassador to Washington. In addition, there had been a backchannel approach to a US TV reporter by a senior KGB official, in which the possibility of the US withdrawing from its new missile sites in Turkey had been brought to the negotiating table. Moscow proposed a straight swap: its missiles would come out of Cuba if the US ones were removed from Turkey. While Kennedy felt he could not agree publicly to these terms, privately he assured the Soviet ambassador that the US would be prepared to remove its missiles quietly a few months after the crisis. But, at the same time, he issued an ultimatum, threatening US military action if the USSR didn’t dismantle its bases in Cuba immediately. In the phrase of the time, Kennedy and Khrushchev stood ‘eyeball to eyeball’ while the world stared down the gun barrel of nuclear war. In the end, the possible consequences proved too terrifying and Khrushchev quietly agreed to the terms of Kennedy’s deal. He gave the order for the missiles to be dismantled and crated. On the Voice of America radio station, Kennedy welcomed his decision. Only Castro, who heard about the agreement over the radio, was furious. Four weeks later, on 21 November, Kennedy formally ended the quarantine and relaxed the Strategic Command’s Defence Readiness Condition from DEFCON 2 to DEFCON 4. The US
missiles were removed from Turkey in April 1963.
November
1 Since the end of the Second World War, British involvement in Japan had dwindled to the point where, in 1950, it was no longer deemed necessary to maintain a station officer there. The show – what there was of it – was run instead from London, based on whatever titbits were thrown from the rapacious CIA operation in the Pacific.
2 A rare American medal, awarded in the name of the President of the United States to a foreign national. The medal itself is suspended from an orange, and, white, striped ribbon and consists of a bronze star, 1½ inches in diameter, with a 3/16-inch-diameter silver star superimposed in the centre and the inscription ‘for bravery in action in the service of the united states flag’ engraved on the back.
3 The SIS had a policy of accepting awards only under exceptional circumstances. After preventing rogue financier Hugo Drax from unleashing his Moonraker rocket on London, the Prime Minister had wanted to give Bond an award, which was politely refused on his behalf by M. Bond had similarly been offered – and declined – the American Award of Merit after foiling Goldfinger’s attempt to raid Fort Knox.
4 Under the previous head of the CIA, Allen Dulles, London had received digests from the Americans of any sigint that concerned them. When McCone took up the position, however, he cracked down on the sharing of intelligence, apparently under the orders of the National Defense Council, out of fear of British security leaks.
5 Bond had passed on the contents of a top-secret decoded message, sent by Moscow to its important stations abroad, and intercepted by the Japanese, detailing a Soviet plan to rid Europe of all American military bases and offensive weapons.
6 The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was at that time regarded as a significant threat to the security of Britain.
7 For the preceding year the Japanese had managed to interpret much of the Soviet wireless traffic from Vladivostok and oriental Russia, using their new, state-of-the-art code-cracking machine, the MAGIC 44.
8 Tiger Tanaka, Oxford-educated head of the Japanese secret service. A judo black belt, heavy drinker and enthusiastic womaniser, he spied for Japan in the UK before returning to his homeland to train as a kamikaze bomber.
9 Tanaka had shown Bond an intercepted Soviet message, which contained details of a Soviet plan to disarm Europe – by pointing the USSR’s new super-missiles at each of America’s European allies in turn, with the threat that it would unleash them unless the Americans removed all their weapons from the European sphere. The Soviet stations to be affected would be informed one week in advance, to allow them to evacuate all Soviet citizens working in the country and burn all archives. Once M had received Bond’s signal, he devised a plan to round up all Soviet nationals immediately on hearing of the nuclear test.
December
1 The Tokyo representative of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS), Richard ‘Dikko’ Lovelace Henderson. Bond went to Japan on an Australian passport, superficially as Henderson’s number two.
2 Fukuoka is the principal town of Kyūshū, Japan’s south island. A remote and rather lawless region, it was known to be the last stronghold of the Black Dragon Society, formerly the most feared and powerful secret society in Japan, but by the early 1960s more of a loose collection of brutal low-lifes.
3 Known as SF (Special Facility), and first used in 1942, this mechanism converted a telephone into a bugging device. Normally, when a handset is replaced on the telephone it disconnects the mouthpiece microphone from the lines to the exchange. SF, however, stopped the disconnection of the line, leaving the microphone continuously active and able to pick up any conversation within range, which was then transmitted back to monitors in the exchange.
4 One of writer and poet Robert Browning’s earliest works, first published in 1835.
5 A photograph was inserted into a light box containing sensors able to calculate the exact dimensions, angles and planes of a human face – none of which are easy to alter using plastic surgery. When a second photograph was superimposed, its dimensions were compared with the first, making it possible to determine – to a significant degree of accuracy – whether the images were of the same person.
6 Colditz Castle, a forbidding medieval edifice perched on a craggy hilltop near Leipzig, Germany. During the war, it was commandeered by the Nazis and used as a high-security prison for Allied officers and captured VIPs. Supposedly escape-proof, it was the only German POW camp with more guards than prisoners. The first inmates comprised a small group of Poles in transit after the fall of Poland. They were relocated in the early summer of 1940 and later replaced by another 140 Polish prisoners. In November 1940, a handful of British RAF officers arrived, followed by six British Army officers, and later by some French officers. More British, French, Belgian and Dutch officers were soon added to the prisoner population residing in – and attempting to escape from – the castle until its liberation on 16 April 1945. After the war, Colditz reverted to its former use as a psychiatric hospital, which was relocated only in 1996. The castle is now a tourist destination, housing a museum dedicated to its wartime occupation.
Moneypenny Diaries: Guardian Angel Page 27
