Small Wars, Faraway Places: Global Insurrection and the Making of the Modern World, 1945-1965

by Burleigh, Michael

  McNamara reverted to his earlier idea of a blockade, which became known as ‘slow track’. Initially he had proposed it as a means of stopping the delivery of further weapons, after air strikes had destroyed those already delivered. After ‘fast track’ had stalled he revived it as an alternative, tweaked to get around the fact that international law categorized a blockade as an act of war. What if a more limited interdiction, to be called a ‘quarantine’ to make it more palatable to international opinion, could be devised to interdict the shipment of specific offensive cargoes, reserving a full blockade for a later date if it did not work? Apart from providing a flexibility absent from the ‘fast track’, the proposed alternative would keep the focus on the Soviets and avoid seeming to make war on Castro’s Cuba. It was decided that ‘slow track’ would be given a week to achieve a result. Meanwhile, at a protracted secret meeting on 22 October, Mikoyan persuaded the Presidium to deny local Soviet commanders the power to launch their weapons independently, and to give the US government an assurance that the weapons would never be put under Cuban control.

  On 23 October SAC went to DEFCON 2, the highest state of ‘defence condition’ alert before war was declared. An eighth of SAC’s armada was permanently in the air at any one time and target folders were regularly updated, to increase the nuclear bomb load here or to deliver an airburst there. Twenty-three nuclear-armed B-52s were ostentatiously sent to orbit points within striking distance of the Soviet Union and 145 US-based ICBMs were put on ready alert; no less ostentatiously, the Americans refrained from beginning the highly visible preparations necessary to put liquid-fuelled missiles based overseas on the same level of readiness, so as not to alarm their allies. Meanwhile a huge influx of fighter and fighter-bomber aircraft crammed into airfields in Florida.30

  ‘Slow track’ was not all that slow, as the quarantine would involve stopping and searching inbound Soviet ships and one of these, the Aleksandrovsk, had reached the port of La Isabela in the Dominican Republic a few hours before the quarantine went into effect. This ship was a source of great anxiety to Khrushchev because she was carrying sixty-eight nuclear warheads, twenty-four for the IRBMs and forty-four for the cruise missiles.31 On the US side, when the quarantine came into force at 10 a.m. on 24 October not much thought had been given to how to respond if the Soviet ships failed to stop, or how to deal with the noisy Foxtrot diesel- and battery-powered submarines that were shadowing them.

  That morning an ashen-faced JFK waited to learn whether the Soviets were going to back down. At last intelligence came in that the Soviet ships had halted or were circling. Finally, one after another, the freighters carrying proscribed cargoes turned around, while an oil tanker and an East German cruise ship submitted to inspection and were permitted to proceed. At a Presidium meeting on 25 October Khrushchev tried unconvincingly to present the retreat as a victory. ‘Apparently Kennedy slept with a wooden knife,’ he announced jovially. Nobody knew what he was talking about, so he explained that ‘When a person goes bear hunting for the first time, he brings a wooden knife with him, so that cleaning his [soiled] trousers will be easier’. At this, the tension in the room broke.32

  A two-day pause brokered at America’s behest by UN Secretary-General U Thant may have defused the likelihood of an untoward incident at sea, although by this time McNamara was micromanaging the quarantine. When the Chief of Naval Operations Admiral George Anderson challenged him, McNamara brutally reminded him who was boss, and told him when he swept from the room that he was ‘finished’. Anderson was put out to pasture as ambassador to Portugal in 1963.

  The problem of the Soviet missiles on Cuba remained, and the possibility of using the Jupiter missiles in Turkey as a bargaining chip, something discussed earlier and discarded, was revived when Kennedy invited eight of the fifteen-strong ExComm group to a private discussion in the Oval Office. Johnson was deliberately excluded. There were two major problems: the missiles had become operational only on 22 October and the Turkish government had told the State Department that they would ‘deeply resent’ it if they were immediately deactivated; and there was no question of being seen to reward the Soviets for their reckless gamble. The State Department began to manage public opinion as early as 25 October by floating the idea through the influential newspaper columnist Walter Lippmann. On the same day a furious Fidel Castro publicly declared that under no circumstances would he accept US verification of the missiles on the island, which he said were purely defensive.

  The outlines of a solution were first mooted at meeting in Washington between Aleksandr Feklisov, a KGB officer, and the ABC journalist John Scali. Feklisov suggested that the Soviets might withdraw their missiles from Cuba in return for a solemn promise that the US would never invade the island. On the same day a signal arrived from Khrushchev that seemed to confirm the informal approach:

  Mr. President, we and you ought not now to pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the knot of war, because the more the two of us pull, the tighter that knot will be tied. And 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, and 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 of what terrible forces our countries dispose. Consequently, if there is no intention to tighten that knot and thereby to 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 that knot. We are ready for this.

  This rambling message had been drafted by Khrushchev. A more considered signal linked the missiles in Cuba with the Jupiters in Turkey. Bobby Kennedy came up with the felicitous solution of publicly embracing the first signal, misrepresented as having promised the unconditional withdrawal of the ballistic missiles in Cuba.

  On 27 October all such deals seemed to be off when a U-2 was shot down over Cuba and another was chased out of Soviet airspace. McNamara took a Machiavellian approach, seeming to be the strongest advocate of retaliatory air strikes, while letting the rest of the ExComm members know that he had gamed out an air onslaught and follow-up invasion of Cuba, a Soviet counter-attack against Turkey, NATO retaliation in the Black Sea and the likelihood that a nuclear war would follow. The Kennedys and an inner group of six ExComm members then decided to give up the soon-to-be-obsolete missiles in Turkey, although keeping this information from the American public.33

  Bobby Kennedy worked out the details with Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, warning that if the missiles did not leave Cuba ‘right away’ there might be a ‘chain reaction’, which chilled the blood of his Soviet interlocutor. Any further Soviet attacks on US planes would meet with instant retaliation that would leave a lot of dead Russians. In his report to Khrushchev, Dobrynin added much entirely false local colour about US generals ‘itching for a fight’, which Khrushchev dramatized as a potential coup against the President. On 30 October Dobrynin tried to hand Bobby Kennedy a letter from Khrushchev formally acknowledging that the Jupiters would go. Bobby refused to accept it, saying: ‘Who knows where and when such letters can surface or be somehow published – not now, but in the future . . . The appearance of such a letter could cause irreparable harm to my political career in the future.’ Recalling his father’s injunction never to put anything in writing, he also deleted any reference to such a deal from his notes.34

  For once, Fidel’s belligerence worked in favour of the US. The U-2 shoot-down was his doing and at 2 a.m. on Saturday 27 October he drove to the Soviet embassy and raved about Cuban honour and his willingness to die ‘with supreme dignity’. He spewed out a torrent of words which Soviet stenographers tried to pare down to a message for Khrushchev. As dawn broke, a text was ready. The key paragraph said: ‘If they carry out an attack on Cuba, a barbaric, illegal, and immoral act, then that would be the time to think about liquidating such a danger for ever through a legal right of self-defence. However ha
rsh and terrible such a decision would be, there is no other way out, in my opinion.’35 The Cuban tail was urging the big red dog to unleash a nuclear war. While this frightening communication wound its way towards the Kremlin, Cuban intelligence radioed its agents in Latin America to prepare to launch a campaign of terrorism and revolution. US embassies and business interests were to be among the targets. Bombs exploded in Venezuela. It is worth noting that Cuban intelligence planned to launch Operation Boomerang, involving the bombing of government buildings, military installations and cinemas in the greater New York area.36

  Castro’s letter had a sobering effect on the Soviets. After waiting a few days, Khrushchev sent a paternal rebuke, reminding Castro that ‘above all Cuba would have been the first to burn in the fire of war’. If Castro wanted to commit suicide that was his affair: ‘We struggle against imperialism not to die but to make full use of our possibilities, so that in this struggle we win more than we lose and achieve the victory of Communism.’ Castro was so annoyed by the Soviet climbdown that he smashed a mirror. Thereafter a contemptuous ditty did the rounds in Havana:

  Nikita, mariquita,

  Lo que se da no se quita!

  [Nikita, you pansy,

  A gift cannot be taken back!]37

  Although the crisis had abated by 29 October 1962, it took months for a settlement to be agreed. On 5 November the Aleksandrovsk sailed home with its nuclear warheads, followed by all the MRBM warheads that had already reached Cuba. In late November the Soviets agreed to remove the Ilyushin bombers. Some but not all the tactical nuclear warheads were shipped out on Christmas Day 1962 and the remainder remained strictly under Soviet control until they too were withdrawn. In turn the US ended the naval quarantine. The paramilitary aspects of Operation Mongoose were suspended in early 1963 and the Jupiters in Turkey were dismantled in April. JFK refused to make a formal pledge of non-aggression towards Cuba, reserving the right to take military action should the Castro regime persist in using the island ‘as a springboard for subversion’.

  Nonetheless that is exactly what Castro did, sponsoring subversion from Guatemala to Chile. With the extravagant JMWAVE station in Miami wound down, a large number of trained, armed and highly motivated exiles were cut loose to raise hell in their own deadly but ineffectual ways. The Kennedys did not give up trying to kill Castro, however, and during a reception on 8 September 1963 at the Brazilian embassy in Havana, Castro gave AP journalist Daniel Harker a three-hour impromptu interview. ‘US leaders’, he warned, ‘should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe.’38

  The day before, CIA headquarters had received a report that agent AM/LASH (Roberto Cubela), a medical doctor and revolutionary hero, who in 1956 had gunned down Batista’s military intelligence chief outside Havana’s Montmartre nightclub, before offering himself to the CIA as an agent, was ready to kill Castro. Cubela felt himself shortchanged in the shareout of power by Fidel. On 29 October he asked the CIA for a high-powered, silenced rifle. At a meeting in Paris on 22 November his case officer gave him a poison pen/syringe instead, at about the time JFK was being assassinated in Dallas. Cubela was arrested in March 1966, but during his trial in Havana all evidence of his dealings with the CIA prior to November 1963 was suppressed at Castro’s express command. Sentenced to twenty-five years’ imprisonment, he was released after serving only thirteen as the prison’s doctor with his own private house. He was often seen outside the prison driving a car. It is very hard to avoid the conclusion that he was a Cuban intelligence plant. Castro himself had a private assassination squad who would kill all those Bolivians involved in the death of Guevara, as well as the exiled dictator Somoza, and make several attempts on the life of Chile’s Augusto Pinochet.39

  There were global ramifications to events in Cuba. Chinese newspapers took the opportunity to laud Castro’s heroic resistance in bold type, while comparing Khrushchev to Neville Chamberlain at Munich in 1938. Given that shortly after Munich the Soviets had allied with Hitler, this was very provocative. From grudgingly and belatedly supporting China in its border war with India, the Soviets started selling India MiG-21 jet fighters instead. Relations between the two great Communist powers got steadily worse, while Castro joined China on a global crusade against imperialism. In late 1963 in response to an appeal from Ben Bella a battalion of Cuban troops, together with tanks, artillery and other heavy weapons arrived to support the Algerian regime in a confrontation with Morocco. It was a decisive intervention, and marked the beginning of a long period of semi-independent Cuban involvement in Africa, which tended to lead rather than follow the Soviet line.40

  Khrushchev’s resort to bluff and brinkmanship to force the US into treating the Soviet Union as an equal played a part in his downfall. Ironically, as Mikoyan knew, by the time he was ousted he had achieved something like peaceful coexistence with the Americans. The plot against Khrushchev was triggered not by foreign policy, but by his arbitrary insistence that the length of time Soviet children spend in school should be reduced from eleven to eight years. This reflected a deep peasant anti-intellectualism at a time when the Soviet state needed all the scientists and technocrats it could produce. The initial plotters were President Leonid Brezhnev, Nikolai Podgorny who had joined the Presidium in 1960, the KGB Chairman Vladimir Semichastny and the former KGB chief Aleksandr Schelepin, who was outraged when, during a visit to Egypt, Khrushchev allowed himself to be seated next to the Iraqi Baathist leader Abdel Salam Aref, who had recently exterminated the Iraqi Communist Party. In October 1964 Khrushchev went to his vacation home at Pitsunda on the Black Sea, only to be urgently summoned back to the Presidium where he found Brezhnev sitting in his usual chair. By the time the session concluded, the sixty-nine-year-old Soviet leader found his bodyguards gone and his black Zil limousine replaced by a modest Volga sedan.41

  While Kennedy’s victory in Cuba helped see off his old Soviet opponent, posthumously, he was also responsible for increased US military involvement in South-east Asia, the obsessional commitment which would end in defeat and a bout of as much introversion as a superpower is capable of. Ironically this obsession with stopping the Communists taking over South Vietnam from within and without coincided with mounting evidence that major splits were developing between the USSR and China which might have been exploited a decade before President Nixon made his historic visits to Beijing and Moscow. What was called ‘the Bloc’ was not as monolithic as it seemed.

  17. OVERREACH: VIETNAM

  Esau’s Birthright: The Sino–Soviet Split

  Mao felt that Khrushchev’s disparagement of Stalin’s reputation merely served the interests of global imperialism. He argued that Stalin’s legacy needed cool assessment, so that the 20 or 30 per cent bad could be separated from the 80 or 70 per cent good. ‘Stalin is a sword,’ he said. ‘It can be used to fight imperialism and various other enemies . . . If this sword is put aside completely, if it is damaged, or if it is abandoned, the enemies will use the sword to try to kill us. Consequently, we would be lifting a rock only to drop it on our own feet.’ Khrushchev replied that the sword was completely useless and should be abandoned.

  Compared with the two-month wait he had endured in 1949, Mao was lavished with attention when he paid his second, and last, visit to Moscow in November 1957 on the fortieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. He was housed in a palace of Catherine the Great, but slept on the floor rather than in her bed. Hidden microphones picked up Mao’s private comments on his hosts, which were withering. Dismissing Khrushchev’s belief in peaceful coexistence with the West, Mao said: ‘If worse came to worst and half of mankind died, the other half would remain, while imperialism would be razed to the ground and the world would become Socialist.’1

  Mao’s psychopathy surged to a new level when he launched the Great Leap Forward in 1958. Detailed research by Frank Dikötter has established that fifty-five to sixty-five million people perished
in this dystopian effort to surpass British industrial output within fifteen years. Even China’s sparrows were not safe from this relentless venture, for they pecked away at grain and had to be kept airborne until they dropped dead by villagers banging pots through the night.2 Foreign relations were not spared the general hysteria; indeed, they may have been integral to it. This was the year when the Soviets sought to install their communications system for submarines operating in the northern Pacific on Chinese soil, offering the Chinese, who wanted to have their own submarine fleet, what Mao dismissed as a ‘military co-operative’. Mao’s response to the Soviet Ambassador was so rude that Khrushchev hastened in person to Beijing, where discussions with the Chinese leader went from bad to worse: ‘The British, Japanese, and other foreigners who stayed in our country for a long time have already been driven away by us, Comrade Khrushchev. I’ll repeat it again. We do not want anyone to use our land to achieve their own purposes any more.’ There was rivalry even when the two relaxed. While Khrushchev bobbed nervously in a rubber ring in the shallow end of Mao’s pool, the Chinese leader ploughed back and forth like a porpoise, demonstrating his mastery of various strokes, while keeping up a stream of talk translated into Russian by poolside interpreters.