The Turks, Hare had said in more than one cable, were proud of the possession of the IRBMs, and rather than being fearful of their targetability, they were particularly proud that these missiles put them on the “very front line” of the NATO military posture. “These are now Turkish missiles,” Hare said. Indeed, “ownership” of the missiles (though not of the warheads, which the United States supposedly controlled) had been formally transferred to the Turks, which made the United States’ unilateral reclaiming of them of questionable legality. The Turks had no desire or intention of giving them up—least of all under Soviet threat.
Moreover, if the United States were seen as disarming NATO of “its” weapons in the face of Soviet threats, it would appear to all of NATO that the United States was sacrificing the “defense” of Europe—its deterrent posture—in the interests of U.S. security. It would be understood as the precursor to a trade-off of the NATO missiles for the removal of the Soviet missiles on Cuba that threatened the continental United States, even though the White House and McNamara proposed to give no hint of this possibility at this time. This “precaution” they were taking—to keep the missiles from being attacked (and secretly, to keep them from being fired by the Turks)—was itself more than a hint of that.
This would be taken by Charles de Gaulle, and others, as confirming what he had been saying for some time: that the United States could not be trusted to put European interests with respect to security above its perception of its own security. Leadership of the alliance—which had always amounted to U.S. hegemony—might be lost to de Gaulle or a combination of France and Germany; the alliance itself might begin to dissolve. And Khrushchev could take advantage of this demoralization to press hard on Berlin.
All this made sense to me. (Although I didn’t know it at the time, these same arguments had been pressed on Kennedy that very morning by McGeorge Bundy and others, persuading him to give up—at least for that moment—his inclination to accept Khrushchev’s proposal Saturday morning of a public trade.) Nevertheless, I tried to craft language that would meet McNamara’s directive to make the best case possible for the move, pretending that it was in the interest of the Turks themselves, not just of the United States—this in the face of Hare’s reports that any such action would destroy their trust in the United States and the alliance.
I was usually pretty fast at drafting language—that was a major part of my job as a consultant from RAND in D.C.—but I found this agonizingly slow going. I typed lines and paragraphs, tore the paper out and threw it away, tried again. I simply didn’t believe what I was writing, and I hated doing it. It was a bureaucrat’s job, elaborating positions that had been dictated from above, even when you strongly disagreed with them personally. But I was a RAND consultant, not an official, not an employee.
I thought of saying I simply couldn’t (wouldn’t) do it, leaving the building if necessary—going back to California—but I put that out of my mind. It would have seriously embarrassed Harry Rowen with Nitze and McNamara. It was Harry who had brought me there and vouched for me. I tried to do it for him, not for them.
But I wasn’t getting anywhere.
In real anguish, I was thinking of Kennedy and McNamara, “They’re blowing it.” The president was going to take away the Turkish missiles. He was going to make the deal that Khrushchev demanded that morning. He was going to snatch defeat—the breakup of the NATO alliance, yielding on Berlin as well as Cuba—from the jaws of victory. I felt sure that Khrushchev was on the verge of giving way. Kennedy was backing off, disastrously, when he didn’t have to.
At one point, Nitze came by the desk where I was writing and asked, “How’s it going?”
Uncharacteristically, I answered that query candidly: “Not so well. Slowly.” I remember feeling very tired as well as frustrated. My mind was turning slowly. Everybody was getting tired. I said to him: “I can’t stand writing logic that Turks can pick apart.” I’m not proud of this now, but I said “Turks” with full chauvinistic overtones, and I wasn’t kidding.
He said, “Well, keep at it,” and walked off.
I kept at it. Half an hour later, Harry came by and put me out of my misery. He said McNamara had drafted the cables himself. It was embarrassing. Nitze must have told him he didn’t have it yet. But I was relieved. Harry said to go home, and I went back to the hotel.
I’ve never forgotten my thoughts as I looked at my face in the mirror above the bathroom sink in my hotel room, clutching the sink in my hands. It was half dark, lit only from the bedroom behind me. I was feeling a kind of horror. I felt I had just been part of something shameful, a transaction that shamed my country. These words were almost aloud in my head as I looked at the mirror: “I’m never coming back here. I’m never going to be in this position again. I had to do this, try to do this, for Harry—he was under orders, it was his job—but I’m not working for Harry anymore. I’m done. I’m not coming back to this town.”
I took off my clothes and fell into bed. The next morning, Sunday, I got up late. I had breakfast at the hotel and wandered into the ISA offices in the Pentagon about ten o’clock.
Everyone was celebrating, looking bemused. There’d been an announcement on the radio from Moscow an hour earlier that Khrushchev was in the process of removing the missiles from Cuba. He’d accepted Kennedy’s proposal of the afternoon before. No mention was made of missiles in Turkey.
It was pretty much what I’d expected, before last night. I was glad to hear it, but I wasn’t so surprised as the others, and I didn’t feel any great jubilation. I felt relief, like everyone, but for a different reason: that McNamara’s draft cables hadn’t been acted on. I checked to see if they’d gone out. They hadn’t—saving the day, as I saw it.
The NATO ministers were meeting at that moment, and the initial reports were that they were all joyously congratulating the United States for standing firm and triumphing. The Turks were especially happy.
a Something I learned later from Carl Kaysen was that Rostow, in wartime, had a recurrent focus on stopping the flow of oil to an adversary. In World War II he had been one of a number of economists in London headquarters (Kaysen was another) recommending targets for our strategic bombing with the objective of wrecking German war production. Rostow had felt ever since then that “the great missed opportunity of the war” had been a failure to concentrate bombing on German oil refining and storage.
Four years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, during Vietnam, Rostow pressed successfully in 1966—a year into the Rolling Thunder bombing campaign against North Vietnam, which had failed to show much effect on the battlefield—for a major attack on oil targets near Hanoi. He predicted it would be decisive in ending the North Vietnamese effort. It wasn’t. The attacks had little effect at all; the North Vietnamese had dispersed their supplies by that time. What I heard from Rostow in 1962 was part of his career obsession with cutting off what General Jack D. Ripper of Dr. Strangelove would have described as an enemy’s vital fluids.
CHAPTER 13
Cuba
The Real Story
Khrushchev had backed off; he had not only accepted the blockade but also removed his missiles, under threat of attack and without any compensating concession by JFK (except what I and most Americans assumed to be a meaningless promise not to invade Cuba). Harry Rowen had shared my confidence that the chance of nuclear war erupting from this confrontation was extremely low. I presumed President Kennedy and his lieutenants on the ExComm shared that confidence as well. Indeed, my notes reveal that sometime during that second week of the crisis, Harry had remarked to me, “I think the Executive Committee puts the chance of nuclear war very low, though they still may overestimate it by ten times. They may put it at one in a hundred.” He himself, he told me, would have said the odds were “one in a thousand.”
But the day after the crisis ended, on Monday, October 29, he informed me that his boss, Paul Nitze, had just told him that he had put the chance of some form of nuclear war, if we had struck
the missiles in Cuba, as “fairly high.” And his estimate of the risk, Nitze thought, was the lowest in the ExComm. Everyone else, he believed, put it higher.
Harry had asked him what odds he would have given. Nitze’s answer: “One in ten.”
I remember vividly my reaction that Monday to this news from Harry. It came in two parts.
First, puzzlement: Why would they put the risk that high? Nitze, of all people, was familiar with the new intelligence estimates. Could it be that he and the others, like the public at large, had not really absorbed the implications of the new intelligence, or didn’t fully believe it?
But then came a second reaction, slightly delayed: “One in ten?! Nuclear war … And we were doing what we were doing?!”
What we had been doing, on recommendations of the ExComm, included the following:
the blockade itself, at the risk of armed conflict with Soviet warships;
forcing Soviet submarines to surface;
high-level and low-level reconnaissance flights over Cuba;
a large-scale airborne alert with significant risk of accidents involving nuclear weapons;
continuing reconnaissance, even after several planes were fired on and one shot down on Saturday; and
full preparations (if they were wholly a bluff, they fooled us) for invasion and airstrike.
With the exception of the dangerous airborne alert, every one of those actions was illegal under international law, a violation of the U.N. Charter (unless as an act of war sanctioned by the U.N. Security Council). More significantly, every one of them threatened at least conventional armed conflict with the Soviet Union. I myself had accepted the general wisdom that the stakes in this confrontation, in global political terms, were quite high: enough to justify certain risks. I was prepared to support non-nuclear threats, willing even to take some risks of conventional war. I was, in short, a Cold Warrior working for the U.S. Defense Department. My emotions Saturday night on the thought of an unnecessary missile trade made that as clear as could be, not least to myself.
But to be willing to take an estimated 10 percent chance of nuclear war?! … In order to avoid a public trade of the Turkish missiles?
Who were these people I was working for? Were they all insane?
Later, Robert McNamara would reveal something of his state of mind on October 27, “the Saturday before the Sunday106 in which Khrushchev announced withdrawal of the missiles … and a U-2 was shot down … I remember leaving the White House at the end of that Saturday. It was a beautiful fall day. And thinking that might well be the last sunset I saw. You couldn’t tell what was going to follow.”
Could I have been that far off in my own belief that nuclear war was extremely unlikely? Could they have been right?
The answer to both is yes—though for different reasons than most of them supposed. The fact is that on Saturday, October 27, 1962, a chain of events was in motion that might have come close to ending civilization. How close? A handbreadth.
That is despite the fact, as I have come to believe, that both leaders, Khrushchev and Kennedy, were determined to avoid armed conflict—that both, in fact, were prepared to settle on the other’s terms, if necessary, rather than go to war. And yet they each hoped, by threatening war, to achieve a better bargain. For the sake of a better deal they both were willing to postpone by hours or days the settlement that each was willing to make. And meanwhile, during those hours, their subordinates (unaware that they were supporting a pure bluff in a game of bargaining) were taking military actions that could unleash an unstoppable train of events, ultimately pulling the trigger on a Doomsday Machine.
* * *
A note: For more than half a century I have done my best to learn about this crisis and to learn from it. The scholarship of many others has been crucial to my current understanding of it, along with the opening of files both in America and Russia, both mostly decades after the events and continuing up to this moment. That will be evident from my endnotes to this chapter (and see my endnotes on Cuba in the introduction). But I have read all these contributions from the perspective of my classified nine-month study of nuclear crises, mainly this one, triggered precisely by my own participation in it and the challenge to understand how its dangers could have been (as I steadily discovered) so much greater than I believed at the time.
I intend to place on my website ellsberg.net/Doomsday/cubanmissilecrisis as many of my own files on the crisis as possible. I could, but probably won’t at this point, write a book as long as this one solely on what I think I’ve learned from my study of the Cuban missile crisis, and what the evidence is for my conclusions so far. But I’m not going to present much of that evidence or reasoning here, or argue for it. What follows are my own inferences—many of them, I warn, unfamiliar and probably controversial even to scholars. And for the purpose of this book I’m going to focus mainly on what bears on the real risk of nuclear war.
For that reason I’ll skip over not only the first nine days of the official crisis but its real origins: about which my understanding—not only in 1962 but in 1964 and for a decade or two after that—was flawed or mistaken in almost every important respect. In particular, that relates to Khrushchev’s incentives to initiate his secret deployments to Cuba. Reducing the strategic imbalance (exposed by the Gilpatric speech and otherwise) was not the only or even main or triggering cause of his secret policy, as I and virtually all scholars and journalists had supposed for more than one decade and in important respects several decades.
It was not until 1975–76,107 with the report of the [Senator] Church Committee on covert operations including the massive 1962 Mongoose project against Cuba, and then a dozen years after that with investigative scholarship on U.S. contingency plans and exercise rehearsals for invading Cuba in 1962 by the historian James Hershberg, that I learned the basis in reality of Khrushchev’s claims (especially in his 1970 memoir) that he had been anguished, with good reason, at the thought that he was about to “lose Cuba”108 to renewed U.S. aggression.† That realistic obsession was a major part of the answer—not once reflected in the Kennedy tapes of the meetings of the ExComm (many of whose members were not cleared either for Mongoose or the early October contingency plans for invasion)—of the question JFK disingenuously raised to his supposedly advisory group, “Why has Khrushchev done this?” For my own reflections on this and other matters relating to the early aspects of the crisis (which in reality began well before, almost a year before, October 16, 1962) see my website, ellsberg.net/Doomsday/cubanmissilecrisis.
* * *
By Thursday, October 25, the day after the blockade was instituted, Khrushchev decided that his effort had failed and that he would have to remove the missiles from Cuba. Despite his threats of defying “piracy,” he didn’t want to challenge the blockade, fearing that Kennedy’s willingness to risk armed conflict with the Soviet Union on the high seas increased the credibility that the United States would attack the missiles if he didn’t remove them. That, subsequently, would call for a response from the Soviets extending far beyond the Caribbean, raising even more risk of all-out war. Khrushchev had not entered into this project with a desire to encounter such risks.
His hope as of Thursday morning in Moscow was to withdraw with as little loss of face as possible, preferably with something to show for the effort—at the very least a non-invasion pledge, but probably a public trade for the Turkish missiles, or perhaps even more. Perhaps the IRBMs in Italy and Britain or all U.S. forces in Turkey, perhaps even concessions on Berlin. In the meantime he continued to press his forces in Cuba to continue the installation of the missiles on a crash basis. Presumably, his aim was to improve the terms of an eventual bargain, by increasing the stakes of any U.S. attack on the missiles, thereby increasing Kennedy’s motivation to strike a deal.
The danger of this strategy lay in increasing U.S. military pressure to attack the missiles before they all became operational. And since that would likely be followed by invasion, Khrushchev m
ight end up triggering the very event the missiles and other equipment had been intended to forestall. On the other hand, the stronger his hand, the more likely that Kennedy might seek a diplomatic solution. And there were “private” indications from the Kennedys that he was leaning in that direction.
The morning after the president’s speech on October 22,109 Robert Kennedy had sent word by two separate channels to Georgi Bolshakov, a Soviet intelligence agent operating under journalistic cover, that his brother was open to removing the NATO missiles from Turkey in exchange for the removal of the missiles in Cuba. It is not clear when, if ever, this message reached Khrushchev. But, as the Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin110 would reveal in 1990, RFK delivered the same message to him in a private meeting on Thursday night. (That very morning Walter Lippmann had published a syndicated column suggesting such a trade. Although for a quarter century Lippmann was depicted as an interfering meddler, the Soviets had every reason to believe he had been writing with Kennedy’s authorization—as was likely the case.)
On this basis, Khrushchev dictated a message to Kennedy, in the presence of the Presidium and with its suggestions, proposing that the crisis be resolved by a non-invasion pledge from the United States and the removal of “the weapons you call offensive” from both Cuba and Turkey. But this message was not sent Friday. Before it was sent, alarming indications came from a variety of sources, and in particular from Castro, that an invasion was imminent, possibly within the next twenty-four hours or the following day. In face of that, Khrushchev dictated—again in the presence of the Presidium—a longer message indicating that a pledge of non-invasion would be enough. There was no mention of Turkey. After delays for coding, transmission, and decoding, that message arrived in sections at the White House and Pentagon Friday evening, though it had been sent that morning.
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