The Dark Side of Camelot

by Seymour Hersh

  The first U-2 flight was a success and, on the evening of October 15, the intelligence community notified McGeorge Bundy that it now had photographic evidence of a Soviet ballistic missile site in Cuba. The president was briefed the next morning, and immediately spread the bad news.* Bobby Kennedy had an appointment with Richard Helms of the CIA a few moments later. "Dick, is it true? Dick, is it true?" he asked. Helms, describing the scene years later to the journalist Richard Reeves, said yes. "Shit!" said the attorney general.

  He and his brother were convinced they had been duped in the back channel by Khrushchev. There are no notes or available records in the Kennedy Library to provide any insight into the president's thinking, but his actions over the next few days seem to have been brilliantly conceived. There would be an angry series of I-told-you-so's from John McCone and the military men in the Pentagon, who would---predictably---call for immediate air strikes or a ground invasion to destroy the missile sites. Being tough and advocating military action had never damaged the career, or the reputation, of anyone in the Kennedy White House. The president would have to act quickly to keep control of his staff and head off any Republican calls for a congressional investigation into the Cuban intelligence failure. Jack Kennedy did not want the Republicans to begin asking about what the president knew and when he knew it.

  Kennedy's first move was to organize the Ex Comm (for Executive Committee of the National Security Council), staff it with insiders and outsiders, and insist that its deliberations remain totally secret. He gave the Ex Comm members one goal: the Soviet missiles in Cuba had to go, either by a blockade of Soviet shipping or something more drastic. In one move, Kennedy isolated those men who could lead a public charge against his stewardship of state and left them to debate in private, while he and his brother struggled to reap political gain from a mess that had been triggered by their obsession with Cuba. The Ex Comm members, who included cabinet secretaries and establishment figures such as Dean Acheson, the hard-line former secretary of state, and Robert A. Lovett, the New York lawyer and financier, were kept busy plotting air strikes and planning invasions.* But the real decision-making was done elsewhere.† The American public would not be informed of the missile crisis until the president decided to inform them, six days hence; until then, barring a leak, the Soviet Union would also not know that its missiles had been discovered. Jack Kennedy had time to consider, in secret conversations with his brother, the next step.

  There was one quick casualty of Khrushchev's daring in Cuba---Ed Lansdale's White House career as a covert operative. On the afternoon of October 16, Bobby Kennedy managed to find the time to go through with a previously arranged meeting in his office with Lansdale and the Special Group (Augmented). It was a cathartic session, as summarized in a memorandum that day by Richard Helms, with the attorney general venting anger and frustration over Mongoose's inability "to influence significantly the course of events in Cuba." Kennedy said, according to Helms, that "the operation has been under way for a year" with no significant acts of successful sabotage. Helms's memorandum, written with ominous understatement, noted that the attorney general, after expressing the "general dissatisfaction" of the president, "traced the history of General Lansdale's personal appointment by the president a year ago." Mongoose was shut down after the missile crisis, and the disgraced Lansdale was shuffled over to a job in the Pentagon.

  President Kennedy, skeptical about the ability of Lansdale and Harvey, had begun worrying months earlier about what to do if, as the intelligence community was predicting, Soviet missiles did arrive in Havana. Documents released in the early 1990s under the Freedom of Information Act show that on August 23 Kennedy had asked the Pentagon for a list of possible responses in case of a Cuban capacity to launch a nuclear strike against the United States. On October 3, Admiral Robert Dennison, commander in chief of the Atlantic Fleet, was ordered to plan for a blockade of Cuba; those plans were ready, according to a later Pentagon history, before the first public announcement of the missile crisis.

  The missiles were politically toxic. Later in the crisis, after the blockade was under way, Bobby Kennedy reassured his brother by telling him, he wrote in Thirteen Days, "I just don't think there was any choice, and not only that, if you hadn't acted, you would have been impeached." The president thought for a moment, and said, "That's what I think---I would have been impeached."

  On October 18, as the Ex Comm debated whether to bomb Cuba, invade Cuba, or blockade Soviet shipping, the president went ahead with a previously scheduled meeting with Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet foreign minister, who had come to the United States for the opening of the fall session of the UN General Assembly. In Thirteen Days, Robert Kennedy quoted the dutiful Soviet official as repeating the party line: "All Cuba wanted was peaceful coexistence; ... she was not interested in exporting her system to other Latin American countries." Gromyko said nothing about the ballistic missiles his country was installing in Cuba, and insisted that the USSR had simply sent some specialists "to train Cubans to handle certain kinds of armament, which were only defensive." Kennedy quoted Gromyko as saying that his country's sole objective was to "give bread to Cuba in order to prevent hunger in that country." His brother, Bobby Kennedy wryly concluded, "was displeased with the spokesman of the Soviet Union."

  "It was incredible," Jack Kennedy later told Kenny O'Donnell, "to sit there and watch the lies coming out of his mouth." The foreign minister's lies became a major component in the newspaper and magazine telling and retelling of the missile crisis, with a State Department official permitting a New York Times reporter to take verbatim notes of the transcript to demonstrate the Russian's "perfidy."

  It was a setup, and Gromyko fell right into the trap. The president had anticipated, an approving Ted Sorensen reported in Kennedy, that Gromyko would say nothing about the missiles in Cuba. "Kennedy had hoped for this," wrote Sorensen, "believing it would strengthen our case with world opinion."

  But Jack Kennedy participated in the lie, too. Why didn't he come clean with Gromyko and share the U-2 evidence of the Soviet missiles in Cuba, and thus give Khrushchev a chance to privately withdraw them? Bobby Kennedy explained in Thirteen Days that his brother, after some debate, decided against any revelations, since "he had not yet determined a final course of action and the disclosure of our knowledge might give the Russians the initiative."

  There is a better answer. Even before his meeting with Gromyko, Jack Kennedy had decided there would be no diplomacy but instead a blockade and an ultimatum about what would happen if the Soviets defied it. He would seem to be willing to force Khrushchev to his knees---at any cost. The possibility exists, too, that Kennedy decided early on in the crisis that if his threats failed, and Khrushchev remained steadfast, he would compromise in secret, as he had done in Berlin a year earlier.

  Only one Washington journalist seemed to understand the danger of Kennedy's policy as it was publicly stated, and was not afraid to write about it. "By confronting Mr. Gromyko privately," the columnist Walter Lippmann, who had visited Khrushchev in 1961 at his Black Sea dacha, wrote in the New York Herald Tribune, "the President would have given Mr. Khrushchev what all wise statesmen give their adversaries---the chance to save face." Kennedy's subsequent speech on the missiles would then have been more effective, Lippmann added, "for it would not have been subject to the criticism that a great power had issued an ultimatum to another great power without first attempting to save face."* There is no evidence that those in the government who knew about it took issue with Kennedy's decision to entrap Gromyko amidst a nuclear crisis.

  The Soviet version of the Kennedy-Gromyko meeting, published in the winter 1996--97 Cold War International History Project Bulletin, added an essential detail: Kennedy went out of his way to offer an explicit agreement, as the foreign minister reported to Moscow, not to attack Cuba in return for a reduction in Soviet arms shipments. "If Mr. Khrushchev addressed me on this issue," Kennedy said, "we could give him corresponding assurances" not to invade
Cuba. Gromyko quoted Kennedy as stating at another point that he had already told Khrushchev that the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion "was a mistake." The president then repeated his offer to give the Soviet premier "assurances that an invasion would not be repeated neither on the part of Cuban refugees, nor on the part of the USA armed forces."

  If Kennedy's soft words were designed to lull Gromyko and his Politburo colleagues to complacency, they were a success; Gromyko reported to Moscow, according to the Bulletin's newly released Soviet documents, that all was well. "Everything which we know about the position of the USA government on the Cuban question," Gromyko smugly told Khrushchev, "allows us to conclude that the overall situation is completely satisfactory.... There is reason to believe that the USA is not preparing an intervention in Cuba and has put its money on obstructing Cuba's economic relations with the USSR and other countries.... In these conditions a USA military adventure against Cuba is almost impossible to imagine."

  What Gromyko and Khrushchev knew---and the Kennedy brothers did not---was that, according to declassified intelligence files in Moscow, the Soviets had secretly shipped at least 134 nuclear warheads, and perhaps more, into Cuba. Within hours, in case of invasion or all-out air attack, the 42,000 Soviet troops in Cuba---twice as many as American intelligence reported---would be able to mount the warheads on Soviet missiles and aircraft.* The Soviet commander in Cuba, General Issa Pliyev, was a battle-hardened veteran who had fought at Stalingrad and had commanded a division that beat back the Germans in defense of Moscow. Pliyev had direct operational control of twelve short-range tactical nuclear missiles, known as Lunas, with two-kiloton warheads. There is every reason to believe that Pliyev would have used every weapon in his arsenal if American marines and army paratroopers began an invasion. The possibility that a Soviet commander in Cuba could respond to American invasion by launching nuclear weapons was never considered in the missile crisis deliberations by the president, his brother, or any member of the Ex Comm. "We never had any positive evidence" that Soviet nuclear warheads were in Cuba, Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric told the Kennedy Library in a 1970 interview. "If you ask my own belief, I don't think that there were," he added. "I think there were plans for flying them in, but I don't think they were actually matched up.... with the launchers." Even eight years after the event, Gilpatric was wrong.

  Gromyko's assurances to Moscow came as America's military machine, unchecked by the increasingly confident president, was flexing its might, moving aircraft, ships, men, and matériel to jumping-off positions for what many generals and admirals were urging: a full-fledged invasion of Cuba. On Monday, October 22, six days after learning of the Soviet missiles in Cuba, Kennedy finally shared what he knew with the American people---and with Nikita Khrushchev. It was an aggressive and chilling crisis address, in which the president compared Castro's revolution to the Third Reich and depicted the Soviet missiles in Cuba as posing the gravest of national security threats to the United States. "The 1930s taught us a clear lesson," Kennedy said. "Aggressive conduct, if allowed to grow unchecked and unchallenged, ultimately leads to war." He announced a blockade on all Soviet military equipment being shipped to Cuba and described that action as "the one most consistent with our character and courage as a nation.... The cost of freedom is always high---but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender or submission."

  "It shall be the policy of this nation," Kennedy declared, "to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union." The president had staked out his position: the fate of the world now rested with Khrushchev.

  Kennedy's audience, of course, was not only Moscow but his political critics in the Republican Party. "Who lost Cuba?" would not be a theme of the 1962 congressional elections.

  Earlier in the day, Kennedy had telephoned Dwight Eisenhower at his retirement farm in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to give him advance word of the blockade. The call was recorded by Evelyn Lincoln, at Kennedy's direction, on the White House's standard Dictaphone system. (Lincoln removed fourteen Dictabelts containing the president's telephone conversations from the National Archives after Kennedy's assassination; the Dictabelts, never before made public, were transcribed for this book.)

  Kennedy was resolute and fatalistic in his talk with Eisenhower. He assured his predecessor that "we will continue" the U-2 surveillance of Cuba, although, Kennedy said, "I would anticipate.... Khrushchev will make a statement that any attack upon Cuba will be regarded as an attack upon the Soviet Union. We have to assume," Kennedy added, "that as this surveillance continues with the U-2S, these SAM sites may shoot one down." He and his advisers were considering what steps to take if that did happen, Kennedy added. "I don't know, we may get into the invasion business before many days are out, but we just have to."

  Eisenhower was approving of the tough talk, and the two men then casually discussed the possibility of all-out nuclear war.

  Eisenhower: "Of course, from a military standpoint, [invading Cuba is] a clean-cut thing to do now."

  Kennedy: "That's right."

  Eisenhower: "Because you've made up your mind you've got to get rid of this thing. The only real way to get rid of it, of course, is the other thing. But having to be concerned with world opinion...."

  Kennedy: "And Berlin.... I suppose that may be what they're going to try to trade off."

  Eisenhower: "My idea is this: the damn Soviets will do whatever they want, what they figure is good for them.... I could be all wrong, but my own conviction is that you will not find a great deal of relationship between these things [Cuba and Berlin]...."

  Kennedy: "General, what if Khrushchev announced tomorrow, which I think he will, that if we attack Cuba, it's going to be nuclear war? What's your judgment as to the chances they'll fire these things off if we invade Cuba?"

  Eisenhower: "Oh, I don't believe they will."

  Kennedy: "In other words, you would take that risk if the situation seems desirable?"

  Eisenhower: "What can you do? If this thing is such a serious thing here on our flank.... you've got to use something. Something may make these people [the Soviets] shoot them off. I just don't believe this will.... I'll say this: I'd want to keep my own people very alert."

  Eisenhower and Kennedy shared a laugh at that point.

  Kennedy: "Well, hang on tight."

  America was bristling and ready for war. At seven o'clock that evening, as the president began his speech, the Pentagon placed the American military establishment on increased alert, to DEFCON 3, beginning the greatest mobilization since World War II. The Strategic Air Command (SAC), which would unilaterally move to DEFCON2 two days later, began deploying its bomber fleet to more than thirty predesignated civilian airfields across the United States. Nuclear weapons were loaded aboard bombers on SAC bases in Spain, Morocco, and England. Fighter-bombers at American bases throughout Europe and Asia also went on alert and many were armed with tactical nuclear weapons and assigned targets in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Several Polaris missile submarines, the heart of the American underwater attack force, left their bases in Scotland and began patrols in the North Atlantic. The submarines had enough nuclear ordnance to destroy every major city in Russia.*

  There was a final, contemptuous contact with Bolshakov, whose loyalty to his government had, not surprisingly, been greater than his loyalty to the Kennedys. After the president's Monday-night speech, Charles Bartlett was instructed by Bobby Kennedy to telephone Bolshakov and let him know that he and the president were enraged at his manipulations. The attorney general, Bartlett said in an interview for this book, "wanted me to tell [Bolshakov] how mad he was." It was, Kennedy told Bartlett, "a slimy thing [for Bolshakov] to do." (Moments after making the call to Bolshakov, Bartlett was telephoned by the attorney general, who chided him for not being very subtle. It was clea
r, Bartlett told me, that Kennedy had wiretapped either his or Bolshakov's telephone.) There was more payback: Bolshakov's role as a purveyor of misleading information soon surfaced in the Washington press, ending his usefulness. He was recalled to Moscow.

  With Bolshakov no longer in the picture, Robert Kennedy turned to Dobrynin, the new ambassador. Soviet documents show that the two men met at the Soviet Embassy late on Tuesday, October 23. Kennedy's message seemed to be that his big brother wasn't kidding. Dobrynin's account, summarized in a cable sent that night to Moscow, described an "obviously excited" Kennedy explaining that the president understood "the seriousness of the situation" and "what sort of dangerous consequences" could arise if the Soviet ships did not respond to the American blockade---"quarantine" was the word now being used---in the Caribbean. Nonetheless, Kennedy said, his brother "cannot act in any other way." The president, Kennedy added, had been deliberately misled by Khrushchev in the back channel. "The personal relations between the president and the Soviet premier have suffered heavy damage," Kennedy told the ambassador. "The president believed everything which was said from the Soviet side, and in essence staked on that card his own political fate, having publicly announced to the USA that the arms deliveries to Cuba carry a purely defensive character, although a number of Republicans have asserted to the contrary.... President Kennedy felt himself deceived, and deceived intentionally" by Khrushchev, who "the president has always trusted on a personal level ... despite the big disagreements and frequent aggravations in relations."