CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

I WAS TEMPTED TO CALL Dad and Mom on the telephone and warn them: “Dad, you and Mom get the hell out of Florida and head north. Go as far as you can get in Canada.”

Mary made us drinks. It was late, nearly midnight. The night was hot and humid, like no air stirred for fear of bringing a wind that bore no good. Mary came out onto our apartment patio carrying cocktails—Make mine a double; hell, make it a triple. She wore a sheer nightgown, nothing underneath. I barely noticed. I was so exhausted from another day in the giant beehive that Washington had become for me.

One time when I was a kid, I watched a beekeeper down the road from us in Virginia rob honey from his hives using smoke from a torch. The bees went crazy when smoke penetrated their little Fort Knox of honey, buzzing and frantically diving and banging about in mindless, frenetic activity. I felt like one of those bees now, as mad and insane as the very important people who were in and out of the Pentagon and the Defense Department at all hours, meeting each other in conference rooms, speaking in harried whispers in corridors, sometimes raising their voices to stress particular points.

Mary and I sat not speaking, with a night view of the Capitol Building dome in the distance. I remembered—I would always remember—the story of Toshiko Saeki of Hiroshima.

This was no way for humans to have to live, under constant fear of destruction.

“Is there going to be a nuclear war?” Mary asked flatly.

Newspapers and TV were full of speculation, in spite of all the secrecy. Enough facts had leaked into the reporting to make Americans ask questions.

“Bill, is there?”

Dad would understand why I couldn’t talk about it.

“Bill?”

“Why would you even ask that question?”

“You’re a shithead, Bill.”

The crisis dragged on from day to day, hour to hour. On television, JFK looked almost too young to be president. Now, I was shocked to glimpse him one afternoon leaving SecDef Robert McNamara’s office. Lines of stress and worry seemed freshly carved into his face. General Lansdale said he was on the phone almost hourly with Khrushchev.

“We’ve let the genie out of the box,” he said, “and if we don’t put the sonofabitch back in the box, we’ll end the next war fighting each other with sticks and stones. At least those of us unfortunate enough to be left alive will.”

One little mistake, one misunderstanding, a minor error of judgment, might be the spark to blow up the whole damned world.

On August 24, a former Brigade 2506 member named Jose Basulto ratcheted up international tensions when he borrowed a thirty-one-foot power cruiser and pooled enough cash to buy a 20mm semiautomatic cannon with one hundred rounds of ammunition. Arms like that could be purchased off the streets in Miami in 1962.

Basulto and a half dozen other exiles sailed from Miami into Havana Harbor and staged a raid on the waterfront Hotel Rosita de Hornado where a large number of Soviet advisors billeted. They shelled the front of the hotel with their cannon, raked it with small arms fire, and returned to Miami.

McNamara called such quixotic ventures “insane.”

In the meantime, U-2 flights revealed Soviet ships slipping out of Black Sea harbors on their way to Cuba with greater and greater numbers of “advisors.” And, quite probably, nuclear missiles. JFK doubled the frequency of spy plane overflights of Castroland. So far, there was no substantial proof to convince the world of the presence of Soviet ICBMs.

Intelligence briefings kept those of us with a need-to-know informed of findings in Cuba by the CIA’s deep-cover network of spies and informants in-country.

A former employee of the Hilton Hotel in Havana told an operative he believed a missile installation was under construction near San Cristóbal. Another overheard Castro’s personal pilot drunk in a bar boasting about missiles. An operative reporting out of CIA headquarters located on the University of Miami’s campus maintained regular contact with a farm owner in Oriente Province. The farmer escaped to Florida, where he relayed an unusual story to Felix Rodriguez, one of the CIA’s most successful agents.

“The Russians are going crazy,” he said. “They’re trucking big loads of ice to their base. Every day they drive truck after truck of ice, and the Russians take over at the gate and drive it into tunnels they’ve built.”

Missile fuel had to be kept at a constant temperature. Apparently, cooling systems in the tunnels had broken down and ice served as a substitute.

Even such random sources as these slowly dried up as the Castros and Guevara put a clamp on the island. Since the Bay of Pigs, Castro’s security forces had used the invasion as an excuse to continue imprisoning hundreds of political opponents. Secret police prowled the shadows, while organized government watch groups spying on neighborhoods intimidated most Cubans.

In September, during a State Department brainstorming session, John McCone, the director of Central Intelligence (DCI), settled his eyes on me.

“It is imperative,” he said, his eyes holding mine, “that we obtain reliable proof that the Soviets have placed ICBMs on Cuban soil.”

I knew what he was getting at. This was a job for Navy SEALs.