A Maze of Options
During the Bay of Pigs fiasco Khrushchev exclaimed, ‘Can he [JFK] really be that indecisive?’, forgetting his own dithering over Hungary in 1956. It is worth bearing in mind that a broad range of people who knew JFK well, including his father, judged him to be a lightweight. He was in some respects a silver screen on which others projected their yearnings, which helps to explain his lasting status as a liberal icon. Another reason is that he also grew in an office that has diminished many of those who have occupied it. In the minds of those who revere his memory, the violently attenuated promise outweighs the amorality of his private life and of his secret conduct as president.
Although he took public responsibility for the Bay of Pigs, JFK seethed with hostility towards the CIA, sacking Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell shortly afterwards. The Republican John McCone replaced Dulles and the suave Richard Helms, known to his detractors as the ‘Eminence Grease’, took over from Bissell. But instead of reining in the paramilitary side of the CIA in favour of humdrum intelligence collection and analysis, the gung-ho Kennedys expanded it. They were admirers of Ian Fleming’s James Bond books, in which a suave Brit saves the world with fancy gadgets. Whereas Eisenhower had authorized 170 CIA covert operations in eight years of office, the Kennedys licensed 163 in less than three. Top of the list was revenge on Castro, for the Kennedys were unaccustomed to failure.1
To ensure that the CIA did the President’s bidding, Bobby Kennedy was effectively put in charge of its operational division. Thus was created the paradox of the top law officer in the country directing an organization whose activities were legal only on rare occasions. He brought in Brigadier-General Edward Lansdale, whose legendary status had survived his lacklustre period in Diem’s turbulent Saigon. It was naively assumed that as an expert in counter-insurgency he should also be able to mount a grassroots rebellion. Lansdale devised a thirty-two-point plan, adding as an afterthought point 33 – to use chemicals to temporarily incapacitate all Cuban plantation workers during the sugar harvest.2 Though formally based in the Pentagon, Lansdale took charge of Special Group Augmented, which ran CIA operations in Cuba. CIA analysts were justly sceptical that Lansdale’s uprising, codenamed Touchdown Play, could be triggered in a popular police state like Cuba.3
Although forbidden by law to operate in the US, the world’s largest CIA station, codenamed JMWAVE, mushroomed on the south campus of the University of Miami, with an annual budget of $50 million. This was four times the total the CIA spent on spying in twenty Latin American countries. Disguised as Zenith Technical Enterprises, it housed 300 CIA officers, who recruited thousands of Cuban exiles as agents. The officers all acted as though they were above the law, whether driving around with sub-machine guns and explosives in their cars or being quietly released from jail after being caught driving under the influence. Indiscriminate recruiting saw the ranks swelled by fantasists and psychopaths, and even the sane and sober recruits knew less and less about life in Cuba, creating a shadow country full of repressed people yearning to be free that simply did not exist. Of course, they and the Miami Cubans ignored the really repressed people in the new Cuba, the blacks who had overwhelmingly supported Batista against these middle-class Hispanic revolutionaries.
JMWAVE’s major project was dubbed Operation Mongoose. Implementation was assigned to the CIA’s Task Force W under a tough ex-FBI man called William Harvey.4 Bug eyed, purple faced and pear shaped, Harvey went around with a pistol in a holster and another clipped to his belt in the small of his back. He hated Lansdale, whom he contemptuously called ‘FM’, short for field marshal. He also despised the Kennedys, calling them ‘fags’ and ‘fuckers’.5 In meetings Harvey liked to annoy Bobby Kennedy by loading and unloading his gun on the table, and on occasion ostentatiously raised a leg to fart. Bobby was present at all Mongoose planning meetings, like one in October 1962 where the minutes read, ‘General Lansdale said that another attempt will be made against the major target which has been the object of three unsuccessful missions, and that approximately six new ones are in the planning stage.’ Harvey was appalled to find himself named and linked in a memo with the word ‘liquidation’.6
JMWAVE ran a number of operations against the Castro regime. The CIA soon had command of the third largest navy in the Caribbean. Large CIA mother ships such as the Rex and Leda towed smaller swift boats within range of Cuba, where they launched black inflatables with teams of saboteurs. Their targets included setting fire to sugarcane plantations and timber yards, and blowing up bridges and rail lines as well as such talismanic sites as the Patrice Lumumba Sulphuric Acid plant. In a raid on 24 August 1962, a thirty-foot boat called the Juanín entered the harbour at Miramar, a Havana suburb. On board were six Cuban exile commandos equipped with two .50-calibre machine guns and a 20mm cannon, acquired from a Mafia gun dealer in Miami. For five minutes they poured fire into the illuminated ballroom of the Blanquita Hotel, where Czech and Russian military personnel liked to party on Friday nights. The boat then sped back into the night.7 Underwater demolition teams were also used to attach limpet mines to ships or to the country’s largest floating crane.8
All overseas CIA stations were required to establish a Cuban desk, responsible for misinformation and sabotage. Large sums of money were disbursed to European industrialists to damage equipment sent to Cuba, such as lubricants doctored to wear out engines or slightly misshaped ball bearings. A Japanese ship’s captain was bribed to collide with a vessel on the River Thames taking Leland buses to Havana. Enormous sums were expended by CIA purchasing agents to deny the Cubans such items as bright stock, a heavy viscous lubricating oil used in engines. As Mongoose seemed not to be delivering the uprising Lansdale had promised, Helms and Harvey decided to re-explore the Mafia connection they had opened during the Eisenhower administration. They were warned off by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who hated Harvey from his time in the Bureau and was fully cognizant of the CIA’s links with the Mafia. Hoover also possessed a political nuclear weapon in the shape of proof that Judith Campbell, one of JFK’s favourite sexual partners, had served as his confidential link with Sam Giancana since JFK first became a senator. After Hoover had presented JFK with a top-secret FBI memo on the subject, he ended his affair with Campbell and also the long and close relationship between his family and the Mob.
While the tide of sleaze flowed on in the secret world, in public JFK initiated the economic quarantine of Cuba whose tattered legacy persists to this day. By executive decree in February 1962 he banned most Cuban imports, notably cigars and tobacco products – having first stocked up his personal supply. The US also arm-twisted the OAS to expel Cuba, and fifteen Latin American states broke off diplomatic relations with the Castro regime. That year, 82 per cent of Cuban exports went to Communist countries, which supplied 65 per cent of the island’s imports.
Despite all this activity, voters still thought JFK and the Democrats were most weak on the subject of Cuba, leading to enhanced sabre-rattling in the weeks before the mid-term polls in 1962. JFK may have ruled out an unprovoked invasion, but he ordered contingency plans should a viable excuse for a successful invasion arise – which is to say if Mongoose finally produced Lansdale’s ‘spontaneous’ uprising. The plan was for a combined operation known by its February 1962 planning title OPLAN 314-61. On 1 October army and navy commanders were ordered to prepare to execute Operation Ortsac (Castro cunningly spelled backwards), a large-scale amphibious exercise in the Caribbean to begin on 15 October.9 The KGB knew about this in general terms, and connected it with Castro’s public declaration on 1 December that he was a Communist bent on building a Marxist-Leninist society.10
The US also resumed atmospheric nuclear tests after Khrushchev had refused site inspections that might have revealed Soviet strategic weaknesses. The GRU (the foreign military intelligence directorate of the Soviet General Staff), usually more dependable than the politicized KGB, falsely reported that only the Soviet test of a fifty-megaton Tsar hydrogen bomb in October 1961 had deterred the US from launching a pre-emptive nuclear strike. Actually, both sides knew that the colossally destructive weapon was unusable. What really worried Khrushchev was that following the installation of highly accurate Minuteman missiles in blast-proof silos in Montana, South Dakota and Wyoming, the US had a nine-to-one superiority in Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles over the USSR, whose meagre arsenal of SS-7s were relatively inaccurate and required larger warheads. Also, the solid-fuel Minuteman could be launched much more rapidly than liquid-fuelled SS-7s, making them highly vulnerable to a US first strike. The British SIS confirmed much of this detail through GRU Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, who began spying for them in late 1960.11
In April 1962 JFK and the visiting Shah of Iran inspected Lantphibex-62, a vast amphibious exercise off Puerto Rico involving 40,000 troops and eighty-four warships. Developments in Cuba itself were also giving Khrushchev concern. Moscow’s Cuban Communist friends were losing ground to those like Guevara who were attracted by the vicious élan of Mao’s China. To the simple-minded or wilfully ignorant, the Great Leap Forward – a crash collectivization and industrialization programme initiated by Mao in the late 1950s which caused a catastrophic famine – was an example to be followed in the creation of the ‘new man’. The Soviet Union seemed part of the problem of imperialism rather than the solution, against which the Chinese appeared to offer the revolutionary solidarity of Third World proletarian nations. The looming split with China might be inevitable, given Mao’s determination to be recognized as the Communist world’s ‘Great Master’ in succession to Stalin. But ideological deviation among the satellite countries, among which Khrushchev (but not Castro) counted Cuba, posed a threat to the forward defence of the Soviet heartland.
In fact, to the chagrin of the stolid old men in the Kremlin, their charismatic new Cuban friends effortlessly assumed the role of the revolutionary socialist vanguard supposedly reserved for the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Romantic style once again trumped ideological substance, and the Russians found themselves under attack from the left, when all their mental processes were geared to dealing with the comparatively arcane deviationism of Yugoslavia’s Tito. Castro and Guevara were also reckless, training guerrilla fighters to create trouble even for Latin American countries that had not joined the OAS boycott of Cuba.12
All of these factors explain why Khrushchev decided to invest in Cuba more heavily than the arms shipments promised but only partially delivered because of the competing claims of Nasser’s Egypt. Stalin had been contemptuous of revolutionaries in the undeveloped world, but his successors were compelled to be more respectful of the revolutionary potentialities unleashed by colonial struggles, and to pay more attention to the educated elites in the civil service or the military in the Third World. Khrushchev decided that the USSR should ride the doctrinally unpredicted wave or else be left behind in what could well be the Marxist-Leninist dream of world revolution. To do so involved co-opting the Cubans, who had won enormous prestige by defeating the Americans, in order to halt their drift towards the perfidious Chinese and to curb the Castro–Guevara combine’s pretensions to becoming an autonomous ideological force in their own right.
On 12 April 1962 Khrushchev stopped prevaricating about deliveries of both Surface-to-Air (SAM) missile batteries and the Sopka coastal defence cruise missile system to Cuba, adding ten Ilyushin IL-28 medium bombers that Castro had not requested. Accompanying the weapons were Soviet military technicians to train the Cubans in their use – but also to guard them against misuse. These were purely defensive weapons, fully justified by the ongoing aggression of Operation Mongoose. But, as Mikoyan acknowledged after his first trip to Havana, Castro reminded aged Bolsheviks of when they had been young and daring. It was time for Khrushchev to show daring himself.13
Later in April Khrushchev said to his defence chief, Rodion Malinovsky, ‘Why not throw a hedgehog at Uncle Sam’s pants?’ Malinovsky answered that, whereas the Soviets had no SS-7s to spare, they had medium- (MRBM) and intermediate-range missiles in relative abundance. The IRBMs were comparable with the US Army Jupiter missiles that the US had recently installed in Italy and Turkey, and with the US Air Force Thor missiles installed in Britain. The Soviets were not to know that the rival missile systems had already caused a huge bureaucratic row, which had been resolved by the Solomonic decision to phase out Jupiter and Thor in favour of the submarine-based Polaris system. The deployment of Jupiter to Turkey and Italy had been little more than a counter to the view expressed by de Gaulle that the US would never use nuclear weapons to defend Europe, and that the continent should develop its own.
Khrushchev’s seemingly casual exchange with Malinovsky marked the beginning of a policy shift from defending Cuba to a projection of Soviet nuclear power into the Western hemisphere. There is little doubt that the Soviets would not have embarked on it were they not convinced that JFK was a weak man who would back down again if challenged robustly. The underhand and mean little pin-pricks of Operation Mongoose also indicated a ruler deficient in moral courage. In geostrategic terms the prize seemed well worth the risk. Putting the M into MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) by situating a formidable nuclear arsenal ninety miles from the coast of Florida, outflanking the north-facing US early-warning system, would greatly strengthen Khrushchev’s hand in negotiations over West Berlin and a whole range of other issues.14
Khrushchev’s Cuban launch platform would have included forty missiles with one-megaton warheads – R-12 MRBMs and R-14 IRBMs with respective ranges of 1,000 and 2,000 miles – and warheads in the low-kiloton range for eighty cruise missiles with a range of a hundred miles. In addition over 50,000 Soviet technicians and troops would buttress the island’s defences, though in the event only 41,000 were sent. A Soviet naval fleet would permanently operate from Cuban waters, including seven submarines carrying R-13 nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles based in the great natural harbour of Cienfuegos.15 The deployment was in flagrant violation of the formal guarantees Khrushchev had given in April 1961 that the Soviet Union did not have any bases in Cuba and did not intend to establish any. In August 1962, Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin assured Bobby Kennedy that Khrushchev would not cause trouble during the imminent US mid-term elections, and that he would never arm a third party with the means to wage a nuclear war.
As past masters of maskirovka (military camouflage and deception), the Soviets expected to be able to complete the deployment undetected, as they had done with a similar force projection into East Germany in 1959. Operation Anadyr was named after an obscure river on a Siberian peninsula, and KGB-controlled CIA watchers sent back reports of trainloads of fur hats and felt boots apparently heading towards the Arctic. Not even ships’ captains were told of their destination until they were at sea, but there was a surprisingly glaring lapse in the order to stop shaving given in June to the troops that were to be embarked. The idea was that they should blend in with their Cuban comrades on arrival. Pallid Slavic skins were also exposed to the sun in the vain hope of acquiring local colour during the long sea voyage; they peeled and glowed red instead.16
General Issa Pliyev flew to Havana in July, to prepare the launch sites, although maskirovka was to prove inadequate to conceal the equivalent of a major circus in a small town. From mid-July, eighty-five ships were en route to Cuba, some passing by intelligence-gathering nodes such as Gibraltar. While large numbers of troops sweltered below deck, a select few cavorted on deck for the benefit of reconnaissance aircraft. On 30 July, after one spy plane had flown so low that it crashed into the sea, Khrushchev piously asked JFK to suspend reconnaissance flights over Soviet ships in the Caribbean ‘for the sake of better relations’. The demands of maskirovka aside, the Soviets lacked the necessary shipping to deliver whole systems simultaneously, and missiles and warheads were despatched at considerable intervals, in the event allowing the US some scope to respond short of war.17
CIA chief John McCone did not believe it, and after U-2 flights had detected the positioning of top-of-the-range SA-2 SAM batteries on 29 August he sent JFK a memo speculating that they might have been deployed to protect more dangerous systems. However, he did not follow it up and went on a long honeymoon instead. Republican Senator Kenneth Keating was the sole voice warning that the Soviets were up to something destabilizing, but JFK dismissed him as ‘a nut’.18
US intelligence efforts redoubled as the ships began arriving in Cuba. It was the hurricane season and bad weather hampered aerial reconnaissance, but the fundamental problem was that, from fourteen miles above, U-2 cameras could not conclusively distinguish between a SAM and a ballistic missile under a tarpaulin on a trailer. Yet, as each day passed, the density of SAM coverage made low-level passes over Cuba more perilous, and as the CIA had discovered with the downing of Gary Powers, even the U-2s were threatened. Photographs taken at a slanting angle by aircraft skirting the island were even less revealing. Agents on the ground, however, reported that some of the trailers were so long that they damaged houses and knocked down telegraph poles when they made sharp turns, firmly indicating that they were carrying something bigger than a SAM.
On 4 September JFK issued a press statement warning the Soviets of the gravest consequences should they be giving Cuba ‘significant offensive capability’, specifying Soviet bases, Red Army troops and ballistic missiles. This let the Soviets know the US was aware of their game, and that the American public would now know too. The tension ratcheted up. By the end of the month he ordered the Pentagon to plan air strikes to knock out any ballistic missiles that might be identified, and/or to pave the way for an invasion. Later that month a CIA agent reported that the SAMs were being positioned in a trapezoid manner, the known configuration for defending a ballistic missile installation. It was decided to risk a low-level overflight when weather permitted.
On Monday 15 October, JFK received Algeria’s Ahmed Ben Bella in the White House. When Ben Bella probed JFK about his intentions towards Cuba, the President said that he would have to invade the island if the Soviets turned it into an offensive base, or if Castro tried to incite revolution in the Western hemisphere. But, JFK added, he might be able to reconcile himself to a ‘national Communist’ regime akin to those in Poland or Yugoslavia.19 Hours after Ben Bella had left, analysis of U-2 film taken the day before revealed fixed concrete slabs, and images of R-12 ballistic missiles before their trailers had time to scuttle beneath the palm trees. When JFK was told, he exclaimed, ‘He can’t do that to me!’ When Bobby was shown the briefing boards, he said, ‘Oh shit! Shit! Shit! Those sons of bitches Russians.’20
Blissfully unaware of this, Ben Bella flew on to Havana, where he was equally warmly welcomed. Algerian war orphans given sanctuary in Cuba cheered him on the airport tarmac. During the visit the Cubans agreed to send a team of doctors to make up the gaps in Algeria’s medical services left by the departing French. Everything seemed normal. At the official dinner on 17 October, Ben Bella reported JFK’s words to Fidel, and must have been startled by the ostentatious nonchalance with which his friend responded by boasting of his plans to export ‘the Revolution’ to the whole of Latin America.21
Soviet and Cuban intelligence failed to report on how Washington was responding. US options were thrashed out in an Executive Committee of the National Security Council, known as ExComm, though of course all major decisions were JFK’s alone. It would take only ninety seconds for his military aides to bring the ‘football’ containing the nuclear launch codes. ExComm’s members included the Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Maxwell Taylor; the CIA’s McCone; the National Security Advisor McGeorge ‘Mac’ Bundy (brother of William Bundy) and Ted Sorenson from the White House; and Dean Rusk, George Ball, Llewellyn Thomas and Charles Bohlen from the State Department. Dean Acheson and Adlai Stevenson, who also attended as elder statesmen, represented the two poles of Democrat foreign policy thinking. Bobby Kennedy was a permanent presence to cover for his brother, who had to maintain his normal schedule in the run-up to the mid-term elections; McGeorge Bundy proved to be ExComm’s weathercock, veering from air strikes to blockade and back again, although Acheson was implacably in favour of sending in the bombers. Valued advice came from outside ExComm, when JFK consulted ex-President Eisenhower by telephone. The Vice President was present at many sessions too, but did not say much. When he did it was along the lines of ‘All I know is that when I was a boy in Texas, and you were walking along the road when a rattlesnake reared up ready to strike, the only thing to do was to take a stick and chop its head off.’ Among the most hawkish, Vice President Johnson would be excluded from an inner ExComm cabal that settled the eventual deal with the Soviets.22
All participants were encouraged to maintain their regular public duties, and took effective measures to avoid attracting the attention of journalists. They car-pooled so that there should be no giveaway cavalcade of black automobiles entering the White House and took to using a tunnel from the Treasury building into the White House bomb shelter. Several ExComm members slept in their offices, not just for convenience but to avoid having to lie to their wives. George Ball broke cover by telling his wife to convert their basement into a bomb shelter, with canned food, bottled water and even a Bible for their pious black cook. McGeorge Bundy’s wife appears to have been fully aware of what was going on and impressed on him that a violent solution was not necessary. The general climate was caught by Tom Lehrer’s song:
Oh, we will all fry together when we fry
We’ll be French fried potatoes by and by
There will be no more misery
When the world is our rotisserie
Yes, we will all fry together when we fry
ExComm’s undisciplined, unstructured discussions took their toll on all involved. It was not unusual for sessions to go on for thirty hours at a stretch, fuelled by black coffee, sandwiches and cigarettes. Exhaustion manifested itself in short fuses, notably after Adlai Stevenson suggested something that smacked of appeasement. Minds sometimes switched off in the face of a maze of unsatisfactory options. JFK remained serene – according to the official history, relaxing in the evenings by watching films such as Roman Holiday with Audrey Hepburn. It is highly improbable that a man who claimed that he got headaches if he went without sex for a day would have sought any other form of relaxation. Possibly his nod to confidentiality was to limit himself to the services of Mary Pinchot Meyer, with whom he may have previously experimented with LSD and who was the ex-wife of Cord Meyer, head of the CIA’s International Organizations Division.
There was disagreement about the means, but none about the non-negotiable demand that the ballistic missiles must be removed from Cuba. Bobby Kennedy set the tone by declaring that ‘If we go in, we go in hard,’ at one point floating the idea of faking an attack on the US base at Guantanamo to give a pretext for invasion, just as Hitler did with Poland in 1939.23 Taylor was the only serving military officer on ExComm, but throughout the deliberations the other Joint Chiefs of Staff were asked their professional opinions. The easy assumption that civilian doves had to overcome military hawks should be resisted. In fact, there were plenty of civilian hawks, as well as hawkish doves and dovish hawks.24 Added tension came from the fact that several of the civilians had been subordinates of the Chiefs of Staff during the Second World War, notably McNamara, who had served as a statistician for the strategic bombing offensive conducted by General Curtis LeMay, and had in fact recommended him for the job of air force chief of staff in June 1961.
On one occasion, McNamara was told by General Thomas Power of the Strategic Air Command (SAC) that ‘the only way to deal with these barbarians was to blow them all up and I said, “But who’s going to win that?” And he said, ‘I would be satisfied if there were just two Americans left and one Russian – that would be . . . we would have won.” And I said, “Well there’d better be one of them a woman.”’25 The failure of the Joint Chiefs to warn him about the military nonsense of the Bay of Pigs operation had also taught JFK ‘to avoid feeling that just because they [generals] were military men their opinions on military matters were worth a damn’.26
JFK had an intriguing interaction with LeMay. Every time the two met, JFK ‘ended up in a sort of fit’. When Kennedy imagined himself in Khrushchev’s shoes, he conjured up a Russian air force general as relentless as LeMay urging the Soviet leader to destroy the US. This helped him appreciate Khrushchev’s domestic dilemmas. When Le May exclaimed, ‘You’re in a pretty bad fix, Mr President,’ JFK first asked him to repeat himself and then shot back, ‘You’re in there with me – personally.’27 But at the same time JFK appreciated the value of having at his side an air force commander with LeMay’s proven ruthlessness should it come to all-out war. There would be no doubt or hesitation there.28
ExComm was one of the first high-level policy discussions to be secretly recorded by devices activated by a button under JFK’s desk. What began as freewheeling seminar-type discussions, or what Acheson contemptuously called ‘a floating crap game’, gained greater focus. In perhaps the most remarkable personal transformation, the Kennedys set aside their obsessions with bringing down Castro.
Initially JFK was in favour of taking the missile sites out, and teams were formed to game out the options when discussions deadlocked, with participants required to play devil’s advocate against their own preferred strategy, as the NSC under Bobby Cutler had done for Eisenhower. The first discussions rapidly established that there was only one option with regard to such a ‘fast track’, because air strikes limited to the missile sites would almost certainly escalate to a more general air assault. It was most unlikely that the CIA had been able to identify all the sites; indeed the full effectiveness of maskirovka in Cuba was not learned until much later. Post-Second World War analysis of the effects of strategic bombing were not reassuring about the ability of the bombers to win a campaign outright, and once an all-out air assault took place an invasion would follow. Maxwell Taylor’s gloomy estimates of the likely loss of US lives in any such endeavour dampened enthusiasm for a pre-emptive strike, as it became clear that a ‘graded’ military response was a chimera. Conflicting advice from the Joint Chiefs made it very far from their finest hour. Moral qualms did not surface until the high probability of uncontrollable escalation became apparent, with George Ball warning of the negative effects of the US committing its own Pearl Harbor in the Caribbean. Bobby concurred, joking, ‘My brother is not going to be the Tojo of the 1960s.’29
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 harsh 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.