CHAPTER 31

GRAND SETTLEMENT

Nikita Khrushchev and his East German associates had intentionally chosen to build the Berlin Wall on a weekend, when many fewer East Berliners would be going to work at their jobs in West Berlin. So it was that on a Sunday, August 13, 1961, hundreds of East German police lined up along the twenty-seven-mile sectoral boundary, including the Brandenburg Gate, and began unrolling barbed wire. Concrete barriers went up two days later. Ultimately, the wall sliced through 192 streets, thirty-two railway lines, eight S-Bahn city train lines, four subway lines, and three autobahns. On August 22, 1961, a hundred-meter no-man’s-land was created on both sides of the wall.

West Berlin—a hundred miles inside East Germany—had been set aside by France, Britain, and the United States after the Grand Alliance with the Soviets defeated Hitler. It almost immediately became the political ground zero in the Cold War. An oasis of freedom, it acted like a magnet. By 1961, more than three million East Germans—a fifth of the population—had fled to the city, often using it as a way station for relocating across Western Europe.

The need for a solution became acute when, in the spring of 1961, the westward flow of refugees doubled after the East German parliament voted down a proposal to lift wages and shorten the workweek. The ugly, hastily built barrier was a brutish stopgap measure, not a long-term solution, and gave the West another propaganda gift of inestimable value. Kennedy speechwriter Teddy Sorensen summarized the view from the White House: The wall was “illegal, immoral, and inhumane, but not a cause for war.” The humane way to deal with East Germany’s problem—and the self-evident answer to the crisis—would have been to permit Germany’s reunification. Instead, East Germany limped along, and its most notable product became young female athletes disfigured by doping. An already diseased state submitted to perversion.

The fix Khrushchev preferred he dared not attempt. He wanted to flush the Western military presence out of Berlin altogether. But during a June 1961 summit in Geneva, President Kennedy made clear such a move would mean war—“West Berlin is Western Europe,” he told the Soviet leader. Khrushchev knew he was still outgunned and, overall, his communist empire was a sputtering mess.

Meeting the requirements of food and shelter remained a challenge. Taller buildings would have more expeditiously answered the USSR’s desperate housing shortage, but there weren’t sufficient raw materials to supply elevators for apartments above five stories. Soviet agriculture couldn’t produce an adequate supply of meat and dairy. At peasant markets, eggs were selling for three dollars a dozen—this in a country habituated to paying only pennies for basic food items. The Kremlin was forced to sell twenty-three tons of gold to buy European butter.

A poster circulated in the Siberian city of Chita: “You’re a blabbermouth, Khrushchev: Where’s the abundance you promised?” When retail prices were raised on meat, poultry, butter, and milk, civil disturbances took place across the Soviet Union. After Red Army troops and secret police units were sent to pacify Novocherkassk, a demonstration of ten thousand ended with twenty-six dead and eight wounded. Wrote William Taubman, “The authorities were so determined to conceal the true toll that they repaved the street, which scrub brushes and fire hoses had proved unable to cleanse of blood, and buried the victims secretly in five separate cemeteries in widely dispersed parts of the Rostov Province.”

As civil discontent mounted, so did crime. Khrushchev demanded a greater use of the death penalty. The KGB enlarged its police units. A one-third increase in the defense budget was authorized. Khrushchev’s hope of improving the Soviet standard of living through détente and demilitarization had all but faded away.

Meanwhile, the Soviet rocket program, which the Soviet leader envisioned as a shortcut to strategic parity with the United States, was still struggling to recover from a disaster at the Baikonur Cosmodrome on October 24, 1960. During the prelaunch sequence of the new R-16 intercontinental ballistic missile, a fuel supply system, improperly repaired, caused a fire. Ten tons of fuel ignited. More than a hundred people died, many burned alive, including Mitrofan Nedelin, the head of the Strategic Rocket Forces and chief marshal of artillery. He could only be identified by the Hero of the Soviet Union award on his uniform. The Soviet media reported he had died in a plane crash.

In early 1962, Khrushchev received more depressing news about his missile program. He learned that the R-16 had been made obsolete by the second generation of U.S. missiles, the Minuteman. The corrosive liquid propellant used for the R-16 had to be drained if the rocket wasn’t immediately used. As a result, the missile always required refueling, which took hours. By contrast, the U.S. Minuteman, powered by solid fuels, remained in a ready position for years; it required only minutes to launch. “Before we managed to move the R-16 and lift it into place, nothing would be left of us,” a chief rocket official told Khrushchev.

The arms deficiency propelled Khrushchev to find a partial solution through geography. Although the Soviets were struggling to build a reliable intercontinental ballistic missile, they did have effective medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBMs) and intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs). These weapons provided little leverage if they remained inside the borders of the Soviet Union, but—assuming Fidel Castro’s cooperation—the Soviets could spot a bunch of them in Cuba, ninety miles off the U.S. coast, close enough to imperil every city in the continental United States. “Why not throw a hedgehog at Uncle Sam’s pants?” Khrushchev quipped.

“As we now know,” Max Frankel wrote, “the Cuban missile ploy was cooked up in the spring of 1962 by Khrushchev, and his defense minister, Rodion Malinovksy. They faced a growing ‘missile gap’ in America’s favor and realized that catching up in the production of ICBMs would take years and cost a czar’s fortune. Quickly building nuclear bases in Cuba would let them deploy their abundant stocks of short range (1,000-to 2,000-mile) missiles and instantly multiply the number of American targets in their nuclear sights.”

Khrushchev began imagining a grand settlement. “By November 6, [1962,] all the missiles would be in Cuba and operational,” wrote Fursenko and Naftali, “and his Foreign Ministry would have prepared boilerplate for formal agreements on the establishment of a UN presence in West Berlin and the withdrawal of Western troops. In addition, he would have a draft of a test ban treaty that he could offer to Kennedy as a sweetener once the President had swallowed the retreat from Berlin.” Providing Castro with a nuclear boost would also deter American interference. “So long as the secret [missile] deployment to Cuba could hold,” Fursenko and Naftali added, “Khrushchev believed that John Kennedy would have no choice but to accept Soviet terms for ending the Cold War in 1962.”

This thinking was the product of a desperate man ruling a dysfunctional state. Desperation doesn’t often clarify the mind, and Khrushchev’s best-laid plans would go terribly awry.

In July 1962, the Soviets began positioning a chunk of the Red Army in Cuba. The deployment would eventually include antiaircraft guns and missiles, a battalion of T-55 tanks, a wing of MIG-21 fighters, forty-two Il-28 light bombers, 162 nuclear weapons, and 41,902 troops. This large and rapid military surge was going to be hard to miss and, predictably, the goal of total secrecy was never met.

Many of the arriving Soviet soldiers were dressed as civilians and described as machine operators, irrigation specialists, and agricultural advisors; the Cuban population was not fooled. Sergey Biryuzov, head of the Soviet Rocket Forces, told Khrushchev that the missiles would be concealed and camouflaged by palm trees; this was fanciful thinking. Within weeks, the CIA had learned about the buildup from sources on the ground and U-2 photos.

After the Soviets shot down the U-2 piloted by Gary Powers, Khrushchev had seen the quality of the photos taken by the plane. This fact alone should have made him far more skeptical of being able to hide his hedgehogs from Uncle Sam. Operation Anadyr, as the Cuba plan was code-named, could only pave the way for his “Grand Settlement to End the Cold War” if the United States was suddenly and shockingly presented with a nuclear fait accompli.

On August 10, 1962, CIA director John A. McCone sent a memo to Kennedy about the Soviet arms traffic and reasoned that sending antiaircraft missiles into Cuba only made sense “if Moscow intended to use them to shield a base for ballistic missiles aimed at the United States.” Three weeks later, on August 31, Republican Kenneth Keating went to the Senate floor and accused the Kennedy administration of hiding the fact that Khrushchev was building rocket bases in Cuba. With the Bay of Pigs catastrophe still resonant and midterm elections approaching, such a charge was political dynamite for the White House. “In his presidential bid,” Benjamin Schwarz noted in the Atlantic, “Kennedy had red-baited the Eisenhower-Nixon administration, charging that its policies had ‘helped make Communism’s first Caribbean base.’” Roger Hilsman, the State Department’s director of intelligence and research, put it this way: “The United States might not be in mortal danger, but… the administration most certainly was.”

On September 7, a day before the first consignment of medium-range nuclear missiles arrived in Cuba, Soviet ambassador to the United States Anatoly Dobrynin assured U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Adlai Stevenson that the Soviet Union was supplying only defensive weapons to Cuba. (Such lies continued until October 25, when Stevenson produced reconnaissance photos of the missile sites at the UN.) In all, thirty-six R-12 MRBMs would be delivered. These were topped by a megaton-class warhead capable of reaching as far north as New York, or as far west as Dallas.

Unknown for the remainder of the Cold War, the Soviets also shipped more than a hundred smaller tactical nuclear weapons to Cuba. These were to be used to repel a prospective U.S. invasion. Some of the nuclear-tipped cruise missiles had a hundred-mile range and enough destructive power to destroy an invasion armada. Others were assigned to Soviet motorized brigades and were to be used exclusively for battlefield combat. A total of six nuclear bombs were also provided for the light bombers, and four Soviet submarines moving toward Cuba each carried a nuclear missile.

The thirteen-day period that came to be identified as the height of the crisis began on October 16, when Kennedy received solid visual evidence of the missiles from a U-2 flight. Oleg Penkovsky, a CIA agent inside Soviet military intelligence, had already provided an R-12 manual, which greatly helped analysts make sense of the photographs. JFK’s military advisors, LeMay in particular, pushed for an attack.

“The Russian bear has always been eager to stick his paw in Latin American waters,” LeMay told Kennedy at one point. “Now that we’ve got him in a trap, let’s take his leg off right up to his testicles. On second thought, let’s take off his testicles, too.”

“These brass hats have one great advantage in their favor,” Kennedy said to his closest advisors. “If we listen to them, and do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them that they were wrong.”

On October 17, 1962, Kennedy decided the initial U.S. response would be a blockade to interrupt all incoming shipping. Five more days would pass before JFK told Khrushchev—and the world—about his decision to blockade Cuba, which he’d technically call a “quarantine,” so it didn’t sound like an act of war, even though by any other name it was still an act of war. What propelled the idea of a blockade was smart politics: Look tough, but don’t play nutty nuclear cowboy.

At 7:00 p.m. Eastern on October 22, Kennedy delivered, as the New York Times wrote, “an 18-minute radio and television address of a grimness unparalleled in recent times.” The president announced the discovery of the missiles in Cuba, the start of the quarantine, and invoked the nineteenth-century Monroe Doctrine:

It shall be the policy of this nation 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.

As Kennedy said those words, twenty-year-old college junior and future journalist Michael Mosettig was watching at a fraternity house affiliated with George Washington University. “In a room of about 20 normally talkative and garrulous fraternity men, the only sound was the occasional gasp,” he recalled. “As that week spun on, seemingly in increasing danger, there was some talk of a few people here moving their families out of Washington.… Ever since the Soviets exploded their first atomic bomb in 1949, being a nuclear target was part of the subconscious price that we and our families paid to work and live in the nation’s capital.” The New Yorker wrote, “The great gate hung on its hinges, and would have to swing, but when? And in what direction? In the oddly silent wasteland of First Avenue, we could hear the ticking of the watch on our wrist.”

On October 24, Kennedy put additional pressure on Khrushchev to remove the missiles by placing Strategic Air Command at Defense Condition (DEFCON) 2 for the first time since the system was established, in 1959. This was one step short of nuclear war. The order was issued on an open channel so that the Soviets could hear it. Sixty-six B-52s carrying hydrogen bombs were now constantly airborne, replaced with fresh crews every twenty-four hours.

What came next depends upon your source, or gullibility. According to the formidable Kennedy mythmaking machine, JFK calmly repelled the warmongers inside his administration and ultimately strong-armed the Soviet leader into packing up his missiles in return for a minor concession, a declaration that the United States would not invade Cuba. But that’s definitely not what happened.

“In the midst of that crisis,” Schwarz wrote, “the sanest and most sensible observers… saw a missile trade as a fairly simple solution.” The quid pro quo being suggested by, among others, UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson was this: Khrushchev would take the missiles out of Cuba if Kennedy removed the U.S. missiles in Turkey. “In an effort to resolve the impasse,” Schwarz added, “Khrushchev himself openly made this proposal on October 27. According to the version of events propagated by the Kennedy administration (and long accepted as historical fact), Washington unequivocally rebuffed Moscow’s offer and instead, thanks to Kennedy’s resolve, forced a unilateral Soviet withdrawal.”

This was the way the deal actually went down: Without telling his top advisors, Kennedy instructed his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, to meet secretly with Soviet ambassador Dobrynin. RFK told Dobrynin that the United States was willing to remove the missiles from Turkey within five months provided the concession not be part of any public resolution to the conflict. Vice President Lyndon Johnson was one of many who did not know about the trade. “In their effort to maintain the cover-up,” wrote Schwarz, “a number of those who did, including [Secretary of Defense Robert] McNamara and [Secretary of State Dean] Rusk, lied to Congress.… By successfully hiding the deal… Kennedy and his team reinforced the dangerous notion that firmness in the face of what the United States construes as aggression, and the graduated escalation of military threats and action in countering that aggression, makes for a successful national-security strategy.”

What also remained hidden for decades were multiple harrowing episodes during those thirteen tense days in October that could have resulted in global nuclear war.

At least four nuclear weapons were detonated in space during the Cuban Missile Crisis, two by the United States, two by the Soviets. These were incredibly ill-timed tests of the Christofilos effect, named after Nicholas Christofilos, a Greek elevator repairman turned inventor who theorized that an antimissile shield of high-energy electrons—a kind of invisible Astrodome—could be created by exploding a large number of nuclear weapons in space.

The United States conducted a test related to this theory on October 20, code-named Checkmate. A rocket was launched from Johnston Atoll, 860 miles southwest of Hawaii, in the United States Minor Outlying Islands. The rocket carried a low-yield nuclear warhead that was detonated at an altitude of 91 miles. Observers on Johnston Island reported seeing a man-made version of the aurora borealis—a circular green-and-blue region “surrounded by a blood-red ring” along with “blue-green streamers and numerous pink striations.”

On October 22, likely in response to the U.S. test, the Soviets exploded a warhead of their own in space. Four days later, on October 26, the United States conducted a second high-altitude nuclear test, code-named Bluegill Triple Prime. By this point, the U.S. military had been placed on DEFCON 2 alert. Commenting on the timing of the tests, CIA Soviet missile expert Raymond Garthoff said, “The danger of the situation simply getting out of control from developments or accidents or incidents that neither side—leaders on either side—were even aware of, much less in control of, could have led to war.”

On October 28, 1962, in Kazakhstan, the Soviets detonated a nuclear weapon at an altitude of ninety-three miles. Russian scientists reported that the detonation caused an electromagnetic pulse that covered all of Kazakhstan, including “electrical cables buried underground.”

Meanwhile, Curtis LeMay was conspiring with his successor at SAC, Thomas Powers, to raise the heat. “They began taking small steps to provoke nuclear war on their own,” the New Yorker’s Joshua Rothman noted. “At the height of the crisis, SAC decided to go ahead with an ICBM test launch which, by all rights, should have been cancelled.” This was a deliberate provocation, and there were more. “SAC airborne-alert bombers deliberately flew past their customary turnaround points toward the Soviet Union,” Richard Rhodes wrote. “The bombers did eventually turn back, but the provocation was clear.”

On the morning of Saturday, October 27, U-2 pilot Rudolf Anderson was approaching Cuba during what he expected to be a routine reconnaissance mission. At the same time, one of the newly constructed Soviet antiaircraft missile batteries on Cuba started the first test of its early warning and guidance system.

“[The] numbers appeared on the screen: azimuth, altitude, distance, speed,” Khrushchev’s son Sergei later wrote.

There could be no doubt. They’d detected a spy plane. The operators called the head of Soviet air defenses in Cuba, Col. Georgy Voronkov. He in turn tried to contact the commander of all Soviet forces in Cuba, Gen. Issa Pliyev, but no one knew where he was. Voronkov called again: “The target is leaving. We have two minutes left.” The generals had no orders from Moscow to shoot down single American planes. They were authorized to use missiles only in case of an assault on the island, a massive bomber attack. But there was no categorical prohibition either. Now only seconds were left.

“Fire,” one of Pliyev’s deputies, Maj. Gen. Leonid Gabruz, breathed softly into the telephone.

Two SAM-2 anti-aircraft missiles broke from their launchers and tore into the clear blue sky. A small white puff of smoke appeared. The operator reported: “The target has been destroyed.”

U.S. officials assumed Khrushchev had ordered the attack and were deeply shaken. “Had another American plane been hit,” George Perkovich wrote in Politico, “the United States probably would have responded first by bombing missile installations. Depending on how Castro and his forces reacted to that, and whether the Soviets would have begun removing the detected missiles, Kennedy and the military planned that the United States would begin an invasion.” The United States had expected that such an invasion would produce a quick victory; at the time, intelligence reports indicated only eight thousand to ten thousand Soviet troops were in Cuba. In fact, there were four times that many, a total not revealed until 2008.

On the same day the U-2 was shot down, USS Beale, an American destroyer, located a diesel-powered Soviet Foxtrot submarine in Cuban waters. The Beale began dropping practice depth charges, the size of a hand grenade, to force the sub to surface. The charges were actually nonlethal practice rounds, and the U.S. Navy had informed the Soviets about using this tactic. But the captain of submarine B-59, Valentin Savitsky, didn’t have that information, nor did he know about Kennedy’s blockade. He’d lost communication with Moscow.

The atmosphere on board the Soviet vessel was already tense and unsustainable. The battery was failing, and the air conditioning and onboard freezer had conked out. This had the effect of spoiling much of the food supply and raising the temperature inside the ship to a sweltering one hundred degrees. The crew, dripping sweat, were working in their underwear and fainting from rising levels of carbon dioxide. Due to lack of water, everyone was infected with rashes.

As the assault of depth charges continued, the Soviet seamen assumed they were under attack. “They exploded right next to the hull,” said intelligence officer Vadim Orlov. “It felt like you were sitting in a metal barrel, which somebody is constantly blasting with a sledgehammer.”

The U.S. Navy was also missing a critical piece of information about the B-59: The Soviet sub was carrying a 15-kiloton T-5 nuclear torpedo, approximating the explosive power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Savitsky ordered the nuclear torpedo prepared for battle readiness. Then he roared, “We’re going to blast them now! We will die, but we will sink them all—we will not become the shame of the fleet.”

The sub’s target was USS Randolf, a giant aircraft carrier leading the Navy task force. However, firing without a direct order from Moscow required the consent of all three senior officers on board. Political officer Ivan Maslennikov agreed that the torpedo should be launched. But the other officer, Second Captain Vasili Arkhipov, dissented. His word carried weight. The year before, he had exposed himself to deadly radiation in order to save a submarine with an overheating reactor.

Arkhipov argued that they did not know for sure that the ship was under attack. Why not surface and then await orders from Moscow? The torpedo wasn’t fired. The B-59 surfaced near the American warships and set off north, returning to the Soviet Union without incident.

Thomas Blanton, the director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University, said, “The lesson from this is that a guy called Vasili Arkhipov saved the world.”

“We know now,” said Harvard political scientist Graham Allison, “that in addition to nuclear-armed ballistic missiles, the Soviet Union had deployed 100 tactical nuclear weapons to Cuba.… The U.S. air strike and invasion that were scheduled for the third week of the confrontation would likely have triggered a nuclear response against American ships and troops, and perhaps even Miami. The resulting war might have led to the deaths of over 100 million Americans and over 100 million Russians.”

As more has been learned about the scope of what took place during the crisis, the actions of Khrushchev and Kennedy have received much harsher reviews. “[Khrushchev] managed to transform the years between 1958 and 1962 into the most dangerous period of the Cold War without achieving a grand settlement,” wrote Fursenko and Naftali. “The threat of nuclear war was useful only if your enemy truly believed you were suicidal. Instead, with the United States aware of its strategic advantage, these standoffs turned into games of chicken that Khrushchev always called off first. It was Khrushchev’s propensity to risk war to make peace that bedeviled U.S. presidents.” In the meantime, Kennedy was consumed by imagery and oblivious to the downside of a Cuba policy that had completely forsaken diplomacy and essentially had only one action item: assassinating Fidel Castro.

In the immediate aftermath of the Cuban crisis, a Soviet envoy told his American counterpart, “We will honor this agreement, but I want to tell you something. You’ll never do this to us again.” Soviet lieutenant general Nikolai Detinov explained what came next: “Because of the strategic [imbalance] between the United States and the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union had to accept everything that the United States dictated to it and this had a painful effect on our country and our government.… All our economic resources were mobilized [afterward] to solve this problem.” By 1978, the two nations would achieve numerical nuclear parity, with the Soviets slightly ahead, commanding an inventory of 25,393 total warheads to 24,243 for the United States. The Soviet stockpile would peak at 40,000 warheads during the 1980s.