CHAPTER 15:
TO THE BRINK OF NUCLEAR WAR AND BACK
Chairman Nikita Khrushchev responded defiantly to the blockade, denouncing the U.S. action in an October 23 letter to Kennedy as a “gross violation” of international law and a “threat to peace and security.” He stressed, “We cannot recognize the right of the United States to establish control over armaments essential to Republic of Cuba for strengthening its defensive capability.”
Khrushchev decided to test Kennedy’s determination, according to his foreign-policy aide Oleg Troyanovsky. “The first reaction of Khrushchev and the others to Kennedy’s speech was one of relief rather than alarm,” Troyanovsky recalls. “The ‘quarantine’ of Cuba proclaimed by President Kennedy seemed to leave a great deal of room for political maneuvering. In any case it did not sound like an ultimatum or a direct threat of an attack on Cuba.” Khrushchev ordered Soviet merchant ships sailing toward the U.S. quarantine line to proceed on course. He later wrote, “We didn’t let ourselves be intimidated.”
The impending showdown on the seas off Cuba was infused with the nightmarish logic of Cold War brinkmanship. Khrushchev recollected, “In our estimation the Americans were trying to frighten us, but they were no less scared than we were of atomic war.” He continued, “We hadn’t had time to deliver all our shipments to Cuba, but we had installed enough missiles already to destroy New York, Chicago, and the other huge industrial cities, not to mention a little village like Washington. I don’t think America had ever faced such a threat of destruction as at that moment.”618
There was considerable anxiety in the Kremlin as thirty Soviet merchant ships steamed toward Cuba, including five vessels carrying nuclear warheads. Soviet Defense Minister Rodion Malinovsky had instructed General Issa Pliyev, commander of Soviet forces in Cuba, to ready his troops for war on October 22. The USSR accelerated its military construction activities in Cuba. Historians Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali write, “The Soviet colony on the island… was in a state of frenzied activity. Pliyev had ordered stepped-up measures to prepare for war. At 2 a.m. on October 23, Soviet soldiers began digging trenches around missile installations and manning antiaircraft batteries.”619
In an October 23 letter, Khrushchev told Castro what the USSR was doing to defend Cuba. “The Soviet Government has expressed the most determined protest against the piratical actions of the United States Government, denouncing them as perfidious and aggressive.” He said, “We have issued instructions to our military personnel in Cuba on the need to adopt the necessary measures to be completely ready for combat.” Military forces in the USSR and Warsaw Pact countries were also put on alert status.
In Havana, Fidel Castro denounced the blockade on Cuban television, in a voice filled with anger and emotion. “Our arms are defensive,” he declared. “We will acquire the arms we feel like acquiring and we don’t have to give an account to the imperialists. Cuba has the right to arm itself and defend itself. What would have occurred if we had not been armed at the time of Girón Beach [Bay of Pigs]?” Castro put 350,000 Cuban soldiers and militia members on combat alert status to defend the island from an expected invasion by U.S. troops.620
In Washington, the CIA’s Board of National Estimates (BNE) warned that the USSR was likely to challenge the U.S. blockade line. In an October 23 letter, President John Kennedy urged Khrushchev to honor the U.S. quarantine of Cuba. “I think you will recognize that the steps which started the current chain of events was the action of your government in secretly furnishing offensive weapons to Cuba,” Kennedy wrote. “I am concerned that we both show prudence and do nothing to allow events to make the situation more difficult to control than it already is.”621
On the evening of October 23, Attorney General Robert Kennedy paid a secret visit to Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin at the Soviet Embassy. Dobrynin remembered, “He was in a state of agitation.” Kennedy was angry that the Soviets had deceived the Kennedy Administration about the offensive nature of the weapons the USSR was delivering to Cuba.
As he got ready to leave, Kennedy asked whether the Soviet merchant ships en route to Cuba would voluntarily comply with the U.S. blockade. Dobrynin said the ship captains had been instructed to continue on course for Cuba. Kennedy replied, “I don’t know how all of this will end, for we intend to stop your ships.”
The Kennedy brothers would use the Dobrynin back-channel to communicate with Khrushchev for the rest of the missile crisis. The Kennedys’ confidence in Dobrynin turned out to be well placed. Dobrynin had not deceived the Kennedys about the missiles. Khrushchev had kept him out of the loop on the missile deployment to Cuba.622 The stage was set for the most dangerous crisis of the Cold War.
By imposing a naval blockade of Cuba, Kennedy wanted to demonstrate political firmness and resolve. But he also wanted to avoid a direct military confrontation with the USSR, according to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Maxwell Taylor: “It was a classic example of the use of military power for political purposes…” McNamara biographer Deborah Shapley writes, “The object [of the blockade] was not to shoot anybody but to communicate a political message to Khrushchev.”623 According to Taylor, Kennedy told McNamara to monitor “the key actions of his military forces,” and McNamara did.
The Navy was eager to stop and board any vessel that defied the quarantine. But President Kennedy wanted to give Khrushchev more time to order the merchant ships to turn around. The potential for a naval clash was underscored by the approach of the freighters Gagarin and Kimovsk, which were accompanied by Soviet submarines. The ExCom debated whether to stop ships carrying weapons or those transporting nonmilitary goods, eventually reaching a consensus that there was less risk of confrontation in stopping vessels with nonmilitary cargoes.
The first ship the ExCom decided to stop for inspection was the oil tanker Bucharest. On October 26, when a U.S. Navy destroyer signaled the Bucharest to stop, the crew cooperated fully. The Bucharest was permitted to proceed to Cuba. The Navy also hailed and boarded the Marucla, a Lebanese flag freighter with a dry cargo, without incident. The freighter was allowed to sail to Cuba.624
In the meantime, the Kennedy Administration received intelligence that Soviet merchant ships, thought to be delivering missiles and warheads, had reversed course. Kennedy telephoned British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. He said, “The fourteen ships that have turned back are obviously the ones that have sensitive cargo that he [Khrushchev] does not want us to be able to produce.”625
Khrushchev decided not to challenge the U.S. blockade on the high seas, but Soviet construction activities at missile sites in Cuba continued apace. On October 24, McCone reported to the ExCom, “Surveillance of Cuba indicates the continued rapid progress in completion of the IRBMs and MRBMs.” McCone noted, “Buildings believed to afford nuclear storage are being assembled with great rapidity.” Surveillance also revealed expedited assembly of IL-28 bombers, construction of antiaircraft batteries near missile sites, and increasingly sophisticated camouflage activities.
As construction at the missile sites continued, the United States and the Soviet Union edged ineluctably closer to the brink of nuclear war. Each day the missile crisis remained unresolved, more Soviet missiles became operational, and pressure mounted on Kennedy to take new and increasingly dangerous steps. At an ExCom meeting on October 25, Attorney General Kennedy had second thoughts about air strikes in Cuba. He noted the continuing Soviet construction activities at missile sites.
Kennedy mused, “Rather than have the confrontation with the Russians at sea… it might be better to… knock out their missile bases as a first step.” Mindful of his Pearl Harbor line of opposition to air strikes a few days earlier, Kennedy suggested giving a ten-minute warning to the Russians to remove their military personnel from the missile sites.
As preparations for U.S. military action in Cuba gained momentum, the need for up-to-date targeting intelligence grew. General William Y. Smith, special assistant to General Maxwell Taylor from 1961 to 1963, wrote “Beginning October 23, the U.S. Navy and Air Force began to fly low-level reconnaissance missions over Cuba, partly to intensify the search for nuclear weapons depots but primarily to provide targeting data more accurately than the high-level U-2 photography could supply.”
A plan to use Cuban assets of Operation Mongoose to gather intelligence “on missile bases and other points of interest” was discussed at an ExCom meeting on October 26. Ten teams of five Cubans were to be infiltrated into Cuba in a covert operation involving U.S. submarines. But the plan got bogged down in bureaucratic turf battles among the CIA, Edward Lansdale, and the Pentagon.626
On October 26, President Kennedy learned that the situation in Cuba was even more dangerous than he thought, when McCone and Arthur Lundahl, head of the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC), briefed him on the presence of Luna missiles in Cuba—tactical nuclear missiles with a twenty-to-twenty-five-mile range.627 Had U.S. ground forces intervened in Cuba, the vastly outnumbered Soviet troops on the island likely would have used the Lunas against the invasion force. If Lunas were fired at U.S. forces, the pressure on President Kennedy to authorize a nuclear response would have been intense. As the danger mounted, Khrushchev opened a direct line of communication with Kennedy.
On the evening of October 26, a long letter for President Kennedy from Chairman Khrushchev arrived at the Department of State. Khrushchev acknowledged that the Soviet Union had installed missiles in Cuba, but asserted that the objective of the missile deployment was defensive. Khrushchev welcomed Kennedy’s recognition of the need for mutual restraint. “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 the knot will be tied,” he wrote.
He referred to his personal experiences in war. “If indeed war should break out, then, it would not be in our power to contain or stop it, for such is the logic of war,” he wrote. “I have participated in two wars and know that war ends when it has rolled through cities and villages, everywhere sowing death and destruction.” Khrushchev offered Kennedy an olive branch. “If assurances were given by the President and the Government of the United States that the USA would not participate in an attack on Cuba and would restrain others from actions of this sort, if you would recall your fleet, this would significantly change everything.”628
A handful of ExCom members met with President Kennedy in the Oval Office to analyze Khrushchev’s letter. Under Secretary of State George Ball remembered, “The Chairman’s letter seemed to be the break in the clouds we had been waiting for…” White House aide Theodore Sorensen recalled the letter was “long, meandering, full of polemics but in essence appearing to contain the germ of a reasonable settlement.”
When the ExCom reconvened the next morning, Kennedy and his aides believed that a favorable settlement of the crisis was within reach. But those hopes were promptly dashed. Sorensen notes, “A new Khrushchev letter came in, this time in public, making no mention of the private correspondence but raising the ante: the Jupiter missiles in Turkey must be included in exchange.”
National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy suggested that Kennedy ignore Khrushchev’s new proposal and respond to his earlier quid pro quo restricted to Cuba: the removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba in return for a U.S. pledge not to invade Cuba. Kennedy disagreed. He thought that Khrushchev’s new offer must be taken seriously. “We’re going to be in an insupportable position on this matter if it becomes his proposal. In the first place, we last year tried to get the missiles out of there [Turkey] because they’re not militarily useful, number one.” Kennedy noted, “Number two… it will look like a very fair trade.”
He continued, “[I]t will [be] very difficult to explain why we are going to take hostile military action in Cuba, against those [missile] sites… when he’s saying: ‘If you’ll get yours out of Turkey, we’ll get ours out of Cuba.’ I think we’ve got a very touchy point here.”629
In the ExCom, however, there was opposition to a Cuba-Turkey missile tradeoff. The minutes of an ExCom Berlin-NATO subcommittee meeting on October 27 reported, “The subject was raised and while no firm and formal judgments were reached the sense of the group was that the door should be closed as quickly as possible on the idea of trading the U.S. position in Turkey for the Soviet position in Cuba.”630
President Kennedy stepped out of the Cabinet Room to attend to other business. When he returned to the ExCom meeting, he resumed his analysis of Khrushchev’s latest proposal. “Let’s not kid ourselves. They’ve got a very good proposal, which is the reason they’ve made it public,” Kennedy asserted. “[I]t makes it much more difficult for us to move [against Cuba] with world support.”631
In the meantime, the full text of Khrushchev’s new proposal arrived in Washington. Khrushchev wrote, “You have been alarmed by the fact that we aided Cuba with weapons, in order to strengthen its defense capability.” He added, “Our aim has been to help Cuba and no one can dispute the humanity of our motives, which are oriented toward enabling Cuba to live peacefully and develop in the way its people desire.”
Khrushchev spelled out his new proposal. The Soviet Union would remove its missiles from Cuba if the United States withdrew its missiles from Turkey. To complete the quid pro quo, Khrushchev proposed that the United States pledge not to invade Cuba or interfere in the island’s internal affairs.632
Meanwhile, the Soviet Defense Ministry received a coded message from General Issa Pliyev, commander of Soviet forces in Cuba, on the morning of October 27. Pliyev cited intelligence sources that reported the United States had located the positions of Soviet missile sites in Cuba. Pliyev’s sources also said the U.S. Strategic Air Command had been put on “a full military alert.” “In the opinion of the Cuban comrades a strike by U.S. aircraft on our facilities in Cuba ought to be expected on the night of 26–27 October or at dawn on the 27th.” He noted, “In case of a strike on our facilities by American aircraft it has been decided to use all available air defense resources.” A few hours later Defense Minister Malinovsky, with the backing of Khrushchev and the Presidium, cabled Pliyev. Malinovsky wrote, “Your decision is approved.”633
Halfway around the world, in the E-ring of the Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs of Staff rejected Khrushchev’s new proposal. The Joint Chiefs distrusted Khrushchev’s motives. General Taylor dismissed the proposal as a stalling tactic designed to draw the United States into lengthy and inconclusive negotiations.
The Joint Chiefs believed that the moment had arrived for decisive U.S. military action. Taylor told the ExCom that the Joint Chiefs favored the implementation of OPLAN 312, “the big [air] strike,” on October 29, to be followed in seven days by OPLAN 316, “the invasion plan,” unless “there is irrefutable evidence in the meantime that offensive weapons are being dismantled…” Kennedy rejected the Joint Chiefs’ recommendation. The White House responded to Khrushchev’s proposal with a press statement. “Work on the Cuban bases must stop,” the White House declared. “Offensive weapons must be rendered inoperable; and further shipment of offensive weapons to Cuba must cease—all under effective international verification.”634 Kennedy was playing for time, waiting for diplomacy to bear fruit. In the short term, however, the missile crisis took a turn for the worse.
In the White House, October 27 was known as “Black Saturday,” the day events pushed the “hands of the metaphorical Doomsday Clock,” in journalist Michael Dobbs’s apt phrase, to “one minute to midnight.”
On October 27, a U-2 spy plane was shot down over eastern Cuba by a surface-to-air missile (SAM) under Soviet control, killing the pilot, Rudolf Anderson. The CIA did not learn until later that “Castro was personally responsible” for the downing of the spy plane. A Soviet general in Cuba had “succumbed” to Castro’s “harangue” not to let the U-2 “photograph Cuba,” and ordered the attack on Anderson’s U-2 without Khrushchev’s authorization.
With the downing of the U-2 in Cuba, Kennedy felt the knot suddenly tighten in the rope on which he and Khrushchev were pulling. ExCom policy on retaliation notwithstanding, Kennedy put off ordering a retaliatory strike on the suspected SAM site.635 A few hours after the downing of Anderson’s U-2 in Cuba, President Kennedy was informed that a U-2 had gone astray in the Arctic north of the USSR, west of Alaska.
U-2 pilot Charles Maultsby had set out on air sampling mission from Alaska to the North Pole on October 27. But Maultsby, confused by the aurora borealis, lost his navigational bearings over the North Pole. On the return leg of his flight, Maultsby flew 1,000 miles off course, into Soviet airspace over the Chukat Peninsula, causing Soviet MiGs to scramble in pursuit of his high-flying spy plane. The veteran pilot managed to regain his bearings, evade the MiGs, and return to Alaska. Nonetheless, Maultsby’s overflight of the Soviet Arctic was highly provocative. Dobbs writes, “There was a risk that Soviet leaders would view a U-2 overflight as a reconnaissance mission prior to an all-out attack.”636
In another ominous development, a Soviet cruise missile regiment took up a position within fifteen miles of the U.S. Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay on October 27. Nuclear-armed FKR cruise missiles had roughly the same destructive power as the U.S. atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in World War II. The FKRs were aimed at the Guantánamo base, to prevent a breakout of U.S. forces in the event of a U.S. invasion of Cuba.”637
As developments appeared to spin out of control, President Kennedy eased his grip on the rope. He told his brother and Sorensen to draft a diplomatic response to Khrushchev. The ExCom was too divided to accomplish that task. Kennedy’s letter accepted the general framework of Khrushchev’s first proposal of October 26. “You would agree to remove those weapons systems from Cuba under appropriate United Nations observation and supervision; and undertake, with suitable safeguards to halt the further introduction of such weapons systems into Cuba.” He added, “We, on our part, would agree… (a) to remove promptly the quarantine measures now in effect and (b) to give assurances against an invasion of Cuba and I am confident that other nations of the Western Hemisphere would be prepared to do likewise.”638
On October 27, Attorney General Kennedy summoned Ambassador Dobrynin to the Department of Justice. Kennedy handed Dobrynin a copy of his brother’s letter to Khrushchev. He told Dobrynin that the crisis in the Caribbean was at a crossroads. He said that if the USSR did not remove its missiles from Cuba as part of a diplomatic settlement, the United States would destroy the missiles by direct military action. He added that the United States would resume reconnaissance fights over Cuba, and if U.S. planes were shot at, the United States would return fire. He requested a response from Khrushchev within twenty-four hours.
In his letter to Khrushchev, President Kennedy did not address the removal of Jupiter missiles from Turkey. But a few hours earlier, Kennedy and a handful of his advisers had set the parameters for Robert Kennedy’s talks with Dobrynin. Robert Kennedy was authorized to offer a Cuba-Turkey missile trade in a secret oral message to Dobrynin if he raised the subject. Bundy later acknowledged that Kennedy was “instructed” to tell Dobrynin the U.S. offer to withdraw its Jupiter missiles from Turkey must remain secret, adding “any Soviet reference to our assurance would simply make it null and void.”
Robert Kennedy wrote in his diary after meeting with Dobrynin, “The President was not optimistic, nor was I… The expectation was a military confrontation by Tuesday [October 30] and possibly tomorrow [October 28].”639 Meanwhile, President Kennedy met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff on October 28. He praised the Joint Chiefs for their “advice and counsel” during “this very, very difficult period.” But the Joint Chiefs were seething with anger. Admiral Anderson declared, “We’ve been had.”
Joint Chiefs Chairman Maxwell Taylor had led the Chiefs to believe that the naval blockade would be a prelude to U.S. military intervention in Cuba. Taylor’s aide General William Y. Smith later wrote, “Primed to deliver a knockout blow, the leaders of the U.S. armed forces were obliged to pull their punch.”640 For Kennedy, the meeting was a vivid reminder that the window of opportunity for diplomacy would be brief. Khrushchev also recognized the need to reach a negotiated settlement of the “Caribbean crisis” as quickly as possible.
The situation in Cuba was slipping out of Khrushchev’s control. Castro invited Ambassador Alexandr Alexsiev to his command post in Havana on October 26, and pressed for the Soviet Union to do more “to deter a U.S. attack,” which he believed was imminent. He wanted “guidance” on how to respond to U.S. reconnaissance overflights. Later in the day, Castro met with General Issa Pliyev, commander of Soviet military forces in Cuba. “I told him that the Cuban side could not allow the American planes to fly at such low altitudes over Cuba anymore,” Castro recalled. “Those overflights were nothing else but preparation for a sudden American invasion of Cuba.”
Meanwhile, Khrushchev grilled Defense Minister Malinovsky about the U-2 shoot-down. He wanted to know if Lieutenant General Stepan Grechko had sought authorization from Moscow before he okayed the launch of a SAM at a spy plane. Sergei Khrushchev writes, “Malinovsky replied that there wasn’t enough time, and the general decided to follow Fidel Castro’s orders to Cuban antiaircraft forces.”641
But the problem was not limited to an undisciplined Soviet general. Soviet commanders and their troops had embraced the spirit of the Cuban revolution. According to General Anatoly Gribkov, Soviet troops stood a little taller and saluted more smartly in the presence of the charismatic Castro and Che Guevara. They were prepared to fight alongside the Cubans if the United States invaded Cuba.
In the meantime, Khrushchev moved to regain control over the Soviet forces in Cuba. He reiterated to Malinovsky, “Only Moscow’s orders.” He stressed, “No independent initiatives. Everything is hanging by a thread.” On October 27, Defense Minister Malinovsky sent a ciphered telegram to Pliyev. Malinovsky stated, “We categorically confirm that you are prohibited from using nuclear weapons from missiles, FKR [cruise missiles], ‘Luna’ and aircraft without orders from Moscow.”642
When the Presidium convened on October 28, its first order of business was Dobrynin’s report on his meeting with Robert Kennedy. Dobrynin wrote, “During our meeting R. Kennedy was very upset; in any case I’ve never seen him like this before.” He noted that Kennedy had said “There are many unreasonable heads among the generals who are ‘itching for a fight.’” Kennedy added, “Time is of the essence and we shouldn’t miss the chance.” Sergei Khrushchev writes, “The President was calling for help: that was how Father interpreted Robert Kennedy’s talk with our ambassador.”
The Presidium also discussed the October 27 letter from President Kennedy that his brother delivered to Dobrynin. Several hours later Troyanovsky informed the Presidium that an important message had arrived from Fidel Castro, saying, “Castro thinks… war will begin in the next few hours… possibly in 24 hours, but in no more than 72.” He continued, “In the opinion of the Cuban leadership, the people are ready to repel an imperialist and aggressive attack. They would sooner die than surrender.”
Troyanovsky continued, “In Castro’s opinion, in face of imminent conflict with the United States, the imperialists must not be allowed to deliver a strike,” repeating for emphasis, “allowed to deliver a nuclear strike.”
Khrushchev asked incredulously, “What? Is he proposing that we start a nuclear war? That we launch missiles from Cuba?” “Apparently,” Troyanovsky answered. “The text will be delivered soon and then it will be easier to tell what Castro really has in mind.” Khrushchev declared, “Remove them, and as soon as possible,” referring to the Soviet missiles in Cuba. “Before something terrible happens.”643
In his letter, Castro grappled awkwardly with the strategic implications of an imminent U.S. invasion of Cuba, which he believed would trigger a nuclear war. “If they actually carry out the brutal act of invading Cuba in violation of international law and morality, that would be the moment to eliminate such a danger forever through an act of clear legitimate defense, however harsh and terrible the solution would be, for there is no other,” Castro wrote. “The Soviet Union must never allow the circumstances in which the imperialists could launch the first nuclear strike against it.”
Khrushchev was shaken by Castro’s letter, and promptly cabled Castro. For the first time, he mentioned his ongoing negotiations with Kennedy. “Our October 27 message to President Kennedy allows for the question to be settled in your favor, to defend Cuba from an invasion and prevent war from breaking out,” he wrote in an October 28 cable. He cautioned Castro not to play into the hands of Pentagon “militarists.”
“Yesterday you shot down one of those [U-2s],” Khrushchev scolded Castro. “I would like to advise you in a friendly manner to show patience, firmness and even more firmness. Naturally, if there is an invasion it will be necessary to repulse it by every means. But we mustn’t allow ourselves to be carried away by provocation, because the Pentagon’s unbridled militarists, now that the solution to the conflict is in sight and apparently in your favor, creating a guarantee against the invasion of Cuba, are trying to frustrate the agreement and provoke you into actions it could use against you. I ask you not to give them the pretext for doing that.”
Castro responded, “We agree that we must avoid an incident at this precise moment that could seriously harm the negotiations, so we will instruct the Cuban batteries not to open fire for as long as the negotiations last.”
Khrushchev decided the moment had arrived to act decisively to end the crisis. On October 28, he announced to the Presidium, “Comrades, now we have to look for a dignified way out.” Dobrynin observed, “It was then decided without further delay to accept President Kennedy’s proposals, all the more since his consent to remove the American missiles gradually from Turkey made it possible to justify our retreat.”
On October 29, Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko sent “an urgent cable” to Dobrynin instructing him to seek an immediate meeting with Robert Kennedy. Dobrynin told Kennedy, “The President’s message of October 27 will be answered on the radio today, and the answer will be highly positive.” Kennedy replied, “This is a great relief.”
In a letter to President Kennedy, Khrushchev acknowledged receiving his letter of October 27. Khrushchev wrote, “I express my satisfaction and thank you for the sense of proportion you have displayed and for realization of the responsibility which now devolves on you for the preservation of the peace of the world.” On October 29, President Kennedy and Chairman Khrushchev reached agreement on the broad outlines of a settlement of the Cuban missile crisis. Khrushchev dispatched Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan and Deputy Foreign Minister Vasily Kuznetsov to New York to work out the details.644
President Kennedy tapped former Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy to lead a “coordinating committee” to negotiate the modalities of the removal of the Soviet missiles from Cuba. McCloy and Kuznetsov developed a plan to verify that the Soviet missiles had been removed from Cuba. UN teams would do onsite inspections of Soviet missile sites in Cuba to certify the installations had been dismantled and the missiles withdrawn from the island. With the removal of the missiles from Cuba, the United States would lift its naval blockade and publicly pledge it would not invade Cuba.645 Mikoyan’s talks with the Kennedy Administration would be complicated, however, by Cuba’s dissatisfaction with the Kennedy-Khrushchev agreement.
On October 30, UN General Secretary U Thant flew to Havana, where he discussed with Castro the U.S.–USSR verification plan. Castro rejected onsite inspections, according to Carlos Lechuga, Cuba’s ambassador to the United Nations. Castro told U Thant that the United States had no right to demand onsite inspections. “We have not violated any law, we have not carried out any act of aggression against anyone,” he asserted. “This issue of the inspection is a further attempt to humiliate our country. Therefore, we do not accept it.” Thant said the UN would not undertake inspections if Cuba did not consent. The next day he and Castro met one-on-one, and Castro outlined his own plan in a letter to the UN general secretary on October 28.
According to Castro, Kennedy’s pledge of no U.S. aggression against Cuba was “meaningless” unless more fundamental issues were addressed. Castro offered a five-point plan in which he called on the United States to lift its naval blockade and economic embargo of Cuba and shut down its naval base at Guantánamo Bay. He called for an end to “piratical attacks” by Cuban exile groups based in the United States. He also demanded an end of U.S. aerial surveillance of Cuba.
On November 1, Castro went on Cuban television to oppose UN inspections in Cuba. He not only underscored Cuba’s continuing defiance of the United States but also reflected tensions between Cuba and the Soviet Union. Oleg Troyanovsky recalls, “Khrushchev was not at all pleased about the way the situation unfolded with regard to Cuba. He suffered great anguish over these things.” Khrushchev dispatched Mikoyan to Cuba to resolve Cuba’s differences with the USSR.646 Castro was on hand to greet Mikoyan at José Martí airport on the outskirts of Havana on November 2. As historian Robert Quirk put it, Mikoyan’s reception was “correct but cold.” Pro-Soviet posters all over Cuba were taken down before Mikoyan’s visit.
Castro opened the first meeting on a light note. “We are aware that N. S. Khrushchev once said, ‘There is a Cuban on the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and this Cuban is A. I. Mikoyan,’” Castro joked. “We can speak to you very frankly. We profoundly trust the Soviet Union.” Castro got to the heart of the matter. He faulted Khrushchev for his failure to consult with Cuba about his negotiations with President Kennedy to end the “October crisis.” He said the Soviet Union’s abrupt withdrawal of its missiles left the Cuban revolution vulnerable.647
Mikoyan responded, “Considering that the missiles had been discovered and were no longer a means of deterrence we decided that for the sake of saving Cuba it was necessary to give an order to dismantle and return the strategic missiles to the Soviet Union and to inform Kennedy of this.” He noted, “It was a critical moment. We thought our Cuban friends would understand us.”
Mikoyan emphasized the importance Moscow attached to the defense of the Cuban revolution. He said there had not been enough time for the Soviet Union to consult with Havana. He referred to Castro’s letter of October 26 in which Castro “informed us that an inevitable aggression was expected within 24 hours.” Under normal circumstances, the Soviet Union would have sent a “draft of our decision” to Havana and waited for a reply before responding to Washington. Khrushchev acted quickly to prevent the crisis from spiraling out of control.
The meeting was interrupted when Mikoyan was handed an urgent telegram from Moscow. His wife, Ashkhen, had just died. His son Sergo, who accompanied him to Cuba, returned to Moscow to make funeral arrangements, while Mikoyan remained in Cuba to complete his diplomatic mission. When the talks resumed the next day, Mikoyan said Moscow had no choice but to accept the U.S. demand for UN inspections in Cuba. To do otherwise would have been a deal-breaker. He explained, “If we had made a statement declining inspections, the Americans would have taken it for our desire to swindle them and their intervention would have become a reality.”
Castro replied, “We cannot take that step.” He continued, “If we agree to inspection, then it is as if we permit the United States to determine what we can or cannot do in foreign policy. That hurts our sovereignty.” Khrushchev’s envoy met several times with Castro in private sessions. Mikoyan also met with other Cuban leaders, including President Osvaldo Dorticós, Defense Minister Raúl Castro, Che Guevara, Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, and Emilio Aragonés. Soviet Ambassador Alexsiev usually accompanied Mikoyan to these meetings.
Mikoyan was puzzled as to why the Cuban leaders did not consider the outcome of the missile crisis favorable to the Cuban revolution. But Castro remained skeptical of Kennedy’s no-invasion pledge.648 Mikoyan also failed to convince Che Guevara, who noted that revolutionaries in Latin America were “dismayed” by the USSR’s withdrawal of its missiles from Cuba.
“You offended our feelings by not consulting us,” Guevara explained. “But the main danger is you as if recognized the right of the USA to violate international law. This is great damage done to your policy. This fact really worries us. It may cause difficulty for maintaining the unity of the socialist countries. It seems to us that there already are cracks in the unity of the socialist camp.”
Mikoyan praised the Cuban revolution, but he also acknowledged the limits of Soviet support for Cuba. “You were born heroes, before a revolutionary situation ripened in Latin America, but the camp of socialism still has not grown into its full capability to come to your assistance. We give you ships, weapons, people, fruits and vegetables,” he told Guevara. “There will come a time when we will show our enemies. But we don’t want to die beautifully. Socialism must live.”
Mikoyan was more explicit about the limits of Soviet support in an exchange with Castro on November 19. “You know Comrade Fidel that we have done and shall do all that is necessary for the defense of Cuba,” Mikoyan said. “But you know that we cannot go to nuclear war—that is a line we cannot cross… For Cuba would cease to exist. Many millions would perish. The survivors would never forgive the communist leadership for not using all opportunities to avoid war.”
Despite the difficulty of his negotiations in Cuba, Mikoyan continued to admire Castro and his colleagues. But the missile crisis had profoundly shaken the Cuban revolutionaries’ confidence in Moscow.649 Castro knew all about Khrushchev’s nuclear brinkmanship, what Sergei Khrushchev calls his father’s “nuclear bluff and bluster.” But Khrushchev had failed to take Castro into his confidence about the role nuclear weapons actually played in the USSR’s Cold War strategy. Meanwhile, Mikoyan left Havana for New York, where he resumed negotiations with the United States.
In New York, U.S. negotiator John McCloy dropped the Kennedy Administration’s demand for on-site inspections. The United States and the Soviet Union agreed to inspections on the seas. U.S. aircraft would fly over ships bound for the USSR, to photograph missiles displayed on their decks, to verify that all the missiles had been removed from Cuba.
But the Soviets balked when the United States made a new demand—the withdrawal of IL-28 bombers from Cuba—before the blockade was lifted. As tensions steadily built up between the United States and the Soviet Union, the Joint Chiefs of Staff pressed Kennedy to authorize U.S. air strikes against known IL-28 sites in Cuba.
On November 20, Kennedy and Khrushchev untied the missile crisis knot completely when they reached an agreement on the IL-28s. In a letter, Khrushchev promised Kennedy the IL-28s would be removed from Cuba within thirty days. At a news conference, Kennedy announced that the United States would lift its blockade of Cuba. He said inspections at sea had confirmed that “all known” Soviet missiles in Cuba had been dismantled and loaded on ships bound for the USSR.
But Kennedy also sounded a note of caution.“Important parts of the understanding of October 27 and 28 remain to be carried out.” He worried that Havana would become a base for the “export” of revolution in Latin America. “If Cuba is not used for the export of aggressive communist purposes, there will be peace in the Caribbean.” He stressed, “We will not, of course, abandon the political, economic efforts in this Hemisphere to halt subversion from Cuba nor our purpose and hope that the Cuban people shall someday be truly free. But these policies are very different from any intent to launch a military invasion of the island.”
The next day Kennedy assured the ExCom that there was wiggle room in his no-invasion pledge. “Our objective is to preserve our right to invade Cuba in the event of civil war, if there were guerrilla activities in other Latin American countries or if offensive weapons were reintroduced into Cuba,” he stated. “We do not want to build up Castro by means of a no-invasion guarantee.”650
Meanwhile, Kennedy moved to improve his standing with Cuban exiles, who were angry that he did not use the missile crisis as an opportunity to drive the Cuban revolution from power.