Washington

At 7 p.m. on the evening of Monday 22 October, President John F. Kennedy addressed the nation on television. The speech was read in a confident, business-like manner at a smart pace and with a minimum of emotion.*

Good evening, my fellow citizens.

Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island [Cuba]. The purpose of these bases can be none other than to provide a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere. These new missile sites include medium-range ballistic missiles, capable of striking Washington DC. Additional sites appear to be designed for intermediate-range ballistic missiles capable of travelling more than twice as far. The size of this undertaking makes clear that it has been planned for some months. Yet, only last month, after I had made clear the distinction between any introduction of ground-to-ground missiles and the existence of defensive anti-aircraft missiles, the Soviet government publicly stated on September 11 that ‘the armaments and military equipment sent to Cuba are designed exclusively for defensive purposes’. Only last Thursday, Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko told me in my office that Soviet assistance to Cuba ‘pursued solely the purpose of contributing to the defence capabilities of Cuba,’ that ‘training by Soviet specialists of Cuban nationals in handling defensive armaments was by no means offensive, and if it were otherwise the Soviet government would never become involved in rendering such assistance’. That statement was false.

This secret, swift, extraordinary build-up of Communist missiles in an area well known to have a special and historical relationship to the United States, this sudden, clandestine decision to station strategic weapons for the first time outside of Soviet soil, is a deliberately provocative and unjustified change in the status quo which cannot be accepted by this country. This nation is opposed to war. We are also true to our word. Our unswerving objective, therefore, must be to prevent the use of these missiles against this or any other country, and to secure their withdrawal or elimination from the Western Hemisphere.

Our policy has been one of patience and restraint, as befits a peaceful and powerful nation which leads a worldwide alliance. But now further action is required, and it is under way. We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth; but neither will we shrink from that risk at any time it must be faced.

Kennedy said he had ordered a number of defensive measures:

The President made it clear that the US would regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba at any country in the world to be ‘an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union’. He ended his address to the nation by calling on Khrushchev to ‘halt and eliminate this clandestine, reckless, and provocative threat to world peace and to stable relations between our two nations’.

Until this point, only those who had been involved in the series of meetings, and a few other experts who had to be consulted individually, knew about the discovery of the missiles. Only those subordinates who had to know were put in the picture. The state of readiness of US armed forces had been raised from DEFCON 5 (the lowest state of readiness) to DEFCON 3 (increase in force readiness above that required for normal readiness), but no detailed explanation had been given for this.

Messages had gone out to the heads of most US diplomatic missions around the world asking them to inform the leaders of the governments to which they were accredited, in advance, of the general content of the President’s public address. As predicted by Macmillan, the news had a ‘mixed’ (the diplomatic euphemism for poor) reception in the Western world.

United Kingdom and Western Europe

Initially most people in the Western world outside America had doubts that the published photographs actually proved the existence of missile sites – those shown on television and reproduced in newspapers could just as easily have displayed farms with large barns – and with that doubt came the possibility that the American government were playing some kind of mysterious and dangerous game.

There were anti-war demonstrations outside the American Embassies in London and in other Western capitals.

The mood in Britain was one of concern. The leader of Britain’s opposition Labour Party, Hugh Gaitskell, gave voice to an opinion that was widely held by many throughout Western Europe.

Moscow

On the day that President Kennedy spoke on television to the American people and an astonished world about the discovery of the missiles, the KGB arrested Oleg Penkovsky, charged him with espionage and began to interrogate him. He soon admitted his treachery and informed on Greville Wynne.

Many Soviet politicians, officials and citizens would call it poetic justice rather than a cruel coincidence.

Serov was informed of Penkovsky’s arrest. His world was becoming the mother of all nightmares: first the unfounded accusations of GRU incompetence in Cuba, and then the arrest of his subordinate and personal friend, Oleg Penkovsky, for spying on behalf of the capitalist, imperialist West. Both of these would reflect badly on him, even though he was not responsible for either.

He may well have slept badly that night, awakening to the news of President Kennedy’s announcement to the world that the Soviet Union had placed offensive intercontinental ballistic missiles in Cuba.

Brooding on this, Serov may have wondered briefly if he should have gone to Cuba himself, as he had done in Hungary. But he accepted that he would not have been able to exert the same degree of control because the circumstances were quite different: in Hungary the enemy was internal and finally outnumbered and outgunned by Soviet military might, while in Cuba the enemy was overseas and better armed than even the USSR.

His thoughts turned to Penkovsky. Surely it could not be true that Oleg Vladimirovich had been arrested for espionage. There must be some mistake. This man had looked after his (Serov’s) wife and daughter in London and helped them to find wonderful presents for him. He worked exceptionally hard at his cover job, yet also managed to get good results in his GRU assignments. Yes, he had been sore about his lack of promotion and the KGB’s obsession with his father’s royalism, but that would not have turned him into a traitor.

Penkovsky had been a model member of the party since his early youth, with never a black mark against his name. And yet – thought Serov – there was something peculiar about it all. Why did the KGB stop his posting to India and then grant approval for a job that gave him trips to the West where he could not easily be supervised? Oleg loved his beautiful family and would not, surely, endanger them, though he did occasionally allow his eyes and maybe other parts of his anatomy to wander. He had been a close friend of the wily Comrade Marshal Sergei Varentsov for many years – and there was no way Oleg could pull the wool over Varentsov’s eyes.

These and a hundred other thoughts and visions about Penkovsky would have gone through Serov’s mind, over and over again.

His attention would momentarily return to Cuba as the television screen filled with a picture of Kennedy, a brash, self-assured young man who – in the eyes of Serov – used the imperialist might over which he ruled to confront Communism. It is easy to imagine Serov’s fury with Kennedy. All the evidence suggests he was incandescent. Damn Kennedy for what he had done to Cuba. Damn him and his CIA for luring Oleg into spying for America. Damn him for ruining my career.

Serov had demonstrated over many years that he was not the kind of person to forgive or forget.

Havana

Castro called Ambassador Alekseev in again on 22 October after President Kennedy’s television appearance. He was beside himself with anger.

He gave Alekseev an I-told-you-so lecture, reaffirming his own view that they should have been open about the defence pact. Now Kennedy was making it into a huge episode and Castro was sure that virtually all of the West would support strong American action. If ever Cuba was going to be invaded by America it would be now.

Castro wanted Alekseev to tell him how the Americans had been able to photograph the missile sites. From the photographs that the Americans had published it was clear that the Soviet military had made little effort to camouflage them. The Cuban Army – insisted Castro – would have made a better job of it.

He responded to the crisis by putting the Cuban armed forces on a war footing and reacting belligerently to the idea that independent UN observers might inspect the missile sites. ‘We reject all attempts at inspection,’ the Cuban leader said. ‘We will never surrender our independence and sovereign right to let only whom we want into our territory.’

Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro all requested an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council which called upon acting UN Secretary-General U Thant to negotiate a solution. U Thant sent urgent appeals to Khrushchev to suspend arms shipments to Cuba, and to Kennedy to suspend the blockade, so that talks could take place.

But despite these public efforts to resolve the crisis, exchanges of letters between Kennedy and Khrushchev reveal just how close to the brink of nuclear war the world’s two most powerful nations stood.

Kennedy sent Khrushchev the text of his address to the nation on 22 October, accompanying it with a letter which insisted that the missiles be removed, but it went on to warn of the threat of all-out nuclear war:†

Khrushchev’s response, dated 23 October, accused the US of interfering in the internal affairs of both Cuba and the Soviet Union, avoiding any direct reference to war.

But in a letter to the veteran British peace campaigner Bertrand Russell, Khrushchev spelt out precisely what those catastrophic consequences would be:

United States

It was an anxious time for everyone in the United States. Although the majority of Americans supported Kennedy’s actions, three-fifths of the adult population expected war. At the peak of the crisis people’s thoughts focused on the international situation in general and on atomic war and fall-out in particular, but the American public were not paralysed by events.

Nonetheless, someone who was twelve years old at the time recently recorded his memory of people wondering if there would be a tomorrow; or whether they would manage to return from work to see their families before they were all killed by a nuclear explosion. He remembers, at school, performing daily duck-and-take-cover drills. There was panic buying at food stores, and even gun sales soared in the preparation for a land invasion. They provisioned and checked their hastily built fall-out shelters. These things were happening everywhere, in every neighbourhood in the country.

In his response to Khrushchev’s warning of thermo-nuclear war, Kennedy reiterated that it was the Soviet Union’s decision to place long-range missiles in Cuba which had led to the crisis and urged ‘prudence’, calling on the Soviet leader to order the twenty-five Soviet ships reportedly on their way to Cuba to comply with the US blockade.

The following day, 24 October, Khrushchev responded with a long and emotional letter.

Khrushchev accused Kennedy of acting not just out of hatred for the Cuban people and its government but also for electoral reasons.

The Soviet Union, wrote Khrushchev, would not stand by while American ships carried out ‘piratical acts on the high seas’. It would take whatever measures it felt necessary to protect itself and had everything it needed to do so.

Cuba

In the middle of this exchange of threats and counterthreats, the first of the Soviet ships still heading towards Cuba reached the quarantine line on 24 October. Despite Khrushchev’s condemnation of the quarantine as illegal and piracy on the high seas, the Soviet ships, surprisingly, stopped just short of the American armada.

Washington

Nerves were on edge. There was every possibility of serious action – even war – against Cuba. Bill Harvey knew from his field agents about the rapidly increasing volume of Soviet military personnel and equipment in Cuba but he had not been aware of the discovery of MRBM and IRBM sites nor of the frantic series of meetings until shortly before the President’s television announcement on 22 October.

He had mixed feelings about unfolding events. On the one hand he was pleased to hear that, at last, decisive action would be taken to resolve the Cuban problem. On the other hand he was hurt that the Special Group Augmented, and particularly its chairman, Robert Kennedy, had denied him the scope of action he felt he needed in order to do a proper job.

Harvey had organised nine teams, each of half-a-dozen men, to go to Cuba, gather intelligence and, if required, assist the military in the event of an invasion. These men – all Cuban exiles – would be landed off small submarines in the dead of night.

Typically, Harvey had told neither the Joint Chiefs of Staff nor the Special Group Augmented about the teams until the afternoon of Friday 26 October when there was a meeting composed mostly of SGA members in the JCS Operations Room.

It was an extraordinary meeting in which tempers flared.‡

Harvey had just described the teams that would be going to Cuba in small submarines.

General Edward Lansdale: This is a bit of a surprise to me, Bill. As the overall head of Mongoose I should have been told you were preparing to send these teams into Cuba.
Bill Harvey: There was no need for you to know until now, General. I need to gather intelligence before taking any direct action approved by the SGA and I have your authority and the authority of the SGA to send agents to Cuba to gather that intelligence. This is part of that operation. At this critical time we need intelligence and I’m taking appropriate action to get it. I’ve consulted the military at operational level about specific targets but I didn’t see any need to inform either the SGA or the JCS formally of these activities in advance.
General Maxwell Taylor (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff): Yea; General Johnson told me you offered these groups to help in the situation of an invasion. They could prove to be very useful. General Edward Lansdale: Just a minute, here. Bill’s working under me on Mongoose projects. Now, suddenly, he’s working directly for the Joint Chiefs? Is this not getting a bit out of hand Mr Chairman?
Robert Kennedy: Ah; you’ve made a valid point there Edward. John McCone (CIA Director) [addressing Lansdale, came to the Attorney-General’s rescue]: As I understand it, the Mongoose goal is to encourage the Cuban people to take Cuba away from Castro and to set up a new government. Bill and his Task Force W have supported, and will continue to support you in this, Edward. You’re the director of the operation. No doubt about it. But you have to recognise – we all have to recognise – that CIA operatives are obligated to support the military to the extent desired by the JCS in any combat theatre. Maybe you’ve misunderstood that bit of our commitment, Edward.
McCone [smiled, trying to ease the tension, before continuing]: I think most of us would agree that Mongoose, operating through authorisation by the SGA, is not the fastest way to achieve results. We’ve reached the point – have we not, Mr Chairman? – when we have to be prepared for direct and attributable action. Mongoose just isn’t geared to that.
Robert Kennedy: Thank you, John; I couldn’t have put it better myself. That OK Edward: you’re in charge of Mongoose but not all clandestine activities in Cuba come under Mongoose?
[Lansdale gave a grudging nod and the Attorney-General continued speaking]: Mr Harvey: I’m asking you to be careful about the use of these teams. I can’t give you the details but I can assure you that delicate talks and negotiations are going on at the present time and we don’t need any incidents that could upset these proceedings.
[Harvey continued to slouch in his chair and simply stared at Kennedy with his bulbous eyes, which irritated him.] Do I make myself clear Mr Harvey?
Bill Harvey: You carry on with your negotiations, Mr Attorney General, and I’ll continue to train and prepare my men. I know my job and I’ll do it. I’ll do it damned well, as I’ve always done.

The Attorney-General spoke to McCone after the meeting, asking him to get rid of Harvey, who he found to be obnoxious and dangerous. McCone, while agreeing that Harvey could be infuriating at times, defended him as a hard and efficient worker. That did not matter to Robert Kennedy: Harvey clearly did not like or respect him, so he had to go.

McCone did not relish the idea of removing Harvey from the leadership of Operation Mongoose and replacing him with someone else. He believed Mongoose had run its course and could, perhaps, along with Task Force W, now be killed off. He could then find Harvey a new job well away from the Attorney-General. The Attorney-General, however, thought it might be a bit premature to end Mongoose and suggested they wait for a few days to see how the present negotiations progressed.

Kennedy’s response to Khrushchev’s letter of 24 October merely restated that the crisis had been sparked by the Soviet decision to place missiles on Cuba in spite of having denied any such intent. Khrushchev’s response came on 26 October in the form of a remarkably long and rambling letter with an ending that seemed to develop in the course of dictation rather than having been carefully thought out beforehand:

Did Kennedy really believe that Cuba and the Soviet Union could attack America from Cuban soil? Stopping the Soviet ships would be piracy. If the Soviet Union attempted to do the same to US ships, the Americans would be just as indignant as the Soviets were at the US blockade. He had agreed to U Thant’s proposal that the Soviet shipments should be suspended to allow negotiations to go ahead. If the US also agreed to suspend its blockade, it would ‘give the peoples the possibility of breathing calmly’. If the Kennedy administration was ready to give an assurance that it would not attack Cuba and recall its ships ‘this would immediately change everything’ and the need for Soviet military specialists at the missile sites would disappear, Khrushchev said.

Khrushchev must have reflected – or been told – that this letter of 26 October was too weak, because he sent another letter on the 27th pointing out that while the Americans complained about the presence of Soviet missiles ninety miles away from US territory, it had its own missiles based in Turkey, which had land borders with the Soviet Union. If America withdrew its missiles from Turkey, the Soviet Union would withdraw its missiles from Cuba.

This letter caused a major problem for Kennedy because the Turks were adamant that the NATO missiles should stay and, in any case, the United States could not unilaterally decide to remove the NATO missiles.

That day, 27 October 1962, saw the world move closest to an all-out nuclear war.

A trigger-happy Soviet commander gave an order to fire an SA-4 missile that made a direct hit on an American U-2 spy plane, killing the pilot. A recently approved US military standing order covering such an occurrence called for immediate retaliatory action with an air strike on the site used to fire the missile. When the President was informed of the incident, however, he gave an order not to retaliate because ‘maybe someone just made a mistake’.

Three ExComm meetings were held that day. Those present were preoccupied for much of the time with the military response to the general situation in Cuba and to the downing of the U-2 in particular. The military representatives were clamouring for action: they wanted to destroy the SAM missile site that had been used to shoot down the U-2. At one point General Taylor summarised the conclusions of the Joint Chiefs: unless the missiles were defused immediately, the Chiefs recommended implementation the next day (28 October) of a major air strike, and implementation of the invasion plan a week later. This was not agreed by the committee.

The US plan for an airborne attack followed by invasion included three massive strikes a day until all missiles and other air capability were destroyed. The first day of operations alone included more than 1,000 bombing sorties.

Meanwhile, Kennedy had decided, on advice, to circumvent the Turkish issue by ignoring Khrushchev’s letter of 27 October and responding instead to the previous one, dated the 26th. He agreed to a commitment not to invade Cuba so long as the Soviet Union withdrew its missiles.

Moscow

The final agreement reached in this fateful correspondence was that all MRBM and IRBM missiles and other offensive weapons and aircraft would be removed from Cuba in exchange for guarantees that the United States would not invade, nor encourage anyone else to invade, Cuba. On 28 October, Khrushchev gave orders to begin the removal of all offensive weapons. Kennedy confirmed that there would be no invasion of Cuba.

The world had stepped back just in time from what could have been a catastrophic nuclear war. The crisis was over as long as everyone on both sides abided by the spirit of the agreement.

* See Appendix 1 for the full transcript.

† See Appendix 2 for the full text of this letter and of the exchanges of letters that followed.

‡ Author’s interpretation based on McCone’s ‘Memorandum of MONGOOSE Meeting in the JCS Operations Room, October 26, 1962, at 2:30p.m.’, from CIA documents on the Cuban Missile Crisis.