One Minute to Midnight

by Michael Dobbs

Power was in a quandary. The ability to “read the mail” of the Soviet air defenses was a jealously guarded national secret. If SAC commanders alerted Maultsby to the magnitude of his navigational blunder, they risked tipping the Soviets to a prized intelligence technique. They had to devise a way of steering Maultsby back to Alaska without revealing how they knew his precise location.

Frightened and exhausted, Maultsby was still getting strange calls over his sideband radio. This time, the unfamiliar voice told him to turn right thirty-five degrees, a course that would have taken him deeper into the Soviet Union. The pilot challenged him, using a code that “only a legit operator would know.” There was no response.

The way the Joint Chiefs saw it, any conciliatory words or gestures from Moscow were merely a feint. A top Marine general warned the chiefs that “Khrushchev, like every doctrinaire Communist before him, is a slavish follower of Sun Tzu.” To prove his point, he cited several aphorisms from the venerated Chinese military strategist, drawing parallels between the Middle Empire in 512 B.C. and the Soviet Empire of A.D. 1962: • Speak in humble terms, continue preparations and attack; • Pretend inferiority and encourage the enemy’s arrogance; • The crux of military operations lies in the pretense of accommodating to the designs of the enemy.

had a knack for occasionally

Oxymoron?

Kennedy was taken aback by the apparent Soviet “escalation.” There must have been a significant “change of orders” from Moscow. He began connecting the dots. A tough new message from Khrushchev earlier in the day following more conciliatory signals on Friday. Antiaircraft fire against low-level U.S. Navy reconnaissance planes. And now a U-2 shot down. The outlook suddenly seemed very bleak. Mixing metaphors somewhat, Bobby Kennedy would later describe a sense in the room that “the noose was tightening on all of us, on Americans, on mankind, and that the bridges to escape were crumbling.”

The Cuban obsession with death and self-sacrifice startled Khrushchev, who had seen more than his share of destruction and suffering. He understood, perhaps for the first time, just how differently he and Castro “viewed the world” and valued human life. As Khrushchev saw it, “We are not struggling against imperialism in order to die” but to achieve the long-term “victory of communism.” To be Red and dead was to miss the point.

At 6:40 p.m. Washington time, 1:40 a.m. Sunday in Moscow, the Pentagon announced that an American military reconnaissance aircraft had gone missing over Cuba and was “presumed lost.” The Pentagon statement did not make clear whether the plane had been shot down, but the implications for the Kremlin were deeply disturbing. While Khrushchev had authorized his commanders on Cuba to fight back in self-defense, he had not ordered attacks on unarmed reconnaissance planes.

Savitsky was in the control room, along with Arkhipov and the chief of the signals intelligence team, Vadim Orlov. He knew nothing about the signaling procedures introduced by the U.S. Navy. He had lost communications with Moscow and the other three Foxtrots. He knew only that he was surrounded by American warships and desperately needed to recharge his batteries. He could only guess at the fate awaiting him and his men. Judging by the deafening explosions, the Americans were doing their best to torment him. There was no greater humiliation for a submarine captain than to be forced to the surface by the enemy.

Rusk had thought of a way to reconcile the differences in the ExComm. He suggested that Bobby simply inform Dobrynin that the Jupiters would be withdrawn soon anyway. That way, the obsolete American missiles would not be an obstacle to an agreement. But they would also not become a pretext for further haggling. To avoid giving the impression of a Soviet-American bargain at the expense of the Turks, it was important that the unilateral assurance on the Jupiters remain confidential. The secretary of state’s ingenious attempt to square the circle quickly won unanimous support.

The timetable for diplomacy was getting very tight. The Pentagon was calling for air attacks on Cuba to begin by Monday, October 29, in the absence of firm evidence that the Soviets were dismantling their missile sites.

!!

The Presidium members asked Troyanovsky to read the cable again, so they could fully understand its implications. The Turkey offer clearly sweetened the proposed deal even if, as Dobrynin reported, Bobby Kennedy insisted it be kept “extremely confidential.” Any remaining desire to haggle about terms and conditions drained away. After listening to the latest message from Washington, the men around the table “agreed fairly quickly that they had to accept President Kennedy’s conditions,” Troyanovsky would later recall. “In the final analysis, both we and Cuba would get what we wanted, a guarantee that the island would not be attacked.”

The submarine commanders returned to Murmansk at the end of December to a frigid reception from their superiors. No allowances were made for the technical shortcomings of the Soviet vessels or the superiority of U.S. naval forces. As usual, the failure of the mission was blamed on the men who had risked their lives to implement it rather than the admirals and apparatchiks who made a mess of the planning. The deputy minister of defense, Marshal Andrei Grechko, refused to listen to the skippers when they tried to describe the difficulties they had encountered.

The generals were unimpressed by McNamara’s argument that Khrushchev’s concessions left the United States in “a much stronger position.” They drafted an urgent message to the White House dismissing the Soviet move as “an insincere proposal to gain time” and warning that “there should be no relaxation of alert procedures.” “We have been had,” Anderson told Kennedy when they finally got together. “It’s the greatest defeat in our history,” insisted LeMay. “We should invade today.”

“Son of a bitch! Bastard! Asshole!” Fidel went on in this vein for some time, “beating even his own record for curses.” To vent his anger, he kicked a wall and smashed a mirror. The idea that the Russians had made a deal with the Americans “without even bothering to inform us” cut him to the core. He felt deeply “humiliated.”

Despite the determination of the Kennedy brothers to avoid creating a paper trail, dismantling of the Jupiters would begin as promised, five months later, on April 1, 1963.

Subsequent archival revelations demonstrated that Castro and his Soviet patrons had real reasons to fear American attempts at regime change including, as a last resort, a U.S. invasion of Cuba. Sabotage efforts were under way even during the missile crisis itself.

Writing about the past, Arthur Schlesinger observed, is a way of writing about the present. We reinterpret history through the prism of present-day events and controversies.

As the years went by, it became clear that Kennedy’s missile crisis victory had produced many unintended consequences. One was an escalation in the Cold War arms race as Soviet leaders sought to erase the memory of the Cuban humiliation. “You got away with it this time, but you will never get away with it again,” the Soviet deputy foreign minister, Vasily Kuznetsov, told a senior American official shortly after the removal of the Soviet missiles. The Soviet Union would never again allow itself to be in a position of strategic inferiority. In order to achieve military parity with the United States, Khrushchev’s successors embarked on a vast intercontinental ballistic missile program.