One Minute to Midnight

by Michael Dobbs

As the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard noted, history is “lived forwards” but “understood backwards.”

He was the emotional member of the family, as rough and intense as his brother was smooth and calm. JFK had been humiliated once again by Castro and Khrushchev, and RFK was determined to redress the insult. He was extraordinarily competitive—even by the intensely competitive standards of the Kennedy clan—and the longest to nurse a grudge. “Everybody in my family forgives,” the family patriarch, Joseph Kennedy, Sr., had once remarked. “Except Bobby.”

A fallback option was to use chemical agents to destroy Castro’s beard, so that he would become a laughingstock among the Cuban people.

And then there were the constraints imposed by the Kennedys themselves. They wanted a plausibly deniable revolution that could not be traced back to the White House. It was a fatal contradiction.

“Now that we have gotten him in a trap, let’s take his leg off right up to his testicles,” he told his associates. “On second thoughts, let’s take off his testicles, too.”

The events of the next few days would confirm JFK’s view of history as a chaotic process that can occasionally be given a shove in a desired direction, but can never be completely controlled. A president can propose, but ordinary human beings often dispose. In the end, history is shaped by the actions of thousands of individuals: some famous, others obscure; some in positions of great authority, others who want to tear down the established order; some who strive mightily to put themselves in a position to alter events, others who stumble onto the political stage almost by chance.

“The motherland will not forget you,” a representative of the Soviet General Staff told the troops as they set sail.

Instructions on the route to follow were contained in a series of sealed envelopes, to be opened jointly by the commander of the regiment, the ship captain, and the senior KGB representative. The first set of instructions ordered them to “proceed to the Bosphorus” the second “to proceed to Gibraltar.” It was only after the Omsk had passed through the Mediterranean and entered the Atlantic that they opened the third set of instructions, which ordered them to “proceed to Cuba.”

Entertainment consisted of endless reruns of Quiet Flows the Don, the latest Soviet blockbuster.

McNamara estimated Soviet troop strength on Cuba at “six thousand to eight thousand.” CIA analysts arrived at the figure by observing the number of Soviet ships crossing the Atlantic, and figuring out the available deck space. There was one missing element in these calculations: the ability of the Russian soldier to put up with conditions American soldiers would never tolerate. By October 20, more than forty thousand Soviet troops had arrived on Cuba.

Khrushchev detested nighttime meetings. He had held few, if any, of them in his nine years in power. They reminded him of Stalin’s times, when the dictator would summon his terrified subordinates to the Kremlin in the middle of the night. Nobody had ever known what to expect. An angry glance could be a prelude to promotion. A smile might mean death. It all depended on the tyrant’s whim.

“He’s either all the way up or all the way down,” was his wife’s description. His long-suffering foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, testified that Khrushchev had “enough emotion for ten people—at least.”

Unbeknownst to the Americans, however, the Soviets had dozens of short-range battlefield missiles on the island, equipped with nuclear warheads capable of wiping out an entire invading force.

The immediate reactions of the two superpower leaders when confronted by the gravest international crisis of their careers were much the same: shock, wounded pride, grim determination, and barely repressed fear. Kennedy had wanted to bomb the Soviet missile sites; Khrushchev contemplated the use of tactical nuclear weapons against American troops. Either option could easily have led to full-scale nuclear war.

One was the son of an American millionaire, born and bred to a life of privilege. The other was the son of a Ukrainian peasant, who went barefoot as a child and wiped his nose on his sleeve. One man’s rise seemed effortless and natural; the other had clawed his way up through a combination of sycophancy and ruthlessness. One was introspective, the other explosive. The differences extended even to their looks—lean and graceful with a full head of hair versus short, plump, and bald—and their family lives. One wife looked as if she had stepped out of the pages of a fashion magazine; the other was the archetypal Russian babushka.

On another occasion, he said politics was “like the old joke about the two Jews traveling on a train.” One Jew asks the other, “Where are you going?” and gets the reply, “To Zhitomir.” “What a sly fox,” thinks the first Jew. “I know he’s really going to Zhitomir, but he told me Zhitomir so I’ll think he is going to Zhmerinka.”

Sergei concluded that Soviet policy was based on threatening the United States with “weapons we didn’t have.”

The purpose of the missile deployment, Khrushchev kept emphasizing, was not “to start a war” but to give the Americans a taste of “their own medicine.”

To load these planes with nuclear weapons and send them across the country violated the “buddy system,” a sacrosanct Air Force doctrine that required at least two officers to be in physical control of a nuclear weapon at all times. In the words of a shocked nuclear safety officer, Gerhart’s order meant that a single pilot, “by an inadvertent act, would have been able to achieve the full nuclear detonation of the weapon.”

The only exception to the buddy system was in time of war, when an enemy attack was considered imminent.

Rather than hitting a target, the unguided missile was designed to explode in midair, destroying any planes that might be in the vicinity through the sheer force of the blast.

Most worrying of all to Khrushchev was the Aleksandrovsk, a 5,400-ton freighter crammed with nuclear warheads. Her cargo included twenty-four 1-megaton warheads for the R-14 missile, each one of which contained the destructive force of seventy Hiroshima-type atomic bombs. The explosive power concentrated on board the ship exceeded all the bombs dropped in the history of warfare by a factor of at least three.

Castro and his barbudos had stirred the romanticism of the tired old men in the Kremlin, reminding them that they, too, had once been revolutionaries.

In recognition of its exploits, the Wing was the only Air Force unit authorized to include a mushroom cloud in its insignia.

In fact, the Soviet nuclear arsenal on Cuba far exceeded the worst nightmares of anyone in Washington. It included not only the big ballistic missiles targeted on the United States but an array of smaller weapons that could wipe out an invading army or navy. There were nukes for short-range cruise missiles, nukes for Ilyushin-28 bombers, and nukes for tactical rockets known as Lunas.

Ironically, the absence of security fences and armed guards proved to be the ideal camouflage for the Tatyanas. The Americans never did discover where they were hidden.

To avoid appearing on Cuban or Soviet radar screens, they skimmed over the ocean, flying so low that the spray from the waves sometimes splashed against the fuselage.

One thousand feet was the ideal altitude for taking low-level reconnaissance pictures. Lower altitudes produced fuzzy photographs with insufficient overlap between the negatives; higher altitudes resulted in too much overlap and loss of detail.

Dobrynin had difficulty replying as he too had been kept in the dark by Moscow. He gamely insisted that the American information must be wrong.

Castro felt so uncomfortable in public that he had to consciously wind himself up into a lather of indignation. Some observers felt that his legendary loquacity—he often spoke for five or six hours at a stretch—was connected to his shyness. “Fatigued by talking, he rests by talking,” the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez would later observe of Fidel. “When he starts speaking, his voice is always hard to hear and his course is uncertain, but he takes advantage of anything to gain ground, little by little, until he takes possession of his audience.” Having made the huge mental effort to begin speaking, Castro found it difficult to stop.

“No hay cosas imposibles, sino hombres incapaces— There are no impossible deeds, just incapable men.”

In retrospect, of course, it is remarkable that the U.S. intelligence community did not pick up on all these hints and conclude much earlier that there was a strong likelihood that the Soviet Union had deployed nuclear missiles to Cuba. At the time, however, CIA analysts dismissed the boasts as typical Cuban braggadocio.

His knowledge of the Soviet Union was so limited that he had to ask Khrushchev to identify the sage with the large bushy beard whose portrait hung on the wall of his huge Kremlin office. “Why, that’s Karl Marx, the father of Communism,” a surprised first secretary replied.

The truth is that Khrushchev had “blinked” on the first night of the crisis—but it took nearly thirty hours for the “blink” to become visible to decision makers in Washington. The real danger came not from the missile-carrying ships, which were all headed back to the Soviet Union by now, but from the four Foxtrot-class submarines still lurking in the western Atlantic.

Before their departure, the submarine commanders had been given an enigmatic instruction by the deputy head of the Soviet navy, Admiral Vitaly Fokin, on how to respond to an American attack. “If they slap you on the left cheek, do not let them slap you on the right one.”

The control room could withstand conventional bombs, but could not take a direct hit by a nuclear weapon. If destroyed, its functions would immediately be taken over by a series of backup facilities, including three EC-135 “Looking Glass” planes, one of which was in the air at all times with an Air Force general on board.

“All war is immoral,” he explained. “If you let that bother you, you are not a good soldier.”

It was difficult for Castro to know whether the Soviets would ever use the nuclear warheads that remained under their tight control. He knew what he would do if the decision was up to him. If he had learned anything from his exhaustive study of revolutionary movements and his own experiences as a revolutionary, it was that it was suicidal to wait for the enemy to attack.

The targeting cards contained detailed instructions for launching the missile. The most important variables were elevation, azimuth, range, length of time the rocket was under power, type of explosion, and size of the nuclear charge. The cards were the product of weeks of painstaking geodesic research and complicated mathematical calculations. In contrast to a cruise missile, which is powered throughout its flight, a ballistic missile is only powered for the first few minutes after takeoff. It then follows a trajectory that can be calculated with varying degrees of accuracy. Mechanical gyroscopes kept the R-12 missile to its assigned path.

The CIA’s problem in Cuba was the opposite of the KGB’s problem in Washington: not too little human intelligence, but too much.

Somewhat belatedly, U.S. intelligence had managed to ferret out many of the most powerful Soviet weapons in Cuba, including the R-12 medium-range missiles, the Ilyushin-28 bombers, the short-range Lunas, and the SAM antiaircraft missile network. But there was much that the Americans had been unable to find. They suspected that the Soviets had nuclear warheads in Cuba, but did not know where they were stored. They had grossly underestimated the numbers of Soviet troops. And they had absolutely no idea about the weapons system that was key to Moscow’s plans for defending the island against a U.S. invasion. The story of the nuclear-tipped cruise missiles would remain a secret for forty years and is being told in detail here for the first time.

Before hooking the equipment up to Soviet army generators, Soviet technicians had to adapt the electric circuits from the American standard of sixty cycles per second to the Russian standard of fifty cycles.

The antisabotage plan called for “flushing” the interceptor force, Air Force terminology for getting as many planes into the air as quickly as possible.

Cratology scored its greatest triumph in late September when analysts correctly deduced that a Soviet ship bound for Cuba was carrying Il-28 bombers. Since the Il-28 was known to be nuclear-capable, this discovery prompted Kennedy to agree to the crucial October 14 U-2 overflight of Cuba to investigate the Soviet arms buildup.

The analysts could infer a lot just by looking at a picture of a vessel, and studying the way it was sitting in the water. Some of the Soviet cargo ships en route to Cuba had been built in Finland and had unusually long hatches. They were intended for the lumber trade, but the photographs showed them riding suspiciously high in the water. There was an obvious explanation: rockets weighed a good deal less than solid timber.

He was required to come to the surface at least once every twenty-four hours, at midnight Moscow time, for a prescheduled communications session. Nobody at navy headquarters paid attention to the fact that midnight in Moscow was midafternoon in the western Atlantic. The risk of detection rose sharply during the hours of daylight. Even so, Dubivko was terrified of missing a communication session. If war broke out while he was in the depths of the ocean, B-36 would automatically become a prime target for destruction by the American warships lurking overhead. His only chance of survival lay in firing his nuclear torpedo before he himself was destroyed.

The two-a-day, sometimes three-a-day, news briefings were so uninformative that a journalist placed a tin can in the corner of the Pentagon press room labeled “automatic answering device.” It was filled with slips of paper with Sylvesterisms such as “Not necessarily,” “Cannot confirm or deny,” and “No comment.”

It was the zenith of the Cuban love affair with the Soviet Union. Cuban parents were naming their sons after Yuri Gagarin, watching Soviet movies, reading Yevtushenko’s poems, and lining up to buy tickets for the Moscow Circus. But the admiration for the distant superpower was tinged with condescension.

Many Cubans detected a curious contradiction between the sophistication of Soviet weaponry and the backwardness of ordinary Russians.

The Russians were less “overbearing” than the Americans, Franqui thought, and “pleasant” even when drunk, but they gave the impression of “the most absolute poverty.”