One minute to midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the brink of nuclear war (27 page)

Everyone is thirsty. That's all anyone is talking about: thirst. How thirsty I am. It's hard to write, the paper is soaked in sweat. We all look as if we had just come out of a steambath. My fingertips are completely white, as if Lyalechka was one month old again, and I had just washed all her diapers.... The worst thing is that the commander's nerves are shot to hell. He's yelling at everyone and torturing himself. He doesn't understand that he should be saving his strength, and the men's too. Otherwise we are not going to last long. He is becoming paranoid, scared of his own shadow. He's hard to deal with. I feel sorry for him, and at the same time angry with him.

They had been at sea for nearly four weeks.
B-36
had been the first of the four submarines to slip out of Gadzhievo in the dead of the night, without any lights. It had led the way across the Atlantic for the other subs. Captain Aleksei Dubivko was under orders from the Soviet navy to reach the Caicos Passage at the entrance to the Caribbean by the fourth week in October. He had to maintain an average speed of 12 knots, an extraordinarily fast pace for a diesel-electric submarine that could only do 7 or 8 knots underwater. For most of the voyage, it had been necessary to travel on the surface, using his diesel engines rather than his batteries and battling waves as high as a four-story building.

Apart from the grim conditions aboard ship, the journey had been fairly uneventful. The diesel engines were still functioning well--in contrast to Shumkov's experience in
B-130,
which was trailing four hundred miles behind. As far as they knew, they had managed to escape detection by the Americans until they arrived in the Sargasso Sea. The biggest drama was a crew member falling ill with appendicitis. The ship's doctor operated on him on the mess table in the wardroom. Since it was impossible to wield a scalpel accurately with the vessel pitching about on the surface, they conducted the operation fully submerged, cutting their speed to 3 knots and losing a day. The operation was successful.

Andreev kept up a steady commentary on his own state of mind and conditions on board ship in his rambling letter to his beloved Sofia. He was alternately awed by the power and beauty of the ocean and struggling with physical discomfort. "How magnificent the ocean is when it's angry. It's all white. I have seen bigger storms, but never anything more beautiful than this," he told Sofia, as the submarine headed across the Atlantic through gale-force winds. "The waves, what waves! They rise like mountain ridges, seemingly stretching on without end. Our vessel looks like a tiny bug next to them." After dusk fell, the ocean "became terrifying and menacing, and the beauty vanished. All that was left was the dismal blackness and the sensation that anything might happen at any minute."

When they reached the Sargasso, the sea turned "absolutely calm," the color of the water "something between navy blue and purple." But conditions on board ship deteriorated. The temperature in the coolest parts of the sub was at least 100 degrees. "The heat's driving us crazy. The humidity has gone way up. It's getting harder and harder to breathe.... Everyone's agreed that they would rather have frost and snowstorms." Andreev felt as if his head was about to "burst from the stuffy air." Sailors fainted from overheating. Carbon dioxide levels were dangerously high. Men who were not on duty would gather in the coolest section of the boat and "sit immobile, staring at a single spot."

There was not enough fresh water to go around, so the ration was cut to half a pint per crew member per day. Fortunately, there were plentiful supplies of a syrupy fruit compote, which the men drank for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The temperature in the freezer rose to 46 degrees. As the officer in charge of the galley, Andreev ordered an increase in the meat ration, as the meat was all going bad. But hardly anyone felt like eating. Many crew members lost a third of their body weight. The captain accused Andreev of making the food go bad on purpose. "I have become an enemy of the people," Andreev wrote. "There was a big row and I feel very badly about it. The heat's been getting to us."

He thought constantly of his wife and child. "The first thing I do when I wake up is say good morning to you both." While standing watch, he imagined himself on the deck of a luxury passenger liner with Sofochka. "You are in a light summer dress and feel chilly. We stand with our arms around each other, admiring the beauty of the sea by night." He sent greetings to his wife via the constellation Orion, visible simultaneously in Russia and the Atlantic. He remembered Lili "sitting in the sand with her little arm raised.... And here you are, my mermaid, coming out of the water with a wonderful smile.... You are trying to get a ball away from her with a serious face." Memories of the "tiny hands" of his daughter, "her happy smile, her little nodding head across the table from me, her laughter, her caresses," helped him get through the hardest moments of the journey.

B-36
reached the approaches to the Caicos Passage on schedule, just as the crisis was coming to a head. It was then that Captain Dubivko received an urgent message from Moscow, ordering him to hold back. Instead of attempting to negotiate the forty-mile-wide channel, he was instructed to redeploy to the eastern end of the Turks and Caicos Islands, 150 miles away. This was the long way round to Cuba, but the sea channel was twice as wide. The navy chiefs evidently believed that the risks of detection were much reduced if the subs kept away from the narrow sea-lanes.

As
B-36
rounded Grand Turk Island, with its secret SOSUS station, U.S. Navy patrol planes appeared overhead. The Soviet sailors could hear the sound of muffled explosions as the patrol planes dropped practice depth charges and sonobuoys in an effort to locate them. The atmosphere inside the submarine became even more tense. "We are in the enemy's lair. We try not to reveal our presence to them, but they sense our closeness and are searching for us," noted Andreev.

By monitoring American radio broadcasts, Dubivko understood that the Soviet Union and the United States were close to war. 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.

Dubivko was expecting the coded signal from Moscow to start combat operations "from one hour to the next."

NOON FRIDAY, OCTOBER 26

Jack Kennedy was an avid consumer of intelligence. He enjoyed the voyeuristic sensation of peeking into other people's lives, and the power that came from the possession of secret information. He liked to see the raw data so that he could make his own judgments. When Andrei Gromyko visited the White House on October 18, four days after the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba, the U-2 photographs were sitting in the president's desk drawer just a few feet away. Kennedy had difficulty keeping his temper as the Soviet foreign minister continued to deny the existence of the missile bases. He told aides later that he could barely restrain himself from taking the incriminating photographs out of his desk and shoving them under the nose of the poker-faced Russian. He began referring to Gromyko as "that lying bastard."

Lundahl set up his easels in the Oval Office after the Friday morning ExComm meeting. He had brought along some of the latest low-level photography, and was eager to show the president the evidence of the rapid Soviet buildup. He reported that the ground was so drenched from recent rainstorms that the Soviets had erected catwalks around the missile sites, and were laying power cables on raised posts.

"Now this is interesting," interrupted John McCone, pointing to the photograph of the suspected FROG missile launcher. The CIA director explained that analysts were still "not sure" of the evidence, but it was possible that the Soviets had deployed "tactical nuclear weapons for fighting troops in the field."

But Kennedy's thoughts were elsewhere. He was already several steps ahead of the briefers. The more he learned about the scale and sophistication of the Soviet deployment on Cuba, the more doubtful he became of a diplomatic solution to the crisis. He needed to explore other options. Earlier that morning, he had listened to a CIA proposal to smuggle Cuban exiles onto the island in submarines for a sabotage operation against the missile sites. He wanted to know if it was possible to blow up a fuel trailer with a "single bullet."

"It would be fuming red nitric acid, sir," Lundahl replied. "If they're opened up, they might make some real trouble for those who are trying to contain it."

Kennedy noted that it would be much more difficult to destroy the FROGs, which operated on less combustible solid fuel.

"No, you couldn't shoot them up," agreed McCone, a former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission.

As the photo interpreter collected his materials, the president and the CIA director were still debating the options for getting rid of the missile sites. Though he had little faith in diplomacy, Kennedy feared that an air strike and invasion would end up in "a very bloody fight" that might provoke the Soviets into firing the missiles. Neither option was very appealing.

"Invading is going to be a much more serious undertaking than most people realize," McCone acknowledged grimly. "It's very evil stuff they've got there.... They'll give an invading force a pretty bad time. It'll be no cinch by any manner of means."

President Kennedy wanted the news about the
Marucla
to be put out "right now." His advisers believed that the successful boarding operation would help "restore our credibility" with disgruntled Pentagon admirals. His chosen vehicle for getting the
Marucla
story out was an increasingly controversial figure in Washington, Arthur Sylvester.

During the first week of the crisis, the Pentagon spokesman had infuriated reporters with his tight-lipped approach to the release of information. He restricted himself to cautiously worded press statements, dictated over the phone by Kennedy or one of his aides. For both JFK and Sylvester, information was a "weapon," to be used deliberately and sparingly to promote the goals of the administration. Since the purpose of the exercise was the removal of the Soviet military threat to the western hemisphere, the ends clearly justified the means.

By Friday, reporters were complaining loudly that they were getting virtually zero information out of Sylvester. 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."

The frustration of the newsmen--there were no women covering the Pentagon on a regular basis--was understandable. The world appeared to be on the edge of nuclear annihilation, but it was difficult to find out what was really going on. This was a new kind of conflict, a shadowy, antiseptic confrontation with a largely unseen enemy. The stakes were huge, but there was no front line from which the reporters could report, no equivalent of Pearl Harbor or Okinawa or the beaches of Normandy. Reporters had been kept away from the most obvious news locales, such as the naval base at Guantanamo Bay or the ships enforcing the blockade. In reporting the gravest threat to international security since World War II, they were almost completely dependent on the scraps of information thrown their way by the administration.

Now that he finally had some news to divulge, Sylvester was determined to make the most of the opportunity. He updated reporters throughout the day on the status of the
Marucla.
He relayed minute-by-minute accounts of the boarding process, the names and addresses of military personnel involved, the cargo, tonnage, and precise dimensions of the Lebanese ship, the firepower of the American destroyers. But the reporters wanted more. They always wanted more.

1:00 P.M. FRIDAY, OCTOBER 26 (NOON HAVANA)

As Sylvester was describing the search of the
Marucla,
another little drama was unfolding in the Straits of Florida, far from the gaze of the news media. An American destroyer stationed fifty miles from the Cuban coast spotted a Swedish freighter that had somehow slipped through the quarantine line.

"Please identify yourself," signaled the destroyer, the
Newman K. Perry,
by flashing light.

"
Coolangatta
from Gothenburg."

"What is your destination?"

"Havana."

"Where are you coming from?"

"Leningrad."

"What is your cargo?"

"Potatoes."

The captain of the
Coolangatta
was a Swedish sea salt named Nils Carlson. He had the reputation in his company of being "temperamental and headstrong." The potatoes were beginning to rot, because of poor handling and packaging. He was disgusted with the Russians for their incompetence. But he was also irritated with the Americans for interfering with his right of free navigation. As he later told a Swedish journalist, he did not think that his run-down ship could be of any possible interest to the U.S. Navy.

The
Perry
had stationed herself about fifty yards off the starboard side of the
Coolangatta.
Carlson recorded the next signal from the American warship in his log as "Will you stop for inspection?" But his radioman was young and inexperienced in interpreting Morse. For all Carlson knew, the signal might have been an instruction rather than a question.

At any rate, he decided not to respond. After three weeks at sea, he was impatient to get to Havana. He gave the order for "full steam ahead."