One minute to midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the brink of nuclear war (33 page)

The U.S. advance forces circling around Cuba were shockingly ill-informed about what they would find if they were ordered to land on the island. They assumed that their opponents would be primarily Cuban, supported by an unknown number of "Soviet Bloc military technicians." U.S. intelligence estimates referred quaintly to "Sino-Soviet" troops and advisers, two years after the rupture between Moscow and Beijing became public. The intelligence gleaned from the October 25 reconnaissance photograph of a Soviet combat unit near Remedios, equipped with FROG missiles, had still not filtered down to the level of the Marines and airborne units preparing to invade Cuba on the afternoon of Friday, October 26.

As word spread within the upper reaches of the U.S. bureaucracy about the sighting of nuclear-capable battlefield weapons in Cuba, in the hands of Soviet defenders, American commanders began clamoring for tactical nuclear weapons of their own.

The order to move against the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo came late on Friday evening, when it was already dark. Several hundred Soviet soldiers, equipped with three cruise missile launchers, each with its own Hiroshima-sized nuclear device, had been waiting in a "pre-launch position" in a former American military school in the village of Vilorio, about fifteen miles inland from the base. They had moved to Vilorio two days earlier from the supply center at Mayari Arriba in the Sierra del Cristal Mountains. To preserve maximum secrecy, they would only redeploy to the launch position if war was expected to break out.

The deployment order was brought by courier in a sealed packet: a radio message risked being intercepted by the Americans. The new position was near an abandoned coffee plantation in the village of Filipinas, also fifteen miles from Guantanamo but closer to the sea. The distance from the pre-launch position to the launch position was about ten miles. At the launch position, they would prepare to "destroy the target" upon receipt of instructions from the general staff in Moscow.

The Soviet preparations to destroy the Guantanamo Naval Base would remain secret for nearly five decades. The activities of the FKR regiments stationed in Oriente and Pinar del Rio provinces have received scant attention from historians, even though these units controlled more than half the Soviet nuclear warheads deployed to Cuba. Equipped with a 14-kiloton explosive charge, roughly the power of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, the FKR cruise missiles were several times as powerful as the short-range Luna missiles sighted in central Cuba. And there were many more of them: the Soviets brought eighty FKR warheads to Cuba, compared to just twelve Luna warheads.

The movements of the cruise missile convoy on the night of Friday, October 26, as the crisis was about to climax, are being revealed here for the first time. The story has been pieced together from Russian documents and the recollections of participants, which closely match details contained in declassified U.S. intelligence reports. Despite the secrecy surrounding the operation, the Americans were able to follow the cruise missile convoy through radio intercepts and aerial reconnaissance. But, as with the photographs of the Bejucal nuclear storage site, the significance of the raw intelligence was never understood.

Among the Soviet soldiers ordered to Filipinas was a twenty-one-year-old conscript named Viktor Mikheev. He had been serving in the Engineering Corps for just over a year, using his skills as a carpenter to help prepare cruise missile launch positions. He was twenty-one years old when he ended up in Cuba. Photographs that he sent to his mother from the army show a stocky young man, with a piercing gaze and brushed-back hair. He was dressed in a private's uniform, wearing high leather boots and a wide belt with a big red star.

Mikheev's background was typical of the conscripts who took part in Operation Anadyr. He was from a little village in the flat Russian countryside around Moscow. His parents worked on a collective farm. Although he arrived in Cuba in mid-September 1962, he was not allowed to write home until the middle of October. The letter was brief. Military censors prohibited him from saying very much or even revealing his location. "Greetings from a faraway land," he wrote in a letter filled with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. "I am alive and healthy." He explained that "it was forbidden" to write earlier, and gave a post office box in Moscow as his return address.

Mikheev was among twenty soldiers from the field engineering unit riding in the back of a powerful, square-fronted truck known as a KRAZ when the convoy pulled out of Vilorio and headed south, toward the sea. Immediately behind the KRAZ was a truck dragging an FKR cruise missile, a stripped-down version of a MiG-15 jet fighter with swept-back wings and a 14-kiloton nuclear warhead in the middle of the fuselage. The missiles were hidden under canvas. A line of support vehicles, including radio vans used for guiding the missile to its target, trailed behind. The convoy crawled forward in pitch darkness, observing a strict blackout. The commander of the battalion, Major Denischenko, rode in front of the convoy in a Soviet army jeep, together with his political commissar.

Suddenly, through the darkness, came the sound of a mighty crash followed by terrified screams. The troops in the FKR truck thought they were under attack by rebels, possibly even by Americans. Soldiers jumped out of the truck and dived into defensive positions behind rocks and cactuses. There was total confusion.

It took a few minutes to figure out what had happened. The KRAZ truck carrying the engineering team had tipped over into a ravine. When the other soldiers went to investigate, they found the truck at the bottom of the ravine. Mikheev and his friend Aleksandr Sokolov had been crushed to death, along with a Cuban bystander. Half a dozen other soldiers sitting on benches on the right side of the truck were badly injured. Their comrades pulled the dead and injured out and laid them by the side of the road.

Denischenko was unable to avoid calling for help over the radio--even if it meant revealing his position to the Americans. News of the accident reached the regimental commander, Colonel Maltsev, at his field headquarters outside the Cuban town of Guantanamo, ten miles north of the naval base. There were three dead--two Soviets and a Cuban--and at least fifteen wounded, some seriously. Maltsev called for surgeons and sent trucks and ambulances to the crash site.

As usual after such accidents, the priority was not casualties but completing the mission successfully. The long line of trucks dragging the FKR cruise missiles and nuclear warheads headed on into the night as soon as the rescue vehicles arrived.

MIDNIGHT FRIDAY, OCTOBER 26 (11:00 P.M. HAVANA)

It had become impossible for foreign journalists to report freely from Havana. Those who complained about the restrictions were arrested and accused of being "American agents." A Swedish television reporter, Bjorn Ahlander, asked Cuban militiamen whether he should "dress for dinner or for prison" when they burst into his hotel room on Thursday evening. Not receiving a reply, he dressed for dinner and spent a night locked in a cell at police headquarters. He was allowed to return to his hotel on Friday after giving his "word of honor" as a reserve officer in the Swedish army that he would not try to escape.

Foreigners willing to participate in propaganda operations against the United States were, of course, welcome. The Cuban government provided radio facilities to a fugitive American civil rights activist named Robert F. Williams who denounced Kennedy as "the Napoleon of all Napoleons." Addressing his "oppressed North American brothers" over Radio Free Dixie, Williams called on black soldiers serving in the U.S. military units preparing to invade Cuba to rebel against their officers.

"While you are armed, remember this is your only chance to be free," said Williams, in his weekly Friday night broadcast to the Deep South. "This is your only chance to stop your people from being treated worse than dogs. We'll take care of the front, Joe, but from the back, he'll never know what hit him. You dig?"

Carlos Alzugaray had spent the day digging trenches outside Havana with other Cuban diplomats. When he returned to the Foreign Ministry, the talk was all about an American attack on Cuba, expected to take place overnight. The government needed an urgent report on the likely consequences of a nuclear strike, in or near Havana.

Fortunately for the young American expert, Cuba still belonged to an international library consortium and continued to received official U.S. government publications from the Library of Congress. The Defense Department had done an exhaustive study on the effects of nuclear war, outlining different scenarios for atomic annihilation. There were vivid descriptions of what would happen to a medium-sized city like Havana, with a population of nearly 2 million, depending on such variables as the size of weapon, height of burst, and prevailing winds. As Alzugaray read through the material, he felt a growing fatalism.

A 1-megaton bomb--similar to the warheads on the Soviet R-12 missile--would leave a crater about one thousand feet wide and two hundred feet deep if it exploded close to the surface. The explosion would destroy virtually everything within a 1.7-mile radius of the blast--office buildings, apartment blocks, factories, bridges, even highways. In the next five-mile rung out, the force of the blast would blow out walls and windows, leaving the bones of some buildings intact but a pile of debris in the streets. Hundreds of thousands of people living in central Havana would be killed instantly, most from blast injuries or falling debris. Tens of thousands more would die within hours from thermal radiation. Fires would rage across the rest of the city, as far as the outlying suburbs and the Soviet military headquarters at El Chico, twelve miles from the city center.

Alzugaray described the events that would follow a nuclear attack for his colleagues. A blinding flash. A mushroom cloud. Intense heat. Certain death. He then drafted the briefest report of his diplomatic career: "In the event that nuclear weapons are used in or near Havana City, it and we shall all be destroyed." He had completed his assignment. There was nothing more to add.

In the streets around the Foreign Ministry, there were few signs of any civil defense preparations. The calmness with which Cubans went about their daily lives was difficult for foreigners to understand. Maurice Halperin, the American exile, had listened all week to radio broadcasts from Florida reporting the hoarding of food and preparations for evacuation of American cities. He wondered "what was wrong" with his fellow Havana residents, who paid little attention to the antiaircraft batteries on the Malecon, the sandbagged machine-gun nests in the streets, and the barbed wire along the shore. Nobody "seemed to notice or care that in the event of a bombardment, there would be nowhere to hide, no shelters stocked with medical supplies, and no trained personnel to take care of the wounded, put out fires, and bury the dead."

On the fifth floor of the ministry, Alzugaray and other diplomats prepared to spend the night in their offices. They bedded down on top of their desks, exhausted by digging trenches, "without the prospect of certain death affecting our sleep in the very least."

The stage was set for what Theodore Sorensen would later call "by far the worst day" of the Cuban missile crisis, a day that would come to be known around the White House as "Black Saturday." After picking up speed following the president's address to the nation on the evening of Monday, October 22, events were about to accelerate dramatically once again. The crisis was acquiring a logic and momentum of its own. Armies were mobilizing, planes and missiles were being placed on alert, generals were demanding action. The situation was changing minute by minute. The machinery of war was in motion. The world was hurtling toward a nuclear conflict.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Strike First

12:38 A.M. "BLACK SATURDAY," OCTOBER 27

The electronic warfare officers on board the USS
Oxford
sat hunched over their consoles in a cool, dimly lit room lined with recording equipment. It was a cloudy, starless night with moderate easterly winds. The night shift had just taken over. Two decks above their heads, a tall mast pulled down radar signals from hundreds of miles around. With headphones pressed to their ears, the intelligence gatherers strained to hear the telltale whoops and
brrs
of the radars associated with the Soviet air defense system. Until now, the radars had been largely silent, except for short tests. If the radar systems were switched on for any length of time, it would mean that Americans planes flying over Cuba were at serious risk of being shot down.

The intelligence gatherers on board the
Oxford
were cogs in a gigantic information-processing machine. The bits and pieces of data they managed to collect--a radar intercept, an overheard phone conversation, an overhead photograph--were sent to secretive bureaucratic agencies in Washington bearing acronyms like CIA, DIA, NSA, and NPIC. The data was sifted, interpreted, analyzed, and processed in eyes-only reports with code names like PSALM, ELITE, IRONBARK, and FUNNEL.