Back Channel (59 page)

The conversation about the Bay of Pigs between President Kennedy and former President Eisenhower really did take place at Camp David, largely along the lines that I describe in
chapter 29
. Kennedy actually received the intelligence report that the Soviet Union was burning its papers—considered a prelude to war—on Saturday, October 27, not Monday, October 29, as in my novel. The report turned out to be false. The comments that I attribute to Curtis LeMay after the end of the crisis actually combine two separate communications. The subsequent deal to remove the IL-28 bombers from Cuba was reached much as I describe it.

The quotations from documents are all accurate. In a debriefing
from before the missile crisis, Oleg Penkovsky, known as
YOGA
, really did try to persuade his handlers to attack the Soviet Union. The last National Intelligence Estimate before the missiles were discovered really did go disastrously wrong—not the last time that has happened! The letter from Khrushchev really did call Kennedy a degenerate. And so forth.

And there really was a back channel, with several of the meetings held at the Yenching Palace restaurant, which closed its doors in 2007. The real back channel involved John Scali of ABC News, rather than a nineteen-year-old college student. But the Soviet end was indeed Aleksandr Fomin (whose real name was Alexander Feksilov), the KGB
rezident
in Washington, who had been involved in recruiting the Rosenbergs. The details of his life that Fomin vouchsafes to Margo, both in Varna and on the Mall, are uniformly and without exception false: wisps, as Doris Harrington might have called them, spun perhaps to make
GREENHILL
more comfortable following his lead.

How important the back channel really was in resolving the crisis has been debated by historians. Certainly there is no evidence that the Soviets ever tried to persuade Kennedy to mothball the TX-61 “gravity bomb.” The United States in fact completed development of the weapon, which evolved into the B61, a variable-yield thermonuclear warhead that remains part of what is known as the “enduring stockpile”—nuclear weapons that the nation chose to retain following the end of the Cold War. (By the way, Fomin’s English was quite good, but not nearly as perfect as in my tale. His NPR interview and his autobiography are both fascinating.)

The military activities that I mention, from the Neptune P-2H that buzzed and photographed the
Poltava
during its September journey, to the U-2 overflights of Cuba, to the movement of troops and planes to Florida, all took place largely as and when I describe them. Lorenz Niemeyer’s tales about both sides shooting down the other’s surveillance planes are all matters of public record. According to declassified CIA documents, it is a fact that the eleven survivors of the C-130 downed over Soviet territory were never heard from again. A 1993 report suggested that as of that date, some might still have been alive in Soviet custody. On the other hand, the story of the Soviet aircraft that overflew Kuskokwim Bay, although accurately reported by Niemeyer, actually took place in March of 1963, not March of 1962, and
did not remain secret. I chose to advance the start date of Operation Jedburgh by a year or so, to allow Niemeyer and Donald Jensen to be part of it. Civil-rights leaders, by the way, really did complain about the refusal of OSS to send black operatives into the field. One source does mention an unnamed black truck driver who was recruited in a manner that provides the inspiration for Donald’s story here. (Several OSS headquarters employees were black, among them Ralph Bunche.)

Jack Ziegler’s discussion of CIA digraphs in
chapter 5
is accurate. The digraph for the Soviet Union was indeed
AE
;
JM
was the digraph for Cuba. The significance of
QK
is not publicly known, but I decided to appropriate it for Bulgaria because the Agency’s operation in the 1950s aimed at psychological warfare against the Bulgarian regime was known, at least initially, as
QKSTAIR
. (The code name of this operation was later changed to
BGCONVOY
, but
BG
is a very unlikely digraph for Bulgaria: the Agency never chose letters suggestive of the name of the target.)

In the same chapter, my reference to the chain of command in the KGB reflects the teaching of declassified CIA documents. A major really would give commands to a full colonel in appropriate circumstances. The reference in
chapter 9
to Department T of the First Chief Directorate may not be accurate, as some sources suggest that responsibility for “direct action” was not handed over to T until 1963. The reassignment of direct action to the infamous Department V came shortly afterward.

The mention of secure telephone lines at several points in the narrative is anachronistic, if the term is understood in its contemporary sense. The first telephone capable of scrambling and unscrambling voice communications, the STU-1, was not developed until the late 1960s, and did not go into widespread use until several years thereafter.

Niemeyer’s classroom lectures are largely based on historical fact and the early writing of conflict theory. His hypothetical about the bank robber with the hand grenade is borrowed without attribution from an important early paper by Daniel Ellsberg. In his meeting with McGeorge Bundy in the White House basement, Niemeyer is relying upon the work of Nobel Laureate Thomas Schelling, among others. The story in
chapter 3
about the Civil Defense planners failing to tell Ohioans that a mock evacuation was to be staged there is true. Niemeyer’s account in
chapter 18
of the weakness in fallout shelters is drawn
from the proceedings of a National Research Council symposium on the topic that was not actually held until 1965.

The rumor that Bundy hired a Kennedy girlfriend for the National Security Council staff is repeated in at least two sources, but neither gives any detail. Esman’s story of the refusal of the Pentagon to let the White House see a copy of the Joint Strategic Capabilities Plan is true. Oleg Penkovsky really was arrested in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Note that some historians do not believe that Bundy was aware of
YOGA
’
S
true identity.

As to Bundy’s defense of Curtis LeMay, as far as I know nothing like it ever took place. LeMay was a narrow-minded man, of hateful politics, and his fury at the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis is a matter of record. On the other hand, although he is routinely cast as the villain in both fiction and nonfiction about the crisis, I found nothing on the record to suggest that he was ever anything but a thorough patriot who followed the President’s orders to the letter—whatever he may have said about Kennedy behind his back. The story about his successful single-handed efforts to build the Strategic Air Command from scratch is true.

Where I could, I have tried to get minor details right. But some I intentionally changed. For example, the Trimline phone was not available to the public until 1965, and therefore the Madisons could not have had one for Margo to talk on. On the other hand, the term “limousine liberals” seems to have first appeared in a novel published in 1919, and was popularized by conservatives during the 1950s, so could certainly have come from the lips of Jack Ziegler, as it does in
chapter 45
.

As in
Palace Council,
my previous novel set partly in Ithaca, I have tried to be true to the geography of both the town and Cornell University, but here I have also tried to be sensitive to the history. The football game between Cornell and Colgate that features in
chapter 1
was actually played on September 29, 1962. Cornell lost, 23–12. Cornell abolished parietal rules for female students in 1962. For the sake of my fiction I kept them in place for another year.

The facts that Margo reviews about the survival of the Bulgarian Jews during World War II are essentially true, but were not fully known until the opening of the Soviet archives after 1989. Also, there
was no United States consulate in Varna at the time of the events of the novel. Jerry Ainsley’s recital of the result of the fifth game of the 1962 World Series is accurate, but the game was actually played on October 10.

What about the chess? At the 1962 Olympiad, Yefim Geller really did replace Vasily Smyslov on the Soviet team without explanation, and, unlike Smyslov, Geller really did not speak any English. As far as I can tell, Smyslov never visited either Cuba or Curaçao in 1962. The notion that he might have run errands for Soviet intelligence is entirely invented. The gorillas aren’t.

Bobby Fischer’s brilliant game against Robert Byrne was actually played in December 1963. I moved it two years earlier for the convenience of the story. (Bobby played the so-called Game of the Century, mentioned by Doris Harrington, in 1956, against Robert Byrne’s brother Donald.) My descriptions of Fischer’s games at the Chess Olympiad are accurate, although I moved the relevant dates on which the games were played, and also shortened the Olympiad itself.

As to the other side of Fischer, I will freely confess to having exaggerated for the sake of the story what some call his quirks and others call early evidence of the mental illness that would later consume that remarkable brain. According to his biographer, Frank Brady, Fischer really did sail for Europe on the
New Amsterdam
for fear that his plane might be sabotaged. Most of the more bizarre comments I attribute to Fischer come from reliable sources, even though he certainly did not make all of them in 1962. Thus, for example, Fischer’s dithering over whether he should buy a car or get a wife from Asia came to light in the recollections of former world chess champion Mikhail Tal. Fischer’s fascination with
Mein Kampf
was noticed by the immortal Samuel Reshevsky, but not until 1970. Fischer repeated his disdain for women in several published interviews, although several sources mention the rumor that his friends snuck a woman into his room at a chess tournament in Argentina. Nevertheless, on the chessboard Fischer was always his own sternest critic, and there is no suggestion in any of the sources that he blamed any woman—or anyone but himself—for spoiling the winning endgame against Botvinnik.

Finally, what about the novel’s central conceit—that the President could have hidden the back-channel negotiations behind a faux affair with a nineteen-year-old college student? We have it on the authority
of biographer Robert Dallek that Kennedy, while President, did indeed have an affair with a nineteen-year-old collegian—even though she was a white intern in the White House, not a black intern at the Department of Labor. Press accounts, including interviews with the woman in question, have subsequently confirmed Dallek’s account.

As so often, the list of those I would like to thank could go on for some while. I will endeavor to be brief. Let me begin by acknowledging my loyal fans, many of whom have begged for years to learn more about the lives of Misha Garland and Kimmer Madison when they were younger. Many of the questions about Misha I tried to answer in my 2008 novel
Palace Council,
where we meet a good chunk of his family in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. (We meet a much younger Misha, too.) Although Kimmer was a minor character in
New England White,
the instant novel is my first attempt at fleshing out her childhood.

As always, I am grateful to my deft and wonderful editor, Phyllis Grann, and to Lynn Nesbit, my literary agent of more than twenty years, and a very fine and supportive friend. I have had the benefit, as usual, of thoughtful readings of an earlier version of the manuscript by my dear friends George W. Jones, Jr., and Loretta Pleasant-Jones. I have also had the particular benefit of a quite detailed critique from my son, Andrew, whose comments caused me to rewrite significantly several chapters.

Andrew and my daughter, Leah, mentioned in all of my author’s notes over the decades, are grown now, but when I write, I still think of them and my wife Enola as my principal audience. My family has been God’s gift to me in this life, and for their love, and the opportunity to love them in return, I will be forever grateful.

—Cheshire, Connecticut

March 2014

S
TEPHEN
L. C
ARTER
is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale University. His debut novel,
The Emperor of Ocean Park,
spent eleven weeks on the
New York Times
best-seller list, and was followed by the nationwide best-sellers
New England White, Palace Council, Jericho’s Fall,
and, most recently,
The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln.
His acclaimed nonfiction books include
God’s Name in Vain: The Wrongs and Rights of Religion in Politics; Civility: Manners, Morals, and the Etiquette of Democracy;
and
The Violence of Peace: America’s Wars in the Age of Obama.
He lives with his family in Connecticut.