One minute to midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the brink of nuclear war (11 page)

The general explained the situation quickly. The Americans had imposed a naval blockade; he was declaring a full combat alert; everybody must return to their regiments immediately to repel a possible American paratroop drop.

As the commanders left El Chico for the nighttime journey back to their regiments, the roads were already full of trucks and buses transporting Cuban reservists to their posts. There were checkpoints everywhere, but the
companeros sovieticos
were waved through to shouts of
"Viva Cuba, Viva la Union Sovietica."

"Cuba si, yanqui no,"
the militiamen chanted.
"Patria o muerte."

The whole country was suddenly on a war footing. As news spread of Kennedy's speech and the mobilization of the Cuban armed forces, bewildered Soviet soldiers realized that they might soon be at war with the United States over a thin slither of land on the opposite side of the world to their homeland.

3:00 A.M. TUESDAY, OCTOBER 23 (10:00 A.M. MOSCOW)

Forbidden by Khrushchev to leave the Kremlin, Soviet leaders spent an uncomfortable night in their offices on couches and chairs. They met again at 10:00 a.m. to approve the documents drafted overnight by Foreign Ministry officials, including the official Soviet government statement. Orders had already gone out, starting at 6:00 a.m., to sixteen Soviet ships to return home. The major piece of unfinished business was what to do with the four Foxtrot submarines.

The submarines were still three days' sailing time from Cuba. They were scattered across the ocean, but the leading sub was nearing the Turks and Caicos Islands, at the entrance to the Caribbean. Anastas Mikoyan, the most cautious member of the Presidium, wanted to hold the submarines back. He feared their presence in Cuban waters would only increase the risk of a confrontation between the U.S. and Soviet navies. If they continued their journey to Cuba, it was likely they would be detected by American warships. Malinovsky argued that the Foxtrots should proceed on course to the Cuban port of Mariel, where they were meant to set up a submarine base. Several Presidium members supported the minister of defense. Khrushchev let the debate swirl around him. He could not make up his mind.

The argument was finally resolved by the head of the Soviet navy, Admiral Sergei Gorshkov. He was not present at the overnight Presidium meeting, but was invited to address a session later in the day. It was difficult to fault his expertise. Gorshkov had been personally selected by Khrushchev to create a modern navy capable of projecting Soviet power to the borders of America from what had previously been a largely defensive coastal force. He had joined the navy at the age of seventeen and became admiral during World War II at the age of thirty-one. Now fifty-two, he enjoyed a reputation for both dynamism and professionalism. He was known as a hard taskmaster.

The admiral laid his naval charts out on the Presidium's baize-covered table. He pointed out the positions of the four Foxtrots, between 300 and 800 miles from Cuba. He then noted the chokepoints on the sea-lanes to the Caribbean. The direct routes to Cuba from the Atlantic all passed through a 600-mile chain of islands stretching in a southeasterly direction from the Bahamas to the Turks and Caicos. The widest passage through the archipelago measured only forty miles. The only way to avoid this thicket of islands was to skirt the eastern tip of Grand Turk Island, toward Haiti and the Dominican Republic, adding at least two days to the journey.

Gorshkov sided with Mikoyan. He explained that the Americans controlled the narrow sea passages with submarine location equipment, and it was impossible to pass through them without being detected. He agreed that the submarines should be held back two or three days' sailing time from Cuba. In notes dictated shortly after the crisis, Mikoyan recalled that Malinovsky was "unable to object" to the navy chief's presentation. The admiral had performed "a very useful service": He had shown the defense minister to be "incompetent."

Mikoyan breathed a sigh of relief. He congratulated himself on averting an immediate superpower confrontation. But the respite proved temporary. The U.S. Navy was already bearing down on the Soviet submarines.

There was one more piece of urgent business falling to the KGB secret police. For the past year, a Soviet military intelligence officer named Colonel Oleg Penkovsky had been providing top secret documents to his British and American handlers. Among the documents now in the hands of the CIA was the technical manual for the R-12 missile system, together with the layout of a typical missile site and detailed descriptions of the various readiness levels. Penkovsky had been under suspicion for weeks, but the KGB delayed moving against him because it wanted to smash the entire spy ring.

With the Cold War on the verge of turning hot, Penkovsky could not be permitted to feed any more information to the Americans. Plain-clothes agents burst into his apartment on the Moscow River and arrested him without a struggle. Because of the importance of the case, the head of the KGB, Vladimir Semichastny, decided that he would take personal charge of the interrogation. He ordered his men to bring the traitor to his third-floor corner office in the Lubyanka. They sat him down at the other end of a long conference table.

Fearing torture or worse, Penkovsky immediately offered to cooperate with the KGB "in the interests of the motherland."

Semichastny looked at him with distaste. "Tell me what harm you have inflicted on our country. Describe it all in detail, with the most pertinent facts."

CHAPTER THREE

Cubans

6:45 A.M. TUESDAY, OCTOBER 23 (5:45 A.M. HAVANA)

A week after the discovery of the Soviet missiles, CIA analysts were still unable to answer the president's most urgent question: where are the nuclear warheads? They had reexamined all the U-2 pictures to look for telltale signs of a nuclear storage site, such as extra security fencing and antiaircraft protection. Radiation detection devices were being supplied to U.S. ships enforcing the blockade to try to determine whether nuclear warheads were being smuggled into Cuba.

The photo interpreters had identified several possible storage sites, including an abandoned molasses factory protected by an unusual system of double fencing. At several missile sites, construction was proceeding rapidly on bunkers made out of prefabricated aluminum arches, similar to nuclear storage facilities in the Soviet Union. Despite these promising leads, there was no firm evidence of the presence of nuclear warheads on the island.

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.

An initial shipment of ninety Soviet nuclear warheads had arrived in the port of Mariel on October 4, on board the
Indigirka,
a German-built freighter designed for transporting frozen fish. That shipment had included thirty-six 1-megaton warheads for the medium-range R-12 missiles, thirty-six 14-kiloton warheads for the cruise missiles, twelve 2-kiloton warheads for the Lunas, and six 12-kiloton atomic bombs for the IL-28s. The
Aleksandrovsk
was carrying another sixty-eight nukes: an additional forty-four cruise missile warheads, plus twenty-four 1-megaton warheads for the intermediate-range R-14 missiles. (A megaton is the equivalent of 1 million tons of TNT; a kiloton, 1,000 tons. The bomb that destroyed Hiroshima was around 15 kilotons.)

For the Soviet soldiers and technicians responsible for this huge nuclear stockpile, the assignment was like nothing they had previously experienced. Back home, strict regulations governed the transportation and storage of nuclear weapons. Warheads were usually moved from one secure location to another by special train, with elaborate precautions taken to ensure the correct temperature and humidity. On Cuba, many of these rules were simply impractical. The transportation system was rudimentary and there were no climate-controlled storage facilities. Nuclear weapons had to be dragged in and out of caves on rollers and hauled up winding mountain roads in convoys of vans and lorries. Improvisation was the order of the day.

Lieutenant Colonel Valentin Anastasiev was in charge of the six gravity bombs for the IL-28 airplanes, a plutonium-type implosion device similar to the "Fat Man" bomb dropped on Nagasaki in August 1945. When he arrived in Mariel with the
Indigirka,
he was told that a suitable storage place had still not been found for his weapons, nicknamed "Tatyanas" after the wife of one of the bomb engineers. The Tatyanas were an afterthought on Khrushchev's part. He had taken the decision to send them on September 7, at a time when he was worried that the United States might be preparing to invade Cuba. Although the IL-28s could reach Florida, their main function was to destroy U.S. warships and troop concentrations.

Anastasiev was ordered to unload the Tatyanas from the
Indigirka
and take them to an abandoned military barracks ten miles down the coast toward the west, in the opposite direction from Havana. When he got there, he was shocked. The property was only partially fenced. It was isolated but, apart from a Cuban artillery post down the road, there was little security. The bombs, which were packed in big metal crates, were placed in a ramshackle shed, locked with a padlock and guarded by a single Soviet soldier.

The Soviet technicians were assigned rooms in the single-story barracks, not far from a seaside cottage that had once belonged to Batista. The nights were stifling. To get some fresh air, they hooked a boat propeller up to an engine, and placed it near the window. The breeze brought some relief, but the motor made a terrible racket, and everybody had trouble sleeping.

Cuba might be a tropical paradise--"the most beautiful land that human eyes have ever seen," in the words of Christopher Columbus--but for the average Russian soldier it was a strange, even terrifying place, full of wild animals, deadly grasses and insects, and poisoned water supplies. One of Anastasiev's colleagues drowned after being attacked by a stingray.

One day, to distract themselves, the Soviet guards captured a giant barracuda. They kept the fish in Batista's swimming pool, with a rope attached to its belly. When they were bored, they tortured and teased the animal, using the rope to yank it around the swimming pool as it bared its teeth helplessly. It was a "juvenile" form of relaxation, Anastasiev thought, but better than fighting the much bigger predator ninety miles away.

Despite controlling an arsenal capable of killing millions of people, Anastasiev felt enormously vulnerable. If the Americans knew where the nuclear warheads were stored, they would go to extreme lengths to capture one. Armed only with a pistol, Anastasiev lived in constant fear of a U.S. commando raid or an attack by anti-Castro rebels.

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.

Like the
Indigirka,
the
Aleksandrovsk
was loaded with nuclear weapons at a submarine support base in the Kola inlet of the Barents Sea. By crossing the Arctic rather than the Black Sea or the Baltic, the two ships were able to avoid the chokepoints of the Bosphorus and the Skagerrak Strait between Denmark and Sweden, both of which were closely monitored by NATO.

Three 37mm antiaircraft guns had been installed on the upper decks of the
Aleksandrovsk
prior to her departure from Severomorsk on October 7. Since this was a merchant ship ostensibly carrying agricultural equipment to fraternal Cuba, the weapons were carefully concealed beneath coils of ropes. If the Americans attempted to board, Soviet troops had orders to rip away the ropes and open fire.

There was enough ammunition on board the modern, Finnish-built vessel for a short but intense firefight. Demolition engineers had placed explosives around the ship, so she could be quickly scuttled, if necessary. The switches for igniting the explosives were kept in a locked room near the captain's cabin. The senior military officer carried the key around with him at all times.

Since the Soviet military had no experience of shipping nuclear weapons by sea, the voyage required careful preparation. Special holds were constructed on both the
Aleksandrovsk
and the
Indigirka
to accommodate the warheads, with a double system of winches and safety bindings. The weapons themselves were placed inside metal containers, with a reinforced steel base, and hooks and handles for lashing the equipment to the walls. The coffin-shaped boxes measured six by fifteen feet and weighed up to 6 tons.

Despite the precautions, there were moments of near panic when the
Aleksandrovsk
ran into heavy storms in the mid-Atlantic, a week out from Cuba. Gale-force winds buffeted the vessel, threatening to smash the warheads against the bulkhead. Nuclear safety officers struggled for three days and nights to avoid disaster, attaching extra straps and hitches to keep the cargo intact. A military report later praised Captain Anatoly Yastrebov and two soldiers for "saving the ship" and its passengers. For his "great self-control, steadfastness, and courage," Yastrebov was awarded the Order of the Red Banner, the Soviet Union's second-highest military medal.

The
Aleksandrovsk
kept radio silence most of the way across the Atlantic, avoiding unwelcome attention. Communications with Moscow were handled by her escort ship, the
Almetyevsk.
The CIA located the
Aleksandrovsk
on October 19, four days out from Cuba, but listed her simply as a "dry cargo" ship of no particular significance.

Like the
Indigirka,
the
Aleksandrovsk
had been scheduled to dock at Mariel. But she was nearly two hundred miles away from Mariel in the predawn hours of October 23 when she received Khrushchev's order to make for "the nearest port."