One minute to midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the brink of nuclear war (41 page)

Contrary to American expectations, the Soviets did not increase the pressure on Berlin in response to the U.S. blockade of Cuba. There were the usual incidents on the border and arguments about movements of allied convoys. Soviet troops in East Germany were ordered to a higher state of alert. Soviet and American officers exchanged accusations about "provocative actions" by the other side. But it was all more or less routine.

East Germans were still fleeing to the West, although in much reduced numbers. In the early hours of Saturday morning, five young men and a woman clawed their way through layers of barbed wire to reach the French sector. East German border guards sent up flares to illuminate the night and sprayed the ground with automatic weapons fire. The twenty-three-year-old woman caught her coat in a barbed-wire barricade. Her male companions helped her untangle herself and dodge the bullets in the pouring rain. Another group of three young men crept through a graveyard on the border and scrambled over a barbed-wire-topped brick wall into West Berlin.

In the afternoon, a U.S. transport plane flying out of the city along the central air corridor was buzzed by Soviet fighter-interceptors. The Soviet jets made three passes at the slower-moving American T-29 prop aircraft, but did not otherwise interfere. American intelligence officers wondered if the incident was an early sign of a new campaign of air corridor harassment.

Khrushchev may well have seen a link between the deployment of Soviet missiles in Cuba and the endgame over Berlin. In his mind, everything was connected. Had the Cuban gamble succeeded, his overall geopolitical bargaining power would be much greater. He had been dropping heavy hints about a major new initiative on West Berlin, including the signing of a peace treaty with East Germany, after the U.S. congressional elections on November 6. "We will give [Kennedy] a choice. Go to war or sign a peace treaty," the chairman told Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall in September. "Do you need Berlin? Like hell you need it."

Whatever his initial motives for deploying Soviet missiles to Cuba, Khrushchev now had no stomach for a wider confrontation with the United States. He resisted the temptation to raise the stakes in West Berlin at a time when the world was close to nuclear war in Cuba. When a deputy Soviet foreign minister, Vasily Kuznetsov, proposed "increasing pressure" on West Berlin as a way of countering American pressure on Cuba, Khrushchev reacted sharply. "We are just beginning to extricate ourselves from one adventure, and you are suggesting that we jump into another."

Khrushchev had decided to give the West's "testicles" a rest.

9:09 A.M. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27

At McCoy Air Force Base outside Orlando, Florida, Major Rudolf Anderson, Jr., was completing final preparations for his sixth U-2 mission over Cuba. He had received a last briefing from the navigators, gone through his breathing exercises, and wriggled into his partial-pressure flight suit. He would make a one-hour fifteen-minute reconnaissance flight over the eastern half of the island.

Lean and athletic, with dark hair and striking dark brown eyes, the thirty-five-year-old Anderson was a classic Type A personality. Flying was his life and his passion. As a child, he built model airplanes and dreamed of becoming a pilot. His evaluations were uniformly excellent, signposting the way to a brilliant military career. Exuberant in private--he once jumped out of his second-story college dorm window to chase a bird that had escaped from its cage--he was intensely serious when it came to work. His friend Bob Powell considered him the type of pilot "who took every mission you could get. You would volunteer for backup if the primary aborted. You had to go. He was irrepressible."

Anderson was engaged in a friendly competition with another U-2 pilot, Richard Heyser, to rack up the most combat missions over Cuba. Heyser was senior to Anderson in rank, but Anderson was chief of standardization for the squadron, a prestigious position overseeing other pilots. Heyser had flown the U-2 mission over San Cristobal in western Cuba on October 14 that discovered the Soviet missiles. Anderson flew a mission the next day, discovering more missile sites in central Cuba, near Sagua la Grande. By Saturday, October 27, each man had flown five sorties over the island.

Initially, Anderson's name was not on the flight roster for Saturday morning. The original plan consisted of three sorties, to be flown by less experienced pilots. The first mission was a quick twenty-minute hop over the missile sites of central Cuba. The second was a one-hour flight over all the missile sites. The third was a four-hour flight around the periphery of the island, remaining in international airspace. On Friday evening, SAC planners added a fourth mission to the schedule: checking out Soviet and Cuban military deployments in the vicinity of Guantanamo Naval Base and probing the Soviet air defense system. Eager to rack up more combat hours, Anderson lobbied for the assignment.

One by one, the first three missions were canceled in the early hours of Saturday morning. The Navy was conducting low-altitude reconnaissance of the missile sites, so there was not much sense sending U-2s over the same area at a time when the Soviets had activated their air defense system. One pilot, Captain Charles Kern, was already sitting in the cockpit of his plane when the order arrived from Washington to scrub the flight. That left mission 3128--Anderson's mission.

The flight plan called for Anderson to fly within range of eight SAM sites at an altitude of seventy-two thousand feet. He was well aware of the threat posed by Soviet V-75 missiles. His U-2 was equipped with a device for detecting the radar systems associated with the missile system. If a Soviet radar painted his plane, a yellow light would appear in his cockpit. If the SAM site locked on to the plane, the light would turn red. He would then attempt evasive action, feinting inwards and outwards like a matador deflecting a bull. It was hoped that the missiles would zip past him and explode harmlessly in the sky above.

A van drove Anderson to the flight line, where the plane that he had used to make his five previous overflights was waiting. It was a CIA bird, No. 56-6676, repainted with Air Force insignia. Kennedy preferred to have Air Force blue-suiters flying over Cuba rather than CIA pilots: fewer questions would be asked if they were shot down. But the agency U-2s were slightly superior to the Air Force version: they had a more powerful engine and could fly five thousand feet higher. This made them a slightly more difficult target for the Soviet SAMs. The CIA had agreed reluctantly to lend several of its planes to the Air Force on condition that it retained control over the photo interpretation process.

The agency was unhappy about being upstaged by the Air Force. CIA personnel were still responsible for servicing the spy planes at McCoy and taking charge of the intelligence materials. The Air Force pilots regarded them as interlopers, "looking for fault in everything we did." CIA officials complained that the Air Force did not pay enough attention to the threat posed by the SAM sites. There was no system for using electronic warfare techniques to jam the radars used by the Soviet air defense system or to track the U-2s as they flew over Cuba. Intelligence officers estimated the chances of a U-2 pilot being shot down over Cuba as around one in six.

Anderson climbed up the steps to the U-2 followed by his mobile control officer and strapped himself into the cockpit. He carried photographs of his wife and two young children in his wallet. He was still feeling some pain in his right shoulder caused by a fall on the ice while on temporary duty in Alaska, but he was not going to let that stop him from flying. When his commander pulled him off the flight schedule one day to give him some rest, he had complained vociferously. "Aren't I doing a good enough job?" he wanted to know.

The mobile officer, Captain Roger Herman, ran through the final checklist. Herman made sure that Anderson's oxygen supply was connected properly and that the maps and "top secret" target folder were all neatly stacked by the side of the ejector seat. The two pilots tested the emergency systems to make sure they were functioning normally. A surge of oxygen briefly inflated the capstans on Anderson's partial-pressure suit, filling the cockpit. When he was certain that everything was in order, Herman slapped Anderson on the shoulder.

"Okay, Rudy, here we go, have a good trip. See you when you get back."

Anderson gave a thumbs-up sign as Herman closed the canopy. Moments later, his U-2 took off for Cuba. It was 9:09 a.m.

At the time that Anderson took off, an American electronics reconnaissance plane had already been in the air for four hours. The RB-47, a modified version of the B-47 bomber, was ferreting out Soviet radar signals. Captain Stan Willson had taken off at five o'clock that morning from Forbes Air Force Base in Kansas, topped up his fuel tank over the Gulf of Mexico, and was now circling Cuba, taking care to remain over international waters. Although he was interested in any type of radar signal, his primary goal was to find out whether Soviet air defenses had been activated.

In addition to two pilots and a navigator, the crew of the RB-47 included three electronic warfare officers. In official Air Force lingo, they were known as "ravens," but they preferred a more humorous, self-deprecating term, "crows." Shortly after the plane got in the air, but before it reached altitude, the ravens had crawled back to the converted bomb bay, now stuffed with electronic eavesdropping equipment. Protruding like a pregnant womb from the underbelly of the plane, the "crows' nest" was sealed off from the pilot's compartment and pressurized separately. The ravens would spend the next ten hours listening to a series of beeps and twitters over the airwaves.

For the most part, it was boring work, punctuated by moments of intense activity. Many of the men on Willson's plane had flown peripheral missions around the Soviet Union, probing for weaknesses in the air defense system in advance of a possible bomber attack. They would aim directly for the Soviet frontier, as if they were on a bombing raid, and then veer away at the last moment. The idea was to provoke the Russians to switch on their radars. The intercept data could be used later to map the Soviet air defense system. There was always a risk that they would stray over Soviet territory and be shot down. Several members of Willson's outfit--the 55th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing--had ended up in Soviet prisons, while others had been killed by the very weapons systems they had been sent to detect.

The flights around Cuba were known as "Common Cause." Some thrill-seeking ravens had begun to refer to the missions as "Lost Cause." Entire days could go by without anything happening. For one RB-47 pilot, the defining sound of the Cuban missile crisis was the "noise of silence." Both sides remained off the airwaves for as long as they could in order to give away as little information as possible to the enemy. Normally there was "a lot of chatter," but now everybody seemed to be "holding their breath."

On Saturday morning, the airwaves came alive again, as the Soviets turned on their air defense tracking system. When the ravens picked up a radar signal, they immediately turned on their tape recorders and scanners. Analyzing radar signals was a cross between monitoring a cardiogram and studying birdsong. Just as experienced birders can make out hundreds of different varieties of birds, ravens learned to distinguish between different types of radar system, and even imitate them. Early warning radars produced a low-pitched sound, with considerable distance between the pulses. Fire-control radars emitted a shriller, almost continuous squeal, like the chirping of a bird. When a raven heard one of those, he knew that his own plane was in danger of being targeted. The pilot was authorized to "fire to destroy" if he thought he was coming under attack.

As Willson's RB-47 flew around the coast of Cuba, the ravens began picking up radar signals associated with different Soviet missiles. They identified the telltale
brrr-brrr
of a Spoon Rest, the target acquisition radar for the Soviet SAM system. The spy ship
Oxford
had picked up similar signals overnight from the middle of the Florida Straits, an early indication that the Soviets had finally decided to activate their air defense system.

Hunched over their monitors, the ravens suddenly heard the high-pitched
zip-zip-zip
of a fire-control radar. Using their direction-finding equipment, a spinning antenna in the underbelly of the plane, they were able to trace the source of the signal. It was coming from a previously identified SAM site a few miles outside the town of Banes in eastern Cuba. The implications were ominous: American planes overflying Cuba were not just being tracked by Soviet air defenses. They were being targeted.

The senior raven flicked the switch on the intercom connecting the crows' nest to the cockpit above. "Hey boss, we have a Big Cigar."

"Big Cigar" was the official code word for a Fruit Set fire-control radar. The copilot relayed the information to the Strategic Air Command, but there was no way he could get in touch with Anderson directly to warn him of the danger. The U-2 pilot was observing strict radio silence.

After eleven years in the Air Force, Chuck Maultsby had a reputation as an outstanding pilot. He had served two years with the Thunderbirds, the Air Force acrobatic team, maneuvering his F-100 Super Sabre through a series of spectacular loops, rolls, and corkscrews. He flew Right Wing in the four-plane formation. Prior to that, he had survived six hundred days as a Chinese prisoner of war after being shot down in combat over North Korea. With his trim mustache, darkly handsome face, and amused eyes, he looked like a shorter version of the British actor David Niven. He exuded confidence and competence. Like most Air Force top guns, Maultsby firmly believed that he could "whip anybody else in an air fight."

Right now, however, he was feeling anything but confident. According to his flight plan, he should have been on his way back to Alaska. But stars kept popping up in unexpected places. He wondered if something had gone "terribly wrong."

Maultsby was relying on the age-old techniques of celestial navigation--methods used by Magellan and Christopher Columbus--to keep himself oriented. Navigators had prepared a stack of celestial charts for various points along his route. The pilot kept the charts stacked by his seat. When he was halfway to the pole from Barter Island, he pulled out the stiff green card that showed his assumed position and the precise alignment of the stars for this particular time of night. If he was on track, the soft orange light of Arcturus, the brightest star in the northern hemisphere, should have been visible to the right of the plane's nose. Another bright star, Vega, would be located slightly higher up in the sky, toward the northwest. The northern star, Polaris, would be almost directly overhead, indicating that he was getting close to the North Pole. The constellation Orion, the Hunter, would be behind him, toward the south.