One minute to midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the brink of nuclear war (45 page)

The SAM site was laid out in a hexagonal Star of David formation, with the command post in the center of a fortified ring of six missile launchers. Gerchenov kept his eyes on the Fruit Set fire-control radar, which was receiving continually updated target information from the Spoon Rest radar. Before pushing the button, he needed one last instruction from regimental headquarters at Victoria de las Tunas, seventy-five miles away. The chain of command followed the geography of the island. The regiment received its orders from division headquarters in Camaguey, another seventy miles away, which was in turn waiting for a decision from El Chico.

Suddenly, a new order crackled across the radio. Despite the heavy rain, the connection was clear.

"Destroy Target Number 33. Use two missiles."

There was a
whoosh
as the first missile roared into the air, chasing the distant contrail in the sky at three times the speed of sound. A second missile followed a few seconds afterward. They locked onto the target through radar, accelerating in a graceful arc. Watching the radar screen, Gerchenov could see two little dots honing in on a larger dot, gathering speed as they moved across the screen. After a few seconds, the dots merged into one and disintegrated. There was a sudden poof of light in the darkened sky. The major could see pieces of wreckage falling to earth.

"Target Number 33 is destroyed," he reported at 10:19 a.m.

Most of the wreckage fell to earth eight miles from the Banes SAM site. One wing of the plane ended up in the center of a little village called Veguitas. A mangled and charred section of fuselage containing Major Anderson's body landed in a sugarcane field a few hundred yards away. The tail of the U-2 glided onward to the sea.

Reconstructing the incident later, American investigators concluded that a proximity fuse had detonated the SAM missile as it closed in on the spy plane, spraying shrapnel in all directions. Several pieces of shrapnel sliced through the cockpit, piercing the pilot's partial-pressure suit and the back of his helmet. Rudolf Anderson was probably killed instantly. Had he somehow survived the initial explosion, he would certainly have died a few seconds later, from the loss of oxygen and the shock of depressurization.

11:30 A.M. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27 (10:30 A.M. HAVANA)

The column of trucks transporting the nuclear warheads from Bejucal to Sagua la Grande had stopped twice during the night to permit the drivers to get some rest. Everything had gone smoothly. Cuban villagers greeted the slow-moving military convoy during the hours of daylight with shouts of
"Que vivan los sovieticos!"
"Fidel-Khrushchev!" and
"Patria o muerte!"
But none of the onlookers had any idea what was hidden in the boxy, humpbacked storage vans.

The convoy was within sixty miles of its destination when U.S. Navy planes flew low over the central highway. The Americans had still not succeeded in locating the nuclear warheads, despite a frantic search effort. One of the morning reconnaissance missions passed directly over the main nuclear warhead storage facility outside Bejucal, which CIA analysts were still describing as a "munitions storage site." "Bunker not seen," the photo interpreters reported. "No change in visible portion." The previous day, Air Force jets had photographed the storage site for the Luna warheads, six miles east of Bejucal, without finding anything new. "No apparent change," read the photo interpretation report on the Managua bunker. "Single fence around site is supported by Y-shaped posts. Vines have grown on fence in some sections."

The shipment of nuclear warheads to Sagua la Grande meant that the missiles were almost ready to fire. The commander of the missile troops, Major General Statsenko, was pleased with the rapid progress of the last couple of days. By juggling his supplies and diverting some fueling equipment, he had deployed all twenty-four intermediate-range missiles three days earlier than planned. The last remaining battery near San Cristobal had achieved "combat readiness" on Saturday morning.

On the other hand, hitches had occurred in the plan to circumvent American surveillance by moving at least some of the missiles to reserve positions. The sites had been surveyed in advance and were already aligned to targets in the United States. The R-12 missiles could have been transported to the backup sites in a few hours, but there was a shortage of prefabricated launching pads. Without the heavy concrete pads, the missiles would topple over when fired. In ordering the redeployment on Wednesday evening, Statsenko had hoped that his engineers could get around this problem by constructing makeshift pads. But the pads were still not ready by Saturday morning. At a critical moment in the crisis, there were no backup positions.

In the meantime, Statsenko was picking up signs of mounting tension in the Kremlin. The Soviet High Command had received the message reiterating the prohibition on firing nuclear weapons "without approval from Moscow." This was followed by an instruction to halt all daytime work at the missile sites.

"You are irritating the United Nations," the order read. "Conduct thorough camouflage, work only at night."

During the five days that Che Guevara had been living in the Sierra del Rosario Mountains, his guards had done their best to ensure him some privacy. They built a makeshift hut for him in a corner of the soaring cave known as Cueva de los Portales. Constructed from concrete blocks, the hut included a study for Che and a room for his closest aides. The
comandante
slept on a simple metal bed beneath a sloping stone ceiling, with an inhaler by his side to ward off frequent asthma attacks. A secret tunnel provided an escape route down the mountain in the event of an American paratroop drop. Just outside the cave, there was a chair and a stone table, where Che played chess with his aides.

The legendary revolutionary had not spent all that much time in the cave since his arrival late on Monday night. He had traveled all round western Cuba, planning ambushes for the invader, inspecting militia units, meeting with Soviet officers. On one such outing, he had visited a Soviet air defense unit in Pinar del Rio. The sight of the "bearded, energetic man dressed in a jump suit and black beret" had "an almost electric effect" on the Soviet troops, who staged "a brilliant demonstration" of how to prepare a SAM missile for firing. A Soviet general was impressed by "the instant rapport our soldiers felt with Guevara, a measure of the attachment they had formed to the Cuban cause."

Whatever his human qualities, Che was also the most fanatical of Castro's aides. How many people would die in the coming war with America was less important to him than the struggle between the opposing ideological systems. In a newspaper editorial written during the missile crisis but published posthumously, he made clear he saw only two possible futures for mankind: "the definitive victory of socialism or its retrogression under the nuclear victory of imperialist aggression." Che had already made his choice: "the path of liberation even when it may cost millions of atomic victims."

The tranquillity of Che's mountain hideout was shattered by the roar of a pair of U.S. Navy jets skimming across the palm tops. They came from the south, following the line of the San Diego River that linked the Cueva de los Portales to the missile sites of Pinar del Rio. They flew so low that the Cuban defenders could even see the pilots in their cockpits as the Crusaders flew overhead. Surely, they must have been discovered.

As it turned out, it was a coincidence. The Crusaders were merely returning to Florida after flying over the missile sites at San Cristobal. In order to conserve film, the pilots had turned off their cameras well before they overflew the warren of secret caves. Although the Americans knew that Che had left Havana, they never did discover his real hiding place. The previous day, the CIA had reported that Che had "established a military command post at the town of Corral de la Palma," some fifteen miles to the east of his true location.

At about the same time that the Crusaders roared over Che's hideout, two other jets overflew San Julian Airfield on the western tip of Cuba. From the cockpit, the American pilots could make out an Ilyushin-28 light bomber in the "final stage" of completion, with both of its engines already installed. Another five planes were in various stages of assembly, a couple with just a fuselage. At least twenty-one planes had still not been removed from their crates, which were neatly lined up on the apron. Cranes, earth-moving equipment, and radar vans were scattered around the airfield.

The IL-28s were of great interest to American intelligence because they were known to be nuclear-capable. Their jet engines had been copied from Rolls-Royce turbojets licensed to the Soviets by the British during the aftermath of World War II. The three-man crew consisted of a pilot, bombardier, and rear gunner. The Ilyushin could carry several small bombs, torpedoes, or naval mines, or a single atomic bomb such as the "Tatyana," the Soviet version of the American "Fat Man" dropped on Nagasaki. It had a range of seven hundred miles, enough to reach southern Florida.

By the early sixties, the IL-28 was teetering on the verge of obsolescence and certainly no match for U.S. air defenses. Nevertheless, its nuclear capabilities worried American generals. Hundreds of IL-28s had been stationed in Poland and East Germany during the fifties to spear-head a wave of tactical nuclear strikes against NATO forces in the event of war. The use of tactical nuclear weapons had long been an integral part of Soviet war plans. The Soviets had even dropped a live Tatyana on their own troops during a military exercise in Siberia that was meant to simulate a nuclear war with the United States. Some forty-five thousand officers and soldiers were exposed to fallout from the blast, and many subsequently died of radiation-related illnesses.

American intelligence analysts had tracked the transport of the bombers across the Atlantic by analyzing the shape of the crates on Soviet freighters. Identical crates had been used to ship IL-28s to Egypt several years earlier. When the crates showed up in San Julian, they had requested intensive low-level surveillance to follow the assembly process. What the Americans did not know at the time was that the San Julian planes were never intended for use with tactical nuclear weapons. They were under the control of the Soviet navy, and were equipped with torpedoes and naval mines for use against an invading fleet.

Nuclear-capable IL-28s had been delivered to Cuba, but they were at the other end of the island, at an airfield outside the city of Holguin in Oriente Province. No attempt had been made to unpack them from their crates. The Americans would not become aware of their existence until early November, when they sent a low-level reconnaissance mission over the field. The Holguin squadron consisted of nine bombers under the command of the Soviet air force. Six of them were designed to carry the Tatyana bombs; the remaining three planes would fly in front of the squadron, serving as a decoy to enemy radar systems.

Soviet commanders regarded the IL-28s and the Tatyanas as an unnecessary encumbrance. Khrushchev had sent them to Cuba as an additional means of defense against an invading force. In theory, they could have been used against U.S. troop concentrations. But the Soviets already had more effective tactical nuclear weapons on the island, in the form of the FKR cruise missiles and the Luna rockets. The six Tatyanas were overkill, as the officer responsible for them discovered as soon as he stepped off the
Indigirka,
the ship that had transported them from Russia. When Lieutenant Colonel Anastasiev asked what he should do with his bombs, he received a dismissive shrug. The officers greeting the
Indigirka
referred to the Tatyanas as "those things that nobody needs."

After initially taking the Tatyanas to one of Batista's seaside estates, Anastasiev had eventually persuaded his superiors to move them to a more secure location. The new storage place consisted of a tunnel in the nearby mountains protected by some barbed wire and a fence. The security arrangements were rudimentary, but they were an improvement on the padlocked shed by the sea. Equally important, it was easier to control temperature and humidity levels inside the mountain caves. Anastasiev and his men used rounded metal bars to roll the crates containing the 12-kiloton bombs into the tunnel.

Having found a place to store his bombs, Anastasiev went looking for an airfield for the IL-28s. According to the original Defense Ministry plan, they were meant to be based at Santa Clara, in the center of the island. But the Santa Clara field turned out to be totally unsuited to the storage of nuclear weapons. After flying around Cuba for a couple of days, Anastasiev finally settled on the airfield at Holguin. There were earthen bunkers next to the field that could be camouflaged and hermetically sealed. When the IL-28s were assembled, they could be wheeled into the bunkers, along with the Tatyanas.

The next challenge was to transport the Tatyanas from their storage point in western Cuba to Holguin, a journey of five hundred miles. This was the problem that Anastasiev was grappling with on Black Saturday.