The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (113 page)

“Have you changed your opinion that the April 1961 invasion was an American mistake?” Adzhubei said that he asked Kennedy. The president did not like having his nose rubbed in that odorous mess any longer, not by Americans and certainly not by Soviets.

“At the time I called Allen Dulles into my office and dressed him down,” the president said, pounding his fist on the table. “I told him: you should learn from the Russians. When they had difficulties in Hungary, they liquidated the conflict in three days…. But you, Dulles, have never been capable of doing that.”

Adzhubei may have exaggerated Kennedy’s comments, but by all accounts the president did in fact mention Hungary. That was a foolishly provocative analogy to throw out. By its covert activities and military provocations, the Kennedy administration had given Castro and Khrushchev every reason to believe that Cuba was about to be invaded. After reading his son-in-law’s report, Khrushchev took a serious new look at Cuban security, beginning by having the Presidium, the Soviet leadership committee, approve a new $133 million package of military assistance.

In May 1962, the Soviet leader decided that he would further protect Castro by placing nuclear missiles on the island. In doing so, he would also buttress his nation’s position against an America far superior in military strength. Although historians debate why the Russian leader would propose such a daring and dangerous move, what remains indisputable is that the massive CIA operations in south Florida and the feints of Operation Mongoose provided profound political justifications. Without those ceaseless efforts and Castro’s legitimate fears that he was about to be invaded, Khrushchev would undoubtedly never have made such an offer, and even if he had, Castro very probably would not have accepted it.

Castro was not a hand puppet moving every time Khrushchev wiggled his thumb or index finger, and the Soviet leader was right in believing that he would have to convince the Cuban leader of the efficacy of dotting the landscape of Cuba with such deadly weaponry. “Tell Fidel that there is no other way out,” Khrushchev admonished his delegation as they set out to Cuba. He would secretly place the weapons in Cuba. Then at the end of November, after the American elections, Khrushchev would arrive on the island, sign a
new treaty with Castro, and announce to the world that Cuba was now safe from invasion. It was a provocative action, but Khrushchev and Castro had their justifications. In its way, politics follows Newton’s third law of motion: every action creates an equal or opposite reaction. Whether a man is a Communist or a capitalist, if you burn his fields, sabotage his ships, destroy his goods, poison his wells, and attempt to kill his leader, sooner or later he will react, and he will be a different kind of enemy than when it all began.

T
hrough its many sources, the CIA had been receiving information suggesting a major buildup of Soviet activity in Cuba. The United States had counted up to twenty Soviet freighters arriving with military equipment by August 22, and five more seemed to be on the way from Black Sea ports. Large numbers of Russian civilians had arrived as well. Secret military construction was going on in various places around the island. Since the Soviets were usually parsimonious with their client states in their economic commitments and military aid, the CIA concluded “these developments amount to the most extensive campaign to bolster a non-bloc country ever undertaken by the USSR.”

On August 23, President Kennedy met with his top national security advisers to discuss the dramatically increased Soviet presence. CIA Director John McCone called for aggressive new action, including as the strongest alternative “the instantaneous commitment of sufficient armed forces to occupy the country, destroy the regime, free the people, and establish in Cuba a peaceful country which will be a member of the community of American states.” Secretary of State Dean Rusk came up with his own aggressive suggestion: to use the American base at Guantánamo Bay as a staging ground for sabotage.

Kennedy and his associates mused about what this Soviet action might have to do with Turkey, Greece, Berlin, and other trouble spots. McCone brought up the Jupiter missiles in Turkey and Italy that so rankled Khrushchev. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara listened to McCone and then made the point that even though these missiles had become obsolete and useless, politically it was difficult to remove them.

E
very day Kennedy received an endless stream of information. He read crucial secret reports known only to half a dozen people in the world. He perused reams of pedestrian facts churned out by the bureaucratic machine. Mixed into this meld was brilliantly orchestrated misinformation conceived by America’s enemies and sometimes by her friends, or even by those within
the administration. As Kennedy pored through the endless pieces of paper, he remained deeply suspicious of the CIA and Joint Chiefs’ memos. As difficult as it was to mistrust what he read in their memos, Kennedy had learned the valuable lesson that even on these sheets of paper lay the world in all its duplicity, misunderstanding, and uncertainty.

Since the day Kennedy entered office, conservatives had been condemning him for what they considered his cowardly acquiescence to Communist Cuba. On August 31, Senator Kenneth Keating of New York, a moderate Republican, got up in the Senate and savaged the administration for its willful laxness on the Cuban issue. Keating’s speech was doubly troublesome, since he was not one of the wild men of the right, and he had what he called “ominous reports” that “missile bases” were under construction in Cuba.

Kennedy did not know where the Republican senator had gotten his information. He realized, though, that the opposition might try to use this issue to barter its way into majority control of Congress in an election only two months away. Before the Bay of Pigs, the president harbored the delusion that he could control the information that came out of the White House, and he had tried to hide an entire operation under a tarpaulin of deception. Now he was so worried about information leaking that he was unwilling to trust some of the people he had to trust if he was going to make rational decisions.

The afternoon of Keating’s speech, Kennedy called Marshall Carter, the CIA’s deputy director. The president was worried about the dissemination of photos showing the construction of what appeared to be surface-to-air missile sites across Cuba. The photos should have set off an alert throughout the government’s various intelligence operations, but the president wanted them hidden away. “Put it back in the box and nail it tight,” Kennedy told Carter.

Khrushchev needed to lull the Americans for a few weeks and Kennedy was helping him do so. Georgi Bolshakov, the Russian agent used as a conduit in Washington, told his American contacts that relationships between the two great powers might well improve if the Americans would end their “piratical” flights monitoring Soviet ships sailing to Cuba. Kennedy invited the Russian to the White House on September 4 and told him, “Tell him [Khrushchev] that I’ve ordered those flights stopped today.” Afterward Bobby stood with Bolshakov outside the White House beseeching him to inform Khrushchev that whatever he did, he must not try any needless provocations before the midterm congressional elections. “Goddamn it!” Bobby exclaimed. “Georgi, doesn’t Premier Khrushchev realize the president’s position?”

In the charming, gregarious figure of Bolshakov, Bobby saw the possibility of dialogue across the Iron Curtain. The Russian had been useful to the
Kennedys before, though he had been more useful to his Soviet masters. Bobby did not quite grasp that if his own opinion of the Soviet system was correct, Bolshakov was as imprisoned by his handlers as if Bobby were talking to him in a cell.

On September 7, the president learned the deeply disturbing news that in analyzing their most recent U-2 photos of Cuba, the CIA analysts “suspect[ed] the presence of another kind of missile site—possible surface-to-surface.” This was precisely the kind of information that the president’s opponents might use to stir up political hysteria across America. Kennedy could no longer “put it in the box and nail it tight.” But even as he told the analysts to continue their work, he froze the information’s dissemination within a small circle of advisers.

While Kennedy was examining the U-2 photos and trying to put a damper on the whole uncertain business, Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall was meeting with Khrushchev at his summer home on the Black Sea in Soviet Georgia. Khrushchev had decided that he needed a conduit to Kennedy, and Udall was the nearest available vehicle. The Soviet leader, a student of American politics, was perfectly aware of Kennedy’s obsession with the forthcoming election. He promised Udall that he would not create a crisis over Berlin before the American election. “Out of respect for your president we won’t do anything until November,” he said.

If shrewdness were the ultimate attribute, then no one would ever have bested Khrushchev. His salty aphorisms sounded like homespun peasant wisdom, but they were superb vehicles with which to promote his Marxist ideology, the metaphors carrying meanings within meanings. As the Soviet leader saw it, everything was all so simple and logical. The United States had put nuclear weapons in Japan, but all the Soviet Union was doing was giving Castro defensive weapons. “You have surrounded us with military bases,” Khrushchev said. “If you attack Cuba, then we will attack one of the countries next to us where you have placed your bases.”

As Udall listened, he was in essence merely holding a microphone so that Khrushchev could reach Kennedy’s ear. Udall pointed out that only a few members of Congress were spouting such craziness as to call for an invasion of Cuba. “These congressmen do not see with their eyes, but with their asses,” Khrushchev replied. “All they can see is what’s behind them. Yesterday’s events are not today’s realities. I remember Gorky recounting in his memoirs how he had a conversation with Tolstoy. Tolstoy asked him how he got along with women, and then ventured his own opinion. ‘Men are poorly designed. When they’re young, they can satisfy their sexual desires. But as they grow old, the ability to reap this satisfaction disappears. The desires,
however, do not.’ So it is with your congressmen. They do not have power, but they still have the same old desires.”

As Khrushchev muttered his soothing shibboleths, he was orchestrating a deployment of Soviet military power in Cuba beyond anything even the most vociferous critic had imagined. Soviet plans were to install in Cuba twenty-four R-12 nuclear ballistic missiles with a one-thousand-and-fifty-mile range, sixteen R-14 missiles with twice that range, and eighty nuclear cruise missiles with a short range of about one hundred miles. From Cuba, the largest of these missiles could target American cities almost as far west as Seattle. A single missile could destroy one of the nation’s major cities with a force over seventy times that of the bomb that devastated Hiroshima.

The Soviet leader also planned to send eleven submarines sailing out of a new Cuban submarine base, each probably carrying one nuclear torpedo and twenty-one conventional torpedos. Seven of these would carry nuclear missiles. There were also plans to send a squadron of IL-28 light bombers carrying nuclear bombs and a large number of tactical nuclear weapons called Lunas by the Russians and Frogs by NATO. These weapons had a thirty-one-mile range that could be used against anyone rash enough to attempt an invasion of fortress Cuba. Traveling to Cuba with these missiles would be 50,874 Soviet troops, a force that even without the nuclear weapons would change the nature of power in Cuba and the price to be paid in any invasion.

With one bold action, the Soviets would more than double the number of Soviet missiles targeted at American cities. Communist Cuba, so threatened by an American invasion, would suddenly become impregnable to all but an American leader willing to set off nuclear war. The Americans would see and feel what the Soviet people felt: enemy nuclear weapons near enough to cast dark shadows across their border. Khrushchev’s nation was still no match for America in military might and nuclear weaponry, but this daring move would reap untold psychological and political benefits for Communist nations around the world.

During the first days of October, Kennedy did not know the extent of the awesome nuclear weaponry sailing toward Cuba, but he knew that Khrushchev had moved his queen forward on the chessboard of the cold war. Kennedy was fond of quoting Hemingway’s definition of courage as “grace under pressure.” For Kennedy, a true man acted not only courageously but with unflinching coolness. That was precisely how Kennedy himself had acted when PT-109 was cut in two, and it was how he acted now as he received reports on the situation in Cuba. He asked that the U.S. armed forces begin to prepare themselves for military action in Cuba—not immediately, but in the coming three months. He wanted American pilots to be fully prepared to take out the Soviet SA-2 surface-to-air missile sites that he knew
were already in existence, and the air force developed mock-ups for their training.

If the president had not been Bobby’s brother, the attorney general would most likely have accused him of a prissy reluctance to confront Castro. On October 4, Bobby chaired a meeting of the top officials overseeing Operation Mongoose in which he vented his rage, exhibiting a full measure of gracelessness under pressure. These were not midlevel officials he yelled at, but among them Lansdale himself, a man not used to being on the receiving end of such wrath. The general was no longer in the outsider’s enviable position, able to condemn and ridicule what others had done before him. Now he was in the bureaucrat’s uncomfortable chair, having to defend what had not been accomplished while giving what McCone took as the “general impression that things were all right.”

No longer was the man Bobby had thought of as the personification of “the Ugly American” safe from the rebuke that he spilled so indiscriminately on those working on Operation Mongoose at the CIA. The attorney general fumed that “nothing was moving forward.” Bobby wanted gung-ho action, militancy, and bold acts of sabotage, including possibly what would have been an act of war: secret mining of the harbors where the Soviet ships were arriving.