The Abyss, page 24
Moreover, against the background not only of the Bay of Pigs, but also of the ongoing CIA Operation Mongoose, nobody knew better than the Kennedys that the Castro regime and its Soviet mentors had every reason to fear American designs. In the fall of 1962 America’s armed forces, and especially the USAF, were consumed with impatience to grapple the enemy, to assault Cuba and give the Soviets a bloody nose. Without higher sanction, air force chief of staff Gen. Curtis LeMay mandated the establishment of a ‘Cuba attack command center’ at Homestead air base in Florida. SAC’s 55th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing had been conducting nine- and ten-hour sorties around Cuba since 12 September, operations with such codenames as Common Cause and Blue Ink. Maj. Gen. Richard Ellis, LeMay’s executive officer, later described how fuel and munitions were discreetly positioned at air bases the length of the south-eastern United States, on the air force chief’s unilateral say-so, in anticipation of operations against Castro.
Lt. Gen. Jack Merrell, a forty-seven-year-old West Pointer from Pennsylvania, described the extraordinary pre-Crisis USAF concentration in Florida: ‘We had to do a hell of a lot of building up and buy a lot of additional equipment, some of it almost covertly because we didn’t want too much general information of how much we might be planning to do to Cuba, and so I had to go to Congress quite a few times sort of, you might say, behind the scenes, and explain to several of the chairmen of the different committees – like the Armed Services and Appropriation Committee of both House and Senate – of what we had to do, why we had to do it, and I would normally get from them permission to reprogram funds.’ From 14 September, SAC electronic surveillance aircraft, ELINT RB-47s of the 55th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing, were monitoring Soviet activity with special reference to ‘Fruitset’ fire control radars.
Meanwhile Marine BLTs – brigade landing teams – practised amphibious assaults on Vieques Island off Puerto Rico, to oust its fictional dictator ‘Ortsac’. The carrier Essex, fresh out of a refit at Brooklyn Navy Yard, sailed from New York on 25 September; it reached Guantánamo on 19 October for six weeks of refresher training for a crew that included many new hands. The carrier Independence sailed from Norfolk, Virginia on 11 October with destroyer escorts, followed by the Enterprise on the 19th. These latter two giants, together with their escorts and some supporting shore-based air squadrons, were designated Task Force 135. On the 13th two Marine air groups deployed to Key West and Puerto Rico. Navy aircraft roamed the ocean not merely from carriers, but also from fields that included Argentia, Newfoundland; Lajes in the Portuguese Azores; Bermuda; Roosevelt Roads, Puerto Rico; Guantánamo, Cuba; and stations in the east continental US.
In the face of so much visible military and naval activity in close proximity to Cuba, weeks before the missile deployment was revealed, the administration could not legitimately object to a Soviet build-up, designed to protect Castro. The one respect in which the president was unquestionably naïve was that he made a classic error in international relations – expecting his adversary to think and act like himself. He assumed that the Kremlin would be deterred from shipping offensive weapons by the strength of his own public and private warnings of the seriousness with which he would view such action, and by its own consciousness of the USSR’s nuclear weakness.
Because it was obvious to the White House that a missile deployment must trigger a drastic and perhaps violent response, the president supposed that this reality would be equally apparent to the Kremlin. Yet Khrushchev’s reality was not Kennedy’s reality. John Hughes, special assistant to Defense Intelligence Agency director Lt. Gen. Joseph Carroll during the Crisis, wrote later that the greatest barrier to developing strategic warning is ‘the tendency of the human mind to assume that the status quo will continue . . . Nations do not credit their potential opponents with the will to make unexpected acts.’
Late in August, Anatoly Dobrynin met privately with Ted Sorensen, the president’s principal political adviser, who urged that the Soviet Union should restrain its rhetoric in the approach to the mid-term elections, since noisy threats must aid the Republicans. Some days afterwards, the ambassador reported back to the White House that Moscow understood the president’s concerns; would undertake nothing ahead of the election that would raise tension, especially over Berlin. Dobrynin had no inkling of the Kremlin’s Cuban nuclear plan, ‘so Khrushchev’s promises not to complicate the international situation’, he wrote later, ‘. . . were deliberately misleading’. Kennedy nonetheless swallowed the false assurances.
The White House began unwillingly to focus its attention on the spectre of a Soviet ballistic missile deployment, in response to insistent public claims by Republican senator Kenneth Keating of New York. Keating’s sources have never been identified. These were possibly in the defence or intelligence community, but also plausibly Cuban refugees or the former West German ambassador to Cuba, Karl von Spreti. The latter had been briefed by his own country’s intelligence service that the Soviets were undertaking a new missile installation. In Washington in September, he approached the CIA with a narrative about nuclear weapons on Castro’s island – and was rebuffed as a fantasist. Only thereafter did the German allegedly turn to Keating, on the Hill. The senator made a succession of statements, accusing the administration of negligence in its response, or lack of it, to a Soviet build-up. A successful lawyer who adopted a tough anti-communist stance, Keating was nonetheless no way-out extremist: in 1964, he would display courage by declining to endorse Barry Goldwater’s Republican candidacy for the presidency.
In September 1962, Kennedy knew that Keating was talking to informed people, because photos from a 29 August U-2 flight over Cuba showed eight new SAM sites. The president ordered Gen. Marshall ‘Pat’ Carter, who was minding the CIA store in his boss John McCone’s absence, to put the U-2 images ‘in the box and nail it shut’ – to maintain tight secrecy. He knew that silence would not long suffice, however, and asked Dean Rusk to draft a statement on the US government’s response to the Soviet SAM deployments.
First at lunchtime and then later in the afternoon of 4 September, a group chaired by the president met twice in the White House to decide what to say about the Keating charges. In the light of what followed, these were important gatherings, at which important things were said. Dean Rusk asserted that ‘any placing by the Soviets of a significant offensive capability in the hands of this self-announced aggressive regime in Cuba would be a direct and major challenge to this hemisphere and would warrant immediate and appropriate action’. McGeorge Bundy cautioned that ‘we don’t want to get into the position of being frightened by [the Keating] group’. But Robert McNamara supported Rusk, saying that Soviet deliveries of MiG-21 fighters provided further causes for concern. Bundy agreed that the deployment of SAMs looked like a turning point.
McNamara spoke with considerable wisdom and foresight. He warned against making too explicit a public statement until it was plain exactly what sort of weapons the Soviets were installing on Cuba: he mentioned the possibility that these might be nuclear, though not that they might be strategic MRBMs and IRBMs. He also urged the importance of formulating a clear response ahead of such threatened developments. Bundy suggested that there need be no direct US reaction to the deployment of SAMs or surface-to-surface tactical missiles. Rusk disagreed: he feared that such weapons could turn the scale in defeating a possible US invasion, if that proved necessary. McNamara responded – again, presciently – that if the administration was to consider a future blockade to halt Soviet arms shipments, ‘Why wouldn’t we do it today?’ The president interjected: ‘Because we figure they may try to blockade Berlin.’ Rusk said: ‘The configuration in Cuba is still defensive.’ Both he and McNamara raised the possibility of asking Congress for authority to call up reserve forces, though they were unsure whether to seek to make such a move high or low profile, headline-grabbing or otherwise. Either way, the Soviets should get the message.
Kennedy concluded by proposing to call in reporters for an off-the-record briefing, before making a public statement that evening. Bundy was wary of this notion: ‘I would suggest that we be very careful, Mr. President . . . because the issues involved are very grave.’ Kennedy overruled him: ‘That’s right, but . . . we can’t permit somebody to break this story before we do.’ He went on to say that the Cuban problem would not go away any time soon: it was sensible to assume that the Soviet build-up would continue. He himself thought that the presence of surface-to-surface missiles posed such a grave threat to a future US landing that it was unacceptable: ‘The Monroe doctrine doesn’t apply as it did in the past; but we still have our responsibilities . . . There’s certain things that would violate our national security. And we would then have to take appropriate action and such things would be the establishment of surface-tosurface missiles or the putting of, of, a nuclear weapons base.’
Dean Rusk said that when the president spoke publicly, it seemed wise for him to point out that the US had global responsibilities; that Cuba could not be viewed or addressed in isolation, as perhaps it might have been before World War II. ‘We’ve got a million men overseas in confrontation with the Soviet bloc and this is part of that confrontation. This is the thing that makes it so agonizingly difficult.’ Bobby Kennedy responded: ‘Yeah, I understand that. So, therefore, I think that you really have to reach a determination of whether putting surface-to-surface missiles in Cuba would be where we’d really have to face up to it, and figure that you are going to have to take your chance on something like that. Everything you do, whether you do it in Southeast Asia, or Berlin or Cuba or wherever, is going to have some effect on the Soviet Union elsewhere.’ The group then returned to drafting the press statement. Rusk opposed specifying nuclear weapons as a breakpoint: ‘We would create a kind of panic that the facts themselves don’t now justify.’ He proposed a general warning to Moscow, rather than making specific public demands that would trap the Kremlin in a position from which it could not retreat without suffering humiliation.
The president then left the meeting to continue drafting, under Bobby Kennedy’s chairmanship. However, the attorney-general soon also broke away, to meet envoy Anatoly Dobrynin at the Soviet embassy. The mission was located in an old four-storey mansion on 16th Street, three blocks north of the White House, purchased by Russia’s Tsarist government in 1913 from the family of George Pullman, he who made the railroad cars. In 1962 it housed a hundred diplomats and staff, working in extremely crowded discomfort, behind windows bricked up to block American eavesdroppers. Dobrynin described his own second-floor office as ‘a windowless cell’. The ambassador, knowing America well, lived a remarkably informal life, driving himself and his family at weekends; only reluctantly accepting a bodyguard as anti-Soviet demonstrations became more aggressive. He shared with the Bulgarian ambassador the unwelcome honour of claiming to be the lowest-paid envoys in Washington.
Dobrynin was one of very few Soviet diplomats who had the confidence to meet alone with Americans, up to and including the president. When he presented his credentials six months earlier, John F. Kennedy personally led the Russian in turn to the offices of Mac Bundy, Ted Sorensen and Pierre Salinger, introducing him to each ‘with a wisecrack at their expense’. He also joked that he envied Dobrynin’s Kremlin bosses, who had no press to worry about: ‘Whatever I do, 80 per cent of the American media comes out against me.’ At a later White House reception, the president introduced his brother Bobby as ‘an expert in confidential contacts with the Soviet Union’, whom the ambassador ought to get to know better.
This was a jibe at the attorney-general’s back-channel dialogue with the Russians. RFK had become accustomed to serve as the administration’s point man in deniable talks, either through Dobrynin or Georgy Bolshakov. The latter was nominally chief of the TASS news agency, but as a fluent English-speaking GRU colonel his real function was to sustain contact with Robert Kennedy and White House press secretary Pierre Salinger: between May 1961 and December 1962, he met RFK fifty-one times. US intelligence officers and FBI chiefs warned the attorney-general that the Russian peddled disinformation, but Kennedy wished to believe that he enjoyed a genuinely privileged and trusting relationship. On the other side Gromyko, Soviet foreign minister, also resented Bolshakov’s role; he thought the spy a clumsy intermediary who often misinterpreted American positions. He deplored the fact that Bolshakov reported to the Soviet defence ministry, rather than to his own department. But the TASS man had powerful friends in Moscow, notably Anastas Mikoyan and Khrushchev’s son-in-law Aleksei Adzhubei. In November 1961 RFK told his brother of Bolshakov’s claim that Khrushchev was ‘Kennedyizing USSR government, bringing in young people with new vitality, new ideas’. The president laughed and said, ‘We should be Khrushchevizing the American government.’
Meanwhile the hapless Dobrynin never knew exactly what RFK and Salinger said to Bolshakov, or what the Russian told the Americans. On the afternoon of 4 September, the attorney-general expressed the administration’s acute concern about the deployment of missiles in Cuba. The ambassador responded that the island had a right to defend itself. The Soviet Union favoured a nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Dobrynin neither confirmed nor denied the missile reports ‘since I had no information about them whatsoever . . . At that point I never even imagined the idea of stationing our nuclear missiles in Cuba.’ After the meeting, and Kennedy having made plain the gravity of Washington’s alarm, Dobrynin sought urgent instructions from Moscow. He received the response from the foreign ministry: ‘You should confirm that there are only defensive Soviet weapons in Cuba.’ Identical instructions were given to Bolshakov, who was authorized in conversations with the Americans to attach Khrushchev’s name personally to such assurances. The ambassador deplored his own government’s ‘mania for secrecy’, of which the rickety twin-track links between Washington and Moscow were a manifestation.
RFK later claimed that he returned from the 4 September encounter with Dobrynin convinced that it was only a matter of time before the Russians installed nuclear weapons on Cuba. If that is true, it becomes even more astonishing that the administration moved so sluggishly thereafter. When the White House group reconvened at 4 p.m. that same day, it was joined by the armed forces chiefs of staff. The president cautioned the meeting against feeding a Cuba obsession: ‘The fact of the matter is the major danger is the Soviet Union with missiles and nuclear warheads, not Cuba. We don’t want to get everybody so fixed on Cuba . . .’ He wanted to remind Americans that Castro’s island was just one among many scary places in the world. He then, however, invited air force chief Gen. Curtis LeMay to report on the feasibility of destroying the SAM sites from the air. He asked: ‘Would that be a difficult operation?’ The airman responded succinctly, characteristically and idiotically: ‘No, sir.’
One of the most misbegotten military phrases of the twentieth century was ‘surgical air strike’. This implied a capability for precision destruction that was seldom accomplished by any air force, in any conflict. The USAF’s 1962 advocates of swift and extreme force, some of whom after the Crisis sustained their enthusiasm for bombing, invading and occupying Cuba, were granted opportunities in Indochina a few years later, exhaustively to test their claims. US air power seldom, if ever, attained the swift, conclusive outcomes which LeMay professed that he could contrive in the Caribbean.
At 5 p.m., after the group broke up, Kennedy hosted a meeting with congressional leaders, at which ‘Pat’ Carter briefed them on the Soviet SAMs. In response to questioning, even LeMay conceded that such weapons were defensive, not offensive. When Sen. Alexander Wiley of Wisconsin demanded to be told whether the administration proposed ‘just to sit still and let Cuba carry on?’ the president responded that, so long as the weapons were seen to be intended to be protective, he thought that US armed intervention would be ‘a mistake . . . We have to keep some proportion – we’re talking about sixty MiGs [fighters supplied to Castro], we’re talking about some ground-to-air missiles which from the island, do not threaten the United States. We are not talking about nuclear warheads. We’ve got a very difficult situation in Berlin. We’ve got a difficult situation in Southeast Asia and a lot of other places.’
Wiley then asked about the option of imposing a blockade. Kennedy replied: ‘Well, a blockade is a major military operation, too. It’s an act of war . . . There’s no evidence that that would bring down Castro for many many months . . . You’d have people starving and all the rest . . . Berlin would obviously be blockaded too.’ The president concluded that he believed the ongoing Berlin Crisis would reach ‘some kind of a climax this fall’, and meanwhile he was unwilling to impale the US on the Caribbean issue: ‘I know a lot of people want to invade Cuba. I would be opposed to it today.’
In response to further spiky questions from his visitors, including Senators Mike Mansfield and William Fulbright, he recalled the precedent of the Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt in 1956, when the Russians exploited the worldwide focus on that debacle, brutally to crush the uprising in Hungary. Senator Richard Russell warned Kennedy that American public opinion was intensely sensitive about Cuba: ‘It’s in the nature of an offence to the national pride [chuckling] and there’s something personal about it too. It’s so close . . . A man wouldn’t get ruffled about something that happened in Berlin, much less Hungary or some other part of the world, but he would get upset about Cuba.’
