militiamen.
The
General Anatoly Gribkov, the Soviet General Staff's representative in Havana, went to La Isabela to greet the ship. 'So you've brought us a lot of potatoes and flour,' he joked to the captain.
'I don't know what I brought,' the captain replied, unsure who knew about his top secret cargo.
'Don't worry. I know what you brought.'
There was little point unloading the twenty-four R-14 warheads. The intermediate-range missiles were still at sea and unlikely to reach Cuba because of the blockade. The warheads would be more secure if they remained in the air-conditioned hold of the
The port soon became a hub of activity. Gunboats patrolled the entrance to the harbor. Frogmen constantly checked the hull of the
As with the atomic bombs, the best security for the latest batch of nuclear warheads was the incongruity of their location. Mariel had attracted some attention from the CIA photo interpreters, but nobody in Washington thought of La Isabela as a possible nuclear storage site. By October 23, the White House had already forgotten about the plan for an 'underwater demolition attack' approved by Kennedy a week earlier.
If President Kennedy was going to make the case that Soviet missiles on Cuba were a menace to the entire world, he needed better pictures. Up until now, American intelligence analysts had been relying on blurry images captured by U-2 spy planes. The blown-up photographs had provided the first definitive proof of Soviet medium- range missiles in Cuba, but they were difficult for nonexperts to interpret.
The first U-2 mission had been flown by Major Richard Heyser on the morning of Sunday, October 14. His flight route had been carefully planned to investigate reports of missile-related activity in a trapezoid-shaped area of western Cuba near the town of San Cristobal. CIA analysts had struggled for weeks to make sense of conflicting accounts of long, canvas-covered tubes rumbling through obscure villages and fincas as Cuban security forces closed off large tracts of countryside. Heyser took his photos from an altitude of seventy thousand feet.
Now the Americans were back, barely above treetop level.
The six RF-8 Crusader jets of Light Photographic Squadron No. 62 took off from the naval air station at Key West and headed south over the Straits of Florida. To avoid appearing on Cuban or Soviet radar screens, they skimmed over the ocean, flying so low that the spray from the waves sometimes splashed against the fuselage. They flew in pairs, a lead pilot accompanied by a wingman half a mile behind and slightly to his right. When they reached the Cuban coastline, the planes climbed to around five hundred feet and peeled off in three different directions.
The squadron commander, William Ecker, flew directly over a SAM site near Mariel and headed southwest across the Sierra del Rosario Mountains toward San Cristobal MRBM Site No. One with his wingman, Bruce Wilhelmy. (The CIA had named four missile sites after the town of San Cristobal, but this particular one was closer to the village of San Diego de los Banos, twenty miles to the west.) James Kauflin and John Hewitt made for the SAM sites and military airfields around Havana. Tad Riley and Gerald Coffee turned eastward toward central Cuba and the missile sites around Sagua la Grande.
Like the other missile encampments, the San Diego site was tucked away behind the mountains. Ecker made his approach from the east, sticking close to the pine-covered ridge line on his right. Wilhelmy kept a hundred feet behind him, a little to his left, closer to the open plain. When Ecker spotted the target, he popped up to one thousand feet and leveled off. One thousand feet was the ideal altitude for taking low-level reconnaissance pictures. Lower altitudes produced fuzzy photographs with insufficient overlap between the negatives; higher altitudes resulted in too much overlap and loss of detail.
To save their limited supply of film, the pilots waited until the last moment to switch on the cameras. There were six in all: a large forward-firing camera beneath the cockpit, three smaller cameras mounted at different angles for horizon-to-horizon pictures, a vertical camera further back, and a tail camera for sideways shots.
The two Crusaders flew over the palm trees at nearly 500 knots, giving the pilots a ten-second glimpse of the sprawling missile site. Their cameras clicked away furiously, shooting roughly four frames a second, one frame for every seventy yards traveled. The forward camera produced the most useful photographs, six-by-six-inch negatives that combined panoramic views of the countryside and details of missile launchers, trucks, and even individual soldiers. The vertical cameras recorded the most detail, a thin 150-yard wide chronicle of everything directly beneath the two planes.
The missile erectors photographed by Heyser nine days earlier were shrouded in canvas, with cables leading to a command post in the woods. The missiles themselves were in long tents, several hundred yards from the erectors. Fuel tank trailers were stationed nearby. Young men stood by some of the trucks, seemingly undisturbed by the roar of jets overhead. After photographing the missile encampment to his left, Ecker flew directly over a large, hangarlike building being constructed out of white prefabricated slabs, which stood out against the predominantly green background. Workers were crawling across the roof of the building, hammering the slabs into place. Photo interpreters would later identify the unfinished structure as a bunker for nuclear warheads.
Banking away from the missile site, the Crusaders headed back to Florida, landing at the naval air station at Jacksonville. Technicians removed the film canisters from the bomb bays and rushed them to the photo lab. After each mission, an enlisted man stenciled a drawing of a dead chicken onto the fuselage, a sarcastic reference to Castro's September 1960 visit to the United Nations, when the Cuban delegation cooked chickens in their hotel rooms. 'Chalk up another chicken' would soon become the ritual cry of pilots returning from low-level reconnaissance missions over Cuba.
Commander Ecker flew on to Washington, where he was summoned, still in his flight suit, to brief the Joint Chiefs of Staff in their Pentagon conference room. Curtis LeMay was unhappy that the Air Force had been upstaged by the Navy, which was equipped with better cameras and generally considered to be better at low-level reconnaissance. When Ecker apologized for his rough appearance, the Air Force chief removed his cigar and scowled at him. 'You're a pilot, damn it, you're meant to be sweaty.'
Fernando Davalos, the Havana University student mobilized the previous night, spotted the jets as his military convoy headed west, toward San Cristobal. It was a gorgeous morning, and the sun glinted off the wings of the planes, temporarily blinding him. He thought the planes must be Cuban, flying into a nearby air base.
Valentin Polkovnikov had a similar reaction. The Soviet missile forces lieutenant was standing at a checkpoint at the San Diego site when he saw a plane with a white star emblazoned on its fuselage flash overhead. He knew that the Cuban air force used the white star emblem. The star was an American emblem as well, of course, but it was hard to imagine the imperialists being so brazen.
It did not take long for phones to ring, and for higher-ups to demand greater 'vigilance.' Surprise quickly turned to shame. There was a huge psychological difference between high-level and low-level flights. For most Cubans, the U-2s were merely dots in the sky, distant and impersonal. The Crusaders were a national humiliation. It was as if the Americans were taking a sadistic delight in flying over Cuba whenever they wanted. Some Cubans saw ? or thought they saw ? the
At the Soviet air force base at Santa Clara, MiG-21 pilots also expressed frustration about the overflights. 'Why can't we retaliate?' complained one pilot. 'Why are we stuck here like sitting ducks?' The generals pleaded for patience. They had orders not to fire. For the moment.
There seemed little doubt that the Americans could bomb the missile sites whenever they wanted. It was practically impossible to disguise sixty-seven-foot-long objects. They could be covered with canvas and palm fronds, but the shape was still visible. Before deploying the missiles, aides had assured Khrushchev that they could be hidden among the palm trees. What a joke, thought Anatoly Gribkov, the General Staff representative. 'Only
