One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War

After Stevenson finished, Kennedy looked up from his legal pad. 'Terrific,' he told his aides. 'I never knew Adlai had it in him. Too bad he didn't show some of this steam in the 1956 campaign.'

1:03 A.M. FRIDAY, OCTOBER 26 (12:03 A.M. CENTRAL TIME)

The nightwatchman was on his regular rounds. Everybody was on alert for surprise raids by Russian commandos known as spetsnaz infiltrated into the United States in advance of war. War planners had warned that a Soviet nuclear first strike could be preceded by sabotage attacks against military command-and-control facilities. The sector direction center on the southern edge of Duluth Airport was an obvious target as it housed the computers and radar systems that pulled together air defense information across the Great Lakes. If Soviet saboteurs could blow up the fortresslike concrete blockhouse, the United States would lose much of its ability to track Soviet bombers flying in from the North.

The guard was patrolling the back of the four-story building when he saw a shadowy figure climbing a fence near the electricity generating plant. He fired a few shots into the darkness and ran off to sound the alarm. Within seconds, the klaxon had begun to wail, startling pilots in the mess hall several hundred yards away. Nobody knew what to make of the alarm, which was different from the standard scramble signal. They were still wondering what to do when someone reported that it was a sabotage siren, not a scramble siren.

While the pilots at Duluth were waiting for instructions, alarms began going off all over the region, from Canada to South Dakota. Could a Soviet sabotage plot be under way? The antisabotage plan called for 'flushing' the interceptor force, Air Force terminology for getting as many planes into the air as quickly as possible. Unable to figure out what was happening in the Duluth direction center, the controller responsible for Volk Field in Wisconsin decided that 'discretion was the better part of valor' and proceeded to implement the plan.

It had already begun snowing in central Wisconsin and temperatures were hovering around the freezing point. Volk Field was in an isolated area known for its deep ravines and dramatic rock formations. The field was mainly used for training purposes by the Air National Guard. There was no hangar for the alert planes, no radar- guided landing system, no control tower, inadequate runway overruns, and a chronic shortage of deicing equipment. Technicians were still tinkering with the klaxons, and were relying on a jerry-rigged phone system to distribute and authenticate a flush order.

Conditions at some of the other fields being used to host the nuclear-armed F-101s and F-106s of the Air Defense Command were even more rudimentary. Siskiyou County Airport in California lacked virtually everything 'except a runway and a converted dental van' that served as a control tower. At Williams Air Force Base in Arizona, an Air Force pilot watched in horror as an inexperienced civilian contractor spilled twenty gallons of fuel onto the tarmac. It turned out that the contractor had pushed the wrong button. Instead of pumping fuel into the plane, he was pumping fuel out of it.

Aircraft from the big Air Force bases at Duluth and Detroit had been dispersed to Volk, ready to be flushed in the event of a Soviet attack. The Detroit pilots had flown in from Hulman Field outside Terre Haute, a couple of days after one of their colleagues overshot the runway. The pilots bunked down in hospital beds in the dispensary, a thirty-second jeep ride across the tarmac from their planes. They slept in their flight suits.

The order to flush came at 12:14 a.m. Central Time, eleven minutes after the klaxons went off in Duluth. Roused from their sleep, the pilots pulled on their zippered boots, and ran outside into a snowstorm. As he jumped into a jeep and headed to his plane, Lieutenant Dan Barry was convinced that war had broken out. It would be crazy to launch fully armed nuclear interceptors in these conditions in peacetime. He ran up the ladder into the plane, and flicked a switch to bring the engine from shutoff to idle. While the engine warmed up, he strapped on his helmet and the parachute, which was part of the seat. The F-106 was already fully loaded with an MB-1 'Genie' nuclear-tipped missile, two infrared heat-seeking missiles, and two radar-guided missiles.

A flushed plane is like an ambulance or a fire engine, with priority over all other traffic. After climbing to two thousand feet, the planes would make contact with sector headquarters at Duluth. The assumption was that they would head north, to intercept the Soviet Bears and Bisons believed to be swarming over Canada.

Barry was pulling onto the runway when he saw a jeep coming down the runway toward him, flashing its lights frantically. The lead F-106 was about to take off. A second message had arrived from the Duluth controller, canceling the sabotage alert. Since there was no control tower, the only way to prevent the planes from getting airborne was by physically blocking the runway.

It took exactly four minutes to call the planes back. Another minute, and the first nuclear-armed F-106 would have been in the air, the others immediately behind.

Back in Duluth, meanwhile, guards were still searching for the mysterious intruder. A short time later, they found some bullet holes in a tree. They eventually concluded that the suspected spetsnaz saboteur was probably a bear.

CHAPTER SIX Intel

7:50 A.M. FRIDAY, OCTOBER 26

The time had arrived for some political theater. Four days had gone by since Kennedy's announcement of a naval blockade of Cuba ? officially known as a 'quarantine' ? but the U.S. Navy had yet to board a single ship. Journalists were asking questions about the effectiveness of the blockade. Admirals and generals were grumbling about a Soviet oil tanker, the Bucharest, that had been permitted to sail on to Havana on the basis of an assurance by her master that she was not carrying any 'prohibited materials.'

No one was more aware of the public relations aspects of the blockade than the president, a practiced and very effective manipulator of the media. He was his own chief spinmeister, inviting publishers to the Oval Office, stroking the right editors, telephoning influential columnists and reporters, reprimanding administration officials who spoke out of turn. He read newspapers assiduously and encouraged his aides to think about ways to 'brainwash' the press, a term used by his military assistant at the start of the crisis. For Kennedy, the quarantine was primarily a political tool rather than a military one. Public perceptions were all-important.

The ship selected for the necessary demonstration of American resolve was the 7,268-ton Marucla, a Lebanese freighter under charter to the Soviet Union. She was on her way to Cuba from the Latvian port of Riga, with a declared cargo of paper, sulfur, and spare truck parts. The chances of a Lebanese-registered ship, with a largely Greek crew, being found to carry banned Soviet missile parts were practically nonexistent, but that was not the point. By boarding the Marucla, the Navy would signal its determination to enforce the quarantine. As Kennedy told the ExComm on October 25, 'We've got to prove sooner or later that the blockade works.'

The destroyer closest to the Marucla was the USS John R. Pierce, which initiated the chase on Thursday evening. But the Navy thought it would be 'nice' if the interception was made by the USS Joseph P. Kennedy, a destroyer named after the president's brother. The Kennedy was considerably further away from the Marucla at the time, and had to fire up three of her four boilers, reaching a speed of 30 knots, to close the distance. The boarding party would consist of six officers and men from the Kennedy plus the executive officer of the Pierce.

As the Kennedy steamed toward the Marucla, the captain convened a meeting in the wardroom to discuss boarding formalities. After some discussion about what to wear, the boarding party eventually decided on service dress whites without sidearms. Whites were more formal than khaki and would make a good impression. The captain stressed the need for 'friendly gestures' and 'courtesy' rather than peremptory shots across the bow. On Thursday, October 25, the Navy had issued instructions for a gentler approach to enforcing the blockade. If necessary, boarding officers were authorized 'to distribute magazines, candy, and lighters.' A budget of two hundred dollars per ship was authorized for the purchase of appropriate 'people-to-people materials.'

'Take no menacing actions,' the cable instructed. 'Do not train ships guns in direction merchantmen.'

Shortly after dawn, the Kennedy instructed the Marucla by flag and flashing light to prepare for inspection. The immediate challenge was getting on board. The seas were choppy and the whaleboat from the Kennedy bobbed up and down, tantalizingly out of