enforce federal court orders on desegregation. Planners had underestimated the number of vessels needed for an amphibious invasion and miscalculated the gradients at some of the beaches. There was a scramble for deep-water fording kits when the Army discovered that the beaches at Mariel were not as shallow as had been assumed. The Navy complained of a 'critical shortage' of intelligence on sandbars and coral reefs at Tarara beach, which could jeopardize the 'success of entire assault in western Cuba.'
The U.S. advance forces circling around Cuba were shockingly ill-informed about what they would find if they were ordered to land on the island. They assumed that their opponents would be primarily Cuban, supported by an unknown number of 'Soviet Bloc military technicians.' U.S. intelligence estimates referred quaintly to 'Sino-Soviet' troops and advisers, two years after the rupture between Moscow and Beijing became public. The intelligence gleaned from the October 25 reconnaissance photograph of a Soviet combat unit near Remedios, equipped with FROG missiles, had still not filtered down to the level of the Marines and airborne units preparing to invade Cuba on the afternoon of Friday, October 26.
As word spread within the upper reaches of the U.S. bureaucracy about the sighting of nuclear-capable battlefield weapons in Cuba, in the hands of Soviet defenders, American commanders began clamoring for tactical nuclear weapons of their own.
The order to move against the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo came late on Friday evening, when it was already dark. Several hundred Soviet soldiers, equipped with three cruise missile launchers, each with its own Hiroshima-sized nuclear device, had been waiting in a 'pre-launch position' in a former American military school in the village of Vilorio, about fifteen miles inland from the base. They had moved to Vilorio two days earlier from the supply center at Mayari Arriba in the Sierra del Cristal Mountains. To preserve maximum secrecy, they would only redeploy to the launch position if war was expected to break out.
The deployment order was brought by courier in a sealed packet: a radio message risked being intercepted by the Americans. The new position was near an abandoned coffee plantation in the village of Filipinas, also fifteen miles from Guantanamo but closer to the sea. The distance from the pre-launch position to the launch position was about ten miles. At the launch position, they would prepare to 'destroy the target' upon receipt of instructions from the general staff in Moscow.
The Soviet preparations to destroy the Guantanamo Naval Base would remain secret for nearly five decades. The activities of the FKR regiments stationed in Oriente and Pinar del Rio provinces have received scant attention from historians, even though these units controlled more than half the Soviet nuclear warheads deployed to Cuba. Equipped with a 14-kiloton explosive charge, roughly the power of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, the FKR cruise missiles were several times as powerful as the short-range Luna missiles sighted in central Cuba. And there were many more of them: the Soviets brought eighty FKR warheads to Cuba, compared to just twelve Luna warheads.
The movements of the cruise missile convoy on the night of Friday, October 26, as the crisis was about to climax, are being revealed here for the first time. The story has been pieced together from Russian documents and the recollections of participants, which closely match details contained in declassified U.S. intelligence reports. Despite the secrecy surrounding the operation, the Americans were able to follow the cruise missile convoy through radio intercepts and aerial reconnaissance. But, as with the photographs of the Bejucal nuclear storage site, the significance of the raw intelligence was never understood.
Among the Soviet soldiers ordered to Filipinas was a twenty-one-year-old conscript named Viktor Mikheev. He had been serving in the Engineering Corps for just over a year, using his skills as a carpenter to help prepare cruise missile launch positions. He was twenty-one years old when he ended up in Cuba. Photographs that he sent to his mother from the army show a stocky young man, with a piercing gaze and brushed-back hair. He was dressed in a private's uniform, wearing high leather boots and a wide belt with a big red star.
Mikheev's background was typical of the conscripts who took part in Operation Anadyr. He was from a little village in the flat Russian countryside around Moscow. His parents worked on a collective farm. Although he arrived in Cuba in mid-September 1962, he was not allowed to write home until the middle of October. The letter was brief. Military censors prohibited him from saying very much or even revealing his location. 'Greetings from a faraway land,' he wrote in a letter filled with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. 'I am alive and healthy.' He explained that 'it was forbidden' to write earlier, and gave a post office box in Moscow as his return address.
Mikheev was among twenty soldiers from the field engineering unit riding in the back of a powerful, square- fronted truck known as a KRAZ when the convoy pulled out of Vilorio and headed south, toward the sea. Immediately behind the KRAZ was a truck dragging an FKR cruise missile, a stripped-down version of a MiG-15 jet fighter with swept-back wings and a 14-kiloton nuclear warhead in the middle of the fuselage. The missiles were hidden under canvas. A line of support vehicles, including radio vans used for guiding the missile to its target, trailed behind. The convoy crawled forward in pitch darkness, observing a strict blackout. The commander of the battalion, Major Denischenko, rode in front of the convoy in a Soviet army jeep, together with his political commissar.
Suddenly, through the darkness, came the sound of a mighty crash followed by terrified screams. The troops in the FKR truck thought they were under attack by rebels, possibly even by Americans. Soldiers jumped out of the truck and dived into defensive positions behind rocks and cactuses. There was total confusion.
It took a few minutes to figure out what had happened. The KRAZ truck carrying the engineering team had tipped over into a ravine. When the other soldiers went to investigate, they found the truck at the bottom of the ravine. Mikheev and his friend Aleksandr Sokolov had been crushed to death, along with a Cuban bystander. Half a dozen other soldiers sitting on benches on the right side of the truck were badly injured. Their comrades pulled the dead and injured out and laid them by the side of the road.
Denischenko was unable to avoid calling for help over the radio ? even if it meant revealing his position to the Americans. News of the accident reached the regimental commander, Colonel Maltsev, at his field headquarters outside the Cuban town of Guantanamo, ten miles north of the naval base. There were three dead ? two Soviets and a Cuban ? and at least fifteen wounded, some seriously. Maltsev called for surgeons and sent trucks and ambulances to the crash site.
As usual after such accidents, the priority was not casualties but completing the mission successfully. The long line of trucks dragging the FKR cruise missiles and nuclear warheads headed on into the night as soon as the rescue vehicles arrived.
It had become impossible for foreign journalists to report freely from Havana. Those who complained about the restrictions were arrested and accused of being 'American agents.' A Swedish television reporter, Bjorn Ahlander, asked Cuban militiamen whether he should 'dress for dinner or for prison' when they burst into his hotel room on Thursday evening. Not receiving a reply, he dressed for dinner and spent a night locked in a cell at police headquarters. He was allowed to return to his hotel on Friday after giving his 'word of honor' as a reserve officer in the Swedish army that he would not try to escape.
Foreigners willing to participate in propaganda operations against the United States were, of course, welcome. The Cuban government provided radio facilities to a fugitive American civil rights activist named Robert F. Williams who denounced Kennedy as 'the Napoleon of all Napoleons.' Addressing his 'oppressed North American brothers' over Radio Free Dixie, Williams called on black soldiers serving in the U.S. military units preparing to invade Cuba to rebel against their officers.
'While you are armed, remember this is your only chance to be free,' said Williams, in his weekly Friday night broadcast to the Deep South. 'This is your only chance to stop your people from being treated worse than dogs. We'll take care of the front, Joe, but from the back, he'll never know what hit him. You dig?'
Carlos Alzugaray had spent the day digging trenches outside Havana with other Cuban diplomats. When he returned to the Foreign Ministry, the talk was all about an American attack on Cuba, expected to take place overnight. The government needed an urgent report on the likely consequences of a nuclear strike, in or near Havana.
Fortunately for the young American expert, Cuba still belonged to an international library consortium and continued to received official U.S. government publications from the Library of Congress. The Defense Department had done an exhaustive study on the effects of nuclear war, outlining different scenarios for atomic annihilation. There were vivid descriptions of what would happen to a medium-sized city like Havana, with a population of nearly 2 million, depending on such variables as the size of weapon, height of burst, and prevailing winds. As Alzugaray
