Nicaro.
The ExComm was more interested in the public relations advantages of 'grabbing' the
The Air Force had managed to locate the
Captain Joseph Carney took off from Kindley Field on Bermuda at dawn, and headed south toward the search area.
Three more reconnaissance planes were preparing to take off from Bermuda to join the search. The first RB- 47 on the runway was piloted by Major William Britton, who had participated in the effort to locate the
As Britton's plane moved down the short runway, heavy black smoke poured from its engines. The aircraft seemed to have trouble accelerating and did not become airborne until it reached a barrier at the end of the runway. Its left wing dropped sharply. Britton struggled to gain control of the aircraft, and succeeded in bringing his wings level. The plane cleared a low fence and a sparkling turquoise lagoon. On the opposite shore, the right wing dropped and grazed the side of a cliff. There was a loud explosion as the plane crashed to the ground, disintegrating on impact.
A subsequent investigation showed that the maintenancemen at Kindley had serviced the aircraft with the wrong kind of water-alcohol injection fluid. They were unfamiliar with the requirements of the reconnaissance planes, which normally flew out of Forbes Air Force Base in Kansas. The injection fluid was meant to give the engines extra thrust on takeoff, but the servicing actually reduced the thrust. The plane lacked sufficient power to get airborne.
Britton and his three crew members were all killed. The pilots of the other two planes aborted when they saw the fireball on the other side of the lagoon. As it turned out, the mission was unnecessary. Out in the Atlantic, six hundred miles to the south, Joseph Carney had just spotted a ship that looked like the
6:45 A.M. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27
Carney had been assigned a search area measuring fifty by two hundred miles. The procedure was to locate a ship by radar, and then drop down for surveillance and recognition. The RB-47 dived in and out of the clouds as the navigator pointed out possible targets. Among the vessels spotted by Carney was an American destroyer, the USS
After turning away from the
Carney spotted the Soviet ship at 6:45 a.m. and relayed her location to the
1. TRAILING AT 18 MILES
2. AM COMPLETELY PREPARED TO INTERROGATE OR BOARD AS DESIRED.
The
As dawn rose on Saturday morning, Andrew St. George was feeling 'weary and discouraged.' The
The goal was to blow up a Cuban sugar barge, but rough weather, darkness, and the lack of a depth finder had caused the would-be saboteurs to crash one of their two speedboats into a reef. They wrecked the second boat while attempting to salvage the first. After three days wandering through mangrove swamps and surviving on crackers, St. George and his friends stole a battered sailboat and some food from a Cuban fisherman. They headed back for Florida without a compass, battling fifteen-foot waves and bailing water constantly to keep their leaking craft afloat. One by one, they resigned themselves to their fate. St. George could sense 'the rising whistle of death' in the howling wind and sea.
A propagandist more than a reporter, St. George was the modern-day equivalent of the journalistic adventurers who covered the Spanish-American War for William Randolph Hearst. 'You furnish the pictures,' Hearst had told his star cartoonist in 1897, 'and I'll furnish the war.' Within a year, each man had fulfilled his side of the bargain. The artist Frederic Remington drew a shocking picture of demure Cuban ladies being strip-searched by brutal Spanish policemen ? and Hearst helped persuade a wavering President McKinley to declare war against Spain.
Journalists working for Hearst did not just report on the war in Cuba. They actively promoted it and even fought in it. 'A splendid fight,' enthused the publisher, after a visit to the battlefield, with a revolver in his belt and a pencil and notebook in his hand.
'A splendid little war,' agreed future secretary of state John Hay, in a letter to his friend Theodore Roosevelt.
More than six decades later, the American press had shed much of its jingoistic, 'yellow journalism' character. But there were still publishers and reporters in the Hearst tradition who enthusiastically campaigned for a showdown, this time with the Soviet Union. The role once played by Hearst was assumed by the Time-Life empire of Henry and Clare Boothe Luce, which accused the Kennedy administration of 'doing nothing' to prevent a Communist takeover of Cuba. Clare Luce received an admiring note from Hearst's son after she wrote an editorial in
Like the older Hearst, Luce went well beyond writing bellicose editorials attacking government inaction over the Soviet buildup in Cuba. By her own account, she channeled emigre information about Soviet missile sites to Senator Kenneth Keating that the New York Republican used to embarrass Kennedy. She subsidized Cuban exile groups seeking to overthrow Castro and sent reporters along with them on their hit-and-run raids.
A self-described descendant of Hungarian royalty, St. George had a murky past, using his charm and connections to pass from one ideological camp to another. The CIA suspected him of providing information to Soviet intelligence in Austria after the war, but had also used him as an informer. He had a knack for showing up where the action was. During the anti-Batista uprising, he had trekked into the Sierra Maestra to interview Castro and Che Guevara, but had fallen out with the
As he lay facedown on the wet planks of the stolen fishing boat, St. George found himself wondering whether it had been worth it. After a lifetime of excitement, he was reminded of a line in a book by Andre Malraux, quoting a disillusioned revolutionary: 'When you have only one life, you should not try too hard to change the world.'
