ceiling, with an inhaler by his side to ward off frequent asthma attacks. A secret tunnel provided an escape route down the mountain in the event of an American paratroop drop. Just outside the cave, there was a chair and a stone table, where Che played chess with his aides.
The legendary revolutionary had not spent all that much time in the cave since his arrival late on Monday night. He had traveled all round western Cuba, planning ambushes for the invader, inspecting militia units, meeting with Soviet officers. On one such outing, he had visited a Soviet air defense unit in Pinar del Rio. The sight of the 'bearded, energetic man dressed in a jump suit and black beret' had 'an almost electric effect' on the Soviet troops, who staged 'a brilliant demonstration' of how to prepare a SAM missile for firing. A Soviet general was impressed by 'the instant rapport our soldiers felt with Guevara, a measure of the attachment they had formed to the Cuban cause.'
Whatever his human qualities, Che was also the most fanatical of Castro's aides. How many people would die in the coming war with America was less important to him than the struggle between the opposing ideological systems. In a newspaper editorial written during the missile crisis but published posthumously, he made clear he saw only two possible futures for mankind: 'the definitive victory of socialism or its retrogression under the nuclear victory of imperialist aggression.' Che had already made his choice: 'the path of liberation even when it may cost millions of atomic victims.'
The tranquillity of Che's mountain hideout was shattered by the roar of a pair of U.S. Navy jets skimming across the palm tops. They came from the south, following the line of the San Diego River that linked the Cueva de los Portales to the missile sites of Pinar del Rio. They flew so low that the Cuban defenders could even see the pilots in their cockpits as the Crusaders flew overhead. Surely, they must have been discovered.
As it turned out, it was a coincidence. The Crusaders were merely returning to Florida after flying over the missile sites at San Cristobal. In order to conserve film, the pilots had turned off their cameras well before they overflew the warren of secret caves. Although the Americans knew that Che had left Havana, they never did discover his real hiding place. The previous day, the CIA had reported that Che had 'established a military command post at the town of Corral de la Palma,' some fifteen miles to the east of his true location.
At about the same time that the Crusaders roared over Che's hideout, two other jets overflew San Julian Airfield on the western tip of Cuba. From the cockpit, the American pilots could make out an Ilyushin-28 light bomber in the 'final stage' of completion, with both of its engines already installed. Another five planes were in various stages of assembly, a couple with just a fuselage. At least twenty-one planes had still not been removed from their crates, which were neatly lined up on the apron. Cranes, earth-moving equipment, and radar vans were scattered around the airfield.
The IL-28s were of great interest to American intelligence because they were known to be nuclear-capable. Their jet engines had been copied from Rolls-Royce turbojets licensed to the Soviets by the British during the aftermath of World War II. The three-man crew consisted of a pilot, bombardier, and rear gunner. The Ilyushin could carry several small bombs, torpedoes, or naval mines, or a single atomic bomb such as the 'Tatyana,' the Soviet version of the American 'Fat Man' dropped on Nagasaki. It had a range of seven hundred miles, enough to reach southern Florida.
By the early sixties, the IL-28 was teetering on the verge of obsolescence and certainly no match for U.S. air defenses. Nevertheless, its nuclear capabilities worried American generals. Hundreds of IL-28s had been stationed in Poland and East Germany during the fifties to spear-head a wave of tactical nuclear strikes against NATO forces in the event of war. The use of tactical nuclear weapons had long been an integral part of Soviet war plans. The Soviets had even dropped a live Tatyana on their own troops during a military exercise in Siberia that was meant to simulate a nuclear war with the United States. Some forty-five thousand officers and soldiers were exposed to fallout from the blast, and many subsequently died of radiation-related illnesses.
American intelligence analysts had tracked the transport of the bombers across the Atlantic by analyzing the shape of the crates on Soviet freighters. Identical crates had been used to ship IL-28s to Egypt several years earlier. When the crates showed up in San Julian, they had requested intensive low-level surveillance to follow the assembly process. What the Americans did not know at the time was that the San Julian planes were never intended for use with tactical nuclear weapons. They were under the control of the Soviet navy, and were equipped with torpedoes and naval mines for use against an invading fleet.
Nuclear-capable IL-28s had been delivered to Cuba, but they were at the other end of the island, at an airfield outside the city of Holguin in Oriente Province. No attempt had been made to unpack them from their crates. The Americans would not become aware of their existence until early November, when they sent a low-level reconnaissance mission over the field. The Holguin squadron consisted of nine bombers under the command of the Soviet air force. Six of them were designed to carry the Tatyana bombs; the remaining three planes would fly in front of the squadron, serving as a decoy to enemy radar systems.
Soviet commanders regarded the IL-28s and the Tatyanas as an unnecessary encumbrance. Khrushchev had sent them to Cuba as an additional means of defense against an invading force. In theory, they could have been used against U.S. troop concentrations. But the Soviets already had more effective tactical nuclear weapons on the island, in the form of the FKR cruise missiles and the Luna rockets. The six Tatyanas were overkill, as the officer responsible for them discovered as soon as he stepped off the
After initially taking the Tatyanas to one of Batista's seaside estates, Anastasiev had eventually persuaded his superiors to move them to a more secure location. The new storage place consisted of a tunnel in the nearby mountains protected by some barbed wire and a fence. The security arrangements were rudimentary, but they were an improvement on the padlocked shed by the sea. Equally important, it was easier to control temperature and humidity levels inside the mountain caves. Anastasiev and his men used rounded metal bars to roll the crates containing the 12-kiloton bombs into the tunnel.
Having found a place to store his bombs, Anastasiev went looking for an airfield for the IL-28s. According to the original Defense Ministry plan, they were meant to be based at Santa Clara, in the center of the island. But the Santa Clara field turned out to be totally unsuited to the storage of nuclear weapons. After flying around Cuba for a couple of days, Anastasiev finally settled on the airfield at Holguin. There were earthen bunkers next to the field that could be camouflaged and hermetically sealed. When the IL-28s were assembled, they could be wheeled into the bunkers, along with the Tatyanas.
The next challenge was to transport the Tatyanas from their storage point in western Cuba to Holguin, a journey of five hundred miles. This was the problem that Anastasiev was grappling with on Black Saturday.
If Russian generals had tactical nuclear weapons, American generals wanted them too. The discovery of the Ilyushin light bombers and the nuclear-capable FROG missiles had touched off a new arms race. Even though they had no firm evidence that nuclear warheads had arrived in Cuba, U.S. commanders felt they had to plan for all eventualities. While the rest of the country was focused on the medium-range R-12 missiles, the generals were preparing for a tactical nuclear war, to be fought in and around Cuba.
On Saturday morning, the Joint Chiefs of Staff received a top secret message from the commander in chief of the North American Defense Command describing the threat from the Ilyushins. General John Gerhart was responsible for preventing Soviet bombers from attacking Florida from Cuba. He had deployed HAWK missile batteries along the Florida Keys, but had been forbidden to load the missiles with nuclear warheads. He wanted the policy reversed.
'In the event of an IL-28 raid from Cuba which penetrates U.S. air space, I consider it imperative to use weapons with a maximum kill capability,' Gerhart cabled the Pentagon. He asked for clarification of his authority to 'declare Cuban/Sino-Soviet tactical aircraft hostile' and advance permission 'to use nuclear weapons' against incoming Soviet bombers. The Joint Chiefs assured him that nuclear weapons could be used to destroy hostile aircraft if a 'pattern of actions' elsewhere in the air defense system indicated a general 'Cuban and Sino-Soviet attack.' If the Cubans attacked by themselves, nonnuclear weapons should be used.
The commander in chief of the Atlantic Fleet, Admiral Robert Dennison, was worried about the short-range FROG missiles first discovered on October 25 during a low-level reconnaissance flight. If equipped with nuclear warheads, the FROGs could decimate the invading force now heading for Cuba aboard his warships. The admiral proposed equipping 'U.S. air and ground forces earmarked for Cuban operations' with 'an atomic delivery capability.'
