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

All Forces ashore: Decision Day plus eighteen days.

Even more ominously, the ExComm was planning to announce that any Soviet submarine located within the 500-mile intercept zone would be presumed to be 'hostile.' American antisubmarine forces had located two Soviet submarines inside the zone; another two were just outside. The proposed declaration was vaguely worded. Under certain circumstances, it could be interpreted as granting U.S. warships the authority to open fire on the submarines inside the zone, if they presented 'a threat.'

In Havana, Sergio Pineda was preparing for another long night. The reporter for the Prensa Latina news agency had been filing dispatches to Latin American newspapers from the Cuban capital. On Saturday evening, he described the call-up of hundreds of young women into health battalions and the appearance of soldiers in steel helmets outside large office buildings 'unloading enormous crates of medicine and surgical material.'

'Now anything can happen,' Pineda reported. 'There is calm at this time in the city. Everything appears to be sunken into stillness.' As he typed his report, the only sound he could hear was the fluttering of a flute from a radio receiver in a nearby guard post. The music was occasionally interrupted by a radio announcer repeating the words of Antonio Maceo Grajales, one of the heroes of the Cuban war of independence against Spain:

'Whoever attempts to invade Cuba will gather only the dust of its blood-drenched soil, if they do not die in the fight.'

CHAPTER FOURTEEN 'Crate and Return'

2:00 A.M. SUNDAY, OCTOBER 28 (10:00 A.M. MOSCOW)

Events had unfolded very differently from the way Nikita Khrushchev imagined when he sent his armies across the ocean, further than Soviet, or indeed Russian, soldiers had ever ventured before. At the time he made the decision, back in May, it had seemed inspired. He would defend the newest member of the socialist community from American aggression while strengthening the overall military position of the Soviet Union. He had assumed, naively, that it would be possible to hide the nuclear weaponry until he could present the world with a fait accompli. Now, he was faced with a choice he had never anticipated: an American invasion of Cuba and possible nuclear war or a personal humiliation.

The situation was changing hour by hour, sometimes minute by minute, in dangerous, unpredictable ways. Meeting with his Presidium colleagues on Saturday morning, he had announced that an American invasion Cuba was 'unlikely' in the near future. Even though he had already concluded that he would have to withdraw the missiles, it was still possible to negotiate, extracting maximum advantage for the Soviet Union from Kennedy's reluctance to go to war. But a series of unforeseen incidents ? including the shooting down of one U-2, the penetration of Soviet airspace by another, and the alarming message from Castro predicting an imminent yanqui attack ? had persuaded Khrushchev that time was running out.

He had asked the Soviet leadership to meet with him at a government dacha in the bucolic Moscow countryside. A fairy-tale landscape of billowing birch trees, picture-book villages, and the meandering Moscow River, the area around Novo-Ogaryevo had been the playground of the Russian ruling class for centuries. Tsarist governors of Moscow had carved ornamental gardens out of the thick forest; Stalin came here to escape the Kremlin demons; Khrushchev had his own weekend place nearby, where he liked to relax with his family.

A two-story mansion with a mock neoclassical facade, the Novo-Ogaryevo dacha bore a passing resemblance to the White House in Washington. It had originally been built for Stalin's putative successor as Soviet prime minister, Georgi Malenkov, who was quickly pushed aside by the more forceful Khrushchev. After Malenkov's disgrace, the estate was taken away from him and turned into a government guest house. Novo-Ogaryevo would achieve greater fame decades later as the presidential retreat of Mikhail Gorbachev and the site of negotiations that led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

The Presidium members were seated in front of the first secretary along the long, polished oak table. The eighteen attendees included Andrei Gromyko, the foreign minister, and Rodion Malinovsky, the defense minister. Aides hovered in the background, to be summoned and dismissed as needed. As usual, it was Khrushchev's show. The others were happy to let him talk and talk. 'You dragged us into this mess; it is now up to you to find a way out of it' was the unspoken sentiment in the room. Apart from Khrushchev, the only people who contributed very much to the discussion were Gromyko and Anastas Mikoyan.

Lying on the table in front of each Presidium member was a folder with the latest missives from Kennedy and Castro. The White House had released the JFK letter to the press to avoid the long communications delays between Moscow and Washington. Dobrynin's report on his meeting with Bobby Kennedy had still not reached Moscow when the Presidium session began. But Khrushchev was encouraged by the passage in the Kennedy letter that expressed a willingness to discuss 'other armaments' once the Cuban crisis had been resolved. He understood this as 'a hint' on the withdrawal of the Jupiters from Turkey.

Khrushchev had prepared the Presidium for the inevitability of a tactical retreat by depicting the American promise not to invade Cuba as a victory for Soviet diplomacy. His defense was that he was acting in the tradition of the great Lenin, who had surrendered a huge swathe of territory to the Germans under the punitive 1917 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk to 'save Soviet power.' The stakes were even higher now. Khrushchev told his colleagues that they had to defuse 'the danger of war and nuclear catastrophe, with the possibility of destroying the human race. To save the world, we must retreat.'

An aide jotted down the two main points made by the first secretary:

1. If an attack [on Cuba] is provoked, we have given the order for a retaliatory response;

2. We agree to dismantle the missile sites.

The real question facing Khrushchev was not whether to retreat but the logistics for implementing the pullout decision and the concessions he could extract from Washington in return. That issue was largely resolved for him by a series of alarming reports that arrived while the meeting was in progress.

A telegram from the KGB residency in Havana reported that 'our Cuban friends consider that invasion and bombarding of military objects is inevitable.' The cable gave added emphasis to Castro's earlier warning. This was followed at 10:45 a.m. Moscow time by the formal Soviet report on the downing of the American U-2 the previous day. The message, signed by Malinovsky, made clear that the plane had been brought down by a Soviet, rather than Cuban, antiaircraft unit. But it did not say who ordered the shootdown. The possibility that Soviet commanders on Cuba were following Castro's orders on such a sensitive matter alarmed Khrushchev.

As the Presidium members were digesting this information, Khrushchev's foreign policy aide, Oleg Troyanovsky, was summoned to the telephone. The Foreign Ministry had just received a coded cable from Dobrynin on his meeting with Bobby Kennedy. Troyanovsky scribbled down the essential points and returned to the Presidium session.

As the Presidium members listened to Dobrynin's report, the 'highly electric' mood of the meeting became even more charged. RFK's reference to hotheaded American generals resonated with Khrushchev and other Soviet leaders who had long suspected that the Pentagon was the real center of power in Washington. The ambassador's report made it clear that the 'hour of decision' had finally arrived.

The Presidium members asked Troyanovsky to read the cable again, so they could fully understand its implications. The Turkey offer clearly sweetened the proposed deal even if, as Dobrynin reported, Bobby Kennedy insisted it be kept 'extremely confidential.' Any remaining desire to haggle about terms and conditions drained away. After listening to the latest message from Washington, the men around the table 'agreed fairly quickly that they had to accept President Kennedy's conditions,' Troyanovsky would later recall. 'In the final analysis, both we and Cuba would get what we wanted, a guarantee that the island would not be attacked.'

At this point, a phone call arrived for the secretary of the Defense Council. Colonel General Semyon Ivanov returned a few minutes later to report that the U.S. president would go on television at 9:00 a.m. Washington time.