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

Gradually, the truth sank in: they had been abandoned.

The CIA later said that it 'heard nothing' from the two agents after the successful infiltration on the night of October 19–20. Harvey claimed in a memo that it had been 'operationally infeasible' to provide Orozco and Vera with communications equipment 'in view of the operational timing, the terrain [and] the distance to be traveled.' But his version of events, and the accompanying chronology of the Matahambre operation, appears to have been primarily designed to protect his own, severely damaged reputation. Forty-five years later, Vera was taken aback when told Harvey's account, which he dismissed as 'nonsense.' He himself had lugged the radio over the mountains after Orozco fell ill with appendicitis. The radio was their lifeline. 'They knew we were trying to call them,' he insisted. Vera's memory is more convincing than Harvey's official chronology. CIA records show that previous agent teams dispatched to Matahambre were equipped with radios.

In an apparent attempt to create a bureaucratic alibi for himself, Harvey would draw attention to a formal halt to 'all action, maritime and black infiltration operations' from October 28 onward. A temporary stand-down had been imposed two days earlier, on October 26, following the Mongoose meeting at the Pentagon. Already in trouble with Bobby Kennedy for the unauthorized dispatch of agent teams to Cuba, Harvey did not have the stomach to challenge the stand-down order. Orozco and Vera were expendable.

On the morning of Tuesday, October 30, Vera finally concluded that they could wait no longer. 'The boat had not come back, Miguel was dying, and nobody was answering our calls.' He was a tough, wiry little man nicknamed el cojo ? 'the lame one.' (Four years earlier, a truck had run over his foot, leaving him with a permanent limp.) He helped his friend onto the catamaran, originally intended to take them to the mother ship, and set out to sea. Using the stars to navigate, he headed northward, in the direction of the Florida Keys.

Waves were soon battering the little boat from all sides. The constant motion caused Orozco to cry out in pain. As land was disappearing below the horizon, a huge wave capsized the catamaran, washing their ruck-sacks into the sea. They managed to get it back upright, but the motor was useless. Their only usable equipment was a paddle that they had somehow salvaged. There was no way they could reach Florida. They began paddling back in the direction of Cuba.

Orozco and Vera were arrested by Cuban militiamen on the night of November 2 after approaching a peasant for help. A U.S. Navy reconnaissance plane overflew the Matahambre area earlier that same day. It was clear from the photographs of the mine and aerial tramway ? which were both intact and functioning ? that the latest CIA sabotage mission against Cuba had ended in failure.

9:00 A.M. SUNDAY, OCTOBER 28 (5:00 P.M. MOSCOW, 8:00 A.M. HAVANA)

Soviet officials worked on the text of Khrushchev's message to Kennedy until the very last moment, cleaning up the rough draft and translating the finished version into English. At 3:00 p.m. Moscow time, the Foreign Ministry called the U.S. Embassy and told them to expect an important message 'within 1¹/₂ to 2 hours.' Everybody was very conscious of the five o'clock deadline, when the president was expected to address the American people.

With time running out, several copies of the letter were entrusted to the Communist Party secretary in charge of ideology, Leonid Ilyichev, who had responsibility for mass media. He ordered his chauffeur to drive as fast as he could to the headquarters of Radio Moscow, a forty-minute drive with little traffic. The black Chaika sped along the winding forest road connecting Novo-Ogaryevo to the center of Moscow, up the vast expanse of Kutuzov Avenue, past the Triumphal Arch commemorating Napoleon's defeat in 1812, and across the Moscow River. When the militiamen saw the curtained Kremlin limousine approach, they waved other vehicles to the side of the road with their long white nightsticks. By disregarding all traffic regulations, Ilyichev reached the radio station in record time.

At the station, the announcers wanted more time to go over the script. They were used to getting scripts hours, sometimes days in advance, so they could perfect their delivery, striking the appropriate balance of pathos and ideological conviction. Known as diktors in Russian, the newsreaders were the voices of the Soviet state. Most of them were accomplished actors, trained by the famous Stanislavsky School in what was known as the Method. In order to seem sincere, an actor must completely live the part. If he can convince himself that he is hopelessly in love, he can convince his audience. Their voices dripped with pride as they recited five-year plans and steely indignation as they recounted the misdeeds of the imperialists.

The most famous diktor of all was Yuri Levitan. To hear his dulcet, authoritative voice was like listening to Big Brother himself. He had brought the Soviet people news of triumph and tragedy, victory and defeat, persuading them to put their faith in the Communist Party, whatever the circumstances. Levitan had announced the start of the war with Nazi Germany in June 1941 and the defeat of Nazism four years later. He had broken the news of the death of Stalin in 1953 and Yuri Gagarin's space flight in 1961. It now fell to him to proclaim the end of Khrushchev's great Cuban gamble.

Since the deadline was fast approaching, Ilyichev insisted that the diktors go on the air live, with no time to rehearse. Khrushchev's message would be broadcast simultaneously in Russian and English.

'Govorit Moskva,' Levitan began ? 'This is Moscow speaking.' It was 5:00 p.m. in Moscow, 9:00 a.m. in Washington. He told his listeners he would read from a letter written by Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, first secretary of the Presidium of the Communist Party and chairman of the Council of Ministers, to John Fitzgerald Kennedy, president of the United States of America.

The Soviet government, in addition to earlier instructions on the discontinuation of further work on weapons construction sites, has given a new order to dismantle the weapons you described as offensive, and to crate and return them to the Soviet Union.

Levitan managed to make this sound like yet another triumph for Moscow's peace-loving foreign policy over warmongering imperialists. The supremely wise, always reasonable Soviet leadership had saved the world from the threat of nuclear destruction.

Khrushchev's son Sergei had been waiting for his father at the family dacha when he heard the announcement over the radio. He was half-relieved, half-stunned by the turnaround. He would come to view his father's decision in a much more positive light, but at this moment it sounded to him like a 'shameful retreat.'

'That's it,' he thought to himself. 'We've surrendered.'

Other Soviet citizens were grateful that the nightmare was over. When Oleg Troyanovsky finally returned to his apartment after a week on duty at the Kremlin crisis center, he was shocked to discover that he had lost five pounds. When he told his wife what he had been doing, she gently reprimanded him. 'If possible, the next time you want to lose some weight, find a safer way to do it.'

The five o'clock deadline turned out to be a false alarm. No new presidential address had been planned for that time. One of the American television networks had simply decided to rerun Kennedy's October 22 speech. Khrushchev had been misinformed by his intelligence people.

The bells began going off on the news agency teletypes in Washington soon after 9:00 a.m. on Sunday morning. McGeorge Bundy was having breakfast in the White House Mess, down the corridor from the Situation Room, when an aide rushed in with a bulletin torn off the printer. He called Kennedy on an internal phone. The president was in his bedroom, getting dressed to go to church, as his national security adviser read the item from the Foreign Broadcast Information Service:

Moscow Domestic Service in Russian at 1404GMT on 28 October broadcast a message from Khrushchev to President Kennedy stating that the USSR had decided to dismantle Soviet missiles in Cuba and return them to the Soviet Union.

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'I feel like a new man now,' JFK told Dave Powers after digesting the news. 'Do you realize that we had an air strike all arranged for Tuesday? Thank God it's all over.'

Other members of the ExComm were equally ecstatic. John McCone was on his way back from nine o'clock mass when he heard the news over the car radio. 'I could hardly believe my ears,' he later recalled. The Soviet about-face was as unexpected as it was sudden. Donald Wilson 'felt like laughing or yelling or dancing.' After