believe that I have solved the mystery. Soviet officers responsible for handling the warheads gave general descriptions of the location of the bunkers in their memoirs and in interviews with me. They said that the central nuclear storage bunker was somewhere near Bejucal, a town south of Havana. I visited Bejucal in March 2006 but was unable to identify the precise location. While researching CIA records at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, however, I came across references to an 'ammunition storage bunker' near Bejucal. It turned out that the CIA had originally suspected that the bunker might be used to store nuclear warheads, but dismissed the idea because of the lack of multiple security fences around the facility.
My hunt for the nuclear warheads gathered pace in the summer of 2007, when I discovered that the raw intelligence film shot by U.S. Navy and Air Force planes during the missile crisis had been transferred to the National Archives. To be more precise, hundreds of thousands of cans of DIA film have been warehoused at an Archives facility in Kansas. There is just one catch: most of the finding aids remain 'classified.' I could detect little rhyme or reason to the numbering of the cans, making the research process roughly equivalent to finding needles in a haystack. I was permitted to request twenty cans of film at a time, which were then air-freighted overnight from Kansas to Washington. After reeling through more than a hundred cans of film, and tens of thousands of images, I feel enormously fortunate to have found some previously unpublished photographs of the Bejucal facility taken by U.S. reconnaissance planes in October 1962. Several frames included shots of the special vans used to transport nuclear warheads around Cuba, proof that I had found the right place. I was able to combine these photographs with contemporary images from Google Earth to find the precise location of the nuclear storage site.
A final example: uncovering the details of the U-2 flight over Chukotka, also on Black Saturday. Standard academic accounts of the missile crisis usually mention this incident only in passing. The U.S. Air Force has failed to declassify a single piece of information about the flight by Captain Charles F. Maultsby, other than a unit history with the bizarre claim that his mission was '100 percent successful.' I began pressing the U.S. Air Force for information on Maultsby's flight in 2005, but they were unable (or unwilling) even to identify the location of the relevant SAC records. In order to piece together the incident, I had to rely on other sources, including a detailed memoir written by Maultsby prior to his death from prostate cancer in 1998, provided to me by his widow, Jeanne. I was able to supplement this with interviews with his navigator, Fred Okimoto, and fellow U-2 pilots. I came across the key document, a map showing Maultsby's precise flight route, along with tracking data on Soviet MiGs that were sent up to shoot him down, in the files of the State Department Executive Secretariat, which were declassified by the National Archives at my request. I suspect that the map may have been released inadvertently by State Department declassifiers unaware of its significance. As the reader can see from the illustration on the last page of the third insert, the map contains no special classification marking. It is difficult to understand why the Maultsby flight is still the subject of so much official secrecy. The most plausible explanation is that the U.S. government does not want to confirm the widely known fact that it intercepted real-time Soviet air defense tracking, and used these reports to figure out what had happened to the missing U-2 pilot and steer him safely back home.
During two years of research for this book, I interviewed more than a hundred former Cuban missile crisis veterans in the United States, Russia, Ukraine, and Cuba. Since most of them are quoted by name in the endnotes, I will not repeat them all here, but there are some people I would like to single out for special thanks. In Russia, I relied on the research assistance of Svetlana Chervonnaya, a formidable archival sleuth responsible for breaking several important historical stories. Thanks to Svetlana, I met several times with Aleksandr Feklisov, the Soviet spy who over-saw Julius Rosenberg and ran the KGB operation in Washington during the missile crisis. She was also my conduit to the Soviet veterans' group headed by General Anatoly Gribkov (who was the Soviet General Staff representative in Cuba during the missile crisis) and Leonid Sannikov (a young lieutenant serving with one of the missile regiments near Sagua la Grande). Sannikov generously allowed me to review the letters and memoirs collected by his organization, the Inter-regional Association of Internationalist Fighters (Mezhregional'naya Assotsiatsia Voinov-Internationalistov), from missile crisis veterans over the past decade. In addition to putting me in touch with many of his members, he also introduced me to Lieutenant Colonel Sergei Karlov, a historian with the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces, whose encyclopedic knowledge of Operation Anadyr is based on a study of original documents still closed to Western researchers.
Among the Soviet veterans on Cuba, I would particularly like to thank Colonel General Viktor Yesin, the former chief of staff of the Strategic Rocket Forces, and a lieutenant-engineer in Cuba in October 1962. Yesin, now a professor at the USA-Canada Institute in Moscow, patiently explained to me the functioning of the R-12 missile and the firing procedures. For understanding how the missile was targeted on U.S. cities, I am indebted to one of the deputy heads of the Ballistics Division at Soviet headquarters, Major Nikolai Oblizin. A noted mathematician, Oblizin did many of the complicated ballistic calculations involved in targeting Washington, D.C., and other U.S. cities in the pre-computer, pre-GPS era. In Kiev, General Valentin Anastasiev treated me to jaw-dropping stories about the handling of Soviet nuclear warheads, including six Hiroshima-type atomic bombs that were his personal responsibility.
In the United States, I was fortunate to be able to interview several political veterans of the crisis, including former defense secretary Robert McNamara and Theodore Sorensen, special counsel and speechwriter to JFK. Special thanks are due to Dino Brugioni, a top assistant to NPIC director Arthur Lundahl, who spent many hours educating me on the art of photo reconnaissance and how it was applied in Cuba. Dino also alerted me to the transfer of the raw intelligence film to the National Archives, sending me off on a frustrating but eventually rewarding detective chase. Other American missile crisis veterans who went out of their way to help me include: Raymond Garthoff, formerly with the State Department, who read an early draft of my manuscript and made many helpful comments; U-2 pilots Richard Heyser and Gerald McIlmoyle, both of whom flew over Cuba during the missile crisis; Gregory J. Cizek, who was preparing to land on Cuba with the U.S. Marines; and intelligence veterans Thomas Parrott, Thomas Hughes, and Warren Frank. I am grateful to Robb Hoover, the unofficial historian of the 55 Strategic Reconnaissance Wing, for putting me in touch with many veterans of his unit, and to George Cassidy for doing the same with veterans of the USS
I received no assistance from the Cuban authorities. My request for a visa to research the missile crisis was apparently stymied by the bureaucratic paralysis in Havana during Castro's waning years and the transfer of power to Raul: even simple decisions cannot be taken in Cuba without the consent of the man at the top. In the event, I do not think that the lack of cooperation made much difference to my research. Cuban assistance to other historians has largely been limited to long monologues from Fidel, who has said virtually everything he is going to say on the subject, and interviews with a few carefully screened veterans. The official Cuban viewpoint has been amply documented in conferences organized by the National Security Archive, a nonprofit group affiliated with George Washington University in Washington, D.C. I was able to make two private trips to Cuba in 2006 and 2007, and traveled across the entire island, visiting many of the sites associated with the missile crisis, including Che Guevara's cave in Pinar del Rio province, the copper mine at Matahambre, the planned U.S. Marine invasion beach at Tarara, and Soviet headquarters at El Chico. I spoke unofficially with dozens of Cubans, including several with vivid memories of October 1962.
While the accounts of missile crisis veterans were very important to my research, I checked all such testimony against the written record. Memory can play tricks on even the most meticulous eyewitnesses four decades after the event, and it is easy to make mistakes, conflate different incidents, and confuse dates. Archival records are also frequently incomplete and sometimes inaccurate. Even ExComm members sometimes received incorrect information that has turned up in various accounts of the missile crisis. I will mention just two examples. First, on October 24, CIA director John McCone noted in his diary that a Soviet ship headed for Cuba turned around after been confronted by a U.S. destroyer. This incident never happened. Second, on Black Saturday, McNamara reported to President Kennedy that U.S. reconnaissance planes overflying Cuba had been hit by anti-aircraft fire, which later turned out to be incorrect. The most sensible approach for the researcher is to find multiple sources, and use documentary evidence to corroborate oral history, and vice versa.
The starting point for my archival research was the extensive Cuban missile crisis documentation assembled by the National Security Archive, an indispensable reference source for contemporary historians. The Archive, under the direction of Tom Blanton, has taken the lead in aggressively using the Freedom of Information Act to pry
