Michael Dobbs - One Minute to Midnight

The circumstances of Maultsby’s debriefing could scarcely have been less propitious. He had almost fainted at Kotzebue Airfield when told that six Soviet MiGs had attempted to shoot him down. “Shit, oh dear!” was his first reaction. “I’m glad I didn’t know it at the time…Whew!” He then “stumbled over to a chair and took the weight off, fearing my legs were about to give out.” A special C-47 military transport plane was dispatched to Kotzebue to take him back to Eielson Air Force Base, while his unit commander recovered the U-2. From Eielson, another plane, a KC-135, flew him to SAC headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska. He was the only passenger aboard.

An Air Force colonel escorted him to Power’s underground command post beneath Building 500. It was a hive of activity. People were “running from place to place as if their lives depended on it.” The colonel took him to a briefing room next to the command post, and announced that CINCSAC would be with him shortly. At the head of the briefing table was an aeronautical chart plotting Maultsby’s route to the North Pole. A sheet of paper was taped over the portion of the chart that illustrated his overflight of the Soviet Union.

General Power finally entered the room, followed by “eight other generals who looked as if they hadn’t been out of their uniforms for days.” It had been a nerve-wracking twenty-four hours for Power and his colleagues. One U-2 pilot had got lost over the Soviet Union; another had been shot down over Cuba; all high-altitude air-sampling flights had been canceled until further notice; SAC had reached a level of mobilization never before achieved in its sixteen-year history. Maultsby stood to attention nervously while the generals took their seats around the conference table. General Power sat directly across the table from him. Unlike some of the other generals, he wore a clean uniform and was cleanshaven, but looked “extremely tired.”

“Captain Maultsby, how about briefing us on your flight yesterday?” said Power, after everyone was seated.

Maultsby stood next to the navigation chart, describing the air-sampling mission and indicating his planned route to the North Pole. He mentioned the effects of the aurora borealis and the difficulty he had taking fixes.

“Captain Maultsby, do you know where you went after leaving the Pole?” CINCSAC finally interrupted.

“Yes, sir,” replied Maultsby, as the other generals “squirmed in their seats,” looking as if they were “sitting on tacks.”

“Show us please.”

Maultsby lifted the paper from the classified portion of the map, and showed the generals his flight route with a pointer. He had seen a similar map at the military radar station in Kotzebue soon after his return, so he knew where he had been. But he had no idea how the Air Force had been able to track his flight, and could not understand why he had not been “given a steer” before blundering over Soviet territory.

“Gentlemen, do you have any more questions?” asked Power, after Maultsby finished.

Nobody had any questions.

The general smiled.

“Too bad you weren’t configured with a system to gather electromagnetic radiation. The Russians probably had every radar and ICBM site on maximum alert.”

Power ordered Maultsby not to discuss his overflight with anyone. It was not the first time that a SAC plane had gone badly off track in the vicinity of Chukotka. In August, a B-52 bomber fully loaded with nuclear weapons got lost as it was returning to Alaska from Greenland. The B-52 was heading directly toward the Soviet Union and was within three hundred miles of the Chukot Peninsula when ground control finally ordered it to switch course. It appears to have been following a similar track to that followed by Maultsby. According to the official SAC history, the incident “demonstrated the seriousness of celestial computation errors in the polar region.” Since it was twilight, the navigator had been unable to take accurate readings from the stars—just as Maultsby was confused by the aurora borealis.

The generals left the briefing room in order of rank. The last to leave was a one-star. On his way out of the briefing room, the brigadier general turned to Maultsby in amazement.

“You are a lucky little devil. I’ve seen General Power chew up and spit out people for doing a helluva lot less.”

Miguel Orozco and Pedro Vera had recovered their catamaran from the mangrove swamp of Malas Aguas on the northwestern coast of Cuba. They had been trying to contact the CIA mother ship that was meant to bring them back to Florida for several hours, without success. The stomach pains that had plagued Miguel for the past three days were causing him agony. The two men would make further attempts to make contact with their CIA rescuers by radio on October 29 and 30. Their increasingly frantic messages went unanswered.

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.

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 1 1/ 2to 2 hours.” Everybody was very conscious of the five o’clock deadline, when the president was expected to address the American people.