Michael Dobbs - One Minute to Midnight

One of the rare dissenters from the conventional wisdom was CIA director John McCone, a hawkish Republican. McCone could not understand why the Soviets had stationed surface-to-air missiles all around the island unless they had something very valuable to hide. The purpose of the SAM sites was obviously to discourage the United States from sending U-2s over Cuba, he reasoned. Vacationing in the South of France with his new wife, he sent a stream of worried messages back to Washington questioning the official CIA estimate and speculating about the deployment of Soviet medium-range missiles. The messages became known as the “honeymoon cables.”

As he tapped out his reports to Washington, Pasqual was unaware of the debate raging in the CIA about the value of human intelligence, or “Humint” as it was known in the trade. Recently, his AMTORRID network had picked up information about missile-related activity around the town of Mayari Arriba, in the Sierra del Cristal Mountains. Just two days earlier, on October 23, an AMTORRID message described a “convoy of 42 vehicles including seven missile carriers” heading up a newly built road to Mayari. There were also reports of “construction of underground installations” in the area.

The analysts back in Washington were too preoccupied with figuring out what was happening in the confirmed missile sites in western Cuba to pay much attention to what was going on in an obscure part of Oriente. They were unaware of the nuclear menace hanging over the Guantanamo naval base.

Western diplomats based in Santiago de Cuba had also taken note of a new road into the mountains and the frantic efforts to complete it. Driving through the area on the way to Guantanamo, the British consul noticed a “wide, unpaved, new road running North, curving over a low hill and disappearing from view.” Cuban militiamen were dug in behind trees at the top of the hill, guarding the entrance to the road. Neither the consul nor any other foreigner had much idea what lay up the road.

Somewhat belatedly, U.S. intelligence had managed to ferret out many of the most powerful Soviet weapons in Cuba, including the R-12 medium-range missiles, the Ilyushin-28 bombers, the short-range Lunas, and the SAM antiaircraft missile network. But there was much that the Americans had been unable to find. They suspected that the Soviets had nuclear warheads in Cuba, but did not know where they were stored. They had grossly underestimated the numbers of Soviet troops. And they had absolutely no idea about the weapons system that was key to Moscow’s plans for defending the island against a U.S. invasion. The story of the nuclear-tipped cruise missiles would remain a secret for forty years and is being told in detail here for the first time.

Had the Western diplomats been able to travel across the rolling hills past Mayari Arriba, they would have eventually come across a cruise missile base. The missiles were stored at a military barracks tucked away in the mountains. They looked like miniature MiG jets, about twenty feet long and three feet wide, with a stubby nose and folding wings. Some were still in their wooden crates; others were hidden under canvas in fields near the motor park.

The warheads for the missiles were located a few hundred yards away from the barracks, in concrete vaults previously used for storing artillery shells. Each warhead weighed about seven hundred pounds and contained a fourteen-kiloton nuclear charge, roughly the power of the Hiroshima bomb. The vaults were hot and humid, not at all suitable for storing nuclear warheads. But the ever resourceful Cubans had a solution for that problem. They scoured Santiago for old American air conditioners, ripping them out of the numerous brothels that had been closed down in the aftermath of the revolution. Before hooking the equipment up to Soviet army generators, Soviet technicians had to adapt the electric circuits from the American standard of sixty cycles per second to the Russian standard of fifty cycles.

Known by the Russian acronym FKR —frontovaya krylataya raketa, or “front-line winged rocket”—the cruise missiles were the descendants of the German buzz bombs that terrorized London during World War II. Nicknamed “flying bombs” or “doodlebugs” by the British, the German V-1 missiles were essentially unpiloted aircraft that dropped out of the sky when their fuel ran out. The Soviet trailer-launched missiles could hit targets up to 110 miles away, destroying everything within a radius of six thousand feet. A single FKR missile could devastate a U.S. aircraft carrier group or a major military base.

The Soviets had brought two FKR regiments to Cuba. Each regiment controlled forty nuclear warheads and eight cruise missile launchers. One regiment was stationed in western Cuba, not far from Mariel, near a town called Guerra. Its mission was to defend the vulnerable stretch of coastline west and east of Havana, where the Americans were expected to come ashore. The other regiment, headquartered at Mayari, had been ordered to get ready “to deliver a blow to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay.” The plans for GITMO’s destruction were closely coordinated with Raul Castro.

Raul was the quiet brother. For thirty-one years, he had lived in the shadow of his charismatic older sibling. He was small and scrawny, and had never been able to grow more than a few wisps of the beard that was almost part of the uniform of Cuban revolutionaries. He described Fidel as “the troublesome one” and laughed at his loquaciousness. He was as fanatical as his older brother, personally supervising the executions of many counterrevolutionaries, but he expressed his fanaticism in a different way. If Fidel was the visionary, Raul was the organizer.

It made sense for Castro to dispatch his younger brother to Oriente immediately after declaring the alarma de combate on Monday afternoon. Raul knew the region around Mayari intimately. The village had served as his military headquarters during the later stage of the war against Batista. Fidel had sent him and sixty-five followers from the Sierra Madre on Cuba’s southeastern coast to establish a second front inland in the Sierra del Cristal. Mayari consisted of twenty-four ramshackle huts when Raul arrived in a convoy of ten jeeps and pickup trucks. He set up a command post in one of the huts, seized more territory, built an airstrip for the rebel air force, and established schools and health services. Soon Mayari was the capital of a “liberated zone” that extended across the mountains toward the Castro family finca at Biran.

Raul understood immediately that the cruise missiles would be crucial to preventing an American breakout from Guantanamo. Immediately after his arrival, he invited Soviet military commanders to his Santiago headquarters for consultations. Together, they reviewed plans for the destruction of the naval base. The commander of the local FKR regiment, Colonel Dmitri Maltsev, took out a map and briefed Raul on the positions of his troops.

The Soviet officer responsible for the ground defense of Oriente was Colonel Dmitri Yazov. (He would later become Mikhail Gorbachev’s defense minister and a leader of the failed August 1991 coup against Gorbachev.) Like Kovalenko in Remedios, Yazov had great difficulty finding a suitable camp for his motorized rifle regiment. The first site was in a forest filled with poisonous trees and bushes. Unaware of the danger, the troops had used branches from the trees to construct makeshift huts and even beds. The monsoon rains released poison from the branches, infecting an entire tank battalion with terrible skin lesions. Other troops suffered from dysentery caused by spoiled food. The regiment redeployed to an airfield outside the city of Holguin, but its combat readiness was much diminished.

Soon after arriving in Oriente, Raul issued an order subordinating all manpower in the province to the Cuban army. Since he was minister of defense, this meant that every worker in Oriente was now under his personal command. Civilian jeeps and trucks became military vehicles that could not be driven without permission. Under the joint defense plan with the Soviets, Raul was also kept informed about the movements of Yazov’s tanks and Maltsev’s cruise missiles.