Michael Dobbs - One Minute to Midnight

The overnight intelligence haul included information about military units and weapons systems never before seen on Cuba. A low-level photograph of the Remedios area of central Cuba showed row after row of T-54 tanks, electronics vans, armored personnel carriers, an oil storage depot, and at least a hundred tents. From the layout of the site and the precise alignment of the tents and vehicles, it was obvious that this was a Soviet military encampment, not a Cuban one. These were clearly combat troops, not “technicians,” as U.S. intelligence had previously described them. And there were many more of them than anyone had suspected.

The photo interpreters drew the director’s attention to an oblong object with sharklike fins, some thirty-five feet long, alongside a radar truck. Lundahl recognized the object as a FROG, an acronym for “Free Rocket Over Ground.” (FROG was the American designation; the official Soviet name was Luna.) It was impossible to tell whether this particular FROG was conventional or nuclear, but military planners had to assume the worst. There was now a frightening possibility that, in addition to the missiles targeted on the United States, Soviet troops on Cuba were equipped with short-range nuclear-tipped missiles capable of destroying an American invading force.

Low-level photographs of the MRBM sites contained more bad news. Evidence abounded of activity. Fresh ruts in the mud suggested that the Soviets had been exercising the missiles overnight. Most of the sites were now camouflaged, some more effectively than others. Several missile launchers had been covered with plastic sheeting, but analysts were able to use earlier photographs to figure out what lay underneath. The photographs from Calabazar de Sagua were detailed enough to identify poles for camouflage netting. At San Cristobal, two hundred miles to the west, the ropes holding up the missile checkout tents were clearly visible.

Despite the attempts at camouflage, the photo interpreters had spotted cables leading from the missile checkout tents to generators and control panels hidden in the woods. They had found theodolite units, sophisticated optical instruments used for aligning missiles on the launch pad, at most of the sites. Fuel and oxidizer trailers were stationed nearby. Although none of the missiles was in the vertical position, most could be fired within six to eight hours, according to CIA estimates.

By comparing the photographs with data on R-12 readiness times from the technical manual supplied by Oleg Penkovsky, the analysts had concluded that four out of the six medium-range missile sites were “fully operational.” The remaining two would probably be operational within a couple of days.

As he examined the photographs, Lundahl wondered how he would relay the latest intelligence information to the president. A frequent deliverer of bad news, he strove to avoid “dramatics.” He was wary of anything that would create “a fear or stampede.” At the same time, he knew he had to lay out the facts succinctly and conclusively, “so that the decision makers would be convinced, just as the photo interpreters were, that the crisis was entering a new phase.”

The art of aerial reconnaissance went back to the Napoleonic wars. French troops used a military observation balloon in 1794 to spy on Dutch and Austrian troops at the battle of Maubeuge. During the American Civil War, a scientist named Thaddeus Lowe devised a method for telegraphing reports on Confederate troop positions in Virginia from a balloon tethered high above the Potomac River. Union gunners were able to use the information to target Confederate troops without being able to see them. By World War I, both the Germans and the British were using two-seater aerial reconnaissance planes to photograph enemy troop positions. Photo reconnaissance expanded greatly in World War II, both to identify targets and to survey the damage caused by the hugely destructive bombing raids over Germany and Japan.

Like most of his top analysts, Lundahl had served as a photo interpreter during the war, analyzing bombing data from Japan. He liked to boast that aerial photography supplied 80 to 90 percent of the usable military intelligence collected during World War II—and could perform a similar function in the Cold War. The flow of useful information shot up after President Eisenhower authorized the construction of the U-2, a revolutionary plane with equally revolutionary cameras, capable of photographing foot-long objects from seventy thousand feet. The demand for photographic expertise soon became overwhelming. In October 1962 alone, Lundahl’s men were involved in more than six hundred separate photo interpretation projects, ranging from rocket testing sites in Krasnoyarsk to power plants in Shanghai to aircraft plants in Tashkent.

By the early sixties, overhead reconnaissance had spawned an array of esoteric subdisciplines, such as “tentology,” “shelterology,” and “cratology.” Photo interpreters spent days analyzing the crates on the decks of Soviet ships heading for places like Egypt and Indonesia, measuring their precise dimensions, and guessing what might be hidden inside. In 1961, the CIA published a detailed guide to different kinds of crates, teaching its agents the difference between a MiG-15 and a MiG-21 crate. Cratology scored its greatest triumph in late September when analysts correctly deduced that a Soviet ship bound for Cuba was carrying Il-28 bombers. Since the Il-28 was known to be nuclear-capable, this discovery prompted Kennedy to agree to the crucial October 14 U-2 overflight of Cuba to investigate the Soviet arms buildup.

The analysts could infer a lot just by looking at a picture of a vessel, and studying the way it was sitting in the water. Some of the Soviet cargo ships en route to Cuba had been built in Finland and had unusually long hatches. They were intended for the lumber trade, but the photographs showed them riding suspiciously high in the water. There was an obvious explanation: rockets weighed a good deal less than solid timber.

An experienced photo interpreter could extract valuable intelligence information from seemingly unimportant details. The analysts associated baseball fields with Cuban troops, soccer fields with Soviet troops. A flower bed could provide valuable clues to the Soviet order of battle: some units used different-colored flowers to show off their regimental insignia. Large amounts of concrete frequently signaled some kind of nuclear installation. Without ever setting foot in Cuba, photo interpreters could feel its rhythms, appreciate its moods, and share vicariously in the lives of its inhabitants.

One of Lundahl’s top assistants, Dino Brugioni, would later describe the elements that made Cuba so intriguing:

The hot morning sun; the afternoon rain clouds; the strange vegetation of the palm, coniferous, and deciduous trees; the tall marsh grass; the sugarcane fields in the plains; the small towns where people gathered; the large estates overlooking beautiful beaches; the thatched roofs of the peasant huts; the plush resort towns; the rich expanses of fincas, or ranches; the ubiquitous baseball diamonds; the cosmopolitan look of Havana and the sleepy and forgotten appearance of Santiago; the Sierra Maestras rising abruptly behind the coast; the small railroads leading from the sugar-processing centrals to the cane fields; the loneliness of the large prison on the Isle of Pines; the salt flats; the many boats and fishing yards; and the roads that cross and crisscross the island.

And in the center of this tropical paradise, like a strange excrescence upon the land, the Soviet missile sites.

By Friday morning, all four Soviet submarines in the Sargasso Sea had begun to pull back from their forward positions on orders from Moscow. Their mission had become very unclear. There were no longer any Soviet missile-carrying ships for them to protect: those that had not reached Cuba had turned back toward the Soviet Union. After a spirited debate in the Presidium, Khrushchev had decided against sending the Foxtrots through the narrow sea-lanes of the Turks and Caicos Islands, where they could easily be picked up by American submarine hunters. But the Soviet navy did authorize one submarine —B-36— to explore the wider Silver Bank Passage between Grand Turk and Hispaniola. It turned out to be a gross error of judgment.