Michael Dobbs - One Minute to Midnight

He thought constantly of his wife and child. “The first thing I do when I wake up is say good morning to you both.” While standing watch, he imagined himself on the deck of a luxury passenger liner with Sofochka. “You are in a light summer dress and feel chilly. We stand with our arms around each other, admiring the beauty of the sea by night.” He sent greetings to his wife via the constellation Orion, visible simultaneously in Russia and the Atlantic. He remembered Lili “sitting in the sand with her little arm raised…. And here you are, my mermaid, coming out of the water with a wonderful smile…. You are trying to get a ball away from her with a serious face.” Memories of the “tiny hands” of his daughter, “her happy smile, her little nodding head across the table from me, her laughter, her caresses,” helped him get through the hardest moments of the journey.

B-36 reached the approaches to the Caicos Passage on schedule, just as the crisis was coming to a head. It was then that Captain Dubivko received an urgent message from Moscow, ordering him to hold back. Instead of attempting to negotiate the forty-mile-wide channel, he was instructed to redeploy to the eastern end of the Turks and Caicos Islands, 150 miles away. This was the long way round to Cuba, but the sea channel was twice as wide. The navy chiefs evidently believed that the risks of detection were much reduced if the subs kept away from the narrow sea-lanes.

As B-36 rounded Grand Turk Island, with its secret SOSUS station, U.S. Navy patrol planes appeared overhead. The Soviet sailors could hear the sound of muffled explosions as the patrol planes dropped practice depth charges and sonobuoys in an effort to locate them. The atmosphere inside the submarine became even more tense. “We are in the enemy’s lair. We try not to reveal our presence to them, but they sense our closeness and are searching for us,” noted Andreev.

By monitoring American radio broadcasts, Dubivko understood that the Soviet Union and the United States were close to war. He was required to come to the surface at least once every twenty-four hours, at midnight Moscow time, for a prescheduled communications session. Nobody at navy headquarters paid attention to the fact that midnight in Moscow was midafternoon in the western Atlantic. The risk of detection rose sharply during the hours of daylight. Even so, Dubivko was terrified of missing a communication session. If war broke out while he was in the depths of the ocean, B-36 would automatically become a prime target for destruction by the American warships lurking overhead. His only chance of survival lay in firing his nuclear torpedo before he himself was destroyed.

Dubivko was expecting the coded signal from Moscow to start combat operations “from one hour to the next.”

Jack Kennedy was an avid consumer of intelligence. He enjoyed the voyeuristic sensation of peeking into other people’s lives, and the power that came from the possession of secret information. He liked to see the raw data so that he could make his own judgments. When Andrei Gromyko visited the White House on October 18, four days after the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba, the U-2 photographs were sitting in the president’s desk drawer just a few feet away. Kennedy had difficulty keeping his temper as the Soviet foreign minister continued to deny the existence of the missile bases. He told aides later that he could barely restrain himself from taking the incriminating photographs out of his desk and shoving them under the nose of the poker-faced Russian. He began referring to Gromyko as “that lying bastard.”

Lundahl set up his easels in the Oval Office after the Friday morning ExComm meeting. He had brought along some of the latest low-level photography, and was eager to show the president the evidence of the rapid Soviet buildup. He reported that the ground was so drenched from recent rainstorms that the Soviets had erected catwalks around the missile sites, and were laying power cables on raised posts.

“Now this is interesting,” interrupted John McCone, pointing to the photograph of the suspected FROG missile launcher. The CIA director explained that analysts were still “not sure” of the evidence, but it was possible that the Soviets had deployed “tactical nuclear weapons for fighting troops in the field.”

But Kennedy’s thoughts were elsewhere. He was already several steps ahead of the briefers. The more he learned about the scale and sophistication of the Soviet deployment on Cuba, the more doubtful he became of a diplomatic solution to the crisis. He needed to explore other options. Earlier that morning, he had listened to a CIA proposal to smuggle Cuban exiles onto the island in submarines for a sabotage operation against the missile sites. He wanted to know if it was possible to blow up a fuel trailer with a “single bullet.”

“It would be fuming red nitric acid, sir,” Lundahl replied. “If they’re opened up, they might make some real trouble for those who are trying to contain it.”

Kennedy noted that it would be much more difficult to destroy the FROGs, which operated on less combustible solid fuel.

“No, you couldn’t shoot them up,” agreed McCone, a former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission.

As the photo interpreter collected his materials, the president and the CIA director were still debating the options for getting rid of the missile sites. Though he had little faith in diplomacy, Kennedy feared that an air strike and invasion would end up in “a very bloody fight” that might provoke the Soviets into firing the missiles. Neither option was very appealing.

“Invading is going to be a much more serious undertaking than most people realize,” McCone acknowledged grimly. “It’s very evil stuff they’ve got there…. They’ll give an invading force a pretty bad time. It’ll be no cinch by any manner of means.”

President Kennedy wanted the news about the Marucla to be put out “right now.” His advisers believed that the successful boarding operation would help “restore our credibility” with disgruntled Pentagon admirals. His chosen vehicle for getting the Marucla story out was an increasingly controversial figure in Washington, Arthur Sylvester.

During the first week of the crisis, the Pentagon spokesman had infuriated reporters with his tight-lipped approach to the release of information. He restricted himself to cautiously worded press statements, dictated over the phone by Kennedy or one of his aides. For both JFK and Sylvester, information was a “weapon,” to be used deliberately and sparingly to promote the goals of the administration. Since the purpose of the exercise was the removal of the Soviet military threat to the western hemisphere, the ends clearly justified the means.

By Friday, reporters were complaining loudly that they were getting virtually zero information out of Sylvester. The two-a-day, sometimes three-a-day, news briefings were so uninformative that a journalist placed a tin can in the corner of the Pentagon press room labeled “automatic answering device.” It was filled with slips of paper with Sylvesterisms such as “Not necessarily,” “Cannot confirm or deny,” and “No comment.”

The frustration of the newsmen—there were no women covering the Pentagon on a regular basis—was understandable. The world appeared to be on the edge of nuclear annihilation, but it was difficult to find out what was really going on. This was a new kind of conflict, a shadowy, antiseptic confrontation with a largely unseen enemy. The stakes were huge, but there was no front line from which the reporters could report, no equivalent of Pearl Harbor or Okinawa or the beaches of Normandy. Reporters had been kept away from the most obvious news locales, such as the naval base at Guantanamo Bay or the ships enforcing the blockade. In reporting the gravest threat to international security since World War II, they were almost completely dependent on the scraps of information thrown their way by the administration.