Michael Dobbs - One Minute to Midnight

Pliyev rejected Castro’s plea for Soviet soldiers to put on their uniforms. But he agreed to turn on the air defense radars and authorized air defense commanders to respond to a U.S. air strike by firing on enemy planes. He ordered the mining of the land approaches to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay. He instructed two of the Soviet air force’s nuclear-armed cruise missile batteries to move up to their advance firing positions in eastern and western Cuba. And he ordered the release from storage of some of the nuclear warheads for the R-12 missiles aimed at targets in the United States.

There had been some initial confusion over whether Pliyev had the authority to use tactical nuclear weapons to resist a U.S. invasion. Soviet military doctrine called for field commanders to have responsibility for battlefield nuclear weapons in the event of war. The Soviet defense minister had drafted an order granting Pliyev such authority, but did not actually sign it. The latest version of the order, issued on October 23, made clear that Moscow retained full control over the use of all nuclear weapons. Nevertheless, Pliyev wanted to make sure that the missiles were ready to fire if war broke out.

At 9:50 p.m. Havana time, Pliyev sent a message to the Soviet defense minister summarizing his actions.

To the Director [a pseudonym for Malinovsky]

According to intelligence data available to us, the U.S. has identified several of the deployment sites of Comrade STATSENKO [chief of Soviet missile forces on Cuba]. The U.S. Strategic Air Command has issued an order for the full military alert of its aviation strike force.

In the opinion of the Cuban comrades, we must expect a U.S. air strike on our sites in Cuba during the night of Oct. 26-27, or at dawn on Oct. 27.

Fidel Castro has decided to shoot down American war planes with his anti-aircraft artillery in the event of an attack on Cuba.

I have taken measures to disperse tekhniki [euphemism for nuclear warheads] within the operating zone and to strengthen our camouflage efforts.

In the event of American air attacks on our sites, I have decided to use all air defense means available to me.

He signed the telegram “Pavlov,” his official pseudonym.

Colonel Sergei Romanov had the reputation of being as hard on himself as he was on others. He had built his military career on the transporting and storing of nuclear weapons, and it now was in jeopardy. A convoy under his command had been involved in a fatal accident shortly after arriving in Cuba. A Soviet truck had attempted to overtake a slow-moving vehicle on a winding road, and had collided with a car driven by a Cuban civilian. The Cuban was killed. Romanov had received a Communist Party reprimand—a serious punishment. When he got back to Moscow, he would have to face the consequences, a prospect that filled him with dread.

Despite the shadow hanging over him, Romanov had been put in charge of the central nuclear storage depot, where the warheads for the R-12 missiles were stored in shockproof bunkers. The site was hidden in a wooded hillside just north of Bejucal, a flea-infested town of muddy streets lined with dilapidated bungalows, some twenty miles from Havana. A drive-through bunker had been dug into the hillside, covered with reinforced concrete, and backfilled with earth. It had two wings in the form of an L, fifty to seventy-five feet long, connected to an underground parking garage. A circular access road permitted nuclear warhead vans to drive into the bunker from the north entrance and exit from the south entrance. The entire fenced-in complex covered about thirty acres and was easily visible from the air.

Originally constructed by the Cuban army for storing conventional munitions, the bunker had been adapted for nuclear warheads. The general staff had drawn up strict specifications for securing and maintaining the warheads. They were to be stored twenty inches apart from each other in an installation that was at least ten feet high. A space of at least one thousand square feet was required to assemble the warheads and check them out. The temperature in the storage area must not be permitted to rise above 68 degrees. Humidity had to be kept within a band of 45 to 70 percent. Maintaining the correct temperature and humidity levels was a constant struggle. The temperature inside the bunker never dropped much below 80 degrees. In order to bring it down to the maximum permitted level, Romanov had to scrounge air conditioners and boxes of ice from his Cuban hosts.

The stress of handling the equivalent of two thousand Hiroshima-type atomic bombs weighed heavily on everybody. Romanov, who was only getting three or four hours sleep a night, would have a fatal heart attack soon after returning home. His principal deputy, Major Boris Boltenko, would die a few months later of brain cancer. Fellow officers believed Boltenko contracted cancer as a result of assembling atomic warheads for a live test of an R-12 missile the previous year. By the time he arrived in Cuba, he was probably already suffering from undiagnosed radiation sickness. Many of the technicians and engineers who worked with the “gadgets”—as they called the warheads—would later develop cancer.

In contrast to the heavy security around nuclear storage sites in the Soviet Union, the Bejucal bunker was protected by a single fence and several antiaircraft guns. Romanov’s headquarters were on a hill three quarters of a mile away, on the outskirts of town, in an expropriated Catholic orphanage formerly known as La Ciudad de los Ninos. U.S. planes flew overhead by day, gathering intelligence. At night, the Soviet troops guarding the site often heard the sound of gunfire in nearby hills, as Cuban militia units hunted rebels. Sometimes, nervous Soviet soldiers fired at shadows in the darkness. When they went to investigate in the morning, they occasionally found a dead pig in the undergrowth. The next night, they feasted on roast pork.

Bejucal was four to five hours’ drive from the missile sites near San Cristobal in western Cuba, but fourteen hours by poor roads from the regiment commanded by Colonel Sidorov in central Cuba. Pliyev knew there would be no time to get the warheads to Sagua la Grande in the event of an American air strike. In addition to being the most distant of the three missile regiments, Sidorov’s regiment was also the most advanced in its preparations. Since Sidorov had the best chance of delivering a successful nuclear strike against the United States, he would be the first to receive the warheads.

The thirteen-foot nose cones for the R-12 missiles were loaded onto specially designed nuclear storage vans, with rails that extended outwards to the ground. Night had already fallen when the boxy, humpback vans emerged from the underground facility, joining a line of trucks and jeeps. There were a total of forty-four vehicles in the convoy, but only half a dozen carried warheads. Trucks loaded with industrial equipment were interspersed with the warhead vans for purposes of disguise. Rocket troops were stationed along the 250-mile route to Sagua la Grande to block other traffic and ensure the safety of the convoy. Everybody was terrified of another accident.

Every precaution was taken to prevent detection of the convoy from the air. The operation would be carried out in darkness. Drivers were not allowed to use their headlights. The only lights permitted were side-lights—and only on every fourth vehicle. The maximum speed limit was twenty miles per hour.

Romanov and his colleagues were glad to be rid of at least some of the warheads. They lived in constant fear of an American airborne assault. They understood how vulnerable they were and found it difficult to believe that the Americans had not discovered their secret.

The CIA had been scouring Cuba for nuclear warheads ever since discovering the missiles. In fact, they were hidden in plain view all along. American intelligence analysts had been observing the underground excavations at Bejucal for over a year through U-2 imagery, and had carefully logged the construction of the bunkers, loop roads, and fences. By the fall of 1962, they had tagged a pair of Bejucal bunkers as a possible “nuclear weapon storage site.” The CIA informed Kennedy on October 16 that the Bejucal site was “an unusual facility” with “automatic antiaircraft weapon protection.” The agency reported “some similarities but also many points of dissimilarity” with known nuclear storage depots in the Soviet Union.