Michael Dobbs - One Minute to Midnight

“While you are armed, remember this is your only chance to be free,” said Williams, in his weekly Friday night broadcast to the Deep South. “This is your only chance to stop your people from being treated worse than dogs. We’ll take care of the front, Joe, but from the back, he’ll never know what hit him. You dig?”

Carlos Alzugaray had spent the day digging trenches outside Havana with other Cuban diplomats. When he returned to the Foreign Ministry, the talk was all about an American attack on Cuba, expected to take place overnight. The government needed an urgent report on the likely consequences of a nuclear strike, in or near Havana.

Fortunately for the young American expert, Cuba still belonged to an international library consortium and continued to received official U.S. government publications from the Library of Congress. The Defense Department had done an exhaustive study on the effects of nuclear war, outlining different scenarios for atomic annihilation. There were vivid descriptions of what would happen to a medium-sized city like Havana, with a population of nearly 2 million, depending on such variables as the size of weapon, height of burst, and prevailing winds. As Alzugaray read through the material, he felt a growing fatalism.

A 1-megaton bomb—similar to the warheads on the Soviet R-12 missile—would leave a crater about one thousand feet wide and two hundred feet deep if it exploded close to the surface. The explosion would destroy virtually everything within a 1.7-mile radius of the blast—office buildings, apartment blocks, factories, bridges, even highways. In the next five-mile rung out, the force of the blast would blow out walls and windows, leaving the bones of some buildings intact but a pile of debris in the streets. Hundreds of thousands of people living in central Havana would be killed instantly, most from blast injuries or falling debris. Tens of thousands more would die within hours from thermal radiation. Fires would rage across the rest of the city, as far as the outlying suburbs and the Soviet military headquarters at El Chico, twelve miles from the city center.

Alzugaray described the events that would follow a nuclear attack for his colleagues. A blinding flash. A mushroom cloud. Intense heat. Certain death. He then drafted the briefest report of his diplomatic career: “In the event that nuclear weapons are used in or near Havana City, it and we shall all be destroyed.” He had completed his assignment. There was nothing more to add.

In the streets around the Foreign Ministry, there were few signs of any civil defense preparations. The calmness with which Cubans went about their daily lives was difficult for foreigners to understand. Maurice Halperin, the American exile, had listened all week to radio broadcasts from Florida reporting the hoarding of food and preparations for evacuation of American cities. He wondered “what was wrong” with his fellow Havana residents, who paid little attention to the antiaircraft batteries on the Malecon, the sandbagged machine-gun nests in the streets, and the barbed wire along the shore. Nobody “seemed to notice or care that in the event of a bombardment, there would be nowhere to hide, no shelters stocked with medical supplies, and no trained personnel to take care of the wounded, put out fires, and bury the dead.”

On the fifth floor of the ministry, Alzugaray and other diplomats prepared to spend the night in their offices. They bedded down on top of their desks, exhausted by digging trenches, “without the prospect of certain death affecting our sleep in the very least.”

The stage was set for what Theodore Sorensen would later call “by far the worst day” of the Cuban missile crisis, a day that would come to be known around the White House as “Black Saturday.” After picking up speed following the president’s address to the nation on the evening of Monday, October 22, events were about to accelerate dramatically once again. The crisis was acquiring a logic and momentum of its own. Armies were mobilizing, planes and missiles were being placed on alert, generals were demanding action. The situation was changing minute by minute. The machinery of war was in motion. The world was hurtling toward a nuclear conflict.

The electronic warfare officers on board the USS Oxford sat hunched over their consoles in a cool, dimly lit room lined with recording equipment. It was a cloudy, starless night with moderate easterly winds. The night shift had just taken over. Two decks above their heads, a tall mast pulled down radar signals from hundreds of miles around. With headphones pressed to their ears, the intelligence gatherers strained to hear the telltale whoops and brrs of the radars associated with the Soviet air defense system. Until now, the radars had been largely silent, except for short tests. If the radar systems were switched on for any length of time, it would mean that Americans planes flying over Cuba were at serious risk of being shot down.

The intelligence gatherers on board the Oxford were cogs in a gigantic information-processing machine. The bits and pieces of data they managed to collect—a radar intercept, an overheard phone conversation, an overhead photograph—were sent to secretive bureaucratic agencies in Washington bearing acronyms like CIA, DIA, NSA, and NPIC. The data was sifted, interpreted, analyzed, and processed in eyes-only reports with code names like PSALM, ELITE, IRONBARK, and FUNNEL.

The Cold War was an intelligence war. There were times and places when it was waged in the open, as in Korea and later in Vietnam, but for the most part, it was fought in the shadows. Since it was impossible to destroy the enemy without risking a nuclear exchange, Cold War strategists attempted instead to discover his capabilities, to probe for weakness. Military superiority could be transformed into political and diplomatic advantage. Information was power.

Occasionally, an incident took place that provided a glimpse behind the shadows of the intelligence war, as when the Soviets shot down the U-2 piloted by Francis Gary Powers over Siberia in May 1960. As a result of the shootdown, and the subsequent interrogation of Powers by the Soviets, American photographic intelligence capabilities, known as “Photint,” were widely understood. But words like “Elint,” “Comint,” and “Sigint” remained jealously guarded national secrets. “Elint” was shorthand for “electronics intelligence,” primarily the study of radar signals. “Comint” was the acronym for “communications intelligence” “Sigint” signified the broader field of signals intelligence. In addition to the Oxford, listening posts for gathering Comint and Elint included the naval bases at Guantanamo and Key West and Air Force RB-47 planes that patrolled the periphery of Cuba recording radar signals, Morse code messages, pilot chatter, and microwave transmissions.

The last few weeks had been alternately exciting and frustrating for the hundred or so professional eavesdroppers aboard the Oxford, a converted World War II Liberty ship. From their regular operations area adjacent to Havana, they had helped map the SAM missile sites strung out along the coast and overheard Soviet fighter pilots sending messages in rudimentary Spanish with thick Russian accents. But their eavesdropping capabilities had been much reduced by an order the previous weekend to pull the ship out to the middle of the Florida Straits, at least forty miles from Cuba. The decision had been taken for security reasons. Except for a couple of Thompson submachine guns and a half-dozen M-1 rifles, the Oxford was practically defenseless. The United States could not risk her capture. A window into Cuban decision making shut down just as the crisis was heating up.