Michael Dobbs - One Minute to Midnight

The two Cuban exiles dispatched by the CIA to sabotage the Matahambre copper mine had been hiking back across the hills for three nights. They slept during the day so as not to attract attention. They were within sight of the mangrove swamps of Malas Aguas where they had hidden their catamaran. But every step was becoming more difficult for Miguel Orozco, the team leader. He was feverish and dizzy. The stabbing pain in his abdomen increased as he walked.

The two saboteurs were expecting to be exfiltrated from Cuba early the following day, Sunday. The plan called for them to radio a CIA ship waiting offshore, retrieve the catamaran from its hiding place, and use the almost noiseless electric engine to reach the rendezvous point. If there was a problem on either side, they would make further attempts to meet up on Monday and Tuesday. They had no idea what had happened in Matahambre. The sound of controlled explosions from the area led them to believe the mission had been successful.

Pedro Vera did everything he could to help his friend, carrying most of the equipment and offering him a hand over rocks and fallen trees. He thought Miguel might be suffering from stomach flu or an intestinal problem, possibly caused by something they had drunk or eaten. But they had brought most of their own water with them, and had used pills to purify the water they collected along the way from running streams. As they trudged on, with his friend in more and more pain, he wondered if it might be appendicitis.

What neither man knew at the time was that the CIA, on instructions from Bobby Kennedy, had ordered a halt to all infiltration and exfiltration operations of Cuban agents.

It was nearly midday on the other side of the Atlantic, in London, where protesters were gathering in Trafalgar Square for a big anti-American demonstration. A few hundred yards away, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was meeting with his defense chiefs at Admiralty House, his temporary residence while 10 Downing Street was being renovated. Chants of “Hands off Cuba” and “Up Fidel, Kennedy to hell” floated down Whitehall as the British officials discussed how to help their American ally.

The events of the past week had seriously rattled Macmillan, who prided himself on his coolness in a crisis. As a schoolboy at Eton, he had learned never to show much emotion. He was the master of the stiff upper lip, the arched eyebrow, the languid upper-class drawl. He had reacted with aristocratic disdain when Khrushchev interrupted a speech he was making to the UN General Assembly in September 1960. Angered by criticism of Soviet foreign policy, Khrushchev pounded his desk with his fists, waved his arms in the air, and started shouting something in Russian. “I’d like that translated, please, if you will,” was Macmillan’s only comment.

As the Cuban crisis wore on, the prime minister began feeling the strain as never before. He had to tread a careful line between his desire to support Kennedy and the skepticism felt by many British politicians and intelligence experts about the Cuban “threat.” Europeans had learned to live with Soviet nuclear weapons in their backyard and it was difficult to understand why Americans should not do the same. From the British point of view, West Berlin was a much more valuable strategic asset than Cuba. Some British analysts even questioned the photographic evidence “proving” the existence of Soviet missiles in Cuba. To counter such skepticism, the U.S. Embassy in London released some of the photos to the British press before they were distributed in Washington. American reporters were outraged at being scooped.

Macmillan continued to display his trademark calm in public, but betrayed his emotion behind the scenes. The U.S. ambassador to Great Britain, David Bruce, reported dryly to Washington that he thought he detected “a slight oscillation in one wing” of the famously unflappable prime minister. He advised Kennedy to ignore the “caterwauling” and not pay too much attention to the qualms expressed by his British allies when America’s “most vital interests” were at stake. “Only stupid giants let themselves be tied down by Lilliputians,” he cabled.

Kennedy went out of his way to show the British that he took them seriously. He telephoned Macmillan almost every day. The British ambassador to Washington, David Ormsby-Gore, occupied a special position in the court of Camelot. He had been friends with Jack since the days when Joseph Kennedy, Sr., served in London as U.S. ambassador. The president treated Ormsby-Gore as an informal adviser, to the annoyance of other allies, particularly the French. It was rumored in Washington that two beautiful young women seen frequently in the company of the French ambassador were “plants” whose true mission was to “get close to Jack” and neutralize the schemings of perfide Albion.

Macmillan had spoken with Kennedy the previous evening from Admiralty House. He urged Kennedy to compromise with Khrushchev. Laying the groundwork for a possible grand bargain with Moscow, he offered to “immobilize” sixty Thor missiles stationed in Britain. The intermediate-range Thors were under joint British-American control: the British had formal ownership of the missiles while the Americans were responsible for the 1.4-megaton nuclear warheads. The president promised to put Macmillan’s idea into the bureaucratic “machinery.” He later sent a message saying such a deal was premature. He would keep the British proposal in reserve in case all else failed.

In the meantime, Macmillan quietly authorized an increase in British readiness levels. He ordered his defense chiefs to place the Thor missiles and Britain’s own Vulcan nuclear bombers on fifteen-minute alert.

“Berlin is the testicles of the West,” Nikita Khrushchev liked to say. “Every time I want to make the West scream, I squeeze on Berlin.”

Finding a suitable squeeze point was not very difficult. West Berlin was a virtually defenseless capitalist bastion of 2 million people more than one hundred miles inside Communist East Germany. The city was connected to West Germany by thirteen negotiated access routes, any one of which could be severed in minutes by overwhelmingly superior Soviet forces. The access routes included four Autobahns, four railway lines, the Elbe River, a canal, and three air corridors, each of them twenty miles wide. The air corridors had been a lifeline in 1948 after Stalin cut the overland connections. The Western Allies ferried in supplies by air for 462 consecutive days. At the height of the blockade, one Allied transport plane landed in Berlin’s Tempelhof airport every minute.

Both Kennedy and Khrushchev considered Berlin “the most dangerous spot in the world.” They had been sparring over the city ever since Kennedy’s election as president. The status quo was unacceptable to the Soviets: hundreds of East German refugees were crossing the border every day. At the Vienna summit in June 1961, the Soviet leader threatened to sign a peace treaty with East Germany and eliminate Allied rights to West Berlin. Two months later, he chose a different option, erecting a 104-mile-long “anti-Fascist defense barrier,” more commonly known in the West as the Berlin Wall. But tensions continued. On October 26, 1961, American and Soviet tanks had faced each other directly at Checkpoint Charlie in a two-day standoff. It was the first direct American-Soviet confrontation of the nuclear age, with “soldiers and weapons eyeball to eyeball.”

The fate of Berlin had been on the minds of the president and his advisers from the moment they first learned about the presence of Soviet missiles on Cuba. “I am beginning to wonder whether maybe Mr. Khrushchev is entirely rational about Berlin,” Dean Rusk told his colleagues during the first session of the ExComm, on October 16. “They may be thinking that they can either bargain Berlin and Cuba against each other, or that they could provoke us into a kind of action in Cuba which would give an umbrella for them to take action with respect to Berlin.”