60 YEARS AGO TODAY

The ExComm meeting of October 27

The most dangerous 24 hours of the Cuban Missile Crisis happened 60 years ago today, October 27, 1962.

It was the closest to nuclear holocaust the Cold War ever got.

It was a day of rapid escalation that convinced both John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev to strike the deal that would stop events from further spiraling out of control.

Both sides believed that the U.S. was moving closer to attacking Cuba, while nuclear-armed flashpoints erupted over Siberia, at the quarantine line, and in Cuba itself.

The crisis began with the shooting down by Soviet forces of the U-2 flown by Major Rudolf Anderson, the 4080th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing’s top U-2 pilot. Anderson was on his sixth mission over Cuba in the U-2F “Dragon Lady” and had taken off from McCoy Air Force Base in Orlando, Florida. He was shot down by one of two Soviet-supplied S-75 Dvina (NATO designation SA-2 Guideline) surface-to-air missiles fired at the U-2 high over Banes, Cuba. Anderson was killed when fragmentation from the exploding proximity warhead punctured his pressure suit, causing it to decompress at high altitude.

Major Rudolph Anderson

Soviet generals Gorbuz and Grechko in Havana ordered the Soviet-manned unit at the Banes Surface-to-Air Missile Site to shoot the U-2. The SA-2 had been the missile that shot down Francis Gary Powers’ U-2 over Sverdlovsk in May 1960. Soviet forces had killed an American officer; both sides knew it.

Lockheed U2 spyplane

And through all this, no one in Washington knew that the Soviet commander in Cuba had ten tactical nuclear weapons and complete authorized personal authority to deploy them on his own decision in the face of “oncoming events.”

The morning began with the receipt at the Kremlin at 0900 hours Moscow time of an urgent message from the Soviet commander in Cuba, informing the Soviets that a U.S. attack, presaging an invasion, was imminent within 24-72 hours.

The Soviet ambassador in Havana, Aleksandr Alekseyev, was meeting with Fidel Castro at the Soviet embassy through the early hours of the morning, while Castro dictated and revised a message to Khrushchev.

In it, Castro assumed an American wipe-out of Cuba and recommended a Soviet preemptive strike on the U.S. before the U.S. could do the same to the USSR.

Castro had already ordered his anti-aircraft crews to fire on U.S. low-level reconnaissance planes, a fateful order that would raise the nuclear stakes later that day.

The Join Chiefs met at 1000 hours Washington time, to hear a briefing from their intelligence officers that should have cautioned them that “modern equipment” and “surface to surface missiles” were among the Soviet deployment. Instead, Air Force chief of staff Curtis LeMay recommended taking the latest intelligence into account, and again recommending execution of full-scale air strikes followed by OPLAN 316, the invasion.

At 1341 hours, the Chiefs learned a U-2 on an air-sampling mission over the North Pole collecting residue from Soviet atomic tests was “lost off Alaska.” Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara rushed out to inform Secretary of State Dean Rusk “at once.”

Despite the Air Force keeping the reports classified for 60 years, it’s now known that U-2 pilot Charles “Chuck” Maultsby went off course by human error, blinded by the aurora borealis and hampered by a compass malfunction near the Pole and that Soviet fighters scrambled to intercept the U-2, which was in Soviet airspace over Siberia.

The U.S. was able to track both Maultsby and the MIGs attempting to shoot him through intercepted Soviet air defense traffic, but were unable to share this information with the pilot, as the U.S. eavesdropping capabilities were a closely guarded national secret (this would become a big problem three years later over North Vietnam). Navigators guided Maultsby out of Soviet air space by ordering him to turn left until he could see Orion's Belt off his right wingtip. With the constellation observable to his south, Maultsby would be flying westwards, toward Alaska.

It was only reported in 1993 that the two F-102A fighters scrambled from Galena AFB in Alaska to protect Maultsby each carried nuclear-tipped Falcon missiles rather than their conventional arms. The alert level had risen to DEFCON 2; the air-to-air nukes were for taking out incoming Soviet bombers. Thankfully, the F-102s did not catch up to the MIGs before Maultsby, out of fuel, glided his U-2 to a landing in Alaska.

When informed of the incident, President Kennedy exclaimed, “There’s always some sonofabitch who doesn’t get the word.” There was no word to be gotten; the mission was SOP. It was only afterwards that Namara canceled these provocative air-sampling flights.

SOP had also been the word of the day while the US and USSR conducted their scheduled atmospheric nuclear tests this day. The U.S. test, codenamed Calamity in the Dominic series, airdropped an 800-kiloton device at Johnston Island in the Pacific. The Soviet test, codenamed 192, dropped a 260-kiloton device at Novaya Zemlya. It was so SOP that neither White House nor Presidium records took notice.

At 1403 hours, the top Pentagon reconnaissance analyst, Col. Ralph Steakley, came in to tell the Chiefs that Anderson’s U-2 flight was overdue. By 1800 hours, they had a signals intercept that the Cubans had recovered Anderson’s body and the wreckage from the shootdown.

RF-101A lands back in Florida after Cuban recon.

Debriefing of the pilots from the low-level RF-8A Crusader and RF-101 Voodoo flights flown that day showed all but two had been fired on over Cuba.

The Anderson shootdown stunned both the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

Khrushchev quickly realized his orders restraining any use of tactical or strategic nuclear weapons in conditions of perceived attack like the U-2 overflight were useless; he couldn’t control his local commanders.

On the U.S. side, the ExComm (Executive Committee - the senior US leaders) mistakenly saw the U-2 shootdown as clear escalation by Moscow. Fortunately the Joint Chiefs decided against any immediate retaliation, despite Chairman General Maxwell Taylor reminding them they had earlier insisted on taking out a SAM site that shot at U.S. planes.

Now, the Chiefs wanted to wait and launch a full invasion as soon as possible. Army chief of staff Earle Wheeler even remarked gloomily, “Khrushchev may loose one of his missiles on us.”

JFK (r) speaks to LeMay (2nd from r)

At 1830 hours, JCS Chairman Taylor, briefed the Joint Chiefs on the White House discussions that day. “CJCS says President has been seized with the idea of trading Turkish for Cuban missiles: he seems to be the only one in favor of it. The President has a feeling that time is running out.”

Unknown to the Chiefs, from 1659 to 1733 hours the destroyer USS Beale and its anti-submarine cohort around the aircraft carrier USS Randolph were dropping hand grenades on a surfaced Soviet submarine at the quarantine line. The Beale’s deck officer, then-Lt. John W. Peterson, described the “signaling” process in 2002, that his crew was frustrated that dropping signal grenades above the sonar contacts amounted to just “firecrackers;” they then wrapped the grenades in toilet paper tubes that only disintegrated hundreds of feet underwater, thus exploding right next to the targeted submarine.

Soviet submarine B-59

Soviet Navy Valentin Savitsky, commander of the submarine B-59, went up to the conning tower with Captain Second Class Vasily Arkhipov, Chief of Staff of the 69th Submarine Brigade. According to Arkhipov, Savitsky was shocked and blinded by the unexpected actions of U.S. antisubmarine warfare ships and planes that Arkhipov described as “overflights by planes just 20-30 meters above the submarine’s conning tower, use of powerful searchlights, fire from automatic cannons over 300 shells, dropping depth charges, cutting in front of the submarine by destroyers at a dangerous distance, aiming guns at the submarine, yelling from loudspeakers to stop engines." Savitsky could have ordered an emergency dive and, thinking that he was under attack, used his nuclear weapon against the attacker.

Savitsky panicked, ordered an “urgent dive” and preparation of torpedo #1 (with the nuclear warhead). He was unable to descend the narrow stairway of the conning tower, which was temporarily blocked by the signaling officer and his equipment. Arkhipov, who was still on the tower, saw the Americans were actually signaling, not attacking. He called Savitsky back and calmed him down; his order was never transmitted to the officer in charge of the torpedo, and the B-59 signaled back to the Americans to cease all provocative actions. The situation was defused.

The nearest target for the B-59’s nuclear torpedo would have been the Randolph, an Essex-class ship with a complement of 3,400 sailors and marines. Nuclear depth charges were the standard operating procedure response to such an attack, and their components were close by, on the Essex and at Guantanamo.

Also unknown to the Joint Chiefs were the movements of Soviet nuclear warheads in Cuba. U.S. intelligence never detected those warheads during the crisis. According to Soviet documents, including the after-action report by the warheads’ commander, Col. Beloborodov, the warheads were transported to the missile sites and to the tactical launchers on October 26 and were ready for use on October 27.

According to the account by Michael Dobbs in One Minute to Midnight, one of those nuclear warheads tipped an FKR cruise missile that was deployed just 15 miles from Guantanamo Bay naval base, which would have become a smoking radiating ruin if U.S. invasion plans had proceeded.

Soviet FKR cruise missile in Cuba

The Joint Chiefs were also unaware of the human factor among their own forces that raised the risks considerably on that day.

At Malmstrom AFB in Montana, Strategic Air Command officers jury-rigged the launch system on a Minuteman ICBM, bypassing normal procedure to give themselves independent launch authority on October 27.

At 1500 hours Washington time, the 873rd Tactical Missile Squadron on Okinawa received launch orders for their cruise missiles, each with a 1.1 megaton nuclear warhead,, The unit CO, Air Force Captain William Bassett, questioned the command since DEFCON 1 had not been ddclared. When he opened the Top Secret envelope, three of his four targets were in China, which had nothing to do with the missile crisis, as far as he knew, so he pressed higher-ups to stand down.

At 1940 hours, the Joint Chiefs got their last intelligence briefing of the day: The “photography [sic] from today’s missions show that the canvas is off the launchers, that the missiles are on the launchers, and that a reload capability is ready.”

All of the Soviet medium-range ballistic missiles were operational.

Within 15 minutes of this briefing, President Kennedy’s brother Bobby, the Attorney General, hosted Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin at the Justice Department to work out a negotiated solution to the missile crisis.

The conversation, as recorded in Dobrynin’s detailed cable to Moscow, ranged from sticks to carrots. On the threat side was RFK’s warning that the sites in Cuba would be bombed, “There are many unreasonable heads among the generals, and not only among the generals, who are ‘itching for a fight.’”

On the incentive side were assurances against any invasion of Cuba, and the removal of Jupiter missiles from Turkey within a few months. RFK told Dobrynin, “time is of the essence and we shouldn’t miss the chance.”

The Jupiter IRBM that was removed from Turkey in exchange for Soviet removal of missiles from Cuba.

Thanks for reading That’s Another Fine Mess. Please consider supporting this work with a paid subscription. It’s cheap - only $7/month of $70/years, a bargain that saves you $14.

Comments are for the paid subscribers.