Chapter 5

The Cuban Missile Crisis

The military, not just the CIA, misled Kennedy, and he did not forget that “those sons-of-bitches with all the fruit salad just sat there nodding, saying it would work”. In an attempt to end the collusion between the Pentagon and the CIA, and the power granted the CIA to initiate military operations, Kennedy signed a National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM-55) establishing“the Joint Chiefs of Staff as my only military advisers […]. I expect their advice to come to me direct and unfiltered”. A year later, March 13th 1962, advice came from General Lyman Lemnitzer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, under the name Operation Northwood. It was a false flag operation designed to orchestrate acasus belli against Cuba. The project consisted of a wave of terrorist acts falsely attributed to Cuba and the explosion of a plane supposed of carrying vacationing American students over Cuban waters. The explosion would have been preceded by distress radio communications indicating an attack by a Cuban fighter. The actual passengers would be secretly transferred to another plane, and a state funeral would be held in their remembrance. Below is an excerpt of the project, after the copy kept by McNamara, declassified in 1997:

3. A ‘Remember the Maine’ incident could be arranged in several forms : We could blow up a US ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba. We could blow up a drone (unmanned) vessel anywhere in the Cuban waters. We could arrange to cause such incident in the vicinity of Havana or Santiago as a spectacular result of Cuban attack from the air or sea, or both. The presence of Cuban planes or ships merely investigating the intent of the vessel could be fairly compelling evidence that the ship was taken under attack. The nearness to Havana or Santiago would add credibility especially to those people that might have heard the blast or have seen the fire. The US could follow up with an air/sea rescue operation covered by US fighters to ‘evacuate’ remaining members of the non-existent crew. Casualty lists in US newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation.
4. We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington. The terror campaign could be pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the United States. We could sink a boatload of Cubans enroute to Florida (real of simulated). We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized. Exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots, the arrest of Cuban agents and the release of prepared documents substantiating Cuban involvement also would be helpful in projecting the idea of an irresponsible government”.

Horrified, Kennedy rejected the plan. But a month later, on April 10th1962, General Lemnitzerreturned with amemorandum on behalf of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,recommending “a national policy of early military intervention in Cuba […] to overthrow the present communist regime”. “The Joint Chiefs”, specifies the document, “believe that the intervention can be accomplished rapidly enough to minimize communist opportunities for solicitation of UN action”.Kennedy responded by dismissing General Lemnitzer, and placing Maxwell Taylor at the head of the Joint Chiefs. It was, however a change with little effect: all the generals shared the belief that they had already entered into the Third World War, and in the war, according to the famous words of General McArthur, “there is no substitute for victory”. The President failed to reform their perspective. According to his Special Assistant Arthur Schlesinger, Kennedy feared the Pentagon more than the Kremlin because he knew that if nuclear war broke out, it would be by his own camp. He tried to listen patiently to these high-ranking officials, but he sometimes would leave meetings of the National Security Council, sickened by their impatience to trigger nuclear Apocalypse. “These people are crazy!” he shouted as he left one of these meetings, according to his Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric.“The first advice I’m going to give my successor”, he confided to his friend and journalist Ben Bradlee, “is to watch the generals and to avoid feeling that just because they are military men, their opinions on military matters are worth a damn”. For their part, the generals despised Kennedy and the young Washington generation, and they believed that the country's security rested squarely on their shoulders.

It was during the Cuban missile crisis that the tension reached its peak. The failed invasion of the Bay of Pigs had convinced Fidel Castro to officially declare Cuba communist and place his country under the protection of the Soviet Union. In October 1962, the CIA’s U-2 spy planes flying over Cuba reportedthe installation of Soviet nuclear warheads pointed at the United States. During a meeting of the National Security Council that lasted 13 straight days, Kennedy resisted the vehement requests foran air attack against the launch sites by his generals and the Head of the Air Force Curtis LeMay, an attack that could not destroy all missiles before they could be launched, and would amount to a declaration of war against the Soviet Union. Kennedy simplyenforced “a strict quarantine on all offensive military equipment under shipment to Cuba”, and instructed his brother Robert to enter into negotiations with the Soviet Commander in Chief Nikita Khrushchev through the ambassador to Washington Anatoly Dobrynin. According to the account given by Khrushchev in his memoirs, Robert Kennedy's message was: “If the situation continues much longer, the President is not sure that the military will not overthrow him and seize power. […] The situation might get out of control, with irreversible consequences. […] I don’t know how much longer we can hold out against our generals”:Khrushchev would reply to his Foreign Affairs Minister Andri Gromyko, “We have to let Kennedy know that we want to help him… Yes, help. We now have a common cause, to save the world from those pushing us toward war”. Kennedy and Khrushchev would emerge from the crisis with a secret agreement in which Kennedy promised not to invade Cuba and to dismantle the American missiles in Turkey, in exchange for the withdrawal of Soviet missiles in Cuba.

Kennedy had thus deprived the Joint Chiefs a historic opportunity to engage with communist powers. The generals, however, did not relent. A month later, on November 20th 1962, they gave Defense Secretary Robert McNamara a memorandum advocating an increase in nuclear weapons armaments in order to tip the balance between the two powers and grant the ability to strike the USSR with a surprise attack so devastating, that the risk of retaliation be sufficiently low: “The Joint Chiefs of Staff consider that a first-strike capability is both feasible and desirable”. It was an obsession: July 20th 1961 during a meeting of the National Security Council, the generals had presented to Kennedy, a plan for a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union “in late 1963, preceded by a period of heightened tensions”. On this occasion, after raising questions about the expected casualties, the Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatrick reports that, “Kennedy got up and walked right out in the middle of it”, directing at his Secretary of State Dean Rusk, “and we call ourselves the human race”.

In avoiding disaster the two Heads of State were brought closer; Khrushchev sent Kennedy a private letter in which he expressed his hope that, in the eight years of Kennedy’s presidency, “[they] could create good conditions for peaceful coexistence on earth and this would be highly appreciated by the peoples of [their] countries as well as by all other peoples”. This was the second letter of their back-channel correspondence, which would include a total of 21. The first was written by Khrushchev during the Berlin Crisis, September 29th1961: wrapped in newspaper and discreetly handed to Kennedy’s Press Secretary Pierre Salinger by Georgi Bolshakov, the KGB agent close to Khrushchev operating under the cover of a press editor.Kennedy responded positively to the offer of Khrushchev to bypass their respective bureaucracies “for a personal, informal but meaningful exchange of views” that, “must be kept wholly private, not be hinted at in public statements, much less disclosed to the press”. Through such secret dialogues, the two men worked cooperatively to avoid catastrophe. “One of the ironic things about this entire situation”, Kennedy commented to journalist Norman Cousins, “is that Mr. Krushchev and I occupy approximately the same political positions inside our governments. He would like to prevent a nuclear war but is under severe pressure from his hard-line crowd, which interprets every move in that direction as appeasement. I’ve got similar problems”.

It should be remembered that Nikita Khrushchev was not only Stalin's successor, he was the architect of the “de-Stalinization” taking place in the USSR. His “secret” communicationsdenouncing Stalin’s crimes to the Communist Party Congress in 1956 brought a breath of hope to the West when published by the New York Times, and his policy of détente had begun to loosen the grip of repression in the satellite countries. Given their secret correspondence, there is little doubt that if Kennedy had lived and had been reelected in 1964, he and Khrushchev would have normalized relations between their governments and put an end to the Cold War in the 1960s. Kennedy’s friend Bill Walton remembers that on November 19th 1963, after signing the first treaty limiting nuclear testing, Kennedy told him that,“he intended to be the first U.S. President to visit the Kremlin, as soon as he and Khrushchev reached another arms control agreement”.He died three days later.

Johnson never responded to Khrushchev’s repeated requests for exchange, whowould soon be plagued by problems from his own camp, later to be overthrown by a bloodless coup in September 1964 and placed under house arrest. Forced to sidelines throughout the Vietnam War and watching the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Khrushchev was disgusted, lamenting: “What kind of socialism is it when you have to keep people in chains?” Nikita Khrushchev died in 1971.

Next chapter

The only encounter between Kennedy and Khrushchev, in Vienna two months after the Bay of Pigs failed invasion, was ice-cold. But Khrushchev changed his opinion on Kennedy after the happy ending of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Khrushchev was despondent after the news of Kennedy’s death, the only time when his collaborators saw him cry.

The expression “Remember the Maine” refers to the explosion of the USS Maine “by a Spanish mine” in La Havane harbor on February 15th, 1898. It was hammered as a slogan in favor of U.S. intervention against Spain to gain control of its colony, under the false pretext of assisting the Cuban’s struggle for freedom. When the USS Maine was refloated in 1910, its hull was found to have exploded from inside. As no officer was on board on that fatal day, some smell a false flag attack.

“Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country” (Hermann Goering at the Nuremberg Trials).

Eisenhower had attempted to initiate détente with the Soviet Union, intending then to reduce drastically the Defense budget before leaving office. Two days before his Peace Summit with Khrushchev on May 16th, 1960, the CIA managed to have one of its spy plane U-2 shot in Soviet airspace. Tensions immediately heightened and the Congress voted an increase in military budget. When Kennedy, then campaigning for the primaries, was asked by a journalist, “What would you have done when the U-2 plane was shot down over Russia? What message would you have sent to Chairman Khrushchev?” Kennedy answered, to the journalist’s surprise: “I would have apologized”.