t was one minute before high noon on Oct. 27,1962, the air-defense tracking network. But there was little they could day that later became known as "Black Saturday" More do with this information: The ability to "read the mail" than 100,000 American troops were preparing to invade of Russian air defenses was a closely guarded Cold War Cuba to topple Fidel Castro's communist regime and secret. Pentagon records show that Defense Secretary Robert destroy dozens of Soviet intermediate- and medium-range McNamara was not informed about tbe missing U-2 until ballistic missiles thought to be aimed at targets in the 1:41 p.m., 101 minutes after Maultsby first penetrated Soviet IUnited States. American reconnai.ssance aircraft were drawing airspace. He briefed President Jobn E Kennedy by phone enemy fire. The U.S. Strategic Air Command's missiles and four minutes later. manned bombers bad been ordered to DEECON-2, one step "There's always some sonofabitch who doesn't get the word," short of nuclear war. In the Caribbean, U.S. Navy destroyers was Kennedy's frustrated response. were playing a cat-and-mouse game with Russian submarines At 2:03 p.m. came news that another U-2, piloted by Major armed with nuclear-tipped torpedoes. Rudolf Anderson Jr., was missing while on an intelligence- And then, at 11:59 a.m., a U-2 spy plane piloted by Captain gathering mission over eastern Cuba. Evidence soon emerged Charles W. Maultsby unwittingly penetrated Soviet airspace it had been shot down by a Russian surface-to-air missile in a desolate region of the Chukot Peninsula opposite Alaska. near the town of Banes. Anderson was presumed dead. Flying at an altitude of 70,000 feet, the 11-year Air Force Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called the Cuban Missile veteran was oblivious to the drama below. He bad been Crisis "the most dangerous moment in human history." Schol- on a routine mission to the North Pole, gathering radio- ars and politicians agree that for several days the world was active air samples from a Soviet nuclear test. Dazzled by tbe the closest it has ever come to nuclear Armageddon. aurora boreahs, he'd wandered off course, ending up over But the nature of the risks confronting Kennedy and the Soviet Union on the most perilous day of the Cold War. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev have been widely mis- THE END WAS NEAR NEW INFORMATION ABOUT THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS SHOWS JUST HOW CLOSE WE CAME TO NUCLEAR ARMAGEDDON BY MICHAEL DOBBS He was completely unaware the Soviets had scrambled understood. Eor decades, the incident was taught in war MiG figbters to intercept him, and not until he heard bala- colleges and graduate schools as a case study in the art laika music over bis radio did he finally figure out where of "crisis management." A young American president went he was. "eyeball to eyeball" with a Russian chairman and forced A former member of tbe Air Force's Tbunderbirds fligbt- him to back down through a skillful blend of diplomacy demonstration team, Maultsby bad enough fuel in his and force. Accorditig to Scblesinger, Kennedy "dazzled the tank for nine hours and 40 minutes of flight. That was world" through "a combination of toughness and restraint, sufficient for a 4,000-mile round trip between Fairbanks' of will, nerve and wisdom, so brilliantly controlled, so Eielson Air Force Base and tbe Nortb Pole, but not enough matchlessly calibrated." for a 1,000-mile detour over Siberia. At 1:28 p.m. Washing- Tbanks to newly opened archives and interviews with ton time, Maultsby shut down his single Pratt & Whitney key participants in the United States, Russia and Cuha, it is J57 engine and entrusted his fate to his U-2's extraordinary now possible to separate the mytb from the reality. The real gliding capabilities. The Air Force's Alaskan Air Command risks of war in October 1962 arose not from the "eyeball-to- sent up two F-102 figbters to guide bim back across tbe eyeball" confrontation between Kennedy and Khrushchev, Bering Strait and prevent any penetration of American but from "sonofabitcb" moments exemphfied by Maultsby airspace by the Russian MiGs. Because of the heightened and his wandering U-2. alert, the F-102s were armed with nuclear-tipped air-to-air The pampered son of the Boston millionaire and the o missiles, sufficient firepower to destroy an entire fleet of scion of Russian peasants had more in cominon than they incoming Soviet bombers. imagined. Having experienced World War II, both were On the ground, SAC commanders were frantically trying horrified hy the prospect of a nuclear apocalypse. But neither to retrieve their wayward reconnaissance plane. They knew leader was fully in command of his own mihtary machine. Maultsby's location, as they had tapped into the Soviet As the crisis lurched to a climax on Black Saturday, events \ MILITARY HISTORY Photographed from a low-flying U.S. Navy patrol aircraft in November 1962, the Soviet freighter Anosov carries tarpaulin-shrouded ballistic missiles on her fore and aft decks. threatened to spin out of control. Unable to effectively A full-scale invasion of the island would follow within communicate with each other, the two leaders struggled seven days. Marine units and the Army's 1st Annored Divi- to rein in the chaotic forces of history they themselves sion would hit the beaches east and west of Havana, along a had unleashed. 40-mile front, in an operation modeled after the ]uno 1Q44 D-Day landings in France. he countdown to Armageddon began on October 16, It is impossible to tell what would have happened had when Kennedy learned that Khrushchev had broken Kennedy accepted the advice of Air Force General Curtis This promise not to deploy "offensive weapons" in LeMay and the other joint chiefs. But several things are Cuba—a U-2, piloted by Major Richard Heyser, had flown certain. The risks of a nuclear conflagration were extraor- over the island two days earlier and taken photographs dinarily high. And the full scope of the danger was not of intermediate-range Soviet missiles near the town of understood in Washington, Moscow or Havana. None of San Cristóbal. Kennedy branded the mercurial Russian the main protagonists—Kennedy, Khrushchev or Castro— leader "an immoral gangster," but the Americati presi- had tnore than a very limited knowledge of events unfolding on a global battlefield that stretched from the Florida Straits to the Bering Sea. In sotne ways. World War III had already begun—aircraft were taking fire, missiles were being readied for launch and warships were forcing potentially hostile subtnarines to surface. As Black Sattirday dawned, Castro wrote Moscow of his conviction that an American attack on the island was "almost inevitable" and would take place in the next 24 to 72 hours. Unbeknownst to Kennedy, the Cuban leader had visited the Soviet embassy in Havana at 3 a.m. and petined an anguished telegram to Kbrushchev. If the "itnperialists" invaded Cuba, Castro declared, the Soviet Union should undertake a pre-emptive nuclear strike on the United States. In the meantime, he ordered his anti-aircraft defenses to begin firing on low-flying American reconnaissance planes. Castro declared that he and his comrades were "ready to die in the defense of our country" rather than submit to a Yanqui occupation. The Soviet cotnmander in Cuba, General Issa Pliyev, was also preparing for war. On his orders, a convoy of trucks carrying nuclear warheads moved out of the central storage depot at Bejucal, south of Havana, around mid- night. By early afternoon, the convoy had reached the Sagua la Grande missile site in central Cuba, tnaking it possible for the Soviets to lob eight 1-megaton missiles Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and American President John F. Kennedy at the United States. Pliyev also ordered the arming of share a light moment after a meeting at the U.S. Embassy in Vienna, shorter-range tactical nuclear missiles to counter a U.S. in- Austria, in June 1961. Just over a year later, the men, both veterans of vasion of Cuba. By àawn a battery of cruise missiles tipped World War II, would bring the world to the brink of all-out nuclear war. witb 14-kiloton warheads had targeted the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay from an advance position just dent bore some responsibility for bringing about the crisis. 15 miles away. His bellicose, but ultimately ineffective, attempts to get Kennedy was blissfully unaware of the nature of the rid of Castro had provoked Khrushchev into taking dras- threat facing U.S. forces poised to invade Cuba. Oti October tic action to "save socialism" in Cuba. Kennedy imposed 23, the CIA estimated that the Soviets had between 8,000 a military quarantine on the island and demanded the and 10,000 military "advisers" in Cuba, up from an earlier Soviets withdraw their missiles. estimate of 4,000 to 5,000. We now know that the actual By October 27—tbe 12th day of the crisis—the two super- Soviet troop strength on Black Saturday was 42,822, a figure powers were on the brink of war. The CIA reported that that included heavily armed combat units. Furthermore, morning that five of the six Soviet R-12 missile sites were CSI these troops were equipped with tactical nuclear weapons ae. "fully operational." All that remained was for the warheads intended to hurl an invading force back into the sea. Mc- LU to be mated to the missiles. Time was obviously running out.