Blowback - S2 Episode 7 - "Anadyr"

Episode Date: August 16, 2021

Fearing another American invasion — "the big one" — Soviet and Cuban leaders plot a secret response. Camelot never sees it coming.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

In October of 1999, the Pentagon declassified, for the first time, the locations of nuclear weapons it possessed outside of the United States. It revealed, in the words of nuclear arms expert Robert Norris, quote, a huge expanse of nuclear weapons around the globe. Although the Pentagon only named nine locations in its unclassified documents, independent researchers were able to figure out that American nuclear weapons had been stationed in Canada, Greenland, Japan, Morocco, Taiwan, the Philippines, and the Marshall Islands. But there was one revelation from the Pentagon in 2000 that really sticks out. It turns out that the U.S. had secretly placed nuclear material in Puerto Rico in 1956, less than 200 miles away from Cuba. In fact, at the time of this so-called

Cuban Missile Crisis in fall of 1962, there were American nuclear assemblies on Cuban soil in Guantanamo Bay. The only thing missing was plutonium, just a flight or boat ride away from Florida. son. Sweet love this loss, son. Welcome to blowback. I'm Noah Colwyn.

I'm Brendan James. And this is episode seven, Anadir. So, if you're still with us, in the last episode, we talked about the fallout from the Bay of Pigs. We looked at how JFK

quickly convened a group of top advisors to figure out what went wrong. And more importantly, how to make sure they could topple Castro right next time. We discussed Ed Lansdale and the birth of Operation Mankus, a multi-agency effort to undo the Cuban

revolution overseen by JFK's enforcer, his little brother, Attorney General Bobby. And we talked about how America's espionage and economic warfare led both Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro to understand that, rather than giving up after the Bay of Pigs, the Americans were fully committed to undoing the Cuban Revolution. What remained an open question is what the Soviets and the Cubans would do about it. And one answer to that, what they could do, can be found in an unlikely source. At an August 62 meeting of Bobby Kennedy's Get Castro Squad, the special group augmented, the chief of the CIA, John McCone, said this, quote,

If I were Khrushchev, I'd put offensive missiles in Cuba. Then I'd bang my shoe on the desk and say to the United States, how do you like looking down the end of a barrel of a gun for a change? Now let's talk about Berlin and any other subject that I choose, including all your overseas bases. McCone was, of course, speaking hypothetically. He was, after all, the head of the CIA. But the logic he laid out there is exactly what made sense to Nikita Khrushchev in spring of 1962. I want you to go over this thing with me, inch by inch, bring it completely up to date, add or subtract the slightest change, even if it's something as small as the place in the

a hot dog stand. So let's snap back to 1962, springtime, around where we left off last episode. As we discussed, the Americans had kicked Cuba out of the Organization of American States, the OAS, in early 1962, and had implemented the Cuban trade embargo, the same sweeping trade restrictions that are largely in place today six decades later. Anti-Castro-Cuban exiles, the CIA, and the Kennedy administration didn't try to keep their goals a secret, even if parts of their plan were plausibly deniable. If anything, they telegraphed the world that the Cuban Revolution was marked for death. In his memoirs, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev

said as much, quote, although the counter-revolutionaries were defeated in the landing at the Bay of Pigs, you would have had to be completely unrealistic to think that everything had ended with that. That was only the beginning, even though it was an unsuccessful beginning. An unsuccessful effort arouses the desire to do it right a second time. With the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, a sudden uptick in U.S. military exercises in the Caribbean and an upcoming midterm election cycle, Khrushchev and Castro saw the big one,

a real U.S. invasion of Cuba without the pretense of plausible deniability as well on its way. It was in this context in spring of 1962 that Nikita Khrushchev came up with the idea to defend Cuba, and by extension the USSR, by offering to send nuclear missiles to the island. There are several accounts of when Khrushchev first proposed this plan. Anastas Mikoyan, the Soviet deputy minister who had sealed Cuba's first trade deal with the USSR in 1960,

says Khrushchev brought the idea up walking in his guard and outside Moscow. In a different account, that same April, Khrushchev was in the Crimea, with Defense Minister Marshal Rodion Malinowski, who pointed out the U.S. Jupiter missiles on the horizon, looking off toward the Jupyters, Khrushchev was said to be hit with inspiration. Khrushchev himself wrote in his memoirs that the idea occurred to him on a trip to Bulgaria in May of 1962. And here's Khrushchev in his own words. My mind was constantly preoccupied with the thought,

what will happen to Cuba? We're going to lose Cuba. That would have been a big blow to Marxist-Leninist doctrine and would have thrown us far back in Latin America. lowering our prestige there. How would people look at us after that? We had to think of something. But what? It was a highly complicated matter trying to find something you could use as an effective counter to the United States. Naturally, the following solution suggested itself. The United States had surrounded the Soviet Union with its military bases and placed its missiles all around our country.

We knew that the United States had missile bases in Turkey and Italy, not to mention West Germany. We granted the possibility that they also existed in other countries. The planes at those bases were within effective range of our vital industrial and governmental centers, and those planes were armed with atomic bombs. Couldn't we counter with the very same thing? It seemed to me that the possibility of Soviet nukes near the U.S. Might restrain the United States from military action against Cuba. If things worked out that way, it wouldn't be bad.

To some degree, a, quote, balance of fear, a formula used in the West, might be reached. They had surrounded us with military bases and kept our country under the constant threat of possible nuclear attack. But now, the Americans themselves would experience what such a situation feels like. As for us, we had already grown used to it. During the preceding half century, three major wars had been fought on our territory. World War I, the Russian Civil War, and World War II. But the United States had experienced no war on its territory for a long time. The United States had taken part in many wars and had grown rich from them,

shedding the blood of only a minimal number of its own people, while accumulating billions and robbing the whole world. Although the Jupiter missiles could have killed Khrushchev and everyone for miles around him where he was standing by the Black Sea, he had a bigger concern. In the not too distant future, those American Jupiters and Turkey would be replaced with longer-range missiles and nuclear submarines, which Khrushchev knew could allow the Americans to cover the entire Soviet Union in a nuclear blanket. Here's a further example of the nuclear anxiety hanging over the Soviets.

Around this same time, in March 1962, according to archives reviewed by Timothy Naftali and Alexander Fersenko, Soviet military intelligence received, reports from a well-placed source in the U.S. National Security bureaucracy. The headline, the U.S. had planned to launch a preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union the previous fall. According to this source, the USSR's nuclear tests that same fall deterred the U.S. from going through with the strike, convincing the U.S. that the Soviet nuclear capabilities were greater than previously thought. These reports were likely describing a plan,

a very real plan, drawn up by the U.S. military, during the aforementioned standoff over Berlin in 1961, a plan, indeed, to carry out a nuclear first strike on the Soviet Union. A plan once described as, quote, straight out of the Rand Corporation, straight out of Dr. Strangelove.

Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair must. But I do say no more than 10 to 20 million killed, tops, depending on the brakes. So Khrushchev is considering not only the obvious American nuclear aggression, the U.S. military bases all around the world, and the NATO occupation 50 miles into East Germany, in addition to all of this, the news coming out of the Caribbean, the clear U.S. military buildup and so forth, is not good. It is in this context that Khrushchev came up with the idea to offer the embattel. Cuban allies, Soviet nuclear missiles. Or, as he put it, in typical Khrushchevian fashion,

what about putting one of our hedgehogs down the Americans' pants? So in May of 1962, after his return from Bulgaria, Khrushchev presented his idea to send missiles to Cuba before the Soviet Presidium later that month. He emphasized that he wanted to keep the shipment and installation of the nukes secret, as the Americans had done on so many occasions before, with their own nuclear deployments, their U-2 spy flights, and so on. Khrushchev also emphasized the imminence of an American strike on Cuba and explained his plan as a response to the presence of American nuclear missiles on the Soviet Union's doorstep, the Jupiter menace, and NATO's control over West Berlin deep into East Germany

would finally have a proportionate response. One hell of a gamble by Timothy Naftali and Alexander Fersenko offers an account drawn from Soviet archives of how Khrushchev described the situation as he understood it, to the departing delegation of Soviet officials headed toward Cuba to make Castro the nuclear offer. Quote, an attack on Cuba is being prepared, Khrushchev said. The correlation of forces is unfavorable to us, and the only way to save Cuba is to put missiles there. End quote. Kennedy was a smart guy, Khrushchev argued, and he, quote, would not set off a thermonuclear war if there were our warheads there, just as they put their warheads on missiles in Turkey. The Soviet delegation that Khrushchev dispatched to Cuba arrived at the end of May, disguised as an agricultural mission.

In fact, it contained the USSR's head of missile forces and several nuclear ballistic specialists. Fidel Castro described the meeting in which the Soviets made the nuclear offer. Quote, a Soviet head of missile forces had been assigned the mission of proposing that the strategic missiles be installed in Cuba, and they may have been afraid that we wouldn't agree to it. We might have thought the missiles here could serve as grounds for criticism and campaign against the revolution. But we had no doubts when the idea of the missiles was broached. We thought they would help consolidate the defensive power of the entire socialist camp. And subsequently, they would mean our defense.

After this pitch from the Soviets, the Cubans huddled and accepted shortly thereafter. Castro added this, quote, I have never viewed missiles as things that might someday be used against the United States in an unjustified attack for a first strike. I remember that Khrushchev kept repeating that he would never launch a first nuclear strike. Indeed, unlike Eisenhower or Truman before him,

Khrushchev ruled out actually launching the nuclear missiles, saying, quote, not in any case would Soviet missiles in Cuba be used. He understood that Mutual Armageddon was a mug's game. which is important to keep in mind, considering how Khrushchev's and the Presidium's American counterparts will approach that same question later this episode. Every idiot can start a war, Khrushchev said, but it is impossible to win this war.

And by sending the missiles secretly, only revealing them and announcing a Cuban Soviet treaty in late November after the American midterm elections, Khrushchev said, he would have the leverage to plan to visit the U.S. and meet with Kennedy directly. In such a situation, he was sure that he would continue to have a, quote, intelligent rival like Kennedy, instead of whichever even more hawkish cold warrior

was likely to replace him in 1964 should he lose re-election. But one of Khrushchev's advisors, Anastas Mikhailan, from the very beginning, he said that Khrushchev's idea to send the missiles secretly was a mistake. After the Soviet delegation left Cuba, having secured their agreement to send the missiles, Khrushchev wrote to Castro. Quote, the realization of this agreement will mean a further fortification of the victory of the Cuban revolution and of the greater success of our general affairs. Naftali and Fersenko, right, Khrushchev admitted to Castro that it was not only the wish to protect Cuba, but also the attempt to improve the strategic position of the USSR that had motivated the Soviet proposal.

The letter, which was hand delivered the next day by the chief Soviet military representative in Cuba, Major General A.A. Dementiev, delighted Fidel, who expressed an eagerness to move ahead with preparations. Dementiev also recalls that Raul Castro, quote, hugged me and kissed me, expressing joy. While Nikita Khrushchev was brainstorming in the Crimea, CIA agent William Harvey, head of the Kill Castro task force, met in Miami with series regular Johnny Rassau. Recelli over drinks. Harvey, the minimalist, had winnowed down this assassination operation. No more Sam Giacana, no more Santo Traficante, no more Bob Mayhew and Howard Hughes.

The team was now just Tony Verona, Risselli, and the five poison pills that Harvey handed over. The plan was now for an associate of Tony Verona, one of America's hand-picked upstanding Cuban exiles, to poison not only Fidel, but if possible, also. his brother Raoul and Che Guevara. Harvey gave Verona access to a rental van, full of guns and explosives. But there was a ghost at the feast. Just as the FBI had stumbled upon the CIA mafia operation by way of the wiretap case in Vegas, we mentioned last episode, the FBI was closely watching Johnny Raselli and noticed his meeting with Harvey.

One bureau agent informed Harvey they'd have to report his meetings with the gangster to director Hoover, who, incidentally, had just gotten some leverage against JFK, having discovered that the president and Sam G. and Kana shared a romantic companion. All of these tangled wires, all this sloppiness, greatly disturbed William Harvey, who was only heading up this cursed Castro assignment to advance within the agency and move on to bigger and better things. Harvey was now convinced this whole operation was headed off the rails. The operation to send missiles to Cuba, was dubbed Operation Anadir. Unlike the CIA's and Richard Bissell's Operation Zapata at the Bay of Pigs, the planners and officers of Operation Anadir took its secrecy very seriously.

The deception, or Muskyrovka, started with the name, Operation Anadir. Anadir was a river in the Siberian north, not the kind of place you'd associate with Havana's beaches and palm trees. The general staff, whose liaison on this was Soviet defense Minister Rodion Malinovsky, delegated only five officers to oversee Anadir's planning to minimize any word of it leaking out. Soviet military leaders even told a detachment of soldiers to get ready to go somewhere north, where it would be cold. Between May and October, the organizers of Anadir communicated only directly with one another, as they slowly added the necessary people to round out their strategy. In November, it was decided, Cuba and the Soviet Union would

reveal the nuclear weapons to the world. According to a CIA history, The Soviet missiles were sent from eight different ports, four in the North Atlantic and four on the Black Sea, and the cargo was loaded in the dark of night. The Soviets covered their ships in metal to disguise it from above, and even brought aboard tractors, cars, and other heavy machinery to conceal it from anybody who might peek inside. The Soviet captains leading the ships did not know their final destination until they were in the middle of the ocean, using cordonets given to them, in an envelope inside of another

envelope inside a roistery, riddled, and an enigma. Sounds like a bit of a Russian doll. The entirety of Operation Anadir would encompass around 85 ships on over 180 separate journeys. The conditions for Soviet soldiers and others on the ships were awful. It was over 100 degrees inside. The rations were terrible, and on top of everything, they mostly couldn't go above deck due to their strict orders of secrecy. The journey of most of these ships across the Atlantic took roughly three weeks.

weeks. On July 14, 1962, the body of a Cuban fisherman who had last been seen taking his boat in the direction of Guantanamo Bay turned up on a beach. 29-year-old Rodolfo Roussel was found in his boat, beaten to death at least a few days earlier. His body showed signs of torture. His family and the Cuban government alleged that American soldiers stationed at Guantanamo Bay were responsible. On August 20th, Can you know, Kennedy approved Chairman of the Joint Chief Maxwell Taylor's request to move Operation Mongoose into Phase 2. Taylor had reached the limit of waiting for an internal uprising in Cuba to come about, and so he got Kennedy to agree to increase the, quote, noise level.

More sabotage and more terrorism, but not too much so as to break plausible deniability. Here's how Taylor characterized his orders from JFK that day. Quote, while a revolt is not sought at this time, we must be prepared to exploit it, should one unexpectedly occur. The JCS, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will maintain plans for U.S. military intervention. On August 22nd, a cargo ship transporting Cuban sugar to the Soviet Union docked in Puerto Rico for emergency repairs after hitting a reef. About a fifth of the ship's sugar was placed in a warehouse, reportedly collateral for the repair work. CIA agents then snuck into that warehouse and successfully poisoned the stored sugar. According to a New York Times article

about the incident published three years later, the purpose of this chemical sabotage is said to have been to damage inexpensive cargo, to arouse Soviet's suspicions about the quality of Cuban sugar, to create discord between Soviet and Cuban authorities, and possibly to discourage shippers from providing services likely to lead to disputes, recriminations, and perhaps even suspicions of sabotage.

A few days later, we see a rather spectacular example of the terrorism sponsored by Mungus. Last weekend, a suburb of, Savannah was shelled from the sea by a group of student exiles. At midnight on the 24th of August, the CIA-backed Student Revolutionary Directorate, or D.R.E., carried out a commando raid on the Miramar beachfront, using two power boats to shell a suburb and hotel with 50-cow machine guns and rifles. Now, do you know whether anybody was killed, were there any casualties at all? I'll put it this way, if you see a lighted window, and suddenly you see an explosive bullet, come into the room, and you see the explosion inside, and you had seen people walking inside the room before, I question, do you think that at least some kind of injuries wouldn't have taken place?

Were they Cubans? Well, that's the point. If they had been Cubans, Ciddel Castro would have put up a big show. show right away, the way he has always done it. But they, we believe, were East European. The DRE, and don't be misled by the student label in their name, they were one of the most extreme groups in the CIA's lineup. They issued a statement taking credit for the attack, saying its purpose was to denounce the Soviet presence in Cuba. To Nikita Khrushchev's slogan, Peaceful Coexistence, the DRE stated, quote, We will not tolerate peaceful coexistence.

One DRE gunner, Jose Basulto, you may remember him from the Bay of Pigs, he recounted the attack. Quote, I opened up on the hotel dining room where Castro was supposed to be holding the meeting with the Russians. We could only hope he was there, too. I must have shot about 26 times. I could see the shells break into the hotel windows, and then all the lights went out. The U.S. State Department and a cable criticized the DRE attack. while the CIA claimed they had not put the group up to it,

despite the DRE receiving training, travel arrangements, and a $51,000 monthly stipend from the Central Intelligence Agency. The DRE, the agency said, is, quote, prone to undertake independent operations without any warning or permission from the CIA. The DRE's military commander of the raid, a guy named Isidro Borja, was the September 2nd guest on Meet the Press, a week and a half after the rate. This is Sandra Van Oker inviting you to meet the press.

Tonight's program is brought to you by Wheeling Steel Corporation and Wheeling Corrugating Company. Wherever you are, there's a world of wheeling steel in the world around you. The captain of the two-ship expedition. Hesiodro Borja is our guest today. He's chief of the military affairs in the Cuban student director. Borja had the CIA kryptonem M-Hint 5. Borja's voice was the one you just heard a minute ago describing the raid. The Miramar shelling and raid did not go over well, and some damage control was in order.

If the goal of Borja's appearance on Meet the Press was to establish that the DRE had been acting independently, it's unclear how successful it was. When asked to clarify whether he thought it was possible to overthrow Castro, quote, without a direct U.S. intervention, Borja began by saying, We have never asked direct intervention from the United States. We think that we Cubans are in a position to produce the manpower necessary to overthrow the Castro regime. But Borja knew that the Cubans on the island couldn't actually get the job done on their own. And what was needed was to train an army more than 30 times the size of the CIA organized force they had at the Bay of Pigs.

So here's how he finished that answer. We want exactly the same help Fidel Castro is receiving from the Soviet bloc. We are aware that in order to do that, a big stand from the democracy-loving countries of the world has to be made because to form an army of 50,000 men which we think we can go ahead and form

is not a matter of secrecy. Speaking of armies, Borja was asked about the nascent diplomatic efforts to free the Bay of Pigs participants and other anti-Castro prisoners. James Donovan, a lawyer and former intelligence official who had negotiated the release of U2 pilot Gary Powers, was presently meeting with Castro to discuss the, quote, ransom to be paid for the prisoner's release. Borja made the DRE's position plain.

The group was opposed to any negotiation with Castro. James Donovan is in Cuba today, I think, to see whether he's. he could help free the 1,100 or so Cuban prisoners, for which I think, for whom I think, Castro is asking some $62 million. What is the attitude of your student groups about raising that ransom and paying that ransom? Are you for it or against it? Well, unfortunately, that's a question which has to be answered with cold blood in the sense. we know that we have to hurt a lot of sentiments from a lot of mothers and a lot of families but we are standing here in a war of principles we Cubans cannot negotiate with Fidel Castro

because that would mean we are accepting specific coexistence with Castro an August memo sent from the CIA's Miami station chief to William Harvey shows that while the agency was aware that DRE provocations might lead to a war with the Soviet Union, the operation should be considered by the CIA, as the station chief put it, successful. Quote, it was an adjut-prop operation

calculated to impress upon the U.S. and Latin America the reality of Soviet fortification of Cuba. The station chief goes on. In summing up the CIA-D-R-E control relationship, there is no panacea. If one statement could be applied to describe it, however, it would simply be that, in spite of rapport at case officer level, there is not CIA control because of a conflict between DRE objectives, Cuba liberation soonest, and continued

U.S. government lack of Cuba policy. Rather than push the DRE away after an attack that went too far for the State Department, the CIA chose to bring the DRE even closer. Just as the August attack on Miramar couldn't have happened without the CIA's involvement and funding, neither could the DRE press splits in the following months have happened without CIA help. DRE operatives were spread out from Miami to New Orleans to Dallas and were quoted in national newspapers stressing the urgency of immediate U.S. action. On September 10th, with the Dateline in Caracas, the UPI Wire Service reported that a 22-year-old DRE commander from the Miramar raid

publicly promised that he will, quote, attack any Soviet vessel seen in Cuban territorial waters, and that, quote, there will be many other raids following up the August one. Journalist Jefferson Morley and former chief of exile terror group Alpha 66, Antonio Viziana, both suggest that the operation at Miramar could not have gone down without the green light from a CIA officer handling the DRE, known as Maurice Bishop. At the end of his Meet the Press interview, responding to the idea that there had never been a communist state overthrown by the forces of liberty, Borja replied there was. The example he had in mind was apparently Francisco Franco's Spain, where the dictator had triumphed over the democratically elected left-wing popular front in the 1930s.

Well, first I'd like to answer that question of, there has me. been any satellites being free. I think there was one, Spain. And that was the first one. And it was overthrown by force. And it had to be done. And it was carried out. As the Cubans and the Soviets witnessed still more of this mongoose factor, the Kremlin also detected, quote, increased activity at U.S. intermediate missile installations in Turkey. By the end of the summer, Khrushchev was getting a little anxious. In July, Che and some other Cubans had gone to meet Khrushchev to formalize the military agreement. And the Cubans, like Mikoyan, weren't totally convinced that the operation should be secret. They thought it would be just as

effective, if not more so, to announce the military pact in full view of the world. Now, we know already that Khrushchev didn't want to do that. He calculated that any American president, upon hearing an announcement that Soviet nukes were on their way to Cuba, would have a much more hawkish stance than one who didn't know anything. And as we've been discussing, he was sensitive to the fact of the upcoming November elections. He didn't want Kennedy to feel as though he had to make some big, cold war move to shore up support at home before his fellow Democrats were on the ballot. So he held firm that the pact should be kept secret. Carlos Lachuga has a passage here. Khrushchev told Che in his group that there was no need to worry about any

reaction from the United States, because he would send the Baltic fleet if any problem should arise. Guevara and a comrade looked at each other and raised their eyebrows incredulously. But perhaps Khrushchev was not completely brushing off their concerns, because he then sent a vague message to Bobby Kennedy through the back channel, that the USSR was putting defensive weapons in Cuba. He just didn't say, what kind. This hint would be carried by senior Soviet spy Georgi Bolshekhov, one of RFK's luncheon partners. In sending this message, Bolshekov sort of set the general tone of that summer explaining why U.S. Soviet relations were currently strained.

One, there was a resumption of atmospheric nuke testing by the U.S. Two, escalating U.S. military intervention in Southeast Asia. Three, America's NATO policy, including putting the West German Army on the road to nukes. And four, of course, U.S. stubbornness on West Berlin. Among the many critics of the Kennedy administration's Cuba policy, few were as loud and consistent to the Kennedys as Senator Kenneth Keating from New York. Keating was a weird cold warrior. not particularly hawkish, but he had a mean streak when it came to Cuba.

A junior senator, in the shadow of his state's senior senator, Jacob Javits, Cuba was how Keating was able to draw attention to himself. For example, when Fidel visited the U.S. in 1959, Keating personally asked Castro why he hadn't held elections. In 1961, he castigated Kennedy for the Bay of Pigs failure. Ironically, though, for most of 1962, the most notable thing that Keating had to say about Cuba was an unusual defense of the Cuban economy. According to the historian Daniel Gorman, who writes that, quote,

Keating felt that the Kennedy administration's embargo on Cuba was hypocritical since there was no embargo placed upon the Soviet Union. But on August 31st, 1962, Kenneth Keating started sounding the alarm on something that the Kennedy administration had thought highly unlikely at the very least. According to Keating, who dramatically took to the Senate floor to make his proclamation, the Soviets were sending huge numbers of troops to Cuba, citing five different sources. While Keating may have been an anti-Castro crank, he was on to something. Keating didn't say that there were nukes headed for Cuba. He just alluded to ominous sounding missile bases, among other things. But Keating used the opportunity to badger the Kennedy administration

to pull the curtain back on whatever was going on. Quote, it is time for the people of this country and of this hemisphere to have the truth, the whole truth about what Castro and his Soviet cohorts are up to. The source of Keating's information was considered a secret. for many years, but historians have determined that he probably got it from a number of places. One likely source revealed years after the fact was West German intelligence. But perhaps the two most important confirmed sources were the military and the CIA. According to historian Mark White, CIA director John McCone did more than anyone else in the executive branch in the lead up to October to make the case that there was a worrying Soviet military buildup in Cuba.

McCone was Kennedy's post-Bay of Pigs replacement for Alan Dulles, a so-called outsider to the agency, but still a conservative Republican businessman who had served as the chair of the Atomic Energy Commission at the end of the Eisenhower years. In an August memo to JFK, over two months before the missile's discovery, McCone said explicitly that the intelligence suggested that ballistic missiles were on their way to Cuba. Quote, it is conceivable, Mark White writes, that in frustration, McCone turned. to a sympathetic senator. The DRE was also later revealed to be one of Senator Keating's sources, meaning that, at least indirectly, the CIA was sending Soviet missile reports to Keating. The DRE's conduit to Keating was Claire Booth Luce, the conservative politician and activist married to the founding publisher of Time magazine, Henry Luce.

One of Claire Luce's favorite members of the DRE was the man we heard from earlier, Isidro Borja. In his September 2nd meet the press appearance, Borja mostly stayed away from the reports about the missiles. But he did emphasize that no matter what these Soviet troops were, their presence was a pretext for intervention all the same. Do you know yourself whether or not there are Russian soldiers there in uniform? Sure we know. And that's one of the objectives of this whole operation. In addition to the CIA, Keating also received intelligence from within high echelons of the Pentagon itself. Here's Mark White.

Quote, What lends credence to the idea that Pentagon officials helped Keating is the clandestine assistance they also gave Senator Strom Thurmond. The notorious segregationist from South Carolina. Harry Dent, the sleazy Nixon operator who at that time worked for Strom Thurmond, Dent has revealed that several people from the intelligence services of the Defense Department funneled information to Thurmond during 1962. The thrust of these leaks was that McNamara and other upper echelon officials

in the Kennedy administration were misinterpreting intelligence information, constantly underestimating the communist threat, including that posed by Cuba. The following program is brought to you in living color on NBC. On September 4th, Keating appeared on Today's show to, you know, continue banging the drum about these missiles in Cuba, and the White House was prompted to put out a statement pushing back against Keating. JFK and his advisors disbelieved Keating, and were primarily terrified of what the Senator's Cuba talk might do to tank the Democrats' chances in the midterms. So the White House acknowledged that, yes, there was evidence of surface-to-air missile systems in Cuba at the end of

August. But this wasn't anything to be that worried about, as those were only for shooting down planes, and any troops the Soviets were putting there, well, those were just the Ruski's showing off. To put a fine point on it, here's what the White House said in their official response to Keating. It continues to be the policy of the United States that the Castro regime will not be allowed to export its aggressive purposes by force or the threat of force. It will be prevented by whatever means may be necessary from taking action against any part of the Western Hemisphere. By now, Nikita Khrushchev realized the Americans might be getting real. He consulted as generals, and in addition to the original payload, decided to also send tactical nukes,

smaller ones to be used on a battlefield, to go on a new ship, the Indigirka. During these days, Khrushchev, anxious to size up whether the Americans were really on to him, found a hapless U.S. Secretary of the Interior on a Goodwill tour in the USSR and said, hey, let's hang out. And this guy knew nothing, but Khrushchev wanted to talk to him in any event. Nafthali and Fersenko write about their conversation. Quote, Khrushchev resented the fact that the militarily superior U.S. had the luxury of throwing the threat of war around whenever it felt diplomatic pressure. Khrushchev said, it's been a long time since you could spank us like a little boy. Now we can swat your ass. So let's not talk about force. We're equally strong.

In the same moment, Khrushchev is balancing two different messages, as he was throughout the lead-up to the crisis. He criticized the relationship. He criticized the relationship. relentless threats coming not from both sides, but from the U.S. But at the same time, in order to deter possible attacks from the U.S., puffed up the image of Soviet military might, which we now know from that intel we mentioned earlier about a reportedly imminent U.S. nuclear strike on the Soviet Union. This seemed to be a rational strategy. On September 7th, Khrushchev then met with American poet Robert Frost, who was in the USSR

visiting at the time. Frost was a big hit in Russia. After meeting Khrushchev, he said, quote, He's a great man. He knows what power is and isn't afraid to take hold of it. That same day, the White House reveals that Kennedy requested 150,000 men in U.S. reserves on active duty for a year, submitted a bill to Lyndon Johnson to expand the military,

and told the chief of the Atlantic forces that transport planes should be ready for an invasion of Cuba. Soviet forces responded by going on the high, highest state of combat readiness. But still on his balancing act, Khrushchev also cut back on the flotilla destined for Cuba, axing a squad of surface ships and submarines. New York Senator Kenneth Keating's provocative allegations of Soviet missiles in Cuba aroused the passions of Congress and the news media. Newspaper editorials took his and the Cuba hardliner side. The same day that Keating appeared on the Today Show, the White

House warned Khrushchev that sending offensive weapons to Cuba would pose grave consequence. The pressure was only mounting. A week and a half later, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy fretted to JFK that the, quote, congressional head of steam on this is the most serious that we have had. A special note here, one of the many senators who agitated for the right and obligation of America to attack Cuba was one Senator Prescott Bush of Connecticut, father of HW. and grandfather of W and Jeb. On September 20th, the Senate passed a resolution permitting the use of military force on Cuba

if it were believed to endanger, quote, the security of the United States. Cuba responded to these moves by the American government by replying with a list of acts of aggression that the U.S. had carried out against Cuba. Lechuga writes, quote, it said that while efforts were being made to present Cuba as a threat to the security of the United States and to other countries in the hemisphere, the government of the United States had resorted to all manner of means to overthrow the revolutionary government and destroy the political, economic, and social order which the Cuban people were creating, availing themselves of the powers inherent in their self-determination, independence, and sovereignty.

It is in October that the Soviet nuclear payload gets to Cuba. On October 4, 1962, the first Soviet ship carrying nuclear warheads arrives, the Indigirka. So to be clear, while the missile systems are not yet operational, and in fact, more missiles of longer range are still to come and are en route to Cuba, the most important factor, the nuclear one, is now present in the island. Now, in spite of the objectively harrowing conditions for the participants, the extreme secrecy and the months it took to carry out the plan, according to Martin Sherwin, a Pulitzer prize-winning historian and author of the recent book, Gambling with Armageddon,

Anadir basically succeeded. 164 nuclear warheads ultimately arrived on the island. A Soviet military officer who took part in Anadir wrote in his memoir that by October 20th, 16 days after the warheads had first arrived in Cuba, eight medium-range ballistic missiles were operational, ready to fire in two and a half hours. On October 8th, once this initial payload had quietly arrived in Cuba, Cuban President Osvaldo D'Orticos addressed the UN General Assembly and demanded a condemnation

of the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba. He said, if we are attacked, we will defend ourselves. I repeat, we have sufficient means with which to defend ourselves. While he was speaking, the U.S. Congress was already at work on another law, which stated that the U.S. would withdraw all military and economic aid from any country which, quote, furnishes or permits any ship under its registry to trade with Cuba so long as it is governed by the Castro regime. Back home in Havana, a relieved Fidel Castro said that the imperialists would no longer be able to, quote, invade with impunity. The fact that cloudy skies had

obscured the missile sites from view for weeks had made it difficult for the Kennedy administration to confidently rebut Senator Keating. But after, After midnight on October 14, 1962, a U-2 plane flying from California to Cuba at an altitude of more than 70,000 feet snapped photographs of the island below capturing 928 pictures in about six minutes. Although the Soviets had installed air defense systems, the pilot had the luck to make it back to Orlando, Florida without incident. It took about a day for researchers comparing the new U-2 photos with those taken weeks earlier

to confirm their findings. was, in fact, presence of a launch platform for a surface-to-surface missile. The photos were corroborated with evidence supplied by a spy in the Soviet military. CIA director John McCone was not personally on hand on October 15th to receive this news. He had left Washington the day before as his stepson had been killed in a car crash on the West Coast. So McCone's Deputy for Intelligence, Ray Klein, at 8.30 p.m. that Monday night on October 15th, called McGeorge Bundy at his home. When Klein got Bundy on the line, he told him, quote, those things we've been worrying about in Cuba are there.

On Tuesday morning, October 16, 1962, McGeorge Bundy told JFK about the missiles. The president, wearing his pajamas, processed what Khrushchev had done and said, he can't do that to me. Bobby Kennedy was also pissed. He had by now met many times with a senior Soviet. Soviet spy, Georgi Bolshekhov. Certainly Bolshekhov had never mentioned anything about his boss sending missiles to Cuba. And in fact, by now, the Kennedy brothers had received a promise from Khrushchev not to do anything that could hand the midterm elections over to the Republicans. Mark White writes that the younger Kennedy's reaction was, direct quote, oh shit, shit, shit, those sons of bitches Russians.

Ironically, as we mentioned earlier, one of the stated reasons Khrushchev wanted these missiles sent secretly, was in fact to make sure that they did not become a public problem for the Kennedys ahead of the midterms. At 10 minutes before noon, Kennedy convened a meeting of his advisors, a group of over a dozen men that would be canonized as the mythical executive committee, XCOM. Now, there are too many people in XCOM for us to give you a complete rundown, but some of the key cast members in XCOM and in the drama now unfolding are some names that you've heard before. Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Bobby Kennedy, CIA director John McCone, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and a couple newer names, for example,

like Secretary of the Treasury, Douglas Dillon, a Eisenhower Republican who will say Eisenhower-ish things. Now, from the very get-go of the first meeting, McGeorge Bundy immediately leaned into a military solution, as did everyone else. Maxwell Taylor, representing the Joint Chiefs, he said, to do a surprise attack. JFK was open to bombing, but he didn't commit himself to anything. According to Martin Sherwin, defense department official Roswell Gilpatrick chimed in to say, quote, if you're talking about a general air attack program, you might as well think about whether we can eradicate the whole Cuban problem by an invasion just as simply, with as little chance of a negative public reaction. And this is a sentiment backed up by Max Taylor and

JFK. McNamara was still holding out hope that military action would prompt some sort of of domestic internal uprising, quote, it's not probable, but it's conceivable that the airstrike would trigger a nationwide uprising. Toward the end of the meeting, Bobby Kennedy and Max Taylor discussed how long it would take to actually conquer Cuba. Taylor answered, it would take five or six days of, quote, main resistance, followed by a month of, quote, cleaning that up. Here's Marty Sherwin, summarizing the verdict of XCOM in their first meeting on what to do about the Soviet missiles in Cuba, and also explaining how it is that we know exactly what JFK and his brain trust were saying. The conclusion is we're going to have to bomb or invade Cuba,

okay? And Kennedy is, you know, is with it. Now, it's very important the audience understands that all these ex-com meetings were secretly taped by JFK. There was a secret tape recording system and sold several months before in the cabinet room and in the Oval Office. So whenever, you know, those meetings took place, Kennedy threw a switch under the desk till we know exactly what was said, exactly. I think the only way to prevent them coming in, quite frankly, is to say you'll take them out the moment they come in. I think it's really rather unrealistic to think that we could carry out an air attack.

the kind we're talking about an air attack of several hundred sorties because we don't know where these airplanes are are you absolutely clear of your premise that an air strike must go to the whole air complex at the end of the meeting of the first meeting Kennedy is going along with the envisers we're going to have to bomb her in faith

and then luck begins to enter the story it just so happens that Adelaide Stevenson the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations had made a luncheon appointment with Kennedy, you know, weeks before, for October 16th. Now, while Kennedy was off lunching with Adlai Stevenson, which we'll get back to in a minute, the joint chiefs were gathered on the afternoon of October 16th

to discuss the state of their own planning. We actually don't know the full extent of what the chiefs, the heads of the U.S. military, actually discussed amongst themselves during the crisis. Why? In the throes of the Watergate years later, after Gerald Ford had become president, the Joint Chiefs in 1974 destroyed all of the minutes of their executive session meetings from 1947 until then. They did this, by the way, in August 1974, shortly before the newly passed Freedom of Information Act went into effect. Government archivists only found this out two decades later, by the way, in 1993. The only surviving record of the Joint Chief's

private meetings during the crisis is 30 pages of summary notes compiled by a Joint Chief staff analyst before all the notes were destroyed. Back to October 16, 1962, with no minutes of these key Joint Chiefs meetings. The Chiefs, after their first excom meeting, are joined by McNamara. They deride the political alternatives, you know, diplomacy, which McNamara calls, quote, useless, and they weigh the different prices of military action. McNamara believed that using missiles against the USSR, aka nuclear war, would be, quote, costly, but might be worth the cost, according to the summary. But the Joint Chiefs didn't even think Khrushchev had it in him to bring this to nuclear war,

as perhaps they did. As Sherwin puts it, confident that Khrushchev would not start a nuclear war, the Joint Chiefs favored an attack, even if the missiles were operational. There is one important player who is not yet a part of XCOM, Adelae Stevenson, Kennedy's ambassador to the UN. Stevenson didn't have any special sources in Moscow above and beyond what JFK did, but he was the first and one of the very, very few advisors to JFK who told him to consider things seriously

from Khrushchev's perspective, which meant that Stevenson brought up. up the Jupiters. Stevenson's idea would take time to sink in with Kennedy. On Tuesday, October 16th, the second excom meeting took place a few hours after that Stevenson Kennedy luncheon in the early evening. At this meeting, Kennedy pinned the blame for this whole mess on Crucev, quote, he's initiated the danger, really, and Maxwell Taylor took the opportunity to throw at Kennedy a plan involving a, quote, quarter of a million American soldiers, Marines, and airmen to take an island we launched 1,800 Cubans against a year and a half ago.

McNamara laid out three paths forward. One, probably just to get this out of the way, a peaceful diplomatic approach to allies, the Soviets, and Cuba, quote, likely to lead to no satisfactory result. Two, a blockade against offensive weapons entering Cuba. Now, this is important to note. We're not talking about the embargo of Cuba economically. sometimes called the blockade. This is a military blockade to block weapons coming in. Quote, a blockade against offensive weapons entering Cuba. We would be prepared to attack

the Soviet Union in the event that Cuba made any offensive move against this country. McNamara's third suggestion was a mixture of military strategies they've been discussing, involving up to 700 to 1,000 bombing attacks every day for five days on Cuba. In addition to a 150,000 soldier ground commitment. Of course, McNamara emphasized there remained, quote, the possibility of a Cuban uprising. Over the course of the rest of the meeting, McNamara began to wonder what kind of world we live in after we carry out an attack on Cuba. McGeorge Bundy drifted back to the idea that perhaps we had started some of this with our Jupiter missiles in Turkey, whereas Bobby Kennedy, not for the last time, suggested staging something like a

USS main incident inside of Cuba. That is to say, a pretext to invade that may or may not have really been an attack on the United States. As the meeting is wrapping up, JFK, perhaps still thinking about his luncheon with Adelaide Stevenson, is trying to put himself in Khrushchev's shoes. But at this moment, he says, quote, I can't understand his viewpoint. Excom met without JFK on the morning of October 17th, though Kennedy told John McCone separately that, same as last night, he still supported a bombing and invasion. At Xcom, George Ball, the Undersecretary of State who would become known for his internal opposition to the Vietnam War, Ball made his case for something like the Stevenson Plan,

a diplomatic overture to Khrushchev that would give the Soviet Premier an out before any commencement of a military operation. Former ambassador to the Soviet Union, Lewin Thompson, suggested that what Khrushchev was really doing with his Cuba, quote, Gamble, was trying to extract a concession on his long-standing issue, Berlin. And now those were the diplomats.

Over at the Pentagon, meanwhile, according to a summary of their morning meeting, Taylor continued to debrief the military men on the morning's ex-com meeting. Quote, it was agreed that if we want to go to a blockade, we must declare war. And the blockade, Taylor said, was, quote, only in the minds of people who feel that striking missile sites alone is not enough.

Now, by this point, you may be asking, why exactly was this blockade idea such a debate, at least among the non-hardliners who, you know, didn't want to just immediately invade? There were missiles in Cuba, no? And more on the way, probably? Yes, and yes. The problem for XCOM was, the Soviets were perfectly within their rights to send them, them, and the Cubans were perfectly within their rights to accept them. It's called being a sovereign government and having allies. Abraham Caius, State Department Council, went on record

saying the missiles were not illegal. And according to Kennedy speechwriter and advisor Ted Sorensen, quote, legally, the Soviets had every right to do what they did, so long as the Cubans agreed, which of course we know they did. On the other hand, the idea of a military blockade without declaring war, that was flagrantly illegal, and everybody knew it. On Thursday morning, October 18th, as JFK was reading, among other things, a memo from George Ball making the case that, quote, we cannot launch a surprise attack against Cuba without destroying our moral position, the Joint Chiefs had their own crisis meeting. New intelligence reports had come in indicating that the Soviet missiles in Cuba would be operational much sooner than anticipated.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Taylor, adjusted his perspective in the opposite direction from the president. Quote, I now feel airstrikes are not enough, and occupation is the only answer. When JFK began the XCOM meeting at 11 a.m., Dean Rusk delivered a lecture with no clear point, which Robert McNamara promptly ignored, telling the president of new military options, including bombings, missile attacks, and a full invasion. The conversation really gets moving at this meeting with a dry joke from McGeorge Bundy. Quote, if we could trade off Berlin and not have it our fault,

in other words, if we could simply give Berlin over to the Soviets to avoid this whole mess, which is obviously not something that's really on the table, well, perhaps Robert McNamara wasn't treating what Bundy said as a joke, because he then asks, apparently for the room, what happens? Quote, they take it with Soviet troops? Our troops get overrun? And then what do we do? After some more cross-talk, Maxwell Taylor chimes in with what he says would happen.

Quote, we go to general war. Kennedy, however, tries to guide the conversation away from discussing how to go to war, telling the room that a confrontation leading to a nuclear exchange would be a, quote, final failure. He goes on to ask ex-com, quote, would a declaration of war have to accompany a blockade, urging everyone to think? Everybody immediately opposes Kennedy's idea of a blockade without declaring war. George Ball calls it illegal, saying that the U.S. would be committing itself to, quote,

slow agony. CIA director John McCone says that Khrushchev won't respect that. Lewin Thompson, the former ambassador to the Soviet Union, he says, let's declare war against Cuba instead. McGeorge Bundy says, well, even if we don't declare war, we'd still have to invade. and Maxwell Taylor again says, well, if we don't immediately wipe out everything, then the Soviets will move on Berlin, so it's a moot point.

Kennedy took off to meet with Soviet foreign minister Andre Grameco. Neither party indicated that they knew, that the other one knew, that they knew what was going on with the missiles. Grameco, in particular, staring down the president of the United States and his secretary of state, Dean Rusk, played dumb, turning in a solid performance.

which apparently caused Rusk to go red like a crab. Grameko reported back to Khrushchev that the meeting went well enough, and it was unclear how much the Americans knew. After Kennedy had left for his scheduled afternoon meeting with Soviet foreign minister Andre Gromiko, the secret tape recorder in the room kept rolling, and everyone's shit on Kennedy's blockade with no declaration of war idea. And McNamara actually thought out loud

about swapping missiles from Turkey and Italy in exchange for the ones in Cuba. But then, the ever-mercureal defense secretary said that he was now pro-blockade, because it, quote, reduces the very serious risk of large-scale military action. According to the summary of the Joint Chiefs meeting after this latest ex-com session, America's military brass was pissed. Maxwell Taylor told them about the blockade idea gathering steam, quote, the president seemed to feel that we should hold back

until we get a feel for the Russian reaction. Curtis LeMay, who is something like the id of the American military machine and the Air Force General in charge of the Strategic Air Command and thus America's nuclear bombers and ballistic missiles, LeMay said, quote, are we really going to do anything except talk? Taylor responded, definitely. Probably there will be a political approach, followed by a warning, a blockade,

hitting the missiles, and invasion, in that order. We will probably start in the early. part of next week. That night, John F. Kennedy, tape still rolling, sat alone, and spoke aloud his thoughts on the day. Secretary McNamara, Secretary of Patrick, General Taylor,

Attorney General. George Ball, Alexis Johnson, Edmont, George Bundy, Ted Sarnes. During the course of the day, opinions had obviously switched from the advantages of a first strike on the missile sites and on human aviation to a blockade. Dean Atchison, within my talk this afternoon, favored, well, he was uncertain about any of the causes, favored the first strike as being less likely to produce. There's no being most likely to T. Leris down and less likely to be in the action. Friday, October 19th. The Joint Chiefs were informed by Max Taylor that the president was now leading hard toward a selective blockade idea, to which Curtis LeMay replied, quote, it would be pure disaster

to try that. The Joint Chiefs, Taylor said, would have a limited window later that morning to persuade Kennedy from pursuing the blockade strategy. Their agenda to bring to Kennedy was, per to the meeting summary, one, notify British Prime Minister Harold McMillan and possibly German leader Conrad Adonauer two hours in advance. Two, carry out a surprise attack on comprehensive targets. Three, surveillance. Four, blockade.

Five, invade Cuba, question mark. Three of the Joint Chiefs, the head of the Army, Earl Wheeler, the head of the Air Force, Curtis LeMay, and Chief of Naval Operations, George Anderson, They all said yes. Only Maxwell Taylor said we should just be prepared to invade. And finally, six, realized there will be a strain upon NATO and problems about Berlin, you know, should nuclear war kickoff. When the generals got to the Oval Office, JFK let Max Taylor begin to describe all the horrible things that the American military wanted to do to Cuba and the Soviet Union, but then JFK took the floor to ask the military men to consider, quote, why did the Russians do this?

One of the most interesting meetings during that first week is on October 19th Friday where Kennedy meets with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And they've come in with a plan why we have to bomb and invade. And Kennedy, as they start to present it, General Taylor starts to introduce it, Kennedy says, wait a minute, before you get into that, let me tell you my point of view. And he basically explains to them, look, we are not just talking about Cuba. We are also talking about Berlin. If we invade Cuba, it gives Christchyev the perfect excuse to invade West Berlin. If we blockade Cuba, I am also worried that it gives Christchief the opportunity to blockade. West Berlin.

Curtis bombs away LeMay, chief of the Air Force, wasn't buying what JFK was selling, believing that showing vulnerability to the Soviets would allow the USSR to strike first. LeMay, speaking for several people in that room, stated plainly that direct military action, war, was the only way to move forward. As LeMay began to talk about initiating military action in key, Cuba, JFK interrupted him. I think that... What do you think their reprisal would be?

To which LeMay replied, I don't think they're going to make it a reply. Well, we tell them that if there's a situation is just like it's always been, if they make a move, we're going to fight. I don't think it's changed the Berlin situation at all, except you've got to make one more statement on it. So I see no other solution.

This blockade and political action, I see leading into war. So what you heard of the solution They'll leave right under war. This is almost as bad as appeasement of nuclear. So what you heard there was LeMay saying, A blockade without declaring war would just lead to war anyway,

except the Soviets would have the edge. And in his opinion, this would be as bad as British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's appeasement to the Nazis in 1938. This led to an exchange in which LeMay told JFK that anything short of war would not only make America look weak

to its allies and the neutrals, but also its own citizens. LeMay then said to the president, you're in a pretty bad fix. Kennedy asked, what did you say? You're in a pretty bad fix. To which Kennedy quickly replied, in case you haven't noticed,

you're in it with me. That was in the first half hour of the meeting. The Joint Chiefs failed, to make any progress changing Kennedy's mind. Before JFK closed the meeting to leave on a campaign trip, he explicitly brushed the Joint Chiefs off of their hopes of an invasion. Quote, the logical argument is that we don't really have to invade Cuba. We can live with it, is what JFK is saying.

JFK left instructions for Bobby. Call me back to Washington once you've gotten the group, XCOM, on board with the blockade, or as it was now starting to be called the quarantine. This word quarantine was deliberately used as a PR screen to avoid the obvious fact that the United States blockade under international law and most people's common sense would be a declaration of war against both Cuba

and by extension the Soviet Union. This was pointed out in the XCOM meetings. Dean Rusk later wrote, to allow for maximum flexibility, we hit upon a new term quarantine, partly because no one knew exactly what a quarantine meant. At this point, Adlai Stevenson was still urging the diplomatic route, that is an offer to get rid of the Jupyters from Turkey and Italy, and even get out of Guantanamo Bay,

so long as the Soviet Union removed the missiles in Cuba. But no one, including the president, was on board for that type of thinking. That afternoon, Bobby was tasked with wrangling everyone toward JFK's preferred position. was emotional and wired again, and he did that thing where he said we should stage another USS Maine incident. Yeah, a false flag. But he was able to get the joint chiefs and McNamara to accept a blockade and airstrikes only in the event that the missiles are not removed. It was an uneasy consensus, but it was enough for JFK to move forward. The main thing in his way were his own military leaders. October 20th would see a decision made in the White House.

And privately, as Kennedy would soon tell a British confidant, Kennedy felt that, quote, the U.S. might never have a better opportunity for invading Cuba. But actually facing down these missiles was really starting to spook him. And with those close to him, Kennedy was also admitting he would like to, quote, sacrifice the Jupiter missiles to maintain the peace. His brother Bobby, after previous statements urging an outright false flag, was coming to the same conclusion, although he was adamant that a sacrifice of the Jupiter's, for example, should not be made publicly. Kennedy held this day's ex-com meeting for two hours, and the blockade was formally approved. Taylor tried to talk

Kennedy out of the blockade, but with McNamara, Stevenson, and Rusk, all siding with the blockade idea, Taylor and the Joint Chiefs were outvoted. When Maxwell Taylor reported back to the Joint Chiefs on Saturday night, after another ex-com meeting, he told them what their new marching orders were. Kennedy was to announce the blockade and the revelation of the missiles either the following night or Monday night in a televised address. Kennedy had expected the Joint Chiefs not to like his decision, which is why he told Taylor to tell them directly that he expected their support even if they disagreed with the plan.

At the end of the meeting, Army Chief of Staff, Earl Wheeler, and this is a direct quote from the summary, said, quote, I never thought I'd live to see the day when I'd want to go to war. The president's television address on the missiles and the impending blockade was set for the evening of Monday, October 22nd. The blockade was to go into effect exactly a day after JFK's speech. The hours before JFK's address were not calm ones. The State Department and the White House were cranking out directions on how to represent the president's address,

and letters were sent to diplomats around the world, including to the UN, urging to convene an emergency session. Pre-speech, JFK was able to squash New York Times and Washington Post stories about Cuba, both of which had found that JFK was announcing a blockade. They did not publish these stories, quote, in the interest of national security. Among the final preparations that JFK made, before he would read the speech written for him by Ted Saurison, was to instruct a Pentagon Undersecretary

to tell the Joint Chiefs to make it clear that should missile deployments in Turkey and Italy come under attack, their warheads were not to be fired without JFK's say so. Briefing congressional leaders about 90 minutes before he went, went live, Kennedy confronted a predictably hostile crowd. They were even more hawkish than he was, and he was the one carrying out a blockade. But Kennedy emphasized, an invasion of Cuba absolutely remained on the table. More than 200,000 American boots could be on Cuban soil within a week. The Kennedy administration's illegal blockade of Cuba will now escalate the missile crisis

to its apocalyptic peak. The U.S. Navy is encircling Cuba, intent on intercepting Soviet steamers as over 30 vessels, including the second nuclear ship, the Alexandrovsk, are still en route to the island. The Joint Chiefs are in preparations for airstrikes, and soon their state of readiness would ratchet up to DefCon too. In Havana, the announcement of Kennedy's upcoming speech

spread a distinct feeling that the United States was ready to cross the brink. And in Moscow, word that Kennedy was going on TV had Khrushchev's sweating. The Presidium met to discuss the chance of war. The general secretary told his comrades, quote, The thing is, we were not going to unleash war. We just wanted to intimidate them to deter the anti-Cuban forces. It is tragic, he said. They can attack us, and we shall respond.

And then in Khrushchev's typically direct style, he said, this may end in a big war. Good evening, my fellow citizens. This government, as promised, has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet military buildup on the island of Cuba. Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established. the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island. The purpose of these bases can be none other than to provide a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere. Finally, I want to say a few words to the captive people of Cuba. Now your leaders are no longer Cuban leaders, inspired by Cuban ideals. They are puppets

and agents of an international conspiracy, which has turned Cuba against your friends and neighbors in the Americas, and turned it into the first Latin American country to become a target for nuclear war. Our goal is not the victory of might, but the vindication of right. Not peace at the expense of freedom, but both peace and freedom, here in this hemisphere,

and we hope around the world, God willing, that goal will be achieved. Thank you and good night. You know, I'm gonna I don't know.