Cuba Crisis: No Hits But Many Errors

For 25 years, the men who decide how and when America goes to war have found the Cuban missile crisis to be the principal model for crisis resolution. Now, despite a wave of revisionist revelations, the current generation of national-security managers find themselves repeating by rote Cuban missile crisis lessons that are not only incorrect but dangerously likely to turn the hidden errors of 1962 into very real terrors of 1987.

The traditional view has held that President John F. Kennedy’s unblinking brinksmanship led to a successful resolution of the most dangerous superpower confrontation in history. Kennedy and his inner circle of ExCom (Executive Committee) advisers are credited with cleverly managing superior conventional and strategic force, circumventing normal bureaucratic channels, carefully weighing intelligence and the insights of specialists, building consensus among allies by keeping them posted on each new detail and--on the eve of a U.S. congressional election--disarming an unprecedented divisive partisan debate over foreign policy.

These celebrations of successful crisis management have now proved to be horribly myopic. Former ExCom members, as well as Soviet and Cuban officials, after analyzing newly available documents and insider details, acknowledge in retrospect that they were unaware of essential facts about their own forces and were fundamentally wrong about the opposing forces, and that the situation was beyond the control of any one of the leaders.

Former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara and his ExCom colleagues now acknowledge what they did not know at the time:

--That the U.S. missiles in Turkey whose dismantling provided the key component of the final U.S.-Soviet deal had--despite the fact that the United States had already considered them obsolete--only become operational in mid-October, 1962, at almost precisely the same time as the Soviet missiles in Cuba.

--That without higher authorization the commander in chief of the Strategic Air Command elevated the alert level of all SAC units without customary encryption, causing the Soviets to prepare for a pending attack.

--That the extent of damage by U.S. depth charges to Soviet submarines forced to the surface during the blockade was much more serious than known at the time.

--That nuclear weapons were loaded aboard U.S. bombers in Europe during the crisis.

--That none of the ExCom members were aware that U-2 reconnaissance flights on the borders of the Soviet Union continued during the crisis until after one strayed accidentally into Soviet air space the same day a U-2 was shot down over Cuba.

For their part, the Soviet officials now confirm that the Soviet Union had targeted Berlin, and that Cuba had plans to strike certain southern U.S. cities if U.S. forces invaded Cuba. The Soviets claim that because Kennedy made no prior private diplomatic overtures, his sudden announcement of a military blockade took them by surprise. They view his subsequent rejection of a secret Soviet request for a summit as provoking a world crisis that could have been handled quietly.

McNamara and his colleagues admit having believed Khrushchev’s claims that nuclear warheads were already in Cuba and would be used against the United States on already deployed weapons were Kennedy to follow the advice of some advisers to stage a preemptive strike on the Cuban bases. Although American officials now claim they were wrong about the presence of nuclear weapons in Cuba, Soviet officials still insist that warheads were there and that they doubt Khrushchev could have prevented their use by Soviet troops in the case of such a strike.

Most important, it is only now that McNamara and others give credence to the Soviet motivations articulated at the time for putting missiles in Cuba. The Soviets have always claimed that they faced a rapidly growing U.S. nuclear arsenal of vast superiority, sufficient to render them vulnerable to being wiped out by a preemptive first strike.

American nuclear superiority was so complete--5,000 warheads to 300--that a massive first strike was in fact one of the five options available to the President under the U.S. nuclear-war-targetting plan at the time. The approximately 40 intermediate-range missiles the Soviets were sending to Cuba would not have given them a first-strike capability. But it would have made the Soviet strategic deterrent credible.

The second Soviet reason and the primary Cuban justification, the prevention of an impending invasion of Cuba, was scoffed at by American officials in 1962. But McNamara and others on the ExCom assert that they were unaware of important covert operations against Castro during the 16 months after the April, 1961, Bay of Pigs invasion, which they acknowledge must have made a second invasion seem imminent.

The United States had mounted a sophisticated and sustained secret war against Cuba that involved weekly landings by Cuban exiles based in Florida. The exiles sabotaged Cuban factories, poisoned food supplies, destroyed transportation and communication facilities and sent aid to counterrevolutionaries in Cuba’s Escambray range. Cuban officials at the time saw these activities and continuing assassination attempts against Castro as an effort to destabilize Cuba, softening it up for an invasion. The missiles offered Cuba a joint “tripwire” deterrent and a “doomsday” device in which a U.S. invasion would be an attack against a strategic Soviet outpost as well as the catalyst for an ultimate patriotic sacrifice.

Other aspects of the crisis as recently revealed would credit luck rather than skill in resolving it. On the morning of Oct. 27, 1962, a U.S. U-2 reconnaissance plane was shot down over Cuba. Such overflights had confirmed the original missile emplacements and were used to monitor Soviet progress in readying the missiles and to determine whether they were being armed with nuclear warheads. Precisely this assurance enabled Kennedy to hold off the demands from hawks on the ExCom to make immediate air strikes against the installations.

Khrushchev had U.S. concern about the U-2 underscored by Atty. Gen. Robert Kennedy’s visit to Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin on the afternoon of the 27th. Kennedy told the ambassador that unless the missiles were out in 48 hours, the United States would take action. He added ominously, though, that if another plane were shot down, the President would have to follow the wishes of his military advisers for an immediate retaliation. Less than 12 hours later Khrushchev ordered the installations to be dismantled.

Indeed, the Soviet premier could not count on controlling his military assets in Cuba. No command had been given from Moscow that the U-2 be shot down, and he did not know why it had been fired upon.

It now appears from U.S. intelligence decryption that Soviet troops there transmitted a report from Cuba that a “fire fight” had occurred in the vicinity of a Soviet surface-to-air (SAM) missile installation, and that some Soviet soldiers had been killed. Who killed them? Had some Cuban soldiers seized the SAM site and shot down the U-2? Both Soviet and Cuban officials deny this charge. Had Cuban counterrevolutionaries--who were well-armed and were fighting to overthrow the Castro regime--attacked the Soviets? No Soviet or Cuban official has offered this otherwise convenient explanation, and the true explanation remains unclear even today. Immediately following the U-2 shoot-down, Castro ordered--without Soviet consultation--that his Cuban-controlled anti-aircraft batteries should fire on any low-level reconnaissance flights over the island. Castro also refused to allow an international inspection of the missile installations after Khrushchev ordered them destroyed on Oct. 28. Communications between Cuba and the Soviets were very bad during the crisis, and Cuba was not consulted during any of the negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Remarkably, while the ExCom members admit they failed to understand the importance of Cuba’s perceptions about an American threat, they also note that no specialist in their midst had much knowledge about Cuba. U.S. officials had little sense about Cuba’s potential for messing up their carefully crafted crisis management. And most startling, they now acknowledge that they had allowed themselves only limited access to expertise about the Soviet Union.

The Kennedy advisers who denied any hostile intention toward the Soviet Union or Cuba in 1962--and no evidence suggests otherwise--today understand why both countries would reasonably perceive that the United States was preparing to attack them and that the missiles were a serious attempt by the Soviets and the Cubans to improve crisis stability.

The new lessons of the Cuban missile crisis appear to be that no matter how brilliant, crisis managers cannot foresee all contingencies and know all the factors necessary to control events. More important, it was the U.S. threat of force before October and during the crucial 13 days that appears to have engendered and heightened the crisis. The lesson is not that superior force will resolve tensions.

Khrushchev’s fear that the Soviet Union would lose a nuclear war led him into crisis, not away from it. He backed down as he recognized that events were swerving out of control and toward a nuclear holocaust. Similarly, Kennedy appears to have been ready to trade the missiles in Turkey publicly, despite political costs.

Today, as tension heightens in the Persian Gulf, it becomes imperative to draw the appropriate lessons from the Cuban missile crisis. Superpower threats to topple or coerce a frightened regime serve only to exacerbate underlying insecurities. Such threats lead to complex crises in which rational management does not guarantee survival. The missile crisis should have taught us to be more cautious with countries about which we know far too little.