Participants Meet in Moscow : 26 Years Later, New Look at the Cuba Missile Crisis

Top Soviet, American, and Cuban personalities--who more than 26 years ago tried to read each others’ minds as they took the world to the brink of nuclear war over missiles in Cuba--met face-to-face here Friday in hopes of learning where they were right and where they guessed wrong.

Encouraged by Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and President Bush, current and former officials opened a historic, three-day seminar on a distant crisis still so divisive that they don’t even call it by the same name.

It’s the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis to Americans, the Caribbean Crisis to the Soviets and the October Crisis to the Cubans. By whatever name, the officials agreed to discuss the drama together and on the record for the first time here, ostensibly hoping that it might help prevent some future misunderstanding from turning into another gamble with war.

Participants said that the first day’s sessions were “somewhat antagonistic” and contributed little new information. The Cuban participants, particularly, had trouble “getting out of their rhetorical straitjackets,” one delegate to the seminar said.

Speaking to an American colleague, a Soviet participant described some members of his own delegation as being “at war with themselves” over an event that was the pinnacle of the Cold War and, according to Gorbachev, the seed that made clear the need for the “new thinking” he espouses in international relations.

While all but the opening ceremonies were closed to the press, the full meeting is being recorded for the Nuclear Crisis Project at Harvard University’s Center for Science and International Affairs, which inspired the exchange.

“The basic context of the Caribbean Crisis was rooted in the Cold War atmosphere of the early 1960s,” Gorbachev said in a message to the seminar that was read by Valentin M. Falin, head of the Communist Party’s International Department. “Nevertheless, getting insights into the mechanisms generating critical situations like the Caribbean Crisis are as relevant today as they were at the time.”

“The security of the world is well-served by reaching a better, more detailed understanding of the Cuban Missile Crisis,” Bush agreed in a message to the participants read by U.S. Ambassador Jack F. Matlock Jr. “This can only improve our mutual understanding of just the sort of episode we must avoid in the nuclear age.”

‘Lessons of Relevance’

Jorge Risket Valdes, a member of the Politburo of Cuba’s ruling Communist Party and head of the Havana delegation, said he had no message from Cuban leader Fidel Castro but added that he hopes the exercise “will enable us to discuss lessons of relevance for the future of mankind.”

An earlier Nuclear Crisis Project seminar had brought together several of President John F. Kennedy’s advisers and American scholars at Hawk’s Cay, Fla., in 1987. And a follow-up conference in October of that year in Cambridge, Mass., included three Soviets close to the Kremlin leadership but not intimately involved in the 1962 events.

The Moscow meeting is the first to bring together American, Soviet, and Cuban officials who were involved.

They include former Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko and former Ambassador to Washington, Anatoly F. Dobrynin from the Soviet Union; former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, former National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, and other top Kennedy advisers from the United States; and a 10-member Cuban delegation headed by Valdes and other Castro intimates from 1962.

Propaganda Exercise

Some members of the U.S. delegation said they are concerned that the Soviets and, especially, the Cubans might try to turn the meeting into a propaganda exercise. But despite apparent disappointment over the course of the first sessions, they said they remain hopeful.

There was “noticeable relaxation” during later sessions Friday compared to the first, one source said. “Candor is breeding candor. But it’s very uneven throughout.”

Even a quarter-century later, the emotional residue of the Cuban confrontation is such that one American source described the U.S. delegation as “like undergraduates doing their homework” as they excitedly made last-minute preparations.

“Nineteen sixty-two was a very tough time,” commented James G. Blight, director of Harvard’s Nuclear Crisis Project and one of the organizers of the seminar. “It created an enormous amount of bitterness on all sides.”

Moreover, Blight added, “this was a seminal event for all of these people,” and with the passage of time, he believes they are eager that the real story be told.

Bundy said there are so many questions still unanswered about how the crisis developed that it is impossible for him to say what he most hopes to learn from the Soviet and Cuban delegations. “We’re dealing with two closed societies,” he noted.

McNamara was pressed Friday about newly declassified documents that refer to a clandestine plan to overthrow Cuban leader Castro by October, 1962--the month of the missile crisis. Both Soviet and Cuban delegations continued to insist Friday--as their governments have done for years--that the reason Kremlin leader Nikita S. Khrushchev installed the missiles in the Caribbean was to forestall American plans to overthrow Castro by force.

The Americans see that as a smoke screen to cover Khrushchev’s desire to cope with what was then an overwhelming U.S. strategic nuclear advantage by putting the American mainland under direct nuclear threat from Cuba.

The new documents pertain to a CIA operation code-named Mongoose, which had previously been described as a campaign of harassment and sabotage against Cuba. But according to a newly declassified memorandum by Gen. Maxwell D. Taylor, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at least some officials envisioned much more. The memorandum was dated March 14, 1962.

“In undertaking to cause the overthrow of the target government, the U.S. will make maximum use of indigenous resources, internal and external, but recognizes that final success will require decisive U.S. military intervention,” the memorandum says.

McNamara insisted that “despite the documents . . . I can state without any qualification whatsoever there was absolutely no intent by the United States to invade Cuba prior to the time the missiles were emplaced.”

“I think if I’d been a Cuban or a Soviet, I’d have seen considerable evidence of a plan by the United States, or an intent by the United States, to invade,” McNamara said Friday. However, he insisted, such an intention was never in Kennedy’s mind or his own.

“This simply illustrates the great danger of misunderstanding among nations,” the former defense chief said. “I think this is one of the lessons that will come out of this meeting.”

Widely perceived as the closest the world has ever come to nuclear war, the Cuban Missile Crisis began with the discovery in October, 1962, that the Soviets were building nuclear bases in Cuba. The public learned of the matter Oct. 22, when Kennedy announced in a national television address that he had imposed a naval blockade on the island nation and pledged to do whatever necessary to force removal of the missiles.

Meanwhile, Kennedy warned, a Soviet missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere would be considered as an attack by Moscow on the United States, and would trigger full nuclear retaliation.

The public drama continued for six more tense days, as the Soviets at first appeared ready to challenge the naval blockade, then turned back. At one point, Khrushchev demanded that the U.S. withdraw its missiles from Turkey, and at perhaps the most critical moment, an American U-2 spy plane was shot down over Cuba.

Finally, in a meeting whose details remain secret more than a quarter-century later, Robert F. Kennedy, then the attorney general, delivered to then-Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin what the Kremlin apparently interpreted as an ultimatum: If Moscow did not remove the missiles, the United States would do so by force.

On Oct. 28, 1962, Khrushchev agreed, in return for a U.S. pledge not to invade Cuba. While the two sides pulled back from the brink, however, many questions remain about what happened and why--questions that the Harvard project is determined to try to answer in hopes that the knowledge will help prevent some future nuclear showdown.