One minute to midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the brink of nuclear war by Michael Dobbs Read Free Book Online Page B

ski equipment.
    The scale of the Soviet deployment went far beyond the CIA's worst fears. Briefing the president on the afternoon of Saturday, October 20, McNamara estimated Soviet troop strength on Cuba at "six thousand to eight thousand." CIA analysts arrived at the figure by observing the number of Soviet ships crossing the Atlantic, and figuring out the available deck space. There was one missing element in these calculations: the ability of the Russian soldier to put up with conditions American soldiers would never tolerate.
    By October 20, more than forty thousand Soviet troops had arrived on Cuba.

    Once the missiles arrived on the island, they still had to be transported to the launching positions along winding, mountainous roads. Reconnaissance teams had spent weeks marking out the routes, building new roads and bridges, and removing obstacles. Mailboxes, telegraph poles, even entire houses were torn down overnight to permit the passage of eighty-foot trailers. "For the sake of the revolution" was the standard explanation provided to displaced residents by Cuban liaison officers accompanying the Soviet convoys.
    It took two nights to unload the Omsk, which had docked in Casilda, a small fishing port on the southern Cuban coast that could accommodate no more than one medium-sized ship. The facilities were so primitive that the 500-foot-long Omsk had to be moved around several times, to access all the hatches. The missiles were removed from the ship in total darkness under the protection of a seventy-man detachment of Castro's personal bodyguard from the Sierra Maestra. Patrol boats prevented fishing boats from approaching the port and frogmen inspected the hull of the ship every two hours in case of a sabotage attempt.
    To limit the number of eyewitnesses, movement of missiles was restricted to the hours of midnight through 5:00 a.m. Shortly before the convoy departed, police sealed off the route ahead, citing a "traffic accident." Police motorcyclists preceded the convoy followed by an assortment of Soviet jeeps and American Cadillacs and the lumbering missile transporters. Cranes and backup trucks brought up the rear, followed by more motorcyclists. Decoy convoys were dispatched in other directions.
    Speaking Russian in public, and particularly over the radio, was forbidden. Soviet soldiers accompanying the convoy were required to wear Cuban army uniforms and communicate with one another with the Spanish words one through ten. Cuatro, cuatro might mean "halt the convoy" dos, tres "all clear" and so on. The system seemed simple enough, but it created endless misunderstandings. In tense situations, the soldiers would revert to Russian swearwords. Soviet officers joked that "we may not have confused American intelligence, but we certainly confused ourselves."
    Three miles north of Casilda, the convoy reached Trinidad, an architectural jewel built by eighteenth-century sugar barons and slaveowners. Since the missiles could not possibly fit through the old colonial streets, Soviet and Cuban troops had constructed a detour around the town. The convoy then skirted the southern edge of the Escambray mountain range, a stronghold of anti-Castro guerrillas, and headed north into the plains of central Cuba.
    As dawn broke, the drivers stopped for a rest in a forest outside the town of Palmira. The following night, when the convoy moved off again, news arrived that a bridge had been swept away by a tropical rainstorm. There was a delay of twenty-four hours as the entire male population of the region was mobilized to rebuild the bridge. The 140-mile journey took a total of three nights.
    The site chosen for Sidorov's headquarters was tucked behind a range of low hills, between a sugar plantation and a stone quarry. Palm trees dotted the landscape. Soon construction troops were clearing the scrub for a battery of four missile launchers. Four more missile launchers were stationed twelve miles to the northwest, closer to the town of