The Secret History and Unlearned Lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis
There aren’t enough palm trees, the Soviet general thought to himself. It was July 1962, and Igor Statsenko, the 43-year-old Ukrainian-born commander of the Red Army’s missile division, found himself inside a helicopter, flying over central and western Cuba. Below him lay a rugged landscape, with few roads and little forest. Seven weeks earlier, his superior—Sergei Biryuzov, the commander of the Soviet Strategic Missile Forces—had traveled to Cuba disguised as an agricultural expert. Biryuzov had met with the country’s prime minister, Fidel Castro, and shared with him an extraordinary proposal from the Soviet Union’s leader, Nikita Khrushchev, to station ballistic nuclear missiles on Cuban soil. Biryuzov, an artilleryman by training who knew little about missiles, returned to the Soviet Union to tell Khrushchev that the missiles could be safely hidden under the foliage of the island’s plentiful palm trees.
But when Statsenko, a no-nonsense professional, surveyed the Cuban sites from the air, he realized the idea was hogwash. He and the other Soviet military officers on the reconnaissance team immediately raised the problem with their superiors. In the areas where the missile bases were supposed to go, they pointed out, the palm trees stood 40 to 50 feet apart and covered only one-sixteenth of the ground. There would be no way to hide the weapons from the superpower 90 miles to the north.
But the news apparently never reached Khrushchev, who moved forward with his scheme in the belief that the operation would remain secret until the missiles were in place. It was a fateful delusion. In October, an American high-altitude U-2 reconnaissance plane spotted the launch sites, and what became known as “the Cuban missile crisis” began. For a week, U.S. President John F. Kennedy and his advisers debated in secret about how to respond. Ultimately, Kennedy chose not to launch a preemptive attack to destroy the Soviet sites and instead declared a naval blockade of Cuba to give Moscow a chance to back off. Over the course of 13 frightening days, the world stood on the brink of nuclear war, with Kennedy and Khrushchev facing off “eyeball to eyeball,” in the memorable words of Secretary of State Dean Rusk. The crisis ended when Khrushchev capitulated and withdrew missiles from Cuba in return for Kennedy’s public promise to not invade the island and a secret agreement to withdraw American nuclear-tipped missiles from Turkey.
The details of the palm tree fiasco are just some of the revelations in the hundreds of pages of newly released top-secret documents about Soviet decision-making and military planning. Some come from the archives of the Soviet Communist Party and were declassified before the war in Ukraine; others were quietly declassified by the Russian Ministry of Defense in May 2022, in the run-up to the sixtieth anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis. The decision to release these documents, without redaction, is just one of many paradoxes of President Vladimir Putin’s Russia, where state archives continue to release vast troves of evidence about the Soviet past even as the regime cracks down on free inquiry and spreads ahistorical propaganda. We were fortunate to obtain these documents when we did; the ongoing tightening of screws in Russia will likely reverse recent strides in declassification.
The documents shed new light on the most hair-raising of Cold War crises, challenging many assumptions about what motivated the Soviets’ massive operation in Cuba and why it failed so spectacularly. At a time of escalating tensions with another brash leader in the Kremlin, the story of the crisis offers a chilling message about the risks of brinkmanship. It also illustrates the degree to which the difference between catastrophe and peace often comes down not to considered strategies but to pure chance.
The evidence shows that Khrushchev’s idea to send missiles to Cuba was a remarkably poorly thought-through gamble whose success depended on improbably good luck. Far from being a bold chess move motivated by cold-blooded realpolitik, the Soviet operation was a consequence of Khrushchev’s resentment of U.S. assertiveness in Europe and his fear that Kennedy would order an invasion of Cuba, overthrowing Castro and humiliating Moscow in the process. And far from being an impressive display of Soviet cunning and power, the operation was plagued by a profound lack of understanding of on-the-ground conditions in Cuba. The palm tree fiasco was just one of many blunders the Soviets made throughout the summer and fall of 1962.
“Our whole operation was to deter the USA,” Khrushchev said.
The revelations have special resonance at a time when, once again, a leader in the Kremlin is engaged in a risky foreign gambit, confronting the West as the specter of nuclear war lurks in the background. Now, as then, Russian decision-making is driven by hubris and a sense of humiliation. Now, as then, the military brass in Moscow is staying silent about the massive gap between the operation the leader had in mind and the reality of its implementation.
At a question-and-answer session he held in October, Putin was asked about parallels between the current crisis and the one Moscow faced 60 years earlier. He responded cryptically. “I cannot imagine myself in the role of Khrushchev,” he said. “No way.” But if Putin cannot see the similarities between Khrushchev’s predicament and the one he now faces, then he truly is an amateur historian. Russia, it seems, still has not learned the lesson of the Cuban missile crisis: that the whims of an autocratic ruler can lead his country into a geopolitical cul-de-sac—and the world to the edge of calamity.
In 1962, Khrushchev reversed course and found a way out. Putin has yet to do the same.
A MODEST PROPOSAL
“Our whole operation was to deter the USA so they don’t attack Cuba,” Khrushchev told his top political and military leaders on October 22, 1962, after learning from the Soviet embassy in Washington that Kennedy was about to address the American people. Khrushchev’s words are preserved in the detailed minutes of the meeting, recently declassified in the Soviet Communist Party archives. The United States had nuclear missiles in Turkey and Italy. Why couldn’t the Soviet Union have them in Cuba? He went on: “In their time, the USA did the same thing, having encircled our country with missile bases. This deterred us.” Khrushchev expected the United States to simply put up with Soviet deterrence, just as he had put up with U.S. deterrence.
Khrushchev had gotten the idea to send missiles to Cuba months earlier, in May, when he concluded that the CIA’s failed Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961 had been just a trial run. An American takeover of Cuba, he recognized, would deal a serious blow to the Soviet leader’s credibility and expose him to charges of ineptitude in Moscow. But as the minutes of the October 22 meeting make clear, there was more to Khrushchev’s decision-making than concerns about Cuba. Khrushchev deeply resented what he perceived as unequal treatment by the United States. And contrary to the conventional story, he was equally worried about China, which he feared would exploit a defeat in Cuba to challenge his claim to leadership of the global communist movement.
Khrushchev entrusted the implementation of his daring idea to three top military commanders—Biryuzov, Rodion Malinovsky (the defense minister), and Matvei Zakharov (the head of the general staff)—and the whole operation was planned by a handful of officers in the general staff working in utmost secrecy. One of the key newly released documents is a formal proposal for the operation prepared by the military and signed by Malinovsky and Zakharov. It is dated May 24, 1962—just three days after Khrushchev broached his idea of putting missiles in Cuba at the Defense Council, the supreme military-political body he chaired.
According to the proposal, the Soviet army would send to Cuba the 51st Missile Division, consisting of five regiments: all of the group’s officers and soldiers, about 8,000 men, would leave their base in western Ukraine and be permanently stationed in Cuba. They would bring with them 60 ballistic missiles: 36 medium-range R-12s and 24 intermediate-range R-14s. The R-14s were a particular challenge: at 80 feet long and 86 metric tons, the missiles required a host of construction engineers and technicians, as well as dozens of tracks, cranes, bulldozers, excavators, and cement mixers to install them on launching pads in Cuba. The troops of the missile division would be joined by many other soldiers and equipment in Cuba: two antiaircraft divisions, one regiment of Il-28 bombers, one air force squadron of MiG fighters, three regiments with helicopters and cruise missiles, four infantry regiments with tanks, and support and logistics troops. The list of these units filled five pages of the proposal on May 24: 44,000 men in uniform, plus 1,800 construction and engineering specialists.
Soviet generals had never before deployed a full missile division and so many troops by sea, and now they had to send them to another hemisphere. Unfazed, the military planners christened the operation with the code name “Anadyr,” after the Arctic river, across the Bering Sea from Alaska—geographical misdirection designed to confuse U.S. intelligence.
At the top of the proposal, Khrushchev wrote the word “agree” and signed his name. Some distance below are the signatures of 15 other senior leaders. If the operation failed, Khrushchev wanted to make sure no other members of the leadership could distance themselves from it. He had successfully browbeaten his colleagues into literally signing on to his hare-brained scheme. A strikingly similar scene would repeat itself 60 years later, when, days before the invasion of Ukraine, Putin forced members of his security council, one by one, to speak out loud and endorse his “special military operation” at a televised meeting.
OPERATION ANADYR
On May 29, 1962, Biryuzov arrived in Cuba with a Soviet delegation and posed as an agricultural engineer by the name of Petrov. When he conveyed Khrushchev’s proposal to Castro, the Cuban leader’s eyes lit up. Castro embraced Soviet missiles as a service to the entire socialist camp, a Cuban contribution to the struggle against American imperialism. It was during this trip that Biryuzov also reached his pivotal conclusion that palm trees could camouflage the missiles.
In June, when Khrushchev met with the military again, Aleksei Dementyev, a Soviet military adviser in Cuba who was summoned to Moscow, emerged as a lonely voice of caution. As he began to say that it was impossible to hide the missiles from the American U-2s, Malinovsky kicked his subordinate under the table to make him shut up. The operation had already been decided; it was too late to challenge it, much less to Khrushchev’s face. By now, there was no stopping Anadyr. In late June, Castro sent his brother Raúl, the defense minister, to Moscow to discuss a mutual defense agreement that would legitimize Soviet military deployments in Cuba. With Raúl, Khrushchev was full of bombast, even promising to send a military flotilla to Cuba to demonstrate Soviet resolve in the United States’ backyard. Kennedy, he boasted, would do nothing. Yet behind the usual bluster lay fear. Khrushchev wanted to keep Anadyr secret for as long as possible, lest the U.S. intervene and upend his ambitious plans. And so the Soviet-Cuban military agreement was never published.
Top Soviet commanders also wanted to conceal the true purpose of Operation Anadyr—even from much of the rest of the Soviet military. The official documents, part of the recently declassified trove, referred to the operation as an “exercise.” Thus, the greatest gamble in nuclear history was presented to the rest of the military as routine training. In a striking parallel, Putin’s misadventure in Ukraine was also billed as an “exercise,” with unit-level commanders being left in the dark until the last moment.
The reconnaissance team had to take a crash course in elementary Spanish.
Operation Anadyr began in earnest in July. On the 7th, Malinovsky reported to Khrushchev that all the missiles and personnel were ready to leave for Cuba. The expedition was named the Group of Soviet Forces in Cuba, and its commander was Issa Pliev, a grizzled, 59-year-old cavalry general, a veteran of both the Russian Civil War and World War II. The same day, Khrushchev met with him, Statsenko, and 60 other generals, senior officers, and commanders of units as they prepared to depart. Their mission was to fly to Cuba for reconnaissance to prepare everything for the arrival of the armada with missiles and troops in the following months. On July 12, the group arrived in Cuba aboard an Aeroflot passenger plane. A week later, a hundred additional officers arrived on two more flights.
The hasty journey was rife with mishaps. The rest of Soviet officialdom botched the cover story for the reconnaissance group: in newspapers, the passengers on the Aeroflot planes were called “specialists in civil aviation,” even though in Cuba, they had been billed as “specialists in agriculture.” When one flight landed in Havana, no one greeted the passengers, so the officers poked around the airport for three hours before finally being whisked away. Another flight ran into storms and had to divert to Nassau, the Bahamas, where curious American tourists snapped pictures of the Soviet plane and its passengers.
Statsenko arrived on July 12. From July 21 to 25, he and other Soviet officers crisscrossed the island, wearing Cuban army uniforms and accompanied by Castro’s personal bodyguards. They inspected the sites that had been selected for the deployment of five missile regiments, all in western and central Cuba in keeping with Biryuzov’s optimistic report. Statsenko wasn’t just disturbed by the sparsity of palm trees. As he later complained in a report—another recently released document—the Soviet team lacked even basic knowledge of the conditions in Cuba. No one provided them with briefing materials on the geography, climate, and economic conditions of the tropical island. They didn’t even have maps; those were scheduled to arrive later by ship. Heat and humidity hit the team hard. Castro sent a few of his staff officers to help with the inspections, but there were no interpreters, so the reconnaissance team had to take a crash course in elementary Spanish. What little Spanish the officers had picked up in a few days did not get them far.
With the initial missile sites hopelessly exposed, Pliev, the man in charge, ordered the reconnaissance teams to find better locations, in remote areas protected by hills and forests. (According to Castro’s instructions, they also had to find sites that would not require the large-scale resettlement of peasants.) Twice, Pliev asked the general staff back in Moscow if he could move some missile locations to more suitable areas. Each time, Moscow rejected the initiative. Some new areas were rejected because they “were in the area of international flights”—a sensible precaution to avoid the possibility of Soviet surface-to-air missiles accidentally shooting down civilian aircraft. But other locations were rejected because they “did not correspond to the directive of the general staff”—in other words, the planners in Moscow did not want to change what their superiors had already approved. In the end, the missiles were assigned to exposed areas.
Apart from the unexpected difficulties siting the missiles, the Soviets encountered other surprises in Cuba. Pliev and other generals planned to dig underground shelters for the troops, but Cuban soil proved too rocky. Soviet electrical equipment, meanwhile, was incompatible with the Cuban electricity supply, which operated on the North American standard of 120 volts and 60 hertz. The Soviet planners had also forgotten to consider the weather: hurricane season in Cuba runs from June through November, precisely when the missiles and troops had to be deployed, and the unceasing rains impeded transportation and construction. Soviet electronics and engines, designed for the cold and temperate climates of Europe, quickly corroded in the sweltering humidity. Only in September, well after the operation began, did the general staff send instructions for operating and maintaining weaponry in tropical conditions.
“All this should have been known before the reconnaissance work started,” Statsenko told his superiors two months after the crisis ended, his memo dripping with irritation. He took planners to task for knowing so little about Cuba. “The whole operation should have been preceded at least by a minimal acquaintance and study—by those who were supposed to carry out the task—of the economic capabilities of the state, the local geographic conditions, and the military and political situation in the country.” He did not dare mention Biryuzov by name, but at any rate, it was clear to all that the real culprit was Khrushchev, who had left his military no time to prepare.
PRECIOUS CARGO
For all the fumbles, Anadyr was a considerable logistical accomplishment. The scale of the shipments was enormous, as the newly declassified documents detail. Hundreds of trains brought troops and missiles to eight Soviet ports of departure, among them Sevastopol in Crimea, Baltiysk in Kaliningrad, and Liepaja in Latvia. Nikolayev—today, the Ukrainian city of Mykolayiv—on the Black Sea served as the main shipping hub for the missiles because of its giant port facilities and railroad connections. Since the port’s cranes were too small to load the bigger rockets, a floating 100-ton crane was brought in to do the job. The loading proceeded at night and usually took two or three days per missile. Everything was done for the first time, and Soviet engineers had to solve countless problems on the fly. They figured out how to strap missiles inside ships that were normally used to transport grain or cement and how to store liquid rocket fuel safely inside the hold. Two hundred and fifty-six railroad cars delivered 3,810 metric tons of munitions. Some 8,000 trucks and cars, 500 trailers, and 100 tractors were sent, along with 31,000 metric tons of fuel for cars, aircraft, ships, and, of course, missiles. The military dispatched 24,500 metric tons of food. The Soviets planned to stay in Cuba for a long time.
From July to October, the armada of 85 ships ferried men and supplies from the Black Sea, through the Mediterranean, and across the Atlantic Ocean. The ships’ crews could see that their vessels were not going unnoticed. As declassified reports from captains, military officers, and KGB officers reveal, planes—some from NATO countries, others unidentified—flew over the ships more than 50 times. According to a declassified Soviet report, one of the planes even crashed into the sea. Some of the ships were followed by the U.S. Navy. Each Soviet vessel was armed with two double-barreled heavy machine guns. Secret instructions from Moscow allowed the troops on board to fire if their ship was about to be boarded; if it was on the verge of being seized, they were to move all men to rafts, destroy all documents, and sink the ship with its cargo. But a potential emergency was just one of many worries. Some troops traveled by passenger ship, in relative comfort, but most sailed on merchant ships that the Soviets had assigned to the operation. These troops faced an ordeal: they huddled in cramped cargo holds that they shared with equipment, metal parts, and lumber. Often, they fell sick. Some of the men died en route and were buried at sea.
But the ships got lucky and reached Cuba without incident. On September 9, the first six R-12 missiles, stowed inside the cargo ship Omsk, arrived in the port of Casilda, on Cuba’s southern coast. Others arrived later in Mariel, just west of Havana. The missiles were offloaded secretly at night, between 12 and 5 am. The construction workers who were supposed to build pads for the heavier R-14 missiles had not yet arrived, so the soldiers on hand had to do all the work. Soviet military boats and scuba divers secured the nautical zone. Everyone changed into Cuban uniforms. Speaking Russian, according to the instructions of the general staff, was “categorically forbidden.”
The Soviets planned to stay in Cuba for a long time.
Three hundred Cuban soldiers and even some “specially tested and selected fishermen” were charged with protecting the ports where the missiles were to be brought in. The Cuban army and police cordoned the roads and even staged fake car accidents along the route from the port to the missile sites to keep the local population away. A spot west of Havana that would serve as a launch site for R-14 missiles was impossible to conceal, so it was presented to the Cuban public as “the construction site for a Cuban military training center.” Very few Cubans knew about the missiles. In fact, only 14 Cuban officials had a complete view of the operation: Fidel, Raúl, the Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara (then one of Fidel’s top advisers), Pedro Luis Rodríguez (the head of Cuban military intelligence), and ten other senior military officers.
There were now about 42,000 Soviet military personnel on Cuban soil. Those from Statsenko’s missile division focused on constructing launching pads for R-12 missiles. Others manned the bombers, surface-to-air missiles, fighter jets, and other weaponry that Moscow had sent to the island. Once again, however, tropical conditions slowed progress. Rain, humidity, and mosquitoes descended on the arriving regiments. Soldiers slept in soaked tents. Temperatures exceeded 100 Fahrenheit. The camouflage remained an unsolvable problem: among the sparse palm trees, the tents, like the missiles, were impossible to conceal. Commanders draped the equipment in camouflage nets, the new documents reveal, but the color of the nets matched the green foliage of Russia and stood out sharply against the sun-scorched Cuban landscape.
The Soviet general staff wanted the R-12 launch pads completed by November 1. From September through the first half of October, the crews worked overtime to meet this deadline, but again they were delayed by snafus. The construction crews that were supposed to install R-14 missiles, for example, spent a whole month in Cuba waiting for their equipment to arrive. Some of the parts for the R-12 launchers were weeks late. By mid-October, none of the missile sites was ready. The one that was closest to completion—the R-12 site near Calabazar de Sagua, in central Cuba—was plagued by communications problems, with no reliable radio link between it and the headquarters in Havana. And then came October 14.
CAUGHT RED-HANDED
That morning, an American U-2 spy plane, flying at 72,500 feet and equipped with a large-format camera, passed over some of the construction sites. Two days later, the photographs were on Kennedy’s desk.
In retrospect, it is remarkable that it took so long for the Americans to discover the missiles, given the extent of Soviet blunders in Cuba. Luck played a large role. The storms that hindered the Soviet troops also protected them from American snooping since the dense cloud cover prevented aerial photography. And as it happened, the CIA made a blunder of its own. Although the agency had detected the arrival of Soviet antiaircraft weaponry in late August, it failed to draw the obvious conclusion as to what the Soviet forces were so keen to protect, concluding instead that the weapons were merely for Cuba’s conventional defense, despite the suspicions of CIA Director John McCone.
For several days, Kennedy deliberated with his top advisers about how to respond to what he viewed as a blatant act of provocation. Many in the group, known as EXCOMM, favored an all-out attack on Cuba to obliterate the Soviet bases. Kennedy instead opted for a more cautious response: a naval blockade, or “quarantine,” of Cuba. His caution was warranted, for no one could guarantee that all the missiles would be wiped out.
This caution stemmed partly from another source of uncertainty: whether any of the missiles were ready. In fact, as the newly declassified documents reveal, only on October 20 did the first site—one with eight R-12 launchers—become operational. By October 25, two more sites were readied, although again in less-than-ideal circumstances: the rockets had to share fueling equipment, and the Soviets had to cannibalize personnel from regiments originally intended to operate the R-14s. By nightfall of October 27, all 24 launchers for the R-12s, eight per regiment, were ready.
Or rather, almost ready. The storage facility for the R-12 nuclear warheads was located at a considerable distance from the missile sites: 70 miles from one regiment, 90 miles from another, and 300 miles from another. If Moscow gave an order to fire the missiles at U.S. targets, the Soviet commanders in Cuba would need between 14 and 24 hours to truck the warheads across miles of often treacherous terrain. Recognizing that this was too long a lead time, Statsenko, on October 27, ordered some of the warheads moved closer to the farthest regiment, shrinking the lead time to ten hours. Kennedy knew nothing about these logistical challenges. But their existence suggests yet again the role of luck. Had EXCOMM learned of these difficulties, the hawks would have had a stronger argument in favor of an all-out strike on Cuba—which would probably have disabled the missiles but could have led to a war with the Soviet Union, whether in Cuba or Europe.
It is now clear that the Soviet troops in Cuba had no predelegated authority to launch nuclear missiles at the United States; any order had to come from Moscow. It is also doubtful that the Soviets in Cuba had the authority to use shorter-range tactical nuclear weapons in the event of a U.S. invasion. Those weapons included nuclear-armed coastal cruise missiles and short-range rockets that had been shipped to Cuba with Statsenko’s division. During a long meeting in the Kremlin that began on the evening of October 22 and lasted until the wee hours of October 23, the Soviet leaders debated whether the Americans would invade Cuba and, if so, whether the Soviet troops should use tactical nuclear weapons to repel them. Khrushchev never admitted that the entire operation was folly, but he did speak about grave mistakes. The upshot of this meeting—which coincided with Kennedy’s speech announcing the naval blockade—was an order to Pliev to refrain from using either strategic or tactical nuclear weapons except when ordered by Moscow.
There was no American invasion, and the order to fire the missiles never came. If it had, however, it would undoubtedly have been followed to the letter. Statsenko’s report noted that he and those under his command “were prepared to give their lives and honorably carry out any order of the Communist Party and the Soviet government.” His words highlight the fallacy that military leaders might act as a check on political leaders bent on starting a nuclear war: military officials in Cuba were never going to countermand political authorities in Moscow.
THE ABSENCE OF BRAINS
Although Khrushchev raved and raged in the first two days after Kennedy declared the naval blockade, accusing the United States of duplicity and “outright piracy,” on October 25, he changed his tune. That day, he dictated a letter to Kennedy in which he promised to withdraw the missiles in exchange for an American pledge of nonintervention in Cuba. Two days later, he added the removal of U.S. Jupiter missiles in Turkey to his wish list, confusing Kennedy and dragging out the crisis. In the end, Kennedy decided to take the offer. He instructed his brother Robert, the attorney general, to meet with Anatolii Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador in Washington.
On the evening of October 27, Robert Kennedy made an informal pledge to remove the Jupiter missiles from Turkey but insisted that the concession had to remain secret. Newly available cables from Moscow to Dobrynin show how important this assurance was to Khrushchev. The ambassador was specifically instructed to extract the word “agreement” from Kennedy, presumably so Khrushchev could sell the deal as an American capitulation to his inner circle. By creating the impression that Kennedy was also making concessions, the word “agreement” would help rebrand a surrender as a victory, a Cuba-for-Turkey exchange.
By this point, however, Khrushchev was eager for a deal. He had been spooked by a series of disturbing events. On the morning of the 27th, an American U-2 had been shot down over Cuba by a Soviet-supplied surface-to-air missile on the orders of senior Soviet officers in Cuba. The Soviets in Cuba always assumed that there would be a U.S. invasion, and they blamed the Cubans for failing to detect the American reconnaissance flights before the crisis. Accordingly, as the declassified files reveal, Malinovsky presented the downing of the U-2 to Khrushchev as a necessary measure to prevent the Americans from taking more photographs of Soviet bases. He registered no awareness in his missive to Khrushchev that the shoot-down could have become a prelude for World War III. Nor did Statsenko, when he later reported the shootdown matter-of-factly, likewise portraying it as a routine response that the Soviet military was trained and entitled to do.
To Khrushchev, the whole Cuban operation was one big poker match.
In the middle of the day, there had been another incident involving an American U-2: a plane sent to the Arctic to sample the atmosphere for radiation got lost and accidentally flew into Soviet airspace. The Soviet military dutifully mapped its progress on now declassified maps, which also showed the number of hours American planes would need to reach targets in Soviet territory.
The most disturbing development of all, however, was a plea Castro had sent early in the morning of October 27, Havana time, in which he asked Khrushchev to launch a preemptive nuclear strike against the United States if the Americans dared to invade Cuba. Historians have long been aware of this plea, but thanks to the new documents, we now know more about what Khrushchev thought of it. “What is it—a temporary madness or the absence of brains?” he fumed on October 30, according to a declassified dictation taken by his secretary.
Khrushchev was an emotional man, but at the hour of greatest danger, he pulled back from the brink. As he put it to an Indian visitor on October 26, according to the newly released documents, “From the experience of my life, I know that war is like a card game, though I myself never played and never play cards.” That final qualification wasn’t entirely truthful: to Khrushchev, the whole Cuban operation was one big poker match, which he thought he could win by bluffing. But at least he knew when to fold. On October 28, he announced that he would dismantle the missiles.
LEARNING AND FORGETTING
Since 1962, historians, political scientists, and game theorists have endlessly rehashed the Cuban missile crisis. Volumes of documents have been published, and countless conferences and war games have been held. Graham Allison’s classic account of the crisis, Essence of Decision, was published in 1971 and updated in 1999 with the help of Philip Zelikow. One of the original book’s conclusions, also included in the revised edition, has stood the test of time: the crisis was “the defining event of the nuclear age and the most dangerous moment in recorded history.”
But the declassified Soviet documents make some important corrections to the conventional view, highlighting the Achilles’ heel of the Kremlin’s decision-making process, which persists to this day: a broken feedback mechanism. Soviet military leaders had minimal expertise on Cuba, deceived themselves about their ability to hide their operation, overlooked the dangers of U.S. aerial reconnaissance, and ignored the warnings of experts. A small coterie of high officials who knew nothing about Cuba, acting in extreme secrecy, drew up a sloppy plan for an operation that was doomed to fail and never allowed anyone else to question their assumptions.
Indeed, it was the failure of the feedback mechanism that led to the immediate cause of the crisis, the poorly camouflaged missiles. Allison and Zelikow concluded that this oversight was not the result of incompetence but a consequence of the Soviet military mindlessly following its standard operating procedures, which had been “designed for settings in which camouflage had never been required.” In this view, the Soviet forces failed to adequately camouflage the missiles simply because they had never done so before.
The new evidence gives a different answer. The Soviets fully appreciated the importance of hiding the missiles, and Khrushchev’s entire strategy was in fact predicated on the flawed assumption that they would be able to do just that. The Soviet military officers in Cuba were also aware of the importance of concealing the missiles. They recognized the danger of U.S. aerial reconnaissance, tried to address it by proposing better sites, and still failed. The core of the problem was the original carelessness and incompetence of Biryuzov. His offhand conclusion that the missiles could be hidden under the palm trees was passed on as an unimpeachable truth. Military experts far below him in the hierarchy noted that the missiles would be exposed to U-2 overflights and duly reported the problem up the chain of command. Yet the planners in the general staff never corrected it, unwilling to bother their superiors or question the idea of the entire operation. Operation Anadyr failed not because the Soviet rocket forces were too wedded to their standard procedures but because the military’s hypercentralization prevented the feedback mechanisms from working properly.
In their first reports analyzing the crisis—part of the new trove of documents—Soviet military leaders engaged in a blame game. Ignoring his own culpability, Biryuzov pointed the finger at “the excessive centralization of management” of the operation “at all stages in the hands of the general staff, which chained the initiative below and reduced the quality of decision-making on specific questions” on site in Cuba. He never admitted the lack of camouflage as the main flaw of Anadyr, although his political superiors immediately recognized it as such.
Anastas Mikoyan, a member of the Presidium whom Khrushchev had dispatched to Havana to arrange the withdrawal of missiles, spoke to the Soviet officers in Cuba in November. He tried to turn the lack of camouflage into a joke. “The Soviet rockets stood out like during a parade on the Red Square—but erect,” he told Pliev and his comrades. “Our rocket men apparently decided to give Americans a middle finger in this way.” Mikoyan even soothed their anguish about the missiles’ discovery, saying that it was West German intelligence, not the U-2, that discovered the Soviet missiles. (In fact, the West Germans had picked up some evidence but hardly the smoking gun that the U-2 flight uncovered.) And he alleged that once the Soviet missiles were spotted, they no longer served any purpose of deterrence—a preposterous claim, given that the United States could hardly be deterred by missiles it didn’t know about. Despite Mikoyan’s best efforts, Soviet commanders and officers took the order to leave Cuba as a humiliating retreat. Many of them had to recover from nervous breakdowns, recuperating at Black Sea resorts not too far from the ports from which they had sailed to Cuba.
Khrushchev was an emotional man, but at the hour of greatest danger, he pulled back.
Khrushchev was eager to cover his own retreat. He deliberately avoided any criticism of the Soviet military’s performance in Cuba. Although the errors in planning were plain to see, the Soviet leader was more interested in depicting the debacle as a victory than in assigning responsibility for the mishaps. In this, his interests overlapped with those of the Soviet supreme command, which wanted to avoid responsibility, and so the secret fumbles of Operation Anadyr were swept under the rug. Documents about the operation were boxed up and sent to gather dust in the archives, where they remained sealed until last year. Biryuzov was promoted to the head of the general staff, and his career remained untarnished until his death in 1964, when he perished in a plane crash five days after Khrushchev was overthrown by his Presidium colleagues.
Soviet military officials viewed operation Anadyr not as a colossal failure but as a shrewd ploy that almost worked. The lessons they learned were simple: had the Soviets done a better job of coping with the enormous logistical challenges, had they tried harder to hide the missiles, or had they shot down U.S. reconnaissance planes earlier, with a little bit of luck, Operation Anadyr could indeed have succeeded. Statsenko, for all his insights, became fixated on U-2s and recommended in his report that the Soviets urgently develop a technology—“invisible rays”—which would allow them to “distort” the images captured by the reconnaissance planes or perhaps just expose the film they carried. Apparently, it never occurred to him that the whole operation was a bad idea from the start. In fact, the entire point of his postmortem was to explore ways to send strategic missiles “to any distance and deploy them on short notice,” that is, do the same thing again, but do it better. Perhaps Statsenko deemed it above his pay grade to question the bright ideas sent from on high.
Only in the late 1980s, during the era of Mikhail Gorbachev’s “new thinking,” did a different view of the crisis emerge within the Soviet Union. Inspired largely by the American literature on the episode, Moscow came to see the crisis as an unacceptably dangerous moment. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, fears of a nuclear conflict receded, and for Russia, the Cuban missile crisis lost immediate political relevance and became plain old history. Veterans of the crisis embraced heroic narratives of their exploits. Anatoly Gribkov, a general who helped plan Operation Anadyr, declared in his assessment of the crisis, written in the first decade of this century, that the Soviet military’s performance was “an example of the finest military art.” Embarrassing failures were mostly forgotten. Castro, who had horrified Khrushchev by proposing to nuke the United States, later strenuously denied having done so. But all agreed that the Cuban missile crisis was never to be repeated.
BACK ON THE BRINK
Until now. Although Russia in theory remains committed to avoiding a nuclear war, Putin seems to be stoking fears of just such a conflict. Like Khrushchev in his time, Putin is rattling the nuclear saber to prove to everyone—and perhaps above all to himself—that Moscow will not be defeated. Also like Khrushchev, Putin is a gambler, and his misadventure in Ukraine suffers from the same feedback failures, excessive secrecy, and hypercentralization that plagued Khrushchev’s in Cuba. Just as Khrushchev’s lieutenants failed to question his rationale for aiding Cuba, so Putin’s top ministers and advisers did not resist his claim that Ukrainians and Russians were one people and therefore Ukraine had to be “returned” to Russia, by force if need be.
Facing no pushback, Putin turned to Sergei Shoigu, his minister of defense, and Valery Gerasimov, the head of the general staff, to carry out his will. They failed even more spectacularly than their predecessors had in 1962, hobbled by the same structural impediments that ruined Operation Anadyr. It is apparent that the general staff has never digested the awkward details of the story of Khrushchev’s failure, even with the declassification of this new batch of documents.
As he peered uneasily over the brink of nuclear apocalypse, Khrushchev found time to act as a mediator in the monthlong Sino-Indian War, which broke out during the Cuban missile crisis. “History tells us that in order to stop a conflict, one should begin not by exploring the reasons why it happened but by pursuing a cease-fire,” he explained to that Indian visitor on October 26. He added, “What’s important is not to cry for the dead or to avenge them, but to save those who might die if the conflict continues.” He could well have been referring to his own fears about the events brewing that day in the Caribbean.
Like Khrushchev, Putin is a gambler.
Terrified by those developments, Khrushchev understood at last that his reckless gamble had failed and ordered a retreat. Kennedy, too, opted for a compromise. In the end, neither leader proved willing to test the other’s redlines, probably because they did not know where exactly those redlines lay. Khrushchev’s hubris and resentment led him to the worst misadventure of his political career. But his—and Kennedy’s—caution led to a negotiated solution.
Their prudence holds lessons for today, when so many commentators in Russia and in the West are calling for a resolute victory of one side or the other in Ukraine. Some Americans and Europeans assume that the use of nuclear weapons in the current crisis is completely out of the question and thus that the West can safely push the Kremlin into the corner by obtaining a comprehensive victory for Ukraine. But plenty of people in Russia, especially around Putin and among his propagandists, defiantly say that there would be “no world without Russia,” meaning that Moscow should prefer a nuclear Armageddon to defeat.
If such voices had prevailed in 1962, we’d all be dead now.