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By Root 642 0

any American loss was Russia’s gain. My enemy’s enemy is my friend, and all that. Besides, Khrushchev secretly harbored a romantic view of revolution. He’d spent most of his life struggling to survive the quiet treachery of Russian politics and was tired of it. The nice, clean idea of running from rock to rock shooting at Yankee capitalists, actually killing enemies rather than making deals with them, appealed to him very deeply. The trouble was that although he admired Fidel Castro, Khrushchev didn’t know what to make of him. Castro hated America, which was good. But he talked about freedom all the time, and that was worrying. Freedom had no place in the Soviet system. Freedom was another word for anarchy, and that wouldn’t do at all. And Comrade Khrushchev had a deep-seated distrust of men who wore beards. All the same, when Fidel announced that Cuba was an ally of the Soviet Union, Khrushchev was pleasantly surprised. For years now, the damned Americans had positioned their nuclear missiles on the Soviet Union’s borders, in Turkey, Iran, South Korea. But now there was a pro-Soviet Cuba, deliciously close to the U.S. It offered some very tempting opportunities.

In April 1962 Khrushchev was entertaining his defense minister, Malinovsky, at his holiday home on the Black Sea coast. Standing on the balcony, looking south toward Turkey, Khrushchev said, “How about we stick a hedgehog down Kennedy’s shorts?”

In May 1962, when, in England, Frankie should have been working for her O levels, when she was still beyond my wildest and most fevered dreams, a delegation of Russians arrived in Havana. They wore civilian clothes. They were, officially, “agricultural advisers” led by “Engineer Petrov.” Petrov was, in fact, Marshal S. S. Biryuzov, head of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Services. His men didn’t know anything much about agriculture, but they knew an awful lot about building bases from which ballistic missiles could be launched at the United States. By the time Frankie first slid her sweet and smoky tongue between my lips, the Russians were busy clearing patches of jungle and laying concrete pads for rocket launchers. And all through that summer, while Frankie and I sought secret places to explore each other, Soviet men and armaments were being smuggled into Cuba. They made the immense voyage from the Black Sea to the Caribbean in innocent-looking freighters or passenger ships. On the day in September that I returned to school, reluctantly and dazed by love, a ship called the Omsk arrived in Havana. Its cargo was sixty R-12 missiles, each capable of carrying a nuclear warhead equal to a million tons of high explosive.

Astonishingly, the Russians managed to do all this without the Americans catching on. It was an incredible feat. In all, eighty-five ships carried two hundred and thirty thousand tons of stuff from the Soviet Union to Cuba: trucks, bulldozers, prefabricated missile shelters, cranes, planes, food, petrol — the raw materials of war. American high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft — known as U-2s — regularly took photographs of Cuba, but it took months for the CIA to realize the significance of those funny little clearings and the barnlike structures taking shape around them. American naval patrols and American aircraft monitored the sea traffic in and out of Havana but could not see the thousands of men packed, like African slaves, in the unbearably hot and fetid spaces belowdecks. Relying on intercepted Soviet messages, U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that the Omsk was carrying barrels of oil. (Understandable, really, since the Russians didn’t transmit useful messages such as: “Greetings, comrade. I hope the ballistic missiles aren’t rolling around too much in that rough weather.”) CIA agents in Cuba reported the swelling numbers of “agricultural advisers.” Kennedy and his military chiefs strongly suspected that these agronomists were Russian troops, but they hugely underestimated their numbers. The awesome truth was that by the third week of October 1962, there were forty thousand Soviet personnel in Cuba.