The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [410]
Bolshakov had tantalized Bobby, telling him he had a message from Khrushchev. In the netherworld of intelligence, the Russians and the Americans cut their scripts up into many pages so that most players knew only their own few lines and little of the plot they were advancing. Bolshakov had a familiar message to deliver. He told Bobby, “The weapons that the USSR is sending to Cuba will only be of a defensive character.” Bolshakov was like Adlai Stevenson at the United Nations during the Bay of Pigs, speaking lines he thought to be true to serve a purpose of which he had not been informed. Bolshakov believed that he was serving the high cause of peace, but in fact he was betraying Bobby in the name of his country.
The president needed concrete intelligence on what was going on in Cuba, not conjecture, speculation, ruminations, or gossip. On the morning of October 14, Major Richard Heyser of the U.S. Air Force flew a U-2 mission over western Cuba. He was over the island for only six minutes, but that was enough to take 928 photographs that showed three medium-range missile sites and eight missile transporters. Two subsequent flights the next day brought back photos showing two other sites and crates for the Soviet medium-range bombers.
The following evening, October 15, the CIA’s deputy director for intelligence called Bundy at his home to tell him about the latest photos. The news was so extraordinary that it shifted the protocol of power. In any other important matter Bundy would have called the president immediately or left for the White House. This evening, though, he put the phone down and went back to his dinner party, not wanting his foreign guests to have any signal that something was wrong. Even after his guests left, he did not call the president. He knew that Kennedy was tired after a late-night return from New York the previous evening. Bundy decided, as he wrote Kennedy later, that “a quiet evening and a night of sleep were the best preparation you could have in the light of what would face you in the next days.”
Kennedy sat propped up in bed reading the morning newspapers, including a front-page story in the New York Times with the headline “Eisenhower Calls President Weak on Foreign Policy.” That would have been enough unpleasant news for one morning, but then Bundy entered to tell him the results of the U-2’s photographic sortie over Cuba. The first thing the president did was to call Bobby. “We have some big trouble,” the president said. “I want you over here.”
A few minutes later Bobby rushed into Bundy’s office saying that he wanted to see the photographs. It was typical of Bobby not to trust the CIA technicians who had so painstakingly examined the pictures. Arthur Lundahl, the head of the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center, led the attorney general into the room where the pictures were set up on briefing boards. “Oh shit!” Bobby exclaimed. “Shit! Shit! Those sons-of-bitches Russians.” Much as he had during the Bay of Pigs, Bobby immediately personalized these events, seeing the face of the enemy before his eyes.
If there was ever a day that called for the deepest of perceptions and the wisest of judgments, that day had arrived. That reality was not evident that afternoon, as Bobby met at the Justice Department with Lansdale and those most concerned with Operation Mongoose. The attorney general had been upset at Lansdale’s operation for a while. Today he played his trump card, invoking his brother’s sacred name. He opened the meeting by talking of the “general dissatisfaction of the president” with Operation Mongoose. He bemoaned the fact that there had been no real acts of sabotage.
In the world that faced the