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TO THE PRECIPICE

Intended to deflect threats to U.S. security, the pattern of behavior that produced Zapata and Mongoose served instead to create threats where none had existed. So it was in 1962. In mid-August, the CIA warned General Lansdale that Soviet leaders intent on “deter[ring] an anticipated US military intervention against Castro” might be tempted to “establish a medium-range missile base” in Cuba.37 Neither Lansdale nor anyone else in a position of influence paid much attention to this prescient forecast.

The Kennedy administration’s obsessive pursuit of Castro had accomplished only one thing: It removed any doubts the Cuban dictator may have entertained about the dangers facing his regime. To defend his revolution, Castro looked to the Soviet Union, with which Cuba had already established a “fraternal” relationship. In response to his insistent entreaties, Nikita Khrushchev, general secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR—resenting Soviet strategic inferiority and keen to preserve Marxism’s sole foothold in the Western Hemisphere—now offered protection in the form of generous Soviet security assistance: more and better weapons along with more trainers. In April 1962 Castro readily accepted this offer.38

At first, the weapons were defensive—antiaircraft missiles, for example. In May, however, the Soviet presidium added surface-to-surface ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads to the list. Shrouded in secrecy, these along with contingents of Red Army regulars soon began making their way toward Havana. The two preferred means of projecting U.S. power—covert operations and strategic attack—were now on a collision course. Washington’s enthusiasm for clandestine warfare had emerged in part from the belief that it offered a way to solve problems without undue risk of triggering all-out war. Now the Kennedy administration’s insistence on using covert means to liquidate its Castro problem would bring the world to the brink of a nuclear exchange.

Americans habitually assign responsibility for the ensuing Cuban missile crisis to the Soviet Union. According to the conventional story, Khrushchev, a boorish, blustering gambler given to emotional outbursts, overreached. Exhibiting coolness and sophistication, Kennedy then saved the day, thereby averting World War III. This self-justifying interpretation works only by confining the narrative to the famous “thirteen days,” excluding most of what went before and much of what came after.

“Khrushchev should have realized,” wrote Kennedy’s secretary of state, Dean Rusk, in his memoirs, “that deploying missiles in Cuba was too threatening and destabilizing for the United States meekly to allow this to happen.”39 On whether Kennedy should have realized that the Soviet Union would not meekly allow Castro’s overthrow, Rusk is silent. Indeed, inside the administration the governing assumption was that the Soviets would remain passive in the face of American provocations. An interagency “Plan for Cuba” declared categorically that “the USSR will not intervene militarily” to preserve the Cuban Revolution. Although the Soviets might ratchet up the pressure in Berlin or other hotspots, they were sure to “stop short of a direct major confrontation with the U.S.”40

Dismissing Operation Mongoose as “terribly ineffective”—and by implication inconsequential—Secretary of Defense McNamara found it hard to believe that either Cuba or the Soviet Union took seriously U.S. efforts to subvert Castro. After all, McNamara avowed long after the fact, prior to October 1962 the United States “had no plan to invade Cuba.” When challenged on this point, he amended his statement: “Okay, we had no intent.” Yet the veracity of even that assertion requires an exceedingly narrow definition of “we.”41 In OPLAN 314-61, the military establishment over which McNamara presided had developed a detailed invasion plan that senior U.S. commanders by the autumn of 1962 were fully prepared—even eager—to implement.42

Kennedy administration officials also rejected