Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (20 page)

Throughout
the day, NSA listening posts on both sides of the Atlantic focused on about a
dozen Soviet ships en route to Cuba and suspected of transporting missiles or
associated equipment. Inside a listening post hidden in a snake-infested swamp
in the town of Northwest, Virginia; a chilly cove in Winter Harbor, Maine; an
airfield near Miami, Florida; a rolling field in Edzell, Scotland; and other
locations, intercept operators triangulated every signal sent from the ships.
Among those was the
Urgench,
which at 3:10 P.M. was about five hundred
miles from Gibraltar, sailing west toward Cuba.

But when
the
Urgench
was next plotted, at midnight, it had reversed course and
was sailing back toward the Straits of Gibraltar. Immediately, the NSA Command
Center flashed word of the possible retreat to the CIA Watch Office. Harry
Eisenbeiss, the watch officer, checked with the Office of Naval Intelligence,
which had also received NSA's report, but ONI could not confirm the change of
course and thought it might be a Soviet ploy.

In the
meantime, the network of listening posts had spotted other ships also making
180-degree turns. The
Bol'shevik Sukhanov,
which was carrying seven
large crates on its deck, suspected to contain aircraft, "has altered
course and is probably en route back to port," said another intercept
report. Still another followed: "HFDF [high-frequency direction finding]
fix on the Soviet cargo ship
Kislovodsk,
en route to Cuba, indicates
that the ship has altered course to the North."

At 10:38
A.M. on Wednesday, October 24, with the
Urgench
continuing its retreat,
another message was flashed to NSA headquarters. A copy was quickly forwarded
to CIA, which in turn passed the message to the White House. An aide walked
into the Executive Committee meeting and passed the note to McCone, who smiled
broadly and made the announcement: "Mr. President, we have a preliminary
report which seems to indicate that some of the Russian ships have stopped dead
in the water." Kennedy was surprised. "Stopped dead in the water?
Which ships? Are they checking the accuracy of the report? Is it true?"
The NSA report convinced McCone. "The report is accurate, Mr. President.
Six ships previously on their way to Cuba at the edge of the quarantine line
have stopped or have turned back toward the Soviet Union."

President
Kennedy ordered that "no ships ... be stopped or intercepted" for at
least another hour, while additional information was obtained. "If the
ships have orders to turn around, we want to give them every opportunity to do
so. ... Give the Russian vessels an opportunity to turn back. We must move quickly
because the time [before the United States must act] is expiring."

Although
some ships were still heading toward the barricades, the good news from NSA
spread fast. National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy telephoned Under
Secretary of State George Ball. "Have you got the word on what is
happening at sea?" Bundy asked. Ball had not. "The six most
interesting ships have turned back. Two others are turning. We are starting
over here in a thinking session as to what might be done, which will be going
on all afternoon. If you want to come, it would be helpful to have you. . . .
Will you alert anyone else you wish to alert?" "I'll be over,"
said Ball.

The next
day, Thursday, October 25, Kennedy aide Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., met with Under
Secretary of State Averell Harriman to discuss the latest developments.
"Khrushchev," said Harriman, "is sending us desperate signals to
get us to help take him off the hook. He is sending messages exactly as he did
to Eisenhower directly after the U-2 affair. Eisenhower ignored these
messages to his cost. We must not repeat Eisenhower's mistake." Among the
key signals, Harriman told Schlesinger, was "the instructions to the
Soviet ships to change their course."

Harriman
continued: "In view of these signals from Khrushchev, the worst mistake we
can possibly make is to get tougher and to escalate. Khrushchev is pleading
with us to help him find a way out. . . . We cannot afford to lose any time.
Incidents—stopping of ships, etc.—will begin the process of escalation, engage
Soviet prestige and reduce the chances of a peaceful resolution. If we act
shrewdly and speedily, we can bail Khrushchev out and discredit the tough guys
around him—the ones who sold him the Cuban adventure on the theory that
Americans were too liberal to fight."

When the
offensive missiles had been discovered, the formal approval process for U-2
missions was ended. Now the Strategic Air Command had blanket approval to fly
as many missions as needed to cover Cuba completely. Although it was time
consuming, the formal notification process had had the advantage of allowing
NSA listening posts to support the flights. Intercept operators would scan the
frequency spectrum in search of any hostile activity before and during the
mission. If they picked up a warning indicator, they could send a message to
NSA headquarters, which would notify SAC. But now that U-2 missions were being
launched without notice, NSA had no way of knowing when a plane was over Cuba.

But by
Friday, October 26, the results of low-level photography indicated that the
Russians and Cubans were rapidly attempting to complete the four
medium-range-missile site. "Although no additional missiles or erectors
had been seen," said a Joint Chiefs report, "neither was there
evidence of any intention to move or dismantle the sites. Camouflage and canvas
covering of critical equipment was continuing."

At the
same time, however, NSA reported that three Soviet ships suspected of being
missile carriers were now steaming east, back toward Russia, as were all except
one of the Soviet dry cargo ships. Only one Russian dry cargo ship was still
moving toward the quarantine line; it was expected to reach there in three
days.

At
thirty-eight minutes past midnight on Saturday, October 27, an NSA listening
post intercepted signals from three radar installations.

After
checking and double-checking, the intercept operators determined that the radar
was "Spoon Rest," and therefore that three more SAM sites had become
active. "DF line bearings indicate emitters located at Mariel," said
the intercept report, which was Flashed to headquarters, "Havana east, and
poss. Matanzas sites. Emitters remain active." Once again, Castro raised
the stakes for the American reconnaissance pilots.

"On
the twenty-seventh," said Parish, "it was kind of a tight
situation—it was a scary situation, as a matter of fact. It was a scary time,
especially for those of us who had a little bit of access to information which
wasn't generally available. . . . We worked that week and pulled our watches,
nobody was off."

Later that
morning, Major Rudolf Anderson took off in a U-2 from McCoy Air Force Base at
Orlando, Florida. The routine flight was expected to last about three and a
half hours. Over Cuba, Anderson pushed his plane northward toward the town of
Banes.

At an afternoon
Executive Committee meeting, Secretary of Defense McNamara made a routine
report on the day's daylight reconnaissance mission. "One mission aborted
for mechanical reasons, according to preliminary reports," he said.
"One plane is overdue and several are said to have encountered ground
fire." He then recommended a number of night missions. But President
Kennedy held off on a decision until more details could be obtained on the
day's reconnaissance. He then ordered that missions be flown the next day
without fighter escort. "If our planes are fired on," he said,
"we must be prepared for a general response or an attack on the SAM site
which fired on our planes. We will decide tomorrow how we return fire after we
know if they continue their attacks on our planes."

An aide
quickly walked in and handed a note to Joint Chiefs Chairman Maxwell Taylor.
Major Anderson's U-2 had been shot down near Banes. "The wreckage of the
U-2 was on the ground," Taylor was told; "the pilot had been
killed." Taylor recommended an air attack on the SAM site responsible.
McNamara said that we must be ready to attack Cuba by launching 500 sorties on
the first day. Invasion, he said, had "become almost inevitable."

At NSA,
data were immediately called in from air, sea, and ground eavesdropping
platforms in an attempt to discover the details of the shootdown. Director
Blake ordered new rules, as follows: As a first priority, every listening post
was to monitor in real time all reactions to U.S. reconnaissance flights.
"Any time the Cubans scrambled a flight," said Hal Parish, "we
were supposed to tell. . . why they scrambled and who they were after—very
often they were after U.S. aircraft along the coast. . . . When we were still
flying the U-2s and we got what appeared to be Cuban threats to the U-2s with
MiG aircraft, we had it arranged. . . . we would call General [John] Morrison
[at NSA] first to get his okay, then we would call SAC . . . and they would
contact the aircraft."

Once a
warning was received, the reconnaissance flight would immediately break off
from the mission and fly to Andrews Air Force Base near Washington, D.C. There,
NSA analysts would meet the plane and debrief the crew. "You'd debrief in
the airplane off the end of the runway," said Parish. "Pick up all the
tapes and bring them out to the building and put our linguists to work all
night long working on those tapes in order to provide an assessment of whatever
happened that day [and have it out] by six o'clock."

In order
to further protect the pilots, electronic countermeasures needed to be
developed that could jam or deceive the Soviet SA-2 missile. But to develop
these countermeasures, NSA would first have to intercept the missile's telltale
fusing signals, which activated the warhead. That, however, required forcing
the Cubans to fire off one more of their missiles. To accomplish this, DC-130
aircraft began launching high-altitude Ryan 147 drones over the island. The
Ryans were equipped with electronics that made them appear larger than they
actually were, about the size of a U-2.

Each drone
also carried onboard equipment to collect the critical fusing signals and
retransmit them, in the few seconds before it was blasted from the sky, to a
specially equipped type of RB-47 Strato-Spy codenamed Common Cause. One of the
RB-47s was constantly in the air off the Cuban coast. "The plan was to
lure the Cuban missile sites into firing at the drone," said Bruce Bailey,
an Air Force signals intelligence officer, "thus providing the desired
electronic intelligence to the RB-47." But the Cubans refused to fire any
more missiles. "The Cubans had been assured that such a site or base would
be struck immediately," said Bailey. "Obviously they believed that
and refused to fire. The mission soon became more appropriately known as 'Lost
Cause.' "

At 7:15 on
the evening of October 30, as the crisis grew hotter, Robert Kennedy asked
Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin to meet with him in his office at the
Justice Department in half an hour. "In the last two hours we had found
that our planes flying over Cuba had been fired upon," Kennedy told the
ambassador, as he noted in a top secret memo to Dean Rusk. "One of our
U-2's had been shot down and the pilot killed. . . . This was an extremely
serious turn of events. We would have to make certain decisions within the next
twelve or possibly twenty-four hours. There was very little time left. If the
Cubans were shooting at our planes, then we were going to shoot back."
Dobrynin argued that the U.S. was violating Cuban airspace, but Kennedy shot
back that if we had not been violating Cuban airspace then we would still have
believed what he and Khrushchev had said—that there were no long-range missiles
in Cuba. "This matter was far more serious than the air space over Cuba
and involved people all over the world," Kennedy added.

"I
said that he had better understand the situation and he had better communicate
that understanding to Mr. Khrushchev," Kennedy later noted in the long
secret memorandum. "Mr. Khrushchev and he had misled us. The Soviet Union
had secretly established missile bases in Cuba while at the same time
proclaiming, privately and publicly, that this would never be done. I said
those missile bases had to go and they had to go right away. We had to have a
commitment by at least tomorrow [October 31] that those bases would be removed.
This was not an ultimatum, I said, but just a statement of fact. He should
understand that if they did not remove those bases then we would remove them.
His country might take retaliatory action but he should understand that before
this was over, while there might be dead Americans there would also be dead
Russians."

Dobrynin
asked Kennedy whether he was proposing a deal. "I said a letter had just
been transmitted to the Soviet Embassy which stated in substance that the
missile bases should be dismantled," Kennedy wrote, "and all
offensive weapons should be removed from Cuba. In return, if Cuba and Castro
and the Communists ended their subversive activities in other Central and Latin
American countries, we would agree to keep peace in the Caribbean and not
permit an invasion from American soil.”

But
Khrushchev had earlier proposed a swap: take the American missiles away from
his doorstep in Turkey, and he would take the Soviet missiles from Cuba. Dobrynin
once again brought up that proposal. "If some time elapsed," Kennedy
said, mentioning four or five months, "I was sure that these matters could
be resolved satisfactorily."