Oct. 27, 1962, is the date
on which we humans were spared extinction thanks to Soviet Navy submarine
Captain Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov.
Arkhipov insisted on following the book
on using nuclear weapons. He overruled his colleagues on Soviet submarine B-59,
who were readying a 10-kiloton nuclear torpedo to fire at the USS Randolph task
force near Cuba without the required authorization from Moscow.
Communications
links with naval headquarters were down, and Arkhipov’s colleagues were
convinced WWIII had already begun. After hours of battering by depth charges
from U.S. warships, the captain of B-59, Valentin Grigorievich Savitsky,
screamed, “We’re going to blast them now! We will die, but we will sink them
all — we will not disgrace our Navy!” But Captain Arkipov’s permission
was also required. He countermanded Savitsky and B-59 came to the
surface.
Much
of this account of what happened on submarine B-59 is drawn from Daniel
Ellsberg’s masterful book, “The Doomsday Machine” — one of the most gripping
and important books I have ever read. Dan explains, inter alia, on pages
216-217 the curious circumstance whereby the approval of Arkhipov, chief of
staff of the submarine brigade at the time, was also required.
Ellsberg
adds that had Arkhipov been stationed on one of the other submarines (for
example, B-4, which was never located by the Americans), there is every reason
to believe that the carrier USS Randolph and several, perhaps all, of its
accompanying destroyers would have been destroyed by a nuclear explosion.
Equally
chilling, says Dan:
“The
source of this explosion would have been mysterious to other commanders in the
Navy and officials on the ExComm, since no submarines known to be in the region
were believed to carry nuclear warheads. The clear implication on the cause of
the nuclear destruction of this antisubmarine hunter-killer group would have
been a medium-range missile from Cuba whose launch had not been detected. That
is the event that President Kennedy had announced on October 22 would lead to a
full-scale nuclear attack on the Soviet Union.”
‘The Most Dangerous Moment in
Human History’
Historian
Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a close adviser to President John F. Kennedy, later
described Oct. 27, 1962, as Black Saturday, calling it “the most dangerous
moment in human history.” On that same day, the Joint Chiefs of Staff
recommended an all-out invasion of Cuba to destroy the newly emplaced Soviet
missile bases there. Kennedy, who insisted that former U.S. Ambassador to
Russia Llewelyn Thompson attend the meetings of the crisis planning group,
rejected the advice of the military and, with the help of his brother Robert,
Ambassador Thompson, and other sane minds, was able to work out a
compromise with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.
As
for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the president had already concluded that the top
military were unhinged Russophobes, and that they deserved the kind of
sobriquet used by Under Secretary of State George Ball applied to them — a
“sewer of deceit.” As Ellsberg writes (in his Prologue, p. 3): “The total
death toll as calculated by the Joint Chiefs, from a U.S. first strike aimed at
the Soviet Union, its Warsaw Pact satellites, and China, would be roughly six
hundred million dead. A hundred Holocausts.” And yet the fools pressed
on, as in trying to cross “The Big Muddy.”
Intelligence Not So Good
The
pre-Cuban-missile crisis performance of the intelligence community, including
Pentagon intelligence, turned out to hugely inept. The U.S. military, for
example, was blissfully unaware that the Soviet submarines loitering in the
Caribbean were equipped with nuclear-armed torpedoes. Nor did U.S. intelligence
know that the Russians had already mounted nuclear warheads on some of the
missiles installed in Cuba and aimed at the U.S. (The U.S. assumption on Oct.
27 was that the warheads had not been mounted.)
It
was not until 40 years later, at a Cuban crisis “anniversary” conference in
Havana, that former U.S. officials like Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and
National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy learned that some of their key
assumptions were dead and dangerously wrong. (Ellsberg p. 215ff)
Today
the Establishment media has inculcated into American brains that it is a
calumny to criticize the “intelligence community.” This is despite the
relatively recent example of the concocting of outright fraudulent “intelligence”
to “justify” the attack on Iraq in 2003, followed even more recently, sans
evidence, falsely accusing Putin himself of ordering Russian intelligence to
“hack” the computers of the Democratic National Committee. True, the U.S.
intelligence performance on Russia and Cuba in 1962 came close to getting us
all killed in 1962, but back then in my view it was more a case of ineptitude
and arrogance than outright dishonesty.
As
for Cuba, one of the most consequential CIA failures was the formal Special
National Intelligence Estimate (SNIE) of Sept. 19, 1962, which advised
President Kennedy that Russia would not risk trying to put nuclear-armed
missiles in Cuba. To a large extent this judgment was a consequence of
one of the cardinal sins of intelligence analysis — “mirror imaging.” That is,
we had warned the Russians strongly against putting missiles in Cuba; they knew
the U.S., in those years would not take that kind of risk; ergo, they would
take us at our word and avoid blowing up the world over Cuba. Or so the
esteemed NIE estimators thought.
The
Russians, too, were mirror imaging. Khrushchev and his advisers regarded U.S.
nuclear war planners as rational actors acutely aware of the risks of
escalation, who would shy away from ending life immediately for hundreds of
millions of human beings. Their intelligence was not very good on the degree of
Russophobia infecting Air Force General Curtis LeMay and others on the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, who were prepared to countenance hundreds of millions of deaths
in order “to end the Soviet threat.” (Ellsberg was there; he provides a
first-hand account of the craziness in “The Doomsday Machine.”)
Where Did the Grenade Launchers
Go?
I reported for active duty at Infantry
Officers School at Fort Benning, Georgia, on Nov. 3, 1962, six days after the
incident. Most of us new lieutenants had heard about a new weapon, the
grenade launcher, and were eager to try it out. There were none to be
found. Lots of other weapons normally used for training were also
missing.
After we made numerous inquiries, the
brass admitted that virtually all the grenade launchers and much of the other
missing arms and vehicles had been swept up and carried south by a division
coming through Georgia a week or so before. All of it was still down in
the Key West area, we were told. Tangible signs as to how ready the JCS
and Army brass were to attack Cuba, were President Kennedy to have acceded to
their wishes.
Had that happened, it is likely that
neither you nor I would be reading this. Yet, down at Benning, there were
moans and groans complaining that we let the Commies off too easy.
Reprinted with the author’s
permission.
Ray
McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of
the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was an Army infantry/intelligence
officer from 1962-64 and later served as Chief of CIA’s Soviet Foreign Policy
Branch and morning briefer of the President’s Daily Brief. He is co-founder of
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
Copyright © 2019 Ray McGovern, Consortiumnews.com
Copyright © 2019 Ray McGovern, Consortiumnews.com