Red traitor, p.35
Red Traitor, page 35
The reasons why a man chooses to betray his country are complex. As my fictional General Orlov observes, every man justifies his actions by telling himself that he is serving a greater good. Penkovsky was, to his handler Wynne at least, a brave man who died for the cause of peace. My fictional Morozov is a much less sympathetic character, driven in part by anger at the Soviet regime’s murder of his colleagues during Stalin’s purges but mostly by vanity and a sense of personal affront. He is a cynic and a manipulator. Morozov is not Penkovsky. He is his dark twin.
The KGB had evidence of Penkovsky’s treachery as early as October 1961. Their source was a Soviet spy in the US National Security Agency, a lowly former sergeant named Jack Dunlap who worked as an NSA civilian contractor. The technique used by my fictional Dunlop to steal documents is based on the Carroll Report into Dunlap’s espionage. As personal chauffeur to NSA chief of staff Major-General Thomas M. Watlington, Dunlap had top-secret clearance and “no inspection” status. He would regularly collect papers from the General’s desk and photocopy them en route to the typing pool and mailroom.
The real Dunlap was, according to US military investigators, a drunk who agreed to work for the KGB for money, not due to conviction. The KGB, for its part, was concerned that arresting Penkovsky immediately could jeopardize their well-placed agent in the NSA. There was also initially some question in the KGB whether Penkovsky was in fact working as a deliberate double agent, or “dangle,” at the behest of his friend and boss Ivan Serov. The KGB therefore spent nearly a year building a “discovery case” against Penkovsky, hoping to catch him red-handed in order not to throw suspicion on their mole (or by some accounts, moles) in the NSA and, possibly, MI6.
Dunlap was never caught. He committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning in his car on July 23, 1963, a day after taking an FBI polygraph test. Because he died with a clean record, Dunlap is buried alongside other Army veterans at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. Like Morozov, my fictional Dunlop—the greedy Louisiana braggart who spies for money—is an unsympathetic character. To give the real man the benefit of the doubt, I have changed his name, albeit by a single letter.
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Major Tokarev is based on a real-life war veteran named Vitaly Kabatov. Like Tokarev, Kabatov was a cavalry officer who lost both hands to a grenade near Smolensk. He married Saida, a university friend of my mother’s, and wore heavy plastic prostheses. Remarkably, Vitaly was able to live a more or less normal life. On one memorable occasion I even saw him remove his plastic hands and play the piano, a little clumsily, with his stumps. He always said that he was better off than many of his comrades who had lost their lives.
Several veterans of the Cuban submarine flotilla outlived the USSR and the vow of secrecy that they had made to the Soviet Navy. Many told their stories after the fall of Communism in the form of memoirs and interviews with the newly free Russian press.
Captain Rurik Ketov of B-4 recalled the instructions on the use of the special weapon that Vice Admiral Rassokha gave just before they sailed for Cuba: “ ‘Write down when you should use these,’ ” Rassokha told the flotilla commanders. “ ‘In three cases. First, if you get a hole under the water. A hole in your hull. Second, a hole above the water. If you have to come to the surface, and they shoot at you, and you get a hole in your hull. And the third case—when Moscow orders you to use these weapons.’ These were our instructions. And then he added, ‘I suggest to you, commanders, that you use the nuclear weapons first, and then you will figure out what to do after that.’ ”
Captain Nikolai Shumkov, commander of B-130, recalled being told by Admiral Vitaliy A. Fokin, first deputy head of the Soviet Navy, “If they slap you on the left cheek, do not let them slap you on the right one.”
It was clear to all the flotilla’s skippers, Ketov recalled, that “for the first time in history, a commander had a nuclear weapon and the power to use it.”
The Americans had no idea that the Soviet submarines were carrying nuclear weapons—just as the Soviets had no idea that the antisubmarine destroyers USS Bache and Cony were carrying nuclear depth charges. In my fiction, the Soviet flotilla is dispatched by hawks in the military in order to provoke a nuclear confrontation with the United States in case Khrushchev’s nerve failed during the coming standoff. The truth is less dramatic, but in many ways more surprising. It seems that in the stress and chaos of the unfolding crisis, the Soviet high command and the Kremlin simply forgot about the existence of the Anadyr flotilla and their fatal weapons. Indeed, it emerged during the later inquiry that the chiefs of the Defense Ministry believed, absurdly, that the flotilla had been composed of nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarines with their strict command-and-control procedures rather than a group of diesel-electric boats, each with its own nuclear weapon under the operational control of the commander.
The day after Kennedy announced his blockade—or “quarantine,” as he phrased it, since a blockade is technically an act of war—of Cuba on October 22, 1962, the Soviet naval command ordered the four submarines to abort their progress toward Mariel and remain on station in the Sargasso Sea. And then, silence.
On board the Soviet submarines, the commanders and crew were all expecting nuclear war to break out imminently—and to be ordered to use their special weapons to attack the nearest American ships. B-36’s captain, Alexei Dubivko, wrote that “the success of being the first to use our weapons depended on the timely reception of the signal to start combat operations…We were expecting such a signal from one hour to the next.”
In the absence of any orders from Moscow, in high seas whipped up by Hurricane Ella, all four boats tuned into local US radio stations for news. On B-36, Captain Dubivko heard on Miami public radio that “President Kennedy [had] announced a blockade of the island of Cuba, and warned his people about a possibility of a thermonuclear conflict with the Soviet Union on the all-American radio; the Americans are preparing a powerful landing on Cuba; our missiles with nuclear warheads and service personnel are already in Cuba; special camps are being prepared on the Florida peninsula for Russian prisoners of war.” On B-4, Ketov recalled that “everything I knew and everything I did was from listening to Kennedy.”
The White House ExComm, a group of top advisors assembled by Kennedy to deal with the crisis, was aware that the Soviets might attempt to use submarines to run the US blockade. A force of more than a hundred ships—including vessels from allied South and Central American nations—was scrambled to intercept Soviet ships and hunt for submarines. As soon as weather permitted, medium-range P-3 Orion planes were also dispatched from Maryland to drop hundreds of sonar buoys across the sea-lanes to Cuba.
A transcript of the ExComm meeting on October 24 shows how worried Kennedy was that intercepting Soviet submarines could trigger a shooting war. “If he doesn’t surface or if he takes some action—takes some action to assist the merchant ship, are we just going to attack him anyway?” Kennedy asked Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. “At what point are we going to attack him? I think we ought to wait on that today. We don’t want to have the first thing we attack as a Soviet submarine.”
“The plan is…to send antisubmarine helicopters out to harass the submarine,” McNamara replied. “And they have weapons and devices that can damage the submarine. And the plan, therefore, is to put pressure on the submarine, move it out of the area by that pressure, by the pressure of potential destruction, and then make the intercept. But this is only a plan and there are many, many uncertainties.” According to Robert Kennedy, the discussion of how to force the Soviet submarines to the surface was “the time of greatest worry for the President. His hand went up to his face and covered his mouth and he closed his fist. His eyes were tense, almost gray, and we just stared at each other across the table.”
McNamara and the chief of the Navy Staff came up with a system of nonlethal signals using practice depth charges. On October 25, the White House sent a “Notice to Mariners” message to the Soviet Embassy in Washington detailing the US Navy’s procedures for intercepting vessels suspected of breaking the “quarantine” of Cuba. Under the section on “Submarine Surfacing and Identification Procedures,” the US Navy warned that its ships would drop four or five harmless low-explosive sound devices accompanied by an international sonar code signal to “rise to surface.” The notice contained an assurance that all signaling devices were harmless. The Soviet Embassy never acknowledged the message. In any case, there was no way for Moscow to signal submarines that were submerged.
As the Sargasso Sea calmed and the underwater thermocline under which the Soviet boats could hide from sonar detection disappeared, US destroyers first located B-36 and began bombarding her with the agreed-upon depth charge and sonar signals. “Our sonar could effectively be used as an offensive weapon,” recalled Lieutenant Gary Slaughter, communications officer of the USS Cony. “It’s like you have five strong men pounding on a barrel. It’s gotta drive them crazy…There were so many weapons, so many sonars—he was like a rabbit inside a small cage with fifteen hounds outside the cage and fifteen hawks above the cage. That rabbit was dead.”
According to the USS Cony’s antisubmarine warfare officer, Lieutenant Andrew Bradick, their orders were to “hunt [the subs] to exhaustion. You would keep contact with the submarine and he could have to surface because his batteries were going flat.” The US ships kept close to the Soviet submarines, never letting up. “We knew that they had been under great strain for a long time,” said Slaughter. “It was hot, it was miserable. So what we were trying to apply was basically passive torture.”
B-36’s deputy commander, Captain Third Rank Anatoly Andreyev, described the ordeal of the sonar lashing in a journal he kept in the form of a letter to his wife. “For the last four days, they didn’t even let us come up to the periscope depth. My head is bursting from the stuffy air…Today three sailors fainted from overheating again…We are sailing with a risk of dropping down to six thousand meters. This is how much we have under [our boat]. The regeneration of air works poorly, the carbon dioxide content is rising, and the electric power reserves are dropping. Those who are free from their shifts, are sitting immobile, staring at one spot…Temperature in the sections is above 50. In the diesel [sic—he meant the electric engine room]—61 degrees.”
At nine in the morning of October 27, 1962, as the US fleet was chasing B-36 across the Sargasso Sea, a CIA U-2F spy plane piloted by USAF major Rudolf Anderson took off from McCoy Air Force Base near Orlando, Florida. Just over three hours into his flight over Russian installations in Cuba, Anderson’s aircraft was shot down by an S-75 Dvina surface-to-air missile over the northeastern town of Banes. When Kennedy was told about the crisis’s first fatality, he went quiet and said, “Blood has been shed.” The order to fire had been given by a Soviet officer acting on his own authority.
Khrushchev, terrified that events on the ground were about to spin out of control, ordered the Soviet commander in Cuba, General Issa Pliyev, to instruct all his batteries not to fire on any more US planes. Kennedy, for his part, wisely chose not to react. But his brother sent a harsh personal message to Soviet ambassador Dobrynin to signal that the White House’s patience was nearly at an end. The crisis was in its critical stage. “You have drawn first blood,” Robert Kennedy wrote. “The president has decided against advice…not to respond militarily to that attack, but he [Dobrynin] should know that if another plane was shot at…we would take out all the SAMs and antiaircraft…And that would almost surely be followed by an invasion.”
Just minutes after the wreckage of Rudolf Anderson’s U-2F had tumbled to earth over eastern Cuba, the USS Bache made its first contact with a second Soviet submarine off the northern coast of the Dominican Republic—B-59. The destroyers USS Bache, Beale, Cony, Eaton, and Murray, backed by the aircraft carrier USS Randolph, closed in on B-59 and began the same sonar and depth-charge lashing they had been meting out to B-36 for days.
Captain Alexei Dubivko of B-36 had suffered the American sonic bombardment without considering the use of the special weapon. But B-59’s captain, Valentin Savitsky, was a man of a different temperament. Savitsky decided that the detonations were an attack, not an aggressive form of signaling. “There is a specific signal that we have and that is three explosions you have to surface,” recalled B-59’s junior navigator, Viktor Mikhailov. “The American signal was not three.”
B-59’s radio officer, Vadim Orlov, remembered that “the Americans hit us with something stronger than the grenades—apparently with a practice depth bomb. We thought—that’s it—the end. After this attack, the totally exhausted Savitsky, who in addition to everything was not able to establish connection with the General Staff, got furious. He summoned the officer who was assigned to the nuclear torpedo, and ordered him to assemble it to battle readiness. ‘Maybe the war has already started up there, while we are doing somersaults here’—screamed agitated Valentin Grigorievich, justifying his order. ‘We’re gonna blast them now! We will die, but we will sink them all—we will not become the shame of the fleet.’ ”
Savitsky ordered the weapons officer whose sole responsibility was to look after the special weapon to assemble and arm it, and demanded Maslennikov’s half of the arming key in order to do so. But he did not give orders to load the weapon or to flood the torpedo tube.
Exactly what happened next lies between the lines of the survivors’ testimony. Radio officer Orlov would not have been personally present in B-59’s tiny command center during the tense confrontation between Captain Savitsky and flotilla chief of staff Arkhipov—but his recollection is the closest we can get to an eyewitness account to the standoff. “We did not fire the nuclear torpedo—Savitsky was able to rein in his wrath,” Orlov recalled. “After consulting with Second Captain Vasily Alexandrovich Arkhipov and his deputy political officer, Ivan Semenovich Maslennikov, he made the decision to come to the surface.” Olga Arkhipova said that her husband told her that he “knew it was madness to fire a torpedo with a nuclear warhead…[and] didn’t hesitate to say no.”
What Orlov tactfully described as Savitsky’s “consultation” with Arkhipov must have in reality been a tense clash of authority. Savitsky commanded the boat. As Ketov put it, “On board a submarine, the captain is next to God.” The second missile key was, as per regulations, held by the senior Communist Party representative on board—Political Officer Maslennikov. Arkhipov, as flotilla chief of staff, had no official executive role in B-59’s chain of command. But though Savitsky and Arkhipov held equal rank, Arkhipov had higher authority—and formally he would have to consent to the firing of the special weapon. On two of the flotilla’s boats—B-36 and B-130—the captain and political officer alone could have fired their nuclear torpedo. On B-59 and B-4, which carried Brigade Commander Vitaliy Agafonov, the decision effectively needed the consent of three officers. The fact that the hotheaded Savitsky’s belligerence was matched and overruled by Arkhipov’s trauma-inspired horror of nuclear weapons was pure chance. A coincidence that saved the world from nuclear war.
As Arkhipov and Savitsky argued, dusk was falling over Washington. “ ‘The sun is setting. It could be the last sunset we ever see,’ ” McNamara said to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, recalled White House advisor John Stoessinger. “And that’s when I got scared.”
With the Soviets given a final warning after the downing of the U-2 earlier that day, the Cuban missile crisis was just one more violent incident away from spiraling out of both Kennedy’s and Khrushchev’s control. A nuclear attack by a Soviet submarine on a US carrier battle group on the evening of October 27, 1962, would, without a shadow of a doubt, have resulted in a full-scale retaliation by Kennedy.
Astronomical twilight in the Sargasso Sea fell at 18:18. Just over an hour and a half later, B-59 and B-36 finally surfaced. They found themselves in a pool of floodlights from the Beale, Bache, and Cony. A Navy band on the deck of the Bache played jazz to emphasize the US ships’ peaceful intent. The submarines did not respond to signals, but the crew were allowed on deck in groups to breathe fresh air. Around four hours later, when the batteries would have been half-charged, the submarines dived once more and turned east toward home.
Arkhipov’s role in averting nuclear catastrophe did him little good when the flotilla returned to Sveromorsk. The submarines had been discovered and forced to surface, which the command of the Red Banner Northern Fleet considered as little better than surrender. Each captain was required to present a report of events during the mission to the Soviet deputy minister of defense, Marshal Andrei Grechko. Grechko was infuriated by the commanders’ failure to follow strict radio silence after they had been forced to surface by the Americans. Grechko “removed his glasses and hit them against the table in fury, breaking them into small pieces and abruptly leaving the room after that,” recalled one of the officers present.
“ ‘It would have been better if we had all been drowned,’ ” Arkhipov’s wife recalled him saying. “That’s why he didn’t like talking about it. They didn’t appreciate what he had gone through.”
Though Arkhipov never again had an operational command, he rose to the rank of vice admiral and retired honorably in 1985. He died on August 19, 1998, at the age of seventy-two. Recalling the Cuban missile crisis in 2002, Robert McNamara said that the world had “come very close” to nuclear war, “closer than we knew at the time.” Kennedy advisor Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. said the October standoff was “not only the most dangerous moment of the Cold War. It was the most dangerous moment in human history.” A room in the CIA’s headquarters at Langley, Virginia, is named for Arkhipov. It seems a scant memorial to the man whose level-headedness saved the world from nuclear war. This book is dedicated to his memory.
