The Autumn of Crises:
Soviet Submarine Base
At Cienfuegos
A Message from Moscow
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hroughout most of that critical autumn of 1970 the Soviet Union was represented in Washington by a clever, amiable, and discreet but quite powerless chargé d’affaires, Yuli M. Vorontsov. Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin had been recalled for consultations. I learned later that Dobrynin’s absence often reflected the Kremlin’s desire that no serious talks take place—in this case even, or perhaps especially, about the summit with which we were toying. Vorontsov’s rank was quite high but such Soviet diplomats have little discretion; they usually deliver their messages woodenly and then carefully note the reply, limiting discussion to a few obvious questions and not venturing to pretend that they have any opinions of their own. Thus when Vorontsov was jovial, one could be certain it was on instructions; when he was stern, it was the Kremlin that was frowning.
At the end of July in San Clemente I received a call from Vorontsov, who said he had a message for me as soon as possible after my return to Washington; I assumed it concerned Soviet agreement to the summit. We met on August 4 in my White House office and Vorontsov was bubbling with joviality. He had no word from Moscow about a summit, which he knew was being actively and favorably considered; relations between our countries, he thought, had taken a “good turn.” What he had come to convey was his government’s desire to reaffirm the Kennedy-Khrushchev understanding of 1962 with respect to Cuba: “We would like to stress that in the Cuban question we proceed as before from the understanding on this question reached in the past and we expect that the American side will also strictly adhere to this understanding.”
I was puzzled and said so. I was not aware of any special tension over Cuba; we were doing nothing unusual; there was no obvious reason why the Soviet Union should raise the question. Vorontsov was blandly reassuring. There had been news stories, he said, about American plans to strengthen the defense of Guantanamo Naval Base and alleged Soviet military activities in Cuba; he read me a note complaining about stepped-up subversive activities against Cuba by exiles operating from Florida. I asked in what way Moscow wished to confirm the 1962 understanding and what Vorontsov thought the understanding was. He said an oral statement from me would be enough, and he took the understanding to be that we would not invade Cuba by military force. I said I would have to discuss the matter with the President and let him know.
I at once asked the State Department for its records and interpretation of the 1962 understanding. Alex Johnson sent over excerpts from the Kennedy-Khrushchev correspondence and a summary of the subsequent negotiations between John McCloy and Vasily Kuznetsov on the arrangements under which the Soviet missiles and bombers were withdrawn. It emerged that there was no formal understanding in the sense of an agreement, either oral or in writing. The exchanges were, however, sufficiently lengthy and detailed to constitute mutual assurances, as I described to the President:
The Khrushchev-Kennedy exchanges indicate clearly that there was an implicit understanding that we would agree to give assurances against an invasion of Cuba if the Soviet Union would remove its offensive missiles from Cuba under UN observation and would undertake, with suitable safeguards, to halt the re-introduction of such weapons systems into Cuba. However, the agreement was never explicitly completed because the Soviets did not agree to an acceptable verification system (because of Castro’s opposition) and we never made a formal non-invasion pledge. The negotiations between McCloy and Kuznetsov, which were designed to work out a satisfactory means of formalizing the Kennedy-Khrushchev “understanding” eventually just fizzled out.
The “understanding” we have with the Soviets, therefore, is an implicit one, which was never formally buttoned down. In fact, the Soviets removed their missiles and there is no evidence that they have re-introduced them; and we, of course, have not invaded Cuba.
The United States had also put its view on the record in public, and it had never been disputed. The question of a naval or submarine base had come up only briefly. John McCloy had raised the issue with Kuznetsov on November 5, 1962, stating that the United States objected to the establishment of any Soviet military base in Cuba. Kuznetsov said he understood.
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Cuba was a neuralgic problem for Nixon. When he ran for the Presidency in 1960, it featured in the famous television debates with Kennedy. A few days before the debate of October 21, 1960, Kennedy had advocated intervention by American forces to topple Fidel Castro; in those days a muscular stance was not considered incompatible with a liberal political philosophy. Nixon, who was aware of the planning for what turned out to be the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion, felt constrained to disavow the proposal. Whether his purpose was to protect the covert planning, as he claimed, or to assert his own statesmanship in contrast to Kennedy’s “inexperience,” he later convinced himself that his patriotic self-restraint had contributed to his defeat. In his memoirs, Nixon related with some bitterness: “In that debate, Kennedy conveyed the image—to 60 million people—that he was tougher on Castro and communism than I was.”[122] Nixon was determined that no one would ever be able to make this charge again.
Nor was Nixon done with Cuba in 1960. In 1962, when he was running for the governorship of California, the Cuban missile crisis dominated the last three weeks of the campaign—the period Nixon always considered crucial to the outcome. Though he had already fallen behind by then, he was convinced that the crisis had deprived him of the opportunity to recover. He never ceased believing that Kennedy had timed the showdown to enhance Democratic prospects in the midterm elections. For Nixon the coincidence of Cuba with an electoral campaign set off waves of foreboding and resentment. In his view, nothing was more to be avoided than a Cuban crisis in a Congressional election year.
But in the middle of August of 1970 nothing was further from our minds. Nixon and I even speculated that the message delivered by Vorontsov might be a token of Soviet goodwill to improve the atmosphere for a summit in the fall. Our complacency was reflected in our reaction to an FBI report which, as chance would have it, reached us on August 5; it claimed that two boats hired by exiles in Miami would try to sink a Soviet tanker headed for Cuba. Nixon, who usually sympathized with the Cuban exiles, immediately agreed that we should assign two Coast Guard cutters to shadow the tanker and to protect it if necessary; an attack on a Soviet tanker by boats coming from Miami would have been difficult to explain to Moscow after its message. As it turned out, the attack never materialized. We had no other reason for special concern. The U-2 reconnaissance aircraft flying periodic photographic missions had noticed an increase in Soviet military activity in and around Cuba. But they had detected nothing that would indicate a violation of the “understanding.”
On August 7 I gave Vorontsov our reply. It noted with satisfaction the assurance of the Soviet government that the understandings of 1962 were still in full force. We defined these as prohibiting the emplacement of any offensive weapon of any kind or any offensive delivery system on Cuban territory. We reaffirmed that in return we would not use military force to bring about a change in the governmental structure of Cuba. I added as a “personal” observation that there had been Soviet reconnaissance flights off our East Coast by converted bombers using Cuba as a final destination. In our view this was approaching the outer limits of the understanding. Reducing these flights to an absolute minimum would surely help our relationship; it would similarly be noticed if the greatest restraint were exercised with respect to Soviet naval operations in the Caribbean.
Vorontsov expressed his appreciation for the good spirit in which I had made these observations; he was certain that the Kremlin would be happy to receive our confirmation of the understandings of 1962. He repeated his earlier impression that our relations had taken a clear turn for the better.
In the light of events, it is hard to imagine what Vorontsov or his masters could have been thinking. In foreign policy crude tricks are almost always self-defeating. Even in a Machiavellian perception of international relations the resulting loss in confidence needs to be balanced by some decisive benefit. And decisive transformations are hard to come by; certainly what the Soviets were doing in Cuba in the late summer of 1970 involved risks that were out of proportion to the probable gains.
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A Flotilla Heads for Cienfuegos
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n Cuba’s Southern coast there is a port named Cienfuegos. Its harbor can be reached only by a single channel leading to a bay dotted by a number of small islands and surrounded by steep hills. On one of these islands, called Cayo Alcatraz, a U-2 on August 26 photographed new construction activity that had not been evident during a flight eleven days earlier. It seemed to have been going on for several days; all that could be definitely identified was work on a wharf and on some new barracks. In itself this was not unusual. What made it of more than passing significance was another piece of intelligence: A flotilla of Soviet ships was on a course heading toward Cuba; it consisted of a submarine tender, a guided-missile cruiser, a guided-missile destroyer, an ocean-going salvage tug, a heavy salvage ship, a merchant tanker, and an amphibious landing ship carrying two eighty-foot barges. The submarine tender and the barges were of a type normally used for servicing nuclear submarines. The composition of this task force was so unprecedented that something more than a courtesy visit seemed to be involved. Suddenly, a succession of events over the better part of a year began to take on a new significance.
Castro had considered Khrushchev’s conduct in the Cuban missile crisis an abject surrender. Relations between Moscow and Havana had deteriorated dramatically. In 1967 Castro even went so far as to attack the Soviets publicly for their failure to give effective assistance to their Arab friends during the Six Day War. He had resisted Soviet efforts to read the Chinese out of the Communist movement and had continued radical policies of “exporting revolution” in Latin America without Soviet help. Kosygin had met with Castro in 1967, but that November, at the time of the fiftieth anniversary of the Soviet revolution, the Cubans had virtually boycotted the Moscow festivities by sending a low-level delegation, which departed almost immediately without being received by any prominent Soviet leader. Relations began to improve, however, after the death of Che Guevara in October 1967. In the spring of 1968 a new trade agreement was signed, including a Soviet credit of over $300 million. In August 1968 Cuba endorsed the invasion of Czechoslovakia, though belatedly and with qualifications. In early 1969 the Soviets resumed regular shipments of military aid for the first time in a year; they also refinanced the Cuban trade deficit with the USSR. By the time of the June 1969 Conference of Communist Parties the Cuban delegate said grandiloquently that Havana would support Moscow in case of a “provocation or aggression against the Soviet people come from where it may.” It was the first time that Cuba had taken the Soviet side in the Sino-Soviet dispute.
The following month, July 1969, the Soviets undertook their first naval visit to Cuba. Seven ships, including two diesel-powered and one nuclear-powered attack submarine, paid a port call and then conducted some maneuvers in the Gulf of Mexico; the naval force left the area after visiting Martinique and Barbados. Simultaneously, a new Soviet Y-class ballistic missile submarine began its first patrol in the North Atlantic.
In November 1969 Soviet-Cuban relations in the military field advanced another step. The Soviet Minister of Defense, Marshal Andrei Grechko, paid a highly publicized visit to Cuba, accompanied by the Deputy Chief of the Soviet Naval Staff. After the event, it seems likely that it was this visit that led to the events I am about to describe. In the months that followed Grechko’s visit, at any rate, Soviet military activity in and around Cuba gradually increased—almost certainly to get us accustomed to a Soviet naval presence in the Caribbean. In April 1970 the Cuban Defense Minister, Raul Castro, returned Grechko’s visit with a five-week sojourn in the Soviet Union, where he met with Leonid Brezhnev. On April 22, in a Lenin Day speech, Fidel Castro proclaimed his readiness to establish closer military ties with the Soviet Union. Shortly afterward, long-range reconnaissance aircraft began to fly from the Northern USSR to Cuba; these were Tu-95 jet bombers equipped with clearly visible electronic bubbles. Three separate flights preceded the second visit by a Soviet naval task force, which came in April on the heels of a major Soviet naval exercise (“Okean”) in the North Atlantic. This time seven ships arrived for a two-week visit to Cienfuegos. They included a submarine tender and a nuclear-powered E-II-class submarine armed with short-range cruise missiles designed for use against shipping.
Neither the CIA nor the Defense Department raised any warning flags at the time, but the increasing pace of this Soviet air and naval activity concerned me sufficiently to summarize it for the President on June 1, 1970:
While the Soviet naval visits may be part of the overall trend in recent years toward increased Soviet naval activity ever further from Soviet home ports, they may also be an effort to “accustom” Washington to greater Soviet use of Cuba by establishing gradually the precedent of visits and bunkering of active Soviet fleet and air units. The Soviets could conceivably wish to maintain Soviet naval units in the Caribbean-Southern Atlantic on a more or less permanent basis, refueling and resupplying out of Cuba… It will be important to keep our eye on this situation.
Later in June my NSC staff expert in Latin American affairs, Viron P. (Pete) Vaky, called my attention to a CIA study which suggested that the Soviets, however cautiously, might intend to establish a new facility in Cuba, such as an installation for servicing either ships or reconnaissance aircraft.
This was the background against which we watched the Soviet flotilla reach Cienfuegos on September 9. On the following day the merchant tanker joined them. Daily U-2 flights were ordered to begin on the first clear day, which turned out to be September 14.
The Administration’s concern at that point was the flotilla much more than the new shore installations. In an unusual gesture, Mel Laird had invited Pentagon reporters to his private dining room for coffee on September 2 for an impromptu press conference. Laird ranged over a number of issues, including the Middle East. It was his remarks on Cuba, however, that caught the headlines. He called attention to the Soviet ships moving toward the Caribbean, saying that news of them should be made public because there was evidence that the Soviet task force had weapons capable of reaching the United States. But, he added, “I do not see a crisis” because America had sufficient nuclear power to deter attack.[123] The story, however, received little sustained attention from the media. Cuba was vastly overshadowed by the ceasefire violations along the Suez Canal and the looming crisis in Jordan—which may have been one reason why the Soviets were so little eager to help calm the Middle East. It was a measure of the times that, while Jordan was blowing up and the Soviets were building a submarine base in Cuba, the Senate was debating ABM from the premise that defensive American strategic deployments were somehow provocative.
The Cuban reaction to our daily U-2 flights showed that something unusual was afoot. Our first flight on September 14 had to be aborted because MiG fighters scrambled after it. Another mission flying around the periphery of the island was also intercepted and forced to terminate its mission. On September 15 a US Navy antisubmarine aircraft was intercepted and shadowed for sixty miles while the MiG made several strafing passes. I was sufficiently concerned on September 16 to warn the Soviet Union that operating missile-carrying submarines or nuclear weapons from Cuba or servicing them from there would have grave consequences. I used the vehicle of a background briefing in Chicago. Since we did not yet have any concrete evidence or a settled policy, I stopped just short of making a direct charge that the Soviets were actually doing these things. It seemed best to leave open a line of retreat for them.
As it happened, conclusive evidence was being collected that very day by a U-2. What the photography showed was that in less than three weeks the Soviet Union had rushed to complete a fairly significant shore installation. Two new barracks and administrative buildings suddenly stood on Cayo Alcatraz, which had been barren only a month earlier. Recreation facilities had quickly risen on the island, including a basketball court and a soccer field. In my eyes this stamped it indelibly as a Russian base, since as an old soccer fan I knew Cubans played no soccer. More important, the submarine tender was moored in permanent fashion to four buoys in the bay. Alongside the tender were the two support barges, which had been unloaded from the amphibious ship. The tender was thus in a position to service submarines. Antisubmarine nets guarded the entrance to the harbor. On the mainland, a few miles from the town of Cienfuegos, there had arisen a new dock, a fuel storage depot, and the early stages of a major communications facility, undoubtedly the radio link to Moscow, guarded by antiaircraft missiles and surveillance radar. What we saw, in short, had all the earmarks of a permanent Soviet naval base.
I compiled the information for Nixon in a memorandum of September 18, along with a recapitulation of my exchanges with Vorontsov. I concluded:
Today’s photography readout confirms that despite the exchange between Vorontsov and myself the Soviets have moved precipitously to establish an installation in Cienfuegos Bay which is probably designed to serve as a submarine staging base in the Caribbean. Because of the seriousness of this situation I have asked CIA to provide me with a briefing at 12:30 today at which time we will carefully evaluate the full range of photographic evidence now held in an effort to determine more precisely the full scope of Soviet activity in Cuba. I am also initiating, on an urgent basis, a detailed analysis of the strategic implications of this development.
The intelligence analysis that I received later in the day concluded that the Soviets were “establishing a support facility [in Cienfuegos] for naval operations in the Caribbean and the Atlantic.” It added ominously that “Soviet naval units, including nuclear powered submarines, may soon be operating regularly out of the Cuban port of Cienfuegos.” Our naval experts pointed out that a permanent facility in Cuba would sharply reduce the time Soviet submarines lost in making long transits to operating areas in the Atlantic. The result would be to increase by approximately one-third the time that Soviet ballistic missile submarines could be on station in range of the United States, or to increase, also by approximately one-third, the number of submarines on station at any one time. This would be a quantum leap in the strategic capability of the Soviet Union against the United States.
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vidence of the Soviet naval base in Cuba reached us while we were negotiating the release of the hostages held in Amman, while Hussein’s troops were slowly advancing against the fedayeen, while American forces were either being rushed to the Mediterranean or mobilized, while the cease-fire violations along the Suez Canal continued, and while we were trying to design a response to Allende’s plurality in Chile. We were facing that nightmare of policymakers: simultaneous crises in widely separated parts of the globe.
The reaction of senior officials reflected this. Secretary Rogers told me on September 18—the day the intelligence about Cienfuegos was confirmed in Washington—that we had to guard against “high-level tension.” He wanted any paperwork restricted to a minimum so that we did not “create a crisis in the public mind.” The key issue, of course, was not whether there was a crisis in the public mind but whether there existed a crisis objectively, whether we could accept a permanent Soviet naval base in Cuba, whatever its immediate military significance, on top of the dispatch of Soviet military personnel to Egypt. I told Rogers that I would schedule a restricted meeting of the WSAG the next day, giving us an opportunity to collect our thoughts as well as any additional intelligence.
The Washington Special Actions Group met as scheduled on September 19, which coincided with the lull in the fighting in Jordan just before the Syrian invasion. Because the information about Cienfuegos had been restricted, there was no real staff preparation. Opinions therefore gyrated randomly in a conversational style. There was no dispute about the facts; all agreed that a base capable of servicing nuclear submarines was being built and that the Soviets were seeking to skirt the Kennedy-Khrushchev understanding by placing most of the facilities offshore. There was some dispute about whether Soviet activities violated the “understanding”; I reminded the group that in 1962 President Kennedy had reacted not because the deployment of Soviet missiles to Cuba had been “illegal”—it was, in fact, then technically “legal”—but because he considered it a threat to the security of the United States. The group then tried to gauge precisely the degree to which a fully operational base would affect the strategic balance (an issue that had also been debated during the 1962 missile crisis).
These reactions reflected the difficulty Americans have in dealing with the Soviet strategy of ambiguity. We were clearly facing a new naval facility. It had been built deceptively in less than three weeks. Even if no further facilities were added, it would increase the Soviet capacity to keep ballistic missile submarines at combat stations. If expanded, it might effectively double the Soviets’ sea-based missile force against us. If the Soviets proceeded in their usual fashion, the first deployments, if not resisted, would be followed by a further rapid increase. The experience of the missile buildup along the Suez Canal would be repeated, this time against us. If we acquiesced in the original installation, we would have difficulty in resisting its expansion. But as yet our government could not be quite sure what the Soviets were up to, and thus we hesitated over our response. Since both the President and the Secretary of State wished to avoid a crisis atmosphere until we had set our course, I asked each agency represented at the WSAG to submit its assessment and recommendations on a very restricted basis by September 21. The State Department, in particular, was to solicit the views of Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson, then our leading Soviet expert.
Llewellyn Thompson responded that the Soviet move was largely symbolic; it was a symptom of their inferiority complex. Despite all ideological invective, we were the model of a great power that the Soviet Union sought to emulate, lagging some fifteen years behind us in its evolution. In other words, Thompson suggested, the Soviets were now developing overseas naval bases in imitation of our efforts of a decade and a half before. The remedy State proposed was a quiet talk between Rogers and Gromyko in New York, when they would meet normally at the United Nations General Assembly about a month hence. Rogers could then point out our concern. Thompson offered no suggestion as to what we should do if Gromyko stonewalled—which was almost certain.
The estimate of the Defense Department and Joint Chiefs of Staff was diametrically the opposite. They considered a submarine base at Cienfuegos a strategic threat to the United States; in their view it would enable Soviet submarines to extend their operational time at sea and enhance the ability of the Soviet undersea fleet to operate in the Gulf of Mexico, thus exposing additional areas of the United States to ballistic missile attack. The Defense Department and the JCS explained in technical terms how such a base would operate. Naturally, they recommended removal of the base but, as so many military planning papers did, left it to the political leadership to figure out how to accomplish such a sweeping objective. One step proposed was to delay the retirement of some of our older naval ships; how this would signal our resolution or remove the Soviets from Cuba was left to the imagination. Another perceptive suggestion in the fall of 1970—six weeks after Cambodia—was the call-up of reserves.
I saw the Soviet move as going beyond its military implications; it was a part of a process of testing under way in different parts of the world. The Kremlin had perhaps been emboldened when we reacted to the dispatch of combat troops to the Middle East by pressing Israel for a cease-fire. I strongly favored facing the challenge immediately lest the Soviets misunderstand our permissiveness and escalate their involvement to a point where only a major crisis could remove the base. I opposed time-wasting moves such as waiting for a Gromyko-Rogers conversation in a month’s time. The Soviets knew that we were photographing Cienfuegos almost daily; if we did nothing they had to assume that we were acquiescing. If we then suddenly confronted them, they might have run out of maneuvering room; the consequent crisis might well be sharpened by their belief that they had been set up for humiliation. Moreover, we were expecting an imminent reply to our suggestion of a summit. If the Soviets’ answer was positive, we would face additional obstacles in confronting them, and if we did so, we would have to do it abruptly and at a level that would stake the prestige of the top leaders on both sides, making it even more difficult to contain the crisis.
The fact that so much of the equipment was seaborne indicated to me, however, that the Soviets had left themselves a way out. If challenged, they would bristle; they might bargain; but if permitted to so do, they would withdraw. It was not easy to convince the President of this strategy; indeed, I never really did; the final showdown was triggered by an accident.
A potential Cuban crisis during an election struck a raw nerve in Nixon. For anyone who knew him it was out of the question that he would tolerate the establishment of a Soviet naval base in Cuba for any length of time. Too much of his political life had been tied up with taking a tough stance on this issue; his friendship with Charles (Bebe) Rebozo, who hated Castro with a fierce Latin passion, guaranteed that he would be constantly exposed to arguments to take a hard line; he would never want to appear weak before his old friend. Sooner or later he would strike back, and he would then not rest until he had accomplished his objective. But we were now in the midst of the Jordan crisis; Syrian tanks had just crossed into Jordan; for all Nixon knew, that crisis might trigger a showdown with the Soviet Union. The President focused on the most immediate challenge. And Nixon had convinced himself that while Vietnam unleashed media and Congressional assaults on Presidential credibility, a new Cuban missile crisis in an election year would generate a massive public cynicism. Finally, Nixon was scheduled to leave on September 27 for the trip to the Mediterranean, on which he had set his heart, especially looking forward to a demonstration of firepower by the Sixth Fleet. He did not see how he could leave the country if we were in the middle of a Cuban crisis. For all these reasons, Nixon’s preferred strategy was to confront the Soviets right after the election. He accepted my analysis, but for the interim he chose Rogers’s policy of soothing delay.
To be sure, his initial reaction to my memorandum conveying the results of the U-2 mission of September 16 sounded tough. His handwritten note read:
I want a report on a crash basis on: (1) What CIA can do to support any kind of action which will irritate Castro; (2) What actions we can take which we have not yet taken to boycott nations dealing with Castro; (3) Most important, what actions we can take, covert or overt, to put missiles in Turkey—or a sub base in the Black Sea—anything which will give us some trading stock.
But on close examination these were all time-wasting options. Harassment of Castro had been tried and failed in the Sixties; it would take months to organize; “irritating” Castro would have no effect on the Soviet base. Tightening the boycott on Cuba would be even slower; it would run counter to the prevalent trend of our allies’ policies and it too would have no conceivable short-term impact. Putting missiles in Turkey whence they had been removed as a result of the Cuban missile crisis was hardly feasible rapidly. And if we did succeed, it would shake our relations with Turkey if it learned that we were using them only as “trading stock.”
On September 19, when I reported to Nixon the results of the WSAG, he urged me to play it all down. He did not, he said, want some “clown Senator” asking for a Cuban blockade in the middle of an election (as Republican Senators had done in 1962). We were in an anomalous position. The President was heading for a confrontation, but his desire to delay the showdown for two months greatly increased its risks.
Whenever personal persuasion failed, I appealed to Haldeman, who would convey one’s thoughts faithfully and literally without injecting his own views. It was risky to approach Haldeman, since he was likely to interpret any substantive concern as a sign of emotional instability; he had an invincible faith that there was no difficulty that could not be rectified by good public relations. But he was sure to communicate my uneasiness to Nixon even if he treated it as overwrought. I told Haldeman that the President was not focusing on the real issue. If there were a crisis in November or December we would have great difficulty explaining why we had done nothing in September; the Soviets might be misled by simultaneous summit preparations into steps that could cause the situation to get out of control.
The NSC meeting of September 23 helped concentrate the minds of senior officials. Some of the intelligence presented indicated that we had some time; some added to the sense of urgency. On the reassuring side was Helms’s conviction that if the Soviets intended to base ballistic missile submarines in Cuba permanently, they would need additional heavy equipment, particularly large cranes. This equipment was not yet in Cienfuegos. Moreover, we knew of no missile-carrying submarine in the area. On the other hand, we had other intelligence suggesting that nuclear weapons might be on board one of the ships. In the event, the President decided to proceed along the lines he had already privately indicated to me. He asked for contingency plans for the mining of Cienfuegos, the blockade of Cuba, the tailing of Soviet ships, and the removal of all restraints on the Cuban exile community, to be implemented sometime in the future. In the interval, he ordered a very low-key public posture, confined simply to noting that we were aware of what was happening and were watching. Mel Laird pointed out that this would never work; too many people knew what was going on; the story would leak.
It must be remembered that at the time of the NSC meeting on September 23, we did not yet know that the Syrian tanks had turned around and that the invasion of Jordan was over. The President’s procrastination was therefore understandable. Nevertheless, I was extremely uneasy. I thought the proposed policy was likely to tempt the Soviets to escalate their activity in the Caribbean; I did not see how we could move from a low-key posture in September to a confrontation in November if the installations remained the same, or how we would explain a showdown if the Soviets practiced a creeping expansion. If in the meantime the Soviets accepted our summit proposal, the problem would become nearly unmanageable. In short, the longer we waited the more difficult would be the decisions both for us and for the Soviets when we challenged them and the harder it would be to contain the looming crisis.
I convened a restricted meeting of the WSAG in the situation Room on September 24—the day after the Syrian tanks had turned back—to implement the President’s Cuban decisions, much as I disagreed with them. The discussion dealt entirely with press guidance should the construction in Cienfuegos become public while the President was in Europe. It was decided that if the issue came up, Defense would put out the bare-bones facts but offer no comment; State would express the view that the introduction of offensive weapons would be regarded with concern; and the White House would confine itself to stating that the President had been informed and was following events. The departmental press officers were given a detailed factual description; it was intended for their background guidance, not for use in briefings. We were on the way to implementing the President’s decision when it was made irrelevant by a bureaucratic mix-up of monumental proportions.
First, Dobrynin returned to Washington after his absence of seven weeks. Exuding goodwill, joshing that I had broken my promise not to organize a crisis in his absence (referring to Jordan), he called on the evening of September 24 to say that he had a message concerning Jordan and the summit; he was instructed to deliver it personally to the President. I reported this to Nixon, who was unwilling to see Dobrynin. He was afraid the Soviets were turning down the summit and he did not wish to receive a rebuff personally. I told him that the Soviets would probably not rebuff him but seek to string him along and delay the summit until 1971. We both agreed, however, that to have kept the President waiting for six weeks for an answer to a summit proposed in August for October was an act of discourtesy that did not deserve a personal audience. Nor did Nixon want to see Dobrynin without mentioning Cuba, and he saw no way of discussing Cienfuegos without either stirring up the unwanted crisis or leaving an impression that we were acquiescing. It was finally decided that I would receive Dobrynin’s message; it was the best signal of coolness we could give the Soviets. When I told him, Dobrynin pretended to have to check with Moscow.
Dobrynin and I finally met as usual in the Map Room of the White House at 10:00 a.m. on Friday, September 25. I cut off general discussion, pleading pressure of time caused by the President’s imminent departure for Europe. Dobrynin’s message was what I had expected: the Soviet Union agreed in principle to a summit; the agenda outlined in our communication of August 24 was acceptable. Dobrynin did not explain why it had taken so long to reach this profound conclusion. However, the Soviet government preferred that the summit take place in 1971 after the Party Congress in the spring, which in practice meant not before June. Dobrynin then wondered whether the President was thinking of Moscow as a venue. When I allowed for the umpteenth time that this thought had indeed crossed the President’s mind, Dobrynin nevertheless stopped well short of an actual invitation. He left the site and date to further discussion. He also informed me that Premier Kosygin would not attend the twenty-fifth anniversary celebration of the United Nations in October 1970, thus closing off that opportunity for a high-level meeting before the Congressional election. Dobrynin also brought the Soviet leaders’ reaction to the crisis in Jordan, which I have already described. I replied coolly that I would be in touch with him later.
By the time I returned to my office chaos had erupted. The morning had started with a column by C. L. Sulzberger in the New York Times, which, under the headline “Ugly Clouds in the South,” warned of a possible Soviet submarine base in Cienfuegos. Contrary to our carefully planned press guidance, the spokesman of the Defense Department had filled in every detail when asked a question at his morning briefing. It was a Washington classic of misunderstood instructions. The Pentagon briefer had seen the contingency guidance but did not understand that he was to use it only in an extremity and was not to refer to the background material at all. He therefore volunteered everything he knew, giving a detailed account of Soviet construction and naval movements of the past few months.
The press reaction was predictable. The Associated Press led off with: “The Pentagon said today it has firm indications the Soviet Union may be establishing a permanent submarine base in Cuba.” United Press International reported: “The Defense Department said today it has evidence that Russia has started construction of a submarine base in Cuba.” Doubtless the evening television news and the next day’s morning papers would dramatize it all further. It was inconceivable that the President could leave the country two days later without some White House statement on the new “crisis.” Though Mel Laird and Dave Packard called to apologize for the inadvertent Pentagon briefing, the fat was in the fire. Laird offered to take a hard line so that the White House could appear conciliatory, but I would have none of it: “We can downplay it and say it is perfectly natural so we can go on the trip, but then how can we ever confront them on it, which is what the President wants to do?”
Yet when all was said and done the Pentagon bloopers were actually our salvation. The bare-bones press guidance originally planned was so reticent that it would surely have appeared to Moscow as acquiescence; the President’s foreign journey would have provided an opportunity to complete the construction of the base; and the inevitable final confrontation would have been both bitter and far more risky. Now, however, we would be forced into my own preferred course. I told the President that we had no choice now except to face the Soviets down, but we should do so in a manner that gave them a way out. I proposed to use a briefing already scheduled that afternoon on Nixon’s Mediterranean trip to issue a strong warning to the Soviets against building a submarine base in Cuba; I would leave open whether the base already existed, so that a clear line of retreat was available. I would then call in Dobrynin in the guise of giving him an answer to the summit proposal and confront him directly, telling him that we considered Cienfuegos an offensive base and would treat it accordingly. We would insist on its dismantlement. The President’s trip would provide an interlude for that purpose.
When options were starkly defined, Nixon was always decisive. He understood immediately that waffling could only increase our dangers. He approved my recommendation and suggested that I ask Admiral Moorer to move a destroyer near Cienfuegos to emphasize our warning. With the boldness that was his hallmark in foreign policy Nixon authorized a challenge to the Soviet Union on the eve of his departure on an overseas trip. Accordingly, I went to the East Room of the White House to brief the White House press—ostensibly on the President’s trip. When the predictable question on Cuba came up, I replied:
With respect to Soviet naval activity in the Caribbean, we are, of course watching the development of Soviet naval activity and of possible construction there. We are watching it very closely. The Soviet Union can be under no doubt that we would view the establishment of a strategic base in the Caribbean with the utmost seriousness.
I would like perhaps to call attention to a press conference statement that President Kennedy made on November 20, 1962, in which he said the following:
“As for our part, if all offensive weapons are removed from Cuba and kept out of the Hemisphere in the future, under adequate verification and safeguards, and if Cuba is not used for the export of aggressive Communist purposes, there will be peace in the Caribbean.”
The operative part, of course, is here: “if all offensive weapons are removed from Cuba and kept out of the Hemisphere in the future.”
This, of course, remains the policy of this Government.
Later in the briefing I was asked whether this was not a bad time for the President to take a trip. I replied:
We are watching the events in Cuba. We are not at this moment in a position to say exactly what they mean. We will continue to observe them and at the right moment we will take the action that seems indicated. We are in excellent communication. Nothing very rapid and dramatic is likely to occur, and we are going to be in very close touch with the situation.
My briefing on the President’s trip was subject to a press embargo—it could not be used until Saturday, September 26, for the Sunday papers, the day of the President’s departure. The journalists pressed Ron Ziegler to permit immediate use of my Cuba statement. We agreed.
Two hours after my briefing, at 5:30 p.m., I met Dobrynin again in the Map Room. I had summoned him under the pretext of giving him an answer to his summit queries; two could play the game of using summit discussions to take some of the edge off confrontation. I told him that we accepted the principle of a summit and suggested either June or September 1971, depending on the state of our preparations. Moscow was acceptable as the site.
I then turned to the principal purpose of the meeting. Dobrynin had no doubt seen the wire reports of my background briefing in the afternoon. My words had been carefully chosen to suggest that the United States had not yet made up its mind about the precise nature of Soviet activities in Cienfuegos. I wanted him to understand that this was said only to give his government a graceful opportunity to withdraw without a public confrontation. We considered the construction at Cienfuegos unmistakably a submarine base. Moscow should be under no illusion; we would view continued construction with the “utmost gravity”; the base could not remain. We would not shrink from other measures including public steps if forced into it; if the ships—especially the tender—left Cienfuegos, we would consider it a training exercise.
Dobrynin was a thoroughgoing professional. He was usually genial, but he also knew when charm was wasted and when his usual recourse to cataloguing our sins was out of place. The issue now was a test between major powers involving important national interests. He was therefore all business as he sought to determine the extent and the limits of our challenge. Were we claiming that the 1962 understanding had been violated? I dismissed this as a legalistic quibble; in 1962 Kennedy had acted without claiming the violation of an understanding. Cuba, to us, was a place of extreme sensitivity. We considered the sequence of events, starting with Vorontsov’s demarche of August 4, as acts of extremely bad faith. The installations had been completed with maximum deception; they could not remain. Dobrynin asked whether we were going to start a big press campaign on the issue, obviously calculating how much loss of face would be involved in a retreat. I replied that we had no such intention; the President was leaving for ten days in Europe and there would be no further briefings on the subject during that period. The Soviets thus had an opportunity to consider whether to go the route of conciliation or the route of confrontation; we were prepared for either. We were determined that there would be no Soviet submarine base in Cuba. Whatever the phraseology of the 1962 understanding, its intent could not have been to replace land-based with sea-based missiles. Dobrynin coolly said that he would report to Moscow and be in touch.
We kept our word; there was no government briefing. Rogers and Laird were with the President on his trip so that coherent press policy was easier to maintain than normally. The fact remained that less than forty-eight hours after the end of the Syrian invasion of Jordan, we were close to another confrontation, this time with a superpower.
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E could not, of course, prevent newspaper or Congressional speculation sparked by the briefings that had already taken place. The Washington Post headlined the next day: “U.S. Warns Reds on Cuba Sub Base.” But the focus remained on the President’s pending departure for the Mediterranean. The Cuban story was slow in building, and there was no criticism that Nixon was departing in the midst of a crisis. Senator Barry Goldwater was quoted in the Washington Star as considering the Pentagon disclosure of a possible Soviet nuclear submarine base in Cuba evidence of a “serious Russian bid for world domination.” Senator Mike Mansfield was quoted also: “I do view it with alarm. It raises the most serious question in light of President John F. Kennedy’s statement after the 1962 Cuban missile crisis that offensive weapons must be kept out of the Western Hemisphere to assure ‘peace in the Caribbean.’ “ James Reston’s column of September 27 was entitled “Back to Cuba and the Cold War,” and its lead paragraph ran: “Something very serious and dangerous is now happening between the leaders of the U.S. and the Soviet Union. They are clearly misjudging one another in SouthEast Asia, the Middle East and Cuba, and this could be tragic for them and for the peace of the world.”
But this was the era of Vietnam. Almost immediately there was a second wave of reactions attacking the Administration. On Sunday, September 27, Senator J. William Fulbright voiced his skepticism on the television show “Issues and Answers,” helpfully just as the Nixon party departed from Washington: “Nearly every year just before we have an appropriations bill in the Senate, we get these stories; so it may or may not be true.” He said that it was a “questionable proposition” that the Soviets had no right to be in Cuba. He doubted that we could “bluff” the Soviets out of Cuba, because they now had a “degree of parity.” Skeptical opinions in our bureaucracy made their way to the front page of the New York Times in a September 30 story by Tad Szulc:
American officials said today that the U.S. had only dubious and dated information to indicate that the Soviet Union might be planning to build a strategic submarine base in Cuba. For this reason, these officials, who include members of the intelligence community, said they were at a loss to explain why the White House chose last week to warn Moscow against the establishment of such a base.
The theme was picked up by Senator Frank Church, who, after an intelligence briefing, remarked on October 1 that the present evidence did not suggest a reasonable conclusion one way or another. And on October 4, skeptical comments by a different part of our bureaucracy were reported by Neil Sheehan of the New York Times: “Military analysts say they are not sure what the new construction ashore at Cienfuegos signifies, but they say it could be a small facility for submarine-crew housing and recreation… In short the analysts think the Russians do not need and may not want any large base at Cienfuegos for the Yankee-class boats.” This was not the view of the Joint Chiefs; it was also clear that inaction was the best way to encourage the Soviet Union to build whatever it wanted and to expand whatever it was building.
And none of the critics noted that there was no word from the Soviet Union, neither denial nor outraged protest. In the whole period there was only a single, rather lame comment, complaining about hostile propaganda.
The Soviets had taken us seriously. As soon as we returned to Washington on October 5, Dobrynin requested an urgent appointment. He came in the next day with two messages, the first a face-saving one, to be shown to Arab clients, expressing satisfaction at my assurance of September 25 that we would not intervene in Jordan if other countries stayed out. The Kremlin chose to interpret this reaffirmation of the position from which we had never varied as a constructive contribution, and perhaps presented it to its Arab clients as having been exacted by Soviet diplomacy. I saw no point in disputing this; in diplomacy one collects claims on future restraint where one can.
The more important Soviet message concerned Cienfuegos. It began by noting the reaffirmation of the 1962 understanding in the previous exchanges and concluded with a precise commitment that no base was being built in Cuba:
The Soviet side has not done and is not doing in Cuba now—that includes the area of the Cienfuegos port—anything of the kind that would contradict that mentioned understanding.
After rehashing the standard Soviet complaint about American overseas bases, and noting that the Soviet Union had proposed in the SALT talks to limit operational areas of ballistic missile submarines, the note concluded:
In any case, we would like to reaffirm once more that the Soviet side strictly adheres to its part of the understanding on the Cuban question and will continue to adhere to it in the future on the assumption that the American side, as President Nixon has reaffirmed, will also strictly observe its part of the understanding.
Orally, Dobrynin added that while he could not make an agreement that Soviet submarines would never call at Cuban ports, he was prepared on behalf of his government to affirm that ballistic missile submarines would never call there in an operational capacity. I replied that we should make sure that the two governments understood the word “base” in the same manner. I would be back to him soon with some clarifying understandings.
The Soviets’ reply was clearly positive in tone, committing them not to establish a naval base in Cuba—even if the definition was as yet vague—and Soviet actions were consistent with it: after my press statement, construction of port facilities had ceased, the tender had been moved to a pier rather than serving as a floating repair facility, and the next day two ships of the flotilla had departed.
On October 9 I handed Dobrynin a written definition of an operational “base” worked out with Captain Rembrandt C. Robinson, my staff liaison with the Joint Chiefs:
The US Government understands that the USSR will not establish, utilize, or permit the establishment of any facility in Cuba that can be employed to support or repair Soviet naval ships capable of carrying offensive weapons; i.e. submarines or surface ships armed with nuclear-capable, surface-to-surface missiles.
The note then spelled out five activities, in particular, which according to the understanding would not be undertaken. In order to emphasize our determination, we headed it “President’s Note.”
Dobrynin accepted the document and said that he would have to await instructions from Moscow. However, he could tell me now that TASS would soon publish a formal statement. It appeared on October 13, and repeated the essence of the Soviet message of October 6. The spokesman of the Department of State described it as “positive.” And so it was; submarines and offensive missiles on naval vessels were now for the first time incorporated into the 1962 understandings.
An interesting insight into the workings of the Soviet mind was given us two weeks later. Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko, in the United States for the UN General Assembly, saw the President on October 22. On October 23 I spoke with Dobrynin at the Soviet mission in New York because Nixon had not yet given up the effort to extract some summit announcement before the election, an endeavor doomed—luckily for us—to disappointment. Dobrynin brought up Cuba. He said that Gromyko had been amazed because the President, after alluding to it briefly, had never returned to the subject. Naturally, Gromyko wondered about the reason. Could we be planning anything new? To the convoluted, ever-suspicious Soviet mind the President’s omission had profoundly sinister connotations. In fact, Nixon had not pursued the subject because he did not wish to get into the sensitive Kissinger-Dobrynin exchanges in the presence of his Secretary of State. I asked Dobrynin what Gromyko would have replied had the President pursued the subject. Dobrynin said that Gromyko had been instructed to say the following: “We do not have a submarine base in Cuba nor are we building a military naval facility. We do not intend to have a military naval facility, and we will abide strictly by our understandings of 1962. We are also making the exchanges from August onward part of the understanding of 1962.” Dobrynin added that our list of excluded activities could not be a formal agreement because it lacked reciprocity, but the Soviet Union understood what we meant by a base. In other words, the “President’s Note” became part of the understanding.
But nothing with the Soviets ever works this simply. The Soviet submarine tender and salvage tug, accompanied by four merchant ships and five Cuban patrol craft, indeed left Cienfuegos on October 10. On October 15, however, they turned in at the Cuban port of Mariel, on the Northern coast of Cuba. They did not depart from Mariel until October 31; then, after heading in an Easterly direction, they rounded the island again and arrived once again in Cienfuegos on November 7.
I protested angrily to Dobrynin on November 14. On November 24 the ubiquitous Vorontsov told a journalist that it was the task of a tender to tend submarines, and this was what it would do, though at sea. On December 22 I told Dobrynin that servicing submarines in or from Cuban ports would “lead to the most grave situation between the United States and the Soviet Union.” On January 4, 1971, the President reinforced this by stating in a television interview: “In the event that nuclear submarines were serviced either in Cuba or from Cuba, that would be a violation of the understanding.” On January 5 the White House elaborated on this statement, stressing that servicing of submarines “anywhere at sea” from tenders operating from Cuba was barred.[124]
The tender quit the Caribbean on January 3, 1971—only to be replaced by a second tender that arrived in Cuba on February 14 with another Soviet naval task force, including a nuclear-powered attack submarine. I protested this to Dobrynin on three occasions and, after a WSAG meeting, handed him a note on February 22 saying that the presence of a tender in Cienfuegos for 125 of the last 166 days was inconsistent with the understanding. The tender and submarine left. But yet another Soviet flotilla returned in May, this time with a tender and a nuclear-powered cruise-missile submarine on a “training voyage,” making a “brief rest” visit. Obviously the Soviets thought there was a loophole in port visits, and were exploiting it mercilessly. Every conceivable combination was being tried—except the most important one, the presence of a tender in conjunction with a nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine.
We lodged another sharp protest. The tender left once more.
All this, it must be remembered, was handled almost entirely by private diplomacy. The process was essentially a series of messages in the Presidential Channel, backstopped by interagency coordination in the WSAG. Rather than a dramatic confrontation on the order of 1962, we considered that quiet diplomacy was best suited to giving the USSR an opportunity to withdraw without humiliation. By great firmness in the early stages of construction, we avoided a major crisis, yet we achieved our objective. Military construction was halted; the antiaircraft emplacements were dismantled; the communication facility never became operational. Admiral Thomas Moorer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was able to tell the Economic Club of Detroit on November 9, 1970, that the Soviet Union did not have a submarine base in Cuba.
To be sure, the Soviets harassed us for a while longer through the loophole of port visits. But without shore facilities, port calls are strategically ineffective. And formally proscribing port calls would have widespread ramifications for the movement of the US Navy and our principle of freedom of the seas. What concerned us in Cuba in 1970 was an expansion of the Soviet Union’s ballistic missile submarine capability against the United States by virtue of a base in the Caribbean. This was prevented.
We could not forget, of course, the deception that had been attempted. Nor would we be oblivious to the reality that Soviet restraint, when it was achieved, resulted only from our forcing of the issue and determined persistence. The Nixon Administration had told Moscow many times that we were prepared for a period of mutual restraint and conciliation. In the autumn of 1970 Moscow chose to test whether this willingness reflected indecision, domestic weakness due to Vietnam, or the strategy of a serious government. Having been given the answer, Moscow permitted Cienfuegos to recede once more into well-deserved obscurity.
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