there be placed on American readiness to defend
Western interests in Europe or the Middle East
or Asia? That is how the thinking ran in
Washington during the autumn of 1962. For
Kennedy, another defeat over Cuba would have
been calamitous domestically to his standing as
president. His opponents would have gone to
town, charging him with being soft on commu-
nism. The stakes were high and Kennedy was fully
aware of the implications.
From a purely military point of view Kennedy
agreed with his secretary of defence Robert
McNamara that missiles placed in Cuba did not
significantly add to a Soviet threat. Just a few
months earlier, in March 1962, he had concluded
that there was not much difference between mis-
siles stationed in the American hemisphere and
those positioned 5,000 miles away. During the
October crisis later that year McNamara applied
cold logic in analysing what the effect of having
missiles in Cuba would be. Should the Soviets fire
their limited number of Cuban missiles first, they
would reach the US beforeany missiles from the
Soviet Union and so act as a warning, leading to
massive retaliation by the US, with its 1,685
nuclear warheads obliterating much of the Soviet
Union. The injury to the USSR would be mega-
times greater than the injury that forty-two Cuban-
based nuclear weapons could inflict on the US.
Kennedy had not been too greatly alarmed by
Soviet support for Castro before September 1962.
This did not mean he was soft on communism or
prepared to tolerate a communist state in the
Western hemisphere. In fact, the overthrow of
Castro became an obsession. The ill-advised and
in the end ineffectual policies pursued before and
after the Cuban missile crisis were revealed only
when Central Intelligence Agency documents
were published in 1975 by the US Senate under
the title Alleged Assassination Plots Involving
Foreign Leaders. A counter-insurgency expert,
General Edward Lansdale, had been instructed by
Kennedy to recommend actions that would lead
to Castro’s overthrow. In December 1961 with
the backing of the president and his brother
Robert Kennedy, the attorney-general, Operation
Mongoose was launched. The orders read, ‘No
time, money, effort – or manpower is to be
spared. We are at war with Cuba.’ With assassina-
tion seen as a legitimate option, the CIA hatched
plots to ‘knock off Castro’. Every effort was
made to isolate Cuba politically and economically;
sabotage teams infiltrated the island early in 1962
to destroy strategic targets, including bridges
and vital communications, oil refineries and sugar
mills; there was even a plan to poison turkeys.
Another crazy scheme, never carried out, was to
‘incapacitate’ with poisonous chemicals the farm-
ers collecting the sugar harvest or, alternatively, to
poison the sugar being sent to Russia in order to
provoke a breach between the Soviet Union and
Cuba. Intelligence was collected.
The objective of all this was to create havoc
and dissatisfaction in Cuba and so to incite a
popular uprising. Consideration was given to the
possibility that a revolt could then be supported
by American armed forces, to avoid another Bay
of Pigs fiasco. The results of so much activity were
disappointing. Early in October 1962, a few days
before the missile crisis, Robert Kennedy passed
on new instructions from the president to esca-
late Mongoose, to increase the number of sabo-
tage missions – results had to be achieved. That
Castro should in the face of so much hostility
have become paranoid himself is, therefore,
understandable. He appealed to Moscow for help,
believing an American invasion to be imminent.
Khrushchev viewed this as a threat and an oppor-
tunity. Publicly he declared that the Monroe
Doctrine had ‘died a natural death’.
Little thought had been given in Washington
to the likely reaction in the Kremlin to the threats
against Cuba. Khrushchev was a curious mixture
of dreamer and realist, cunning, trusting in his
own abilities and his superior gamesmanship,
ready to gamble on the inferior capacity of his
opponent to respond. The US, he had concluded
in the spring of 1962, was becoming too self-
confident and arrogant, and needed to be check-
ed. Robert McNamara and other members of
the administration had been openly boasting of
America’s growing superiority in nuclear strength
and its ability to deliver it and crush the Soviet
Union. In March 1962 the Saturday Evening Post
reported Kennedy referring to the possibility that
circumstances could arise that might lead to a US