THIRTEEN LIES: KENNEDY AND THE 1962 CUBAN CRISIS.

Some time ago I found on the Web a joker's site with suggestions about deductions you can legally claim to lower your taxes. One of them was, go watch a Kevin Costner movie and deduct it as a charitable contribution. Last week I followed the guy's advice and saw Thirteen Days. Believe me, it was not worth the effort. Next time I'll rather pay my taxes in full.

Though we are used to Hollywood's freedoms in telling history, I always watch a movie for entertainment. If I want to know about history I read it in a good book.

Initially, film makers never made any claim that what they were creating was nothing other than fiction, and I never had a problem with that. Lately, however, there is a growing trend to pass some of Hollywood's fiction as history, and this is something I don't like one bit.

As a card-carrying compassionate Liberal, Kevin Costner feels a strong attraction for starring in politically correct movies. When applied to history, however, political correctness is equivalent to the distortion of the past to justify the politics of the present; that is, lying. Thirteen Days, Costner's latest film about the Cuban missile crisis, is a politically correct movie.

Thirteen days is as full of lies as Robert Kennedy's homonymous book in which the film is mostly based. The rest of the lies come from some recent studies about the crisis made by "serious" historians. Among the most flagrant lies depicted in the film are:

1. In some scenes, soldiers jump from trucks to ready intermediate range missiles. Unless the Soviets had implemented affirmative action at the time and had enlisted some Africans as privates, one must assume that the soldiers manning the missiles in the film are Cuban.

It is true that some Cuban troops had been authorized to work on the installation of the SAM bases. But, with the exception of Fidel Castro, Raúl Castro, and Ché Guevara (none of which are black), the Cubans were strictly forbidden to access the strategic missile bases, or even come close to their perimeter guarded by seasoned Soviet special troops.

2. Kennedy and his close associates were surprised and shocked with the unexpected discovery of strategic Soviet missiles in Cuban soil. It seems that their surprised was faked, because as early as August, 1962, the word was out in Washington that the Soviets were building missile launchers for weapons already in Cuba.

Between August 31 and October 12, 1962, Senator Kenneth Keating made ten Senate speeches and fourteen public statements about the developments in Cuba. He was merely saying publicly what the American intelligence community, apparently his source of information, was muttering as loudly as they could.

Cuban refugees, leaving the island in drones, had been reporting sightings of Soviet army trucks carrying extremely long cigar-shaped objects covered by tarpaulins. Some of the refugees strongly suspected that the cigar-shaped objects they had seen riding on Soviet trucks on Cuban highways were not Siberian Cohibas for Castro. But, instead of paying attention to the growing concern, White House press secretary Pierre Salinger criticized the television networks for giving Keating the air time to express his concerns 3. We were more close to the brink than ever before. During the crisis President Kennedy ordered to defuse the nuclear warheads of the American missiles in Turkey, allegedly to avoid an accident. It was also reported that, even during the most dangerous moments of the crisis, Kennedy didn't alert the civil defense or show any curiosity about learning how to use the secret codes to unleash a nuclear attack. Strange behavior indeed for the commander-in-chief of a country at the brink of a nuclear attack.

But one of the most striking things of the Cuban missile crisis is that the Soviets never placed their troops, nor the civilian defense, under alert. This astonishing fact is mentioned in most of the early accounts of the crisis. Recently declassified top secret CIA documents confirmed the fact. At 10:00 in the morning of Tuesday the 23rd of October, CIA Director John McCone reported a strange thing to the ExComm: no signs of a general alert of Soviet forces in Cuba or around the globe had been reported'

A top secret CIA memo of October 25 clearly states that "We still see no signs of any crash procedure in measures to increase the readiness of Soviet armed forces." A top secret memo of October 26 gives the first indications of a state of alert, but in some European satellite countries, not in the Soviet Union. As late as Friday, October 26, American intelligence reported from Cuba, from Moscow, and from the United Nations, that the Russians were not ready for war. It is only on October 27 that a top secret CIA memo clearly acknowledges that "No significant redeployment of Soviet ground, air or naval forces have been noted. However, there are continuing indications of increased readiness among some units."

Surprisingly, even at that late date, the Soviets had made no attempt to mobilize their civil defense nor to prepare the population for the eventual use of fallout shelters. This was quite significant, because the Soviets had devoted considerable effort to instructing their civilian population in civil defense and had invested considerably in fallout shelters.

4. Now it can be told: we were even more closer to the brink than most people may think. During a three-day meeting that took place in Havana with the presence of Cuban, Soviet, and American scholars and officials, among them Robert S. McNamara, new declassified documents of the crisis from the different parties involved were made available to the scholars. It was during this meeting that a Soviet official, Army General Anatoly Gribkov, who allegedly was responsible for planning the operation in 1962, dropped a bombshell when he confirmed the presence of both strategic and tactical nuclear warheads on Cuban soil. Gribkov provided no evidence to support his claims.

However, notwithstanding Gribkov's unsubstantiated claims, one has to be very naive to believe that the Soviet Union could commit nuclear suicide in defense of a small island lost in the Caribbean whose leader was an unstable, self proclaimed "Marxist." That would have been a totally foolish decision. But Nikita Sergueyevich Khrushchev — a.k.a. the "Butcher of Budapest," and the "Hangman of the Ukraine"-- was anything but a fool.

5. The Soviets had deployed 32 nuclear warheads in Cuba in 1962. The American intelligence never confirmed the presence of nuclear warheads on Cuban soil. They never found evidence of nuclear warheads in Cuba and Kennedy gave specific orders about not verifying the extraction of nuclear warheads by boarding and inspecting the Soviet ships leaving Cuba after the crisis.

Lately, perhaps enticed by juicy grants from American foundations, some of the ex-Soviets have engaged in a fierce competition to tell some Americans what they love to hear. In 1989 Gen. Volkogonov revealed that 20 nuclear warheads were in Cuba. In 1992, Gen, Gribkov raised the number of nuclear warheads in Cuba to 48. In 1996 Lt. Col. Anatoly Dukuchaev raised the ante to 162 nuclear warheads in Cuban soil in 1962. Like rabbits, the nuclear warheads in Cuba keep multiplying. If this fierce competition keeps heating up fueled by American money, one of these funny Russians may end up by claiming that there were more nuclear warheads in Cuba than the number the Soviets actually had at the time.

The main force behind this concerted effort in proving that nuclear warheads were in Cuba is Robert McNamara, whose main goal has been to find justifications for his absurd policies as Secretary of Defense during the Kennedy administration. Recently McNamara found support for his theories from none other than his former executive action target, Fidel Castro, and from a group of Russians, among them, Sergei Mikoyan, an old KGB hand. But McNamara, Castro, and the ex-KGB operatives are very questionable sources of intelligence.

6. The Soviet officers in the field in Cuba had an open hand to use nuclear weapons without further authorization from Moscow. According to Gribkov, General Pliyev, the Soviet military commander in Cuba, had been given authorization to fire nuclear devices against an American invasion force if he considered it necessary, without further authorization from the Kremlin.

However, it is very difficult to believe, as some American researchers and retired senior Soviet officers now claim, that Russian field officers in Cuba had been authorized to use tactical nuclear warheads without further authorization from Moscow. Such an action would have been tantamount to mass suicide, since a single nuclear warhead fired by Russian troops in Cuba would had been equivalent to a declaration of nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. One has to be very naive, or have had as many vodka bottles as Gribkov, to believe that the Kremlin, whose zeal over the control of nuclear devices bordered paranoia, would have committed that act of sheer madness.

7. The plan was Khrushchev's idea to protect Castro from an American invasion. In his memoirs Khrushchev claims that the main reason for sending strategic missiles to Cuba was because Castro feared an American invasion. But it is very difficult to believe that Khrushchev planned to install missiles in Cuba to protect Castro just a few days after Khrushchev had tried to overthrow the Cuban leader by force. Actually, in April of 1962, after Castro discovered and neutralized the plot, he expelled from Cuba Soviet Ambassador Kudryatvsev (who also moonlighted as a senior GRU officer) and a group of his embassy thugs.

Moreover, simple logic dictates that no great power is going to give missiles to any newcomer who just asks for them. The USSR installed missiles where it wanted, and nowhere else. When Mao asked for missiles the Soviets turned him down flat. Neither before 1962, nor after, did the Soviets deploy nuclear warheads beyond their borders. It was not until many years later, only after they had developed reliable devices to control its arming, that the Soviets allowed a limited number of nuclear warheads to cross their borders, and always under strict control of KGB's special troops.

If the Soviets didn't trust their own army, why, then, would they risk placing nuclear missiles so close to the unstable, trigger-happy Castro? If anything, what Khrushchev would have loved was having the Americans doing the dirty job he failed to accomplish, by invading Cuba and helping him getting rid of the unreliable Fidel Castro.

The Soviet commitment in Cuba had proved to be a calamitous failure. As seen from the Kremlin, Castro was unpredictable, volatile, undisciplined, and often nonsensical. His wholesale executions, mass arrests, and terrorist adventures against his Latin American neighbors, together with the sight of hundreds of thousands of Cubans attempting to flee his rule, raised the very Stalinist specter Khrushchev was trying to dispel. Moreover, Castro was making a shambles of the Cuban economy and neglected to pay attention to "suggestions" coming from Moscow.

In such circumstances the sensible course for Khrushchev was to cut his losses and get out of the game, particularly considering that the Soviet lines of supply to Cuba were long and extremely vulnerable. But to leave Cuba voluntarily would have been tantamount to an admission of failure and would had involved substantial loss of face. If, however, Castro could be eliminated as a result of American "aggression," then Khrushchev and the USSR could retreat from Cuba, their honor relatively untarnished. After an American invasion of the island the failure of Communism in Cuba could be blamed not on deficiencies in Soviet-style communist management of Cuban affairs, but on "Yankee Imperialism."

The second part of the series that relates what really happened during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

8. The Soviet had deployed the missiles with cunning and stealth. In shipping the missiles to Cuba, the USSR was accused of stealth and deception. This accusation of deceit runs throughout all official US statements. The evidence indicates, however, that Soviet stealth and deception were faked. The available record suggests that, in fact, the Russians went to great pains to let the Americans discover the missiles. There is evidence that the Soviets sped up their pace of work and camouflaged the missiles only after they were sure the Americans had discovered them.

The plan to set up the missiles was carried out in such a way that they would inevitably be discovered by the Americans. If one assumes that the anti-aircraft SAM's were intended to protect the installations of the strategic missiles, then they should have been installed and ready to shoot the US planes before the strategic missiles arrived. Actually the SAM's and other associated anti-aircraft nets only became operational when the construction of the strategic missile sites was well along, and the Soviets employed almost no camouflage at all to hide either set of weapons. In any case, since the SAM's could not shoot down planes flying below 10,000 feet, these anti-aircraft missiles would not have been useful in the event of an American invasion.

Both the MRBM's and the IRBM's were above ground and located in soft terrain, very vulnerable to any type of enemy attack. Although a single installation of MRBM could be built in a matter of days, the Russians were progressing very slowly in their installation. They seemed to be in no great hurry, and worked only during daylight hours.

The Cubans were concerned about the role of the American intelligence surveillance, but the Russians dismissed their concern and gave the matter no importance. The Cuban intelligence services were also aware that the CIA was interrogating Cuban refugees at the Opa Locka military base in Florida. The large number of refugees arriving in Miami was providing the CIA with a great deal of information. Castro proposed to stop the emigration flood by eliminating all available means of escape from the island, but the Soviets proposed to leave things unchanged.

In that way, reasoned the Russians, the CIA would obtain a lot ofcontradictory information and soon stop relying on the credibility of the refugees. Many of the departing refugees had seen missiles, but, in most cases, these were just antiaircraft SAMs. To the Cubans' dismay, the Soviets even suggested that, instead of trying to hide evidence of the missiles, it was better to let it be obvious. For the first time the Cuban personnel working at the antiaircraft missile sites were granted leaves.

The Cubans knew the quality of the American air surveillance technology. On several occasions Castro asked the Soviets to give him SAMs, and let his people operate them, but the Russians were reluctant. Although most of the Cubans assigned to the missile bases were engineering students from Havana University, the Soviets only allowed them to operate the radars.

By the beginning of August the Russians complained to the Cuban government about the lack of discipline and seditious demonstrations of the university students at the missile bases. Apparently the Cubans were frustrated by the Russians' inaction in the face of overflying American U-2 planes. Fidel himself had to make an inspection visit to the bases in order to calm down the Cubans there. Apparently Fidel convinced everybody, with one important exception: Ché Guevara. Major Guevara said that he would only change his opinion if somebody convinced him that the American spy planes flying over Cuba were not jeopardizing the operation. But he finally opted to accept Fidel's orders.

Contrary to the opinion of most American analysts, almost all SAM antiaircraft sites in western Cuba had reached operational status by the beginning of August, 1962. From that early date the Soviets could have fired on the American spy planes if they had wanted to.

On the morning of October 14, 1962, a U-2 entered Cuban air space and flew over the province of Pinar del Río.

The Cubans watched the plane on the radar screens, appalled as the Russians did nothing. Later Castro complained bitterly about the Russian inaction. Why were the Soviets permitting the American planes to discover the missiles? It was at the Excomm meeting the morning of the 23rd of October that CIA Director John McCone reported that the Russians were beginning to camouflage the missile sites. Nobody could explain why they had waited so long to do so.

9. Finally, the CIA smelled a rat, Kennedy approved the U-2 flights, and Major Anderson photographed the missiles. According to most American analysts, what initiated the crisis were the U-2 photographs of Soviet missile sites in Cuba on October 14, 1962. US leaders might have received information three weeks earlier if a U-2 had flown over the western part of Cuba in the last week of September. But, quite unexplainably, the U-2s were prevented from flying over that part of Cuba, precisely where intelligence reports indicated that the missiles were most likely to be.

On August, 1962, a U-2 returned with photographs of Russian SA-2 antiaircraft missiles being unloaded at Cuban docks. More U-2s came back with fresh pictures of more SA-2s. But President Kennedy insisted there was no evidence that the Russians were moving in offensive missiles that could threaten the United States.

Though all evidence pointed to the province of Pinar del Río in the western part of Cuba as the most likely location for missile sites, a very strange thing happened: after September 5 no U-2 flights were directed over that part of the island. It was not until October 14, that a U-2 plane, reportedly by chance, took the now famous photographs of the sites under construction. Yet, the word that there were Russian missile sites in Cuba was so widespread that even Time magazine ran an article on September 21 showing a map of Cuba clustered with Soviet ground-to-air missiles, mainly in the western part of the island, west and south of Havana.

In retrospect it is clear that both the Americans and the Russians were playing a subtle cat-and-mouse game, the Russians trying, by every means, to get the Americans to discover the missiles, and the Americans trying not to discover them.

10. An American invasion of Cuba would have brought nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The day after the Bay of Pigs invasion began, Khrushchev sent President Kennedy a message appealing to him to stop the aggression. The tone of the message, however, was not in accordance to the man who some months earlier had boasted with apocalyptic visions. "As for the USSR, there must be no mistake about our position. We will extend to the Cuban people and its government all the necessary aid for the repulse of the armed attack on Cuba. . . We are sincerely interested in the relaxation of international tensions, but if others go in for its aggravation, then we will answer then in full measure."

The fact is that when the invasion began Castro wired Russia for help or at least for open solidarity, but Khrushchev ignored him until the Cuban militia had definitely beaten the invaders.

Khrushchev's "missile rattling" about Cuba was not the first case of such bluffings. He had before threatened with rockets over Suez, over the landings in Lebanon and Jordan, and over Berlin. Khrushchev also threatened Britain and France with long-range missiles at the time of the Suez crisis, but not before he was certain that the crisis was effectively over. When the Matsu-Quemoy crisis of the fall of 1958 erupted, Soviet support came in the form of two threatening letters from Khrushchev to Eisenhower. But Khrushchev's guarantees and promises of help to Communist China were extended only after it had become clear that the United States was not going to intervene in the affair and the threat of war was gone.

Therefore, it is safe to assume that, at most, an American invasion of Cuba would have brought a strong condemnation from the USSR delegate at the UN, and a barrage of threats in the Soviet press for internal consumption only, and nothing more.

11. After the crisis was over, Khrushchev and Kennedy signed a secret pact guaranteeing the non-invasion of Cuba. In 1970 Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, disturbed over the submarine base the Soviets were building in Cienfuegos, a port on the Southern coast of Cuba, hunted through the State Department's files looking for the written agreement he was sure President Kennedy had signed with Khrushchev. He found, to his utter amazement, that there was none.

Moreover, if the agreement ever existed, it has the dubious honor of having being applied retroactively, because the American harassment of the anti-Castro Cubans in the US began just after the Bay of Pigs invasion, a year and a half before the Cuban missile crisis. If American presidents from Kennedy on have proved unwilling to get rid of Fidel Castro, it is not because a non-existent pact forbids them to do so, but because of some other secret reasons unknown to us.

12. General LeMay was a mad warmonger out of control. General Curtiss LeMay, Air Force Chief, argued forcefully with the President that a military attack was essential. When the President questioned him about what the Soviet response might be, General LeMay assured him that there would be no reaction at all. Later the Kennedys and their buddies, as usual, made derogatory comments of General LeMay's statements behind his back.

But LeMay was not a mad warmonger as he is depicted in the film, nor was he alone. Former Secretary of State Dean Acheson made his arguments that an air attack and invasion represented the only American alternative to the US He added that the President of the United States had the responsibility for the security of the American people and of the whole world, that it was his duty to take the only action which could protect that security, and that this meant destroying the missiles in Cuba.

Shortly before his tv address to inform the nation of his decision to impose a blockade on the Soviet ships bound for Cuba, President Kennedy met with the members of the Cabinet and informed them of the crisis for the first time. Then, he met with leaders of Congress. According to Robert Kennedy, this was the President's most difficult meeting. Many congressional leaders were sharp in their criticism. They complained that the President should take a more forceful action — a military attack or an invasion of Cuba —, and that the blockade was far too weak a response.

When Senators Richard Russell and William Fulbright were informed of the situation in Cuba and the presidential decision to blockade the island, they argued that a blockade could not be effective in the short time remaining before the missile sites became operational.

In fact, if one assumed that the nuclear warheads were already in Cuba, as it was logical to suppose at the time, a blockade of the island seemed to be a foolhardy decision.

Dean Acheson, one of the most notable critics of President Kennedy's decisions during the crisis, wrote later that, though the American strategy during the crisis was wrong, it succeeded in obtaining the withdrawal of the missiles simply by "dumb luck".

Acheson's recommendation for decisive military action, namely an air strike over Cuba, was flatly rejected by Kennedy. And Acheson was not the only one with little praise for Kennedy's decision-making abilities. General Douglas McArthur, though crediting Kennedy with political cunning, called the President "just dumb when it comes to decision making."

13. On October 28, 1962, a missile battery under Soviet command shot down Maj. Rudolf Anderson's U-2.Not so fast Louie! According to Seymour Hersh, there is strong evidence that, on October 26, 1962, a Cuban army unit attacked and overran a Soviet-manned SAM base at Los Angeles, near Banes, in the Oriente province, killing many Soviets and seizing control of the site. This was the very base that later fired the SAMs which destroyed Anderson's U-2.

Hersh based his article on information partly drawn from an interview with former Department of Defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg, who was himself citing classified material from a post-crisis study of the event. The speculation is based on an intercepted transmission from the Soviet base at Los Angeles indicating heavy fighting and casualties. Adrián Montoro, former director of Radio Havana Cuba, and Juan Antonio Rodríguez Menier, a senior Cuban intelligence officer who defected in 1987 and is now living in the US, seem to confirm Ellsberg's thesis.

The third part of the series that relates what really happened during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

Though both Castro and the Russians have categorically denied that the attack took place, Raymond L. Garthoff, Special Assistant for Soviet bloc Political/Military Affairs in the State Department during the Kennedy administration, claims that, in fact, from October 28, the Cuban army did surround the Soviet missile bases for three days. It is evident that, whatever really happened, Castro was itching for a nuclear shoot-out between the Soviet Union and the United States.

Messages exchanged between Castro and Khrushchev on October 28, 1962, indicate that something very fishy happened that day. In his message the Soviet premier accused the Cuban leader of shooting down the American plane. Then, Khrushchev warned Castro that such steps "will be used by aggressors to their advantage, to further their aims." In his answer to Khrushchev Castro explained that he had mobilized his antiaircraft batteries "to support the position of the Soviet forces." Then, Castro added this cryptic remark: "The Soviet Forces Command can give you further detail on what happened with the plane that was shot down."

The missiles we see in the movie are Hollywoodian contraptions made out of plywood covered by thin aluminum sheet. Well, perhaps not everything in the movie is wrong. There is the possibility that, like the missiles in Costner's film, the Soviet strategic missiles in Cuba had been dummies.

The official story, advanced by the Kennedy administration, accepted at face value by most scholars of the Crisis and later popularized by the American mainstream media, is that, though rumors about the presence of strategic missiles in Cuba were widespread among Cuban exiles in Florida since mid-1962, the American intelligence community was never fooled by them. To American intelligence analysts, "only direct evidence, such as aerial photographs, could be convincing." It was not until 14 October, however, that a U-2, authorized at last to fly over the Western part of Cuba, brought the first high-altitude photographs of what seemed to be Soviet strategic missile sites, in different stages of completion, deployed on Cuban soil.

Once the photographs were evaluated by experts at the National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC), they were brought to President Kennedy who, after a little prompting by a photo-interpreter who attended the meeting (even with help and good will it is not easy to see the missiles in the photographs), accepted as a fact the NPIC's conclusion that Soviet Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev had taken a fateful, aggressive step against the U.S. This meeting is considered by most scholars the beginning of the Cuban missile crisis.

Save for a few skeptics at the United Nations (a little more than a year before, Adlai Stevenson had shown the very same delegates "hard" photographic evidence of Cuban planes, allegedly piloted by Castro's defectors, which had attacked positions on the island previous to the Bay of Pigs landing), most people, including the members of the American press, unquestionably accepted the U-2 photographs as evidence of Khrushchev's treachery. The photographic "evidence," however, was received abroad with mixed feelings.

Sherman Kent recorded in detail the story about how the U-2 photographs were brought to some American allies, and what their reactions were. British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, for example, just spent a few seconds examining the photographs, and accepted the proof on belief. The Prime Minister's Private Secretary, however, "expressed serious concern about the reception any strong Government statement in support of the U.S. decision would have in the absence of incontrovertible proof of the missile buildup."

German Chancellor Adenauer accepted the photographic evidence, and apparently was impressed with it. General de Gaulle accepted President Kennedy's word initially on faith, though later he inspected the photographs in great detail, and was impressed with the quality of them. However, when the photographs were shown to French journalists, one of them, André Fontaine, an important senior writer of Le Monde, strongly expressed his doubts. Only circumstantial evidence he received later, not the photographs themselves, made him change his opinion. Canada's Prime Minister Diefenbaker questioned the credibility of the evidence of Soviet strategic missiles in Cuba.

According to Kent, notwithstanding some of the viewers' past experience in looking at similar photographs, "All viewers, however, took on faith or on the say-so of the purveyors that the pictures were what they claimed to be: scenes from Cuba taken a few days past."

Nevertheless, beginning with Robert Kennedy's classic analysis of the crisis, the acceptance of the U-2's photographs as hard evidence of the presence of Soviet strategic missiles deployed on Cuban soil has rarely been contested.

In the case of the U-2 photographs, the NPIC photo-interpreters correctly decoded the objects appearing in them as images of strategic missiles. But accepting the images of missiles as the ultimate proof of the presence of strategic missiles in Cuba was a big jump of their imagination, as well as a semantic mistake. A more truthful interpretation of the things whose images appeared in the U-2's photographs would have been to call them "objects whose photographic image highly resemble Soviet strategic missiles." But, like the man who mistook his wife for a hat, the photo-interpreters at the NPIC confused the photographs of missiles with the actual missiles. Afterwards, like mesmerized children, the media and the scholarly community blindly followed the Pied Piper of photographic evidence. But, as in Magritte's famous painting The Treachery of Images, a picture of a pipe is not a pipe, and a picture of a missile in not a missile.

With the advent of the new surveillance technologies pioneered with the U-2 plane and now extensively used by satellites, there has been a growing trend in the US intelligence community to rely more and more on imaging intelligence (imint) and less and less on agents in the field (humint). But, as any intelligence specialist can testify, photography alone, though a very useful surveillance component, should never be considered hard evidence. Photographs, at best, are just indicators pointing to a possibility which has to be physically confirmed by other means, preferably by trained, qualified agents working in the field.

Moreover, even disregarding the fact that photographs can be faked and doctored, nothing is so misleading as a photograph. According to the information available up to this moment, the photographic evidence of Soviet strategic missiles on Cuban soil was never confirmed by American agents working in the field. The missiles were never touched, smelled, weighed. Their metal, electronic components, and fuel were never tested; the radiation from their nuclear warheads was never recorded; their heat signature was never verified.

One of the golden rules of intelligence work is to treat with caution all information not independently corroborated or supported by reliable documentary or physical evidence. Yet, recently declassified Soviet documents, and questionable oral reports from Soviet officials who allegedly participated directly in the event, have lately been accepted as sufficient evidence of the presence of strategic missiles and their nuclear warheads in Cuba in 1962. But one can hardly accept as hard evidence non-corroborated, non-evaluated information coming from a former adversary who has yet to prove he has turned into a friend.

Despite all recent claims on the contrary, CIA reports at the time consistently denied the presence of nuclear warheads in Cuba. Also, American planes, flying low over the missile sites and the Soviets ships, never detected any of the radiation that would be expected from nuclear warheads. The technology to detect radiation existed at the time. In the 1960s the NEDS 900 series of radiation detectors had been developed and deployed in the Dardanelles as a way to monitor the presence of nuclear weapons aboard Soviet warships transiting the strait from the Black Sea.

Gen. William Y. Smith, who was a Major and an assistant to Gen. Maxwell Taylor in the White House at the time of the crisis, reported a very interesting detail. While reviewing message traffic from US intelligence sources on Soviet military activity, Gen. Smith found out a report that a US Navy ship had picked up suspicious levels of radioactivity emitted by a Soviet freighter, the Poltava. He suggested to Gen. Taylor that he ask Admiral Anderson if the emanations meant the ship was carrying nuclear warheads. At the next Joint Chief's meeting, Taylor posed the question to Anderson, who replied, somewhat embarrassed, that he had not seen the message. Later that morning, Anderson's office informed Smith that the report had little significance, that Smith had misread it.

It makes sense to believe, therefore, that the Americans had the means to detect radiation from nuclear warheads leaving Cuba, without having to board the Soviet ships. But, again, no mention is made of this important fact in any of the declassified documents on the Cuban missile crisis. Also, Admiral Anderson's behavior, as described by Gen. Smith, is strange, to say the least, because that report was extremely important.

Therefore, either the Americans detected no radiation from the Soviet ships, and they kept the fact secret, or they simply forgot that they had the means to check indirectly the presence of nuclear warheads. But there is a third possibility: that they never tried to detect the radiation from nuclear warheads in Cuba because they were pretty sure there were no nuclear devices in the island. As a matter of fact, this third possibility is the only one that fully explains President Kennedy's strange behavior of not enforcing on the defeated Soviets the physical inspection of their outbound ships who allegedly were bringing the missiles and their nuclear warheads back to the Soviet Union.

The Soviets were masters of deception and disinformation, and maskivovka was an important part of the Soviet military tactic and strategic doctrine. Some western intelligence analysts suspected that, as late as 1960, not only most of the missiles parading in Red Square were dummies, but even some units of the newly created Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces were not getting real missiles. The Russians have a long tradition in the deception business. One must bear in mind that it was count Grigori Aleksandrovich Potemkim who created the first Hollywood-style film sets.

*Servando Gonzalez is a Cuban-born American writer. He was an officer in the Cuban army during the missile crisis. His upcoming book The Secret Fidel Castro: Deconstructing the Symbol will appear this Spring.

SOVIETS CLOSE TO USING A-BOMB IN 1962 CRISIS, FORUM IS TOLD

By Marion Lloyd
Globe Correspondent
La Habana
Cuba
The Boston Globe
Boston
U.S.A.
La Nueva Cuba
Octubre 13, 2002

It was the most dangerous moment of the Cold War. At about 5 p.m. on Oct. 27, 1962, a Soviet submarine armed with a nuclear warhead found itself trapped and being bombarded by a US warship patrolling off Cuba

One of the Soviet captains gave the order to prepare to fire. But a cooler-headed officer persuaded him to wait for instructions from Moscow before unleashing a nuclear attack.

''We thought - that's it - the end,'' Vadim Orlov, a Soviet intelligence officer, was quoted as saying in recently declassified documents from the Cuban missile crisis.

The details on just how close the United States and the Soviet Union came to nuclear war emerged during a three-day conference sponsored by the private National Security Archive, Brown University, and the Cuban government marking the 40th anniversary of the crisis. Although the discovery that Soviet submarines were armed with nuclear weapons was revealed about a year ago, this was the first time key players in the 13-day crisis had sat down to analyze the implications of the Oct. 27 incident.

Participants in the meeting, which ends today with a tour of the missile site, include President Fidel Castro of Cuba and other top Cuban officials, former Kennedy administration officials, and former Soviet military officers, as well as scholars from all three countries.

Until recently, scholars believed that the United States had come within days of nuclear war. Kennedy sent a letter to the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, promising not to invade Cuba if the Soviets removed missiles from Cuba. Kennedy believed that if Khrushchev refused he had no choice but to order a full-scale attack on Cuba.

Only this weekend did many missile-crisis experts learn how much closer the world had come to nuclear war - and how Kennedy himself may not have been the most crucial figure in averting it.

''The lesson from this is that a guy called Vasili Arkhipov saved the world,'' said Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive. He was referring to the Soviet captain who prevailed on his fellow officers not to fire the nuclear torpedo.

US destroyers under orders to enforce a naval quarantine off Cuba did not know that the submarines the Soviets had sent to protect their ships were carrying nuclear weapons. So the Americans began firing depth charges to force the submarines to the surface, a move the Soviets interpreted as the start of World War III.

''We're going to blast them now! We will die, but we will sink them all. We will not disgrace our navy,'' the Soviet intelligence report quotes the first Soviet captain as saying before his co-officer calmed him down.

Blanton said he became convinced of what went on in the submarine after he cross-referenced that version with newly released deck logs from the US destroyers. He confirmed Arkhipov's role after the former officer did not deny the version described in the intelligence report, which was declassified shortly before his death three years ago.

Conference participants pored over thousands of documents declassified since 1992, many of which shed new light on sensitive issues such as US efforts to remove Castro. Cuban officials used the documents in arguing that they had legitimate reasons to believe Washington intended to invade Cuba, and that Castro was justified in seeking Soviet protection.

''It's clear from all the documents that if subversive activity didn't work, the option was an armed invasion,'' said Esteban Morales, head of Cuba's Center for the Study of the United States.

Among key documents was a declassified Defense Department memo from 1961 describing a three-step plan for the ''US endeavor to cause the overthrow of the Castro government.'' The strategy was to stage intensive military exercises near Cuba to provoke a hostile reaction from Castro, which would give Washington the justification it needed to ''destroy Castro with speed, force and determination.''

Robert McNamara, Kennedy's defense secretary and a key conference participant, conceded Friday night that Cuba was justified in fearing an attack. ''If I were in Cuban or Soviet shoes, I would have thought so, too,'' he said. ''We as a superpower did not look through to the ends of our actions. That was a real weakness.''

Participants emphasized that any new knowledge should be used to help avoid future conflict, in particular a potential US war with Iraq. ''God willing, someone will be sitting down in Baghdad and talking about this moment in 40 years'' if a war is averted, said Christopher Kennedy Lawford, President Kennedy's nephew. Lawford, who played a US pilot in a film about the crisis, ''13 Days,'' was among several members of the film's team attending the conference.

The parallel between Kennedy's handling of the crisis and President Bush's deliberations over Iraq was a recurrent theme at the meeting, with many participants accusing Bush of ignoring history.

''There are lessons to be learned,'' said Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., a former Kennedy aide and a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. ''This was not only the most dangerous moment of the Cold War. It was the most dangerous moment in human history.''

Asked whether he thought the conference could play a role in influencing Bush against invading Iraq, Schlesinger said no.

''Kennedy chose quarantine as an alternative to military action,'' he said. ''Bush is committed to military action.''

This story ran on page A20 of the Boston Globe on 10/13/2002. © Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.

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