October 27, 1962: Cuban anti-aircraft gunners open fire on low-level reconnaissance planes over San Cristobal site no. 1 (a Soviet SA-2 missile shoots down Maj. Rudolf Anderson’s U-2 on this day).
Joint Chiefs: “The president has a feeling that time is running out”
Cascade of human errors, nuclear-armed flashpoints on October 27 nearly started World War III by accident
JFK: “always some SOB who doesn’t get the word”
Washington, D.C., October 27, 2022 - The most dangerous 24 hours of the Cuban Missile Crisis came on Saturday, October 27, 1962, 60 years ago today, as the U.S. moved closer to attacking Cuba and nuclear-armed flashpoints erupted over Siberia, at the quarantine line, and in Cuba itself—a rapid escalation that convinced both John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev to strike the deal that would stop events from further spiraling out of control.
Seven hours ahead of Washington, the Kremlin had already received an urgent message (9 a.m., Moscow time) from the Soviet commander in Cuba that a U.S. attack, presaging an invasion, was imminent within 24-72 hours. The Soviet ambassador in Havana, Aleksandr Alekseyev, was closeted with Fidel Castro at the Soviet embassy through the wee hours of the morning, while Castro dictated and revised a message to Khrushchev. The Cuban leader assumed an American wipe-out of Cuba and recommended a Soviet preemptive strike on the U.S. before the U.S. could do the same to the USSR. Castro had already ordered his anti-aircraft crews to fire on U.S. low-level reconnaissance planes—a fateful order that would raise the nuclear stakes later on October 27.
The surviving notes of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff meeting on that day, October 27, depict a six-and-a-half-hour cascade of crises where human error, miscalculation, reckless deployment of nuclear weapons, and testosterone ruled the day.
Notes Taken from Transcripts of Meetings of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, October-November 1962, Dealing with the Cuban Missile Crisis, SECRET. Released to the National Security Archive through the Freedom of Information Act.
The JCS notes from October and November 1962 are all that survive after the Chiefs’ decision, in the 1970s, to destroy the tapes and transcripts from over two decades of JCS meetings. The catalyst was the Supreme Court decision, in 1974, that President Nixon had to turn over his tapes for the criminal prosecutions of his aides. A Joint Chiefs staffer thankfully made handwritten notes from the transcripts in 1976, before the records were destroyed. These notes were typed up in 1993 and later obtained by the National Security Archive through the Freedom of Information Act.
According to the notes, on October 27, 1962, at 1000 (10 a.m. Washington time), the Chiefs heard a briefing from their intelligence officers that should have cautioned them that “modern equipment” and “surface to surface missiles” were among the Soviet deployment. But Air Force chief of staff Curtis LeMay instead recommended “a simple paper taking the latest intelligence into account, and again recommending execution of full-scale OPLAN 312 [the air strikes] followed by OPLAN 316 [the invasion].”
The U.S. invasion plan OPLAN 316 for Cuba in October 1962. Source: Dino Brugioni Collection.
At 1341 hours, as recorded in the notes, the Chiefs learned that a U-2 spy plane on an air-sampling mission over the North Pole (collecting residue from Soviet atomic tests) was “lost off Alaska,” prompting Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to rush out to inform Secretary of State Dean Rusk “at once.”
We now know, despite the Air Force keeping the documents classified for 60 years, that the U-2 pilot, Charles “Chuck” Maultsby, had gone off course by human error—blinded by the aurora borealis and hampered by a compass malfunction near the Pole—and that Soviet MIG fighters had scrambled to intercept the U-2 over Siberia. The detailed reconstruction of the Maultsby mission by Michael Dobbs in his book, One Minute to Midnight, shows how close to disaster this nuclear flashpoint came.
Captain Maultsby's U-2 plane, serial number 56-715
U.S. Air Force Captain Charles Maultsby.
Former SAC pilots and SAC headquarters staff told Dobbs that the U.S. was able to track both Maultsby and the Soviet MIGs attempting to shoot him down by intercepting Soviet air defense traffic. But they were unable to share this information with the pilot, as the U.S. eavesdropping capabilities were a closely guarded national secret. Navigators guided Maultsby out of Soviet air space by ordering him to turn left until he could see Orion's Belt off his right wingtip. With the constellation observable to his south, Maultsby would be flying westwards, back home toward Alaska.
Political scientist Scott Sagan was the first to report (in 1993) that the two Air Force fighters scrambled from Galena Air Base in Alaska to protect the Maultsby U-2 on October 27 each carried Falcon nuclear air-to-air missiles under their wings in lieu of their conventional arms. Alert levels had risen to DEFCON 2, and air-to-air nukes were meant for taking out incoming Soviet bombers. Thankfully, the F-102 Delta Daggers did not catch up to the MIGs before Maultsby glided his U-2, out of fuel, to a landing in Alaska.
President Kennedy famously remarked about the missing U-2, “there’s always some SOB who doesn’t get the word.” But there was no word for Maultsby to get—standard operating procedure sent his mission up, and only afterwards did Secretary of Defense McNamara cancel these air-sampling flights.
SOP also meant, on October 27, that both the U.S. and the USSR would go right ahead with their scheduled atmospheric nuclear tests. The U.S. test, codenamed Calamity in the Dominic series, airdropped an 800-kiloton device at Johnston Island in the Pacific. The Soviet test, codenamed 192 (where’s Pushkin when you need him?), dropped a 260-kiloton device at Novaya Zemlya. Neither White House nor Soviet Presidium records seem to notice.
The Bluestone test in the Dominic series of airdropped nuclear bombs, near Christmas Island, June 30, 1962. Source: Nuclearweaponsarchive.org.
At 1403 in the Joint Chiefs notes, the top Pentagon reconnaissance analyst, Col. Ralph Steakley, came in to let them know the Rudolf Anderson U-2 flight was overdue. By 1800 in the notes, Steakley told the Chiefs that a signals intercept showed the Cubans had recovered Anderson’s body and the wreckage from the shootdown. Debriefing of the pilots from the low-level flights showed that all but two had been fired on over Cuba.
The Anderson shootdown stunned top officials in both the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Khrushchev quickly saw that his orders restraining any use of tactical or strategic nuclear weapons in conditions of perceived attack (like the U-2 overflight) were useless, since he couldn’t control local commanders. Generals Gorbuz and Grechko had decided to order the SAM installation at Banes, Cuba, to shoot down the U-2 after it overflew the latest Soviet deployments in eastern Cuba, including cruise missiles within 15 miles of Guantanamo.
On the U.S. side, the ExComm mistakenly saw the U-2 shootdown as a clear escalation by Moscow. But the Joint Chiefs decided against any immediate retaliation, despite a reminder from Chairman Maxwell Taylor that they had earlier insisted on taking out a SAM site that shot at U.S. planes. Now, the Chiefs wanted to wait and launch a full invasion as soon as possible. Army chief of staff Earle Wheeler even remarked gloomily, “Khrushchev may loose one of his missiles on us.”
At 1830, the JCS Chairman, Gen. Taylor, briefed the Joint Chiefs on the White House discussions that day. “CJCS says President has been seized with the idea of trading Turkish for Cuban missiles: he seems to be the only one in favor of it.” The notes put quotation marks around Taylor’s phrase, “The President has a feeling that time is running out.”
Unknown to the Chiefs, from 1659 to 1733 hours the destroyer Beale and its anti-submarine cohort around the aircraft carrier Randolph were dropping hand grenades on a suspected Soviet submarine at the quarantine line. Unknown to the Beale or to the U.S. Navy, that submarine had a nuclear-tipped torpedo and the capacity to launch it when under attack.
The Beale’s deck officer, then-Lt. John W. Peterson, described the “signaling” process years later at the 2002 Havana conference on the Cuban Missile Crisis. Peterson said his crew was frustrated that dropping signal grenades above the sonar contacts amounted to just “firecrackers,” so the sailors wrapped the grenades in toilet paper tubes that only disintegrated hundreds of feet underwater, thus exploding right next to the targeted submarine.
Deck logs of the U.S. Navy destroyer Beale, signed by deck officer Lt. J.W. Peterson, listing the dropping of five hand grenades at 1659 hours, and the surfacing of the Soviet submarine at 2050 hours on October 27.
Also at the 2002 Havana conference, Soviet signals intelligence officer Vadim Orlov described what it was like to be on the receiving end of the signals. For those aboard the submarine B-59 on October 27, during the Beale’s grenade assault, Orlov said, it felt like being inside an oil drum being hit by sledgehammers. The submarine, built for the icy Arctic waters, and now in the much warmer Sargasso Sea, already suffered from awful conditions, equipment breakdowns, and high temperatures, and had to surface to recharge its exhausted batteries.
Interviews and documentary evidence compiled by the Archive’s Svetlana Savranskaya show the B-59 commander, Valentin Savitsky, thought he was under attack and panicked, ordering an emergency dive and readying the nuclear torpedo. But the submarine brigade chief of staff, Vasily Arkhipov, who happened to be on board, recognized the American forces were signaling and photographing, not attacking, and so managed to calm Savitsky down.
The U.S. Navy shadows the second Soviet F-class submarine to surface, after repeated rounds of signaling depth charges on 27 October (the sub features no conning tower number, but is Soviet fleet number B-59, commanded by Savitsky).
The nearest target for the B-59’s nuclear torpedo would have been the anti-submarine aircraft carrier Randolph, an Essex-class ship with a complement of 3,400 sailors and marines—a number greater than the casualties at Pearl Harbor or on 9/11. Nuclear depth charges were the standard operating procedure response to such an attack, and their components were close by, on the Essex and at Guantanamo.
Also unknown to the Joint Chiefs were the movements of Soviet nuclear warheads in Cuba. U.S. intelligence never detected those warheads during the crisis, only in retrospective analysis of the overhead photography. According to the Soviet documents, including the after-action report by the warheads’ commander, Col. Beloborodov, the warheads were transported to the missile sites and to the tactical launchers on October 26 and were ready for use on October 27.
According to the authoritative account by Michael Dobbs in One Minute to Midnight, one of those nuclear warheads tipped an FKR cruise missile that deployed just 15 miles away from Guantanamo naval base, which would have become a smoking radiating ruin if U.S. invasion plans had proceeded. Dobbs tracked down the Soviet veterans of that FKR deployment, and even the graves in Cuba of two Soviet soldiers who died in a truck crash on the way to Guantanamo.
Soviet FKR cruise missile deployed in Cuba.
The Joint Chiefs were also unaware of the human factor among their own forces that raised the risks considerably on that day. According to Scott Sagan’s account, at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, Strategic Air Command officers jerry-rigged the launch system on a Minuteman ICBM, bypassing normal procedure to give themselves independent launch authority on October 27.
The historian Martin Sherwin has reported even more human error. The 873rd Tactical Missile Squadron on Okinawa apparently received mistaken launch orders at 3 p.m., Washington time, on October 27, for their cruise missiles, each with a 1.1 megaton nuclear warhead; but an Air Force captain named William Bassett questioned the command, since DEFCON 1 had not been reached yet. When he opened the Top Secret envelope, three of his four targets were in China, which had nothing to do with the missile crisis, as far as he knew, so he pressed higher-ups to stand down.
At 1940 hours on October 27, the Joint Chiefs got their last intelligence briefing of the day, with chilling news. The “photyography [sic] from today’s missions show that the canvas is off the launchers, that the missiles are on the launchers, and that a reload capability is ready.” All of the Soviet medium-range ballistic missiles were operational.
Within 15 minutes of this briefing, President Kennedy’s brother Bobby, the Attorney General, was hosting Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin at the Justice Department to work out a negotiated solution to the missile crisis. The conversation, as recorded in Dobrynin’s detailed cable to Moscow, ranged from sticks to carrots. On the threat side was RFK’s warning that the sites in Cuba would be bombed, “there are many unreasonable heads among the generals, and not only among the generals, who are ‘itching for a fight.’” On the incentive side were assurances against any invasion of Cuba, and the removal of Jupiter missiles from Turkey within a few months. RFK told Dobrynin, “time is of the essence and we shouldn’t miss the chance.”
