EURO-CUBA NEWS: Missile Crisis Special (1) - 14/10/02
 
Euro-Cuba News is an email magazine that has been published from London since  November 1999. It aims to provide up to the minute coverage of news from Cuba, on Cuba's international relations and on solidarity actions with Cuba from around the world. This service is free and welcomes input from its readers including comment, articles and solidarity news. Euro-Cuba News is not affiliated to any other organisation.
 
Paul Davidson (Editor)
 
1) Old Foes Exchange Notes on 1962 Missile Crisis - New York Times
2) How Soviet sub officer saved world from nuclear conflict - Daily Telegraph (U.K.)
3) Missile crisis standoff left Castro resenting Soviets - South Florida Sun-Sentinel
4) After 40 years, a closer look - Boston Globe
5) Cuban conference relives missile crisis - BBC
6) Cold War Protagonists Tour Cuba - Associated Press
7) The U.S. ignored a warning from Germany in 1962. - La Jornada
8) A Precedent That Proves Neither Side's Point - Washington Post
9) Letter to Castro did little to ease atomic showdown - Sun-Sentinel
10) U.S. Tried To Divide Cuba, U.S.S.R. - The Hartford Courant
11) 40 Years After Missile Crisis, Players Swap Stories in Cuba - Washington Post
12) The Missiles of 1962 Haunt the Iraq Debate - New York Times
 
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At Cuba Conference, Old Foes Exchange Notes on 1962 Missile Crisis
New York Times - October 14, 2002 - By DAVID GONZALEZ

SAN CRISTÓBAL, Cuba, Oct. 13 — Dino Brugioni had spent decades poring over every detail from the spy plane photographs of Soviet missiles whose discovery here, 40 years ago this weekend, brought the superpowers to the brink of nuclear holocaust. But today the former Central Intelligence Agency officer learned a few things that had eluded even his careful eye, thanks to none other than Gen. Anatoly Gribkov, who was the Soviet officer who supervised the construction of missile bases in Cuba in 1962.

More like old colleagues than former adversaries, the two men stood this morning in front of an abandoned bunker, discussing roads, cables and missile locations. Their exchanges contained more shop talk than sharp words.

"I got a little more detail than I could see," said Mr. Brugioni, who during the Cuban missile crisis had prepared briefings based on spy plane photos. "I'm glad I came to talk with my Russian and Cuban counterparts. It's been 40 years. I've forgiven."

This weekend, presidential advisers and military officers from all sides who took part in the cold war's tensest episode gathered in Cuba to discuss issues arising from those 13 days, including intelligence failures and independent arms inspections.

Those themes have taken on special resonance at a time when United States officials are considering the possibility of pre-emptive action against Saddam Hussein to ensure that Iraq does not develop or use weapons of mass destruction.

Participants at the conference — organized by the Cuban government and the National Security Archive, an American research group that obtained recently declassified American, Soviet and Cuban documents — did not explicitly draw comparisons. But they did say President John F. Kennedy's peaceful resolution of the crisis held a powerful lesson.

"I hope that 10 years from now the Cuban missile crisis will be looked upon as a learning period for the world in understanding the risk to the human race in continuing huge nuclear forces," Robert S. McNamara, who was defense secretary at the time, said in an interview on Friday. "What happened in Cuba is very commonplace. Military operations are much more complex than civilian ones. The variables are greater."

Mr. McNamara, who headed the American delegation at the conference, said recent examples of civilian and "friendly fire" casualties in Afghanistan underscored the hazards of warfare, even when it is confined to conventional weapons.

"There isn't any learning period with nuclear weapons," he said. "You make one mistake and you destroy nations."

Fidel Castro, the Cuban president, attended most of the closed-door sessions in Havana and offered long commentaries. According to those present at a meeting on Friday, Mr. Castro questioned a retired Soviet military officer at length about the size of the Soviet nuclear arsenal compared with that of the United States and the numbers and location of warheads on the island.

"Castro didn't know," said Thomas Blanton, the National Security Archive's executive director. "But he said that they had a sense that the Soviet Union was first with Sputnik, Yuri A. Gagarin and having the largest bomb." He added that "they assumed the Soviet Union was at least equal" to the United States militarily.

The Americans viewed the Soviet missiles, evidence of which Mr. Kennedy received on Oct. 16, 1962, as a provocation. But Cuban officials placed the crisis in the context of the threat of an American military invasion, mindful of the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion by Cuban exiles in 1961. They had also worried about Cuban exiles backed by the United States in the destabilization campaign known as Operation Mongoose.

"The United States had already developed subversive activities including assassination plans against the leaders of the revolution," said Esteban Morales, a researcher at the University of Havana.

Theodore C. Sorensen, Mr. Kennedy's counsel and chief speechwriter, said Mr. Kennedy had had no intention of staging an American invasion of Cuba. Rather, the goal was to isolate Cuba and prevent it from becoming a Soviet military outpost.

Nonetheless, at the conference Mr. Sorensen apologized to the Cubans for the sabotage campaign. "I represent nobody but myself," he said. "I just thought an apology was due."

Mr. Kennedy's military advisers were urging him to prepare for an invasion, however, once the United States had responded to the detection of the missiles by establishing a naval and air blockade to prevent Soviet ships from reaching Cuba. On Oct. 27, according to documents released at the conference, events were spinning out of control. An American surveillance plane was shot down over Cuba, another wandered into Soviet airspace, and an American destroyer was dropping depth charges to force to the surface a Soviet submarine that had approached the American blockade line.

The commander of the Soviet submarine, which had a nuclear-tipped torpedo, "summoned the officer who was assigned to the nuclear torpedo and ordered him to assemble it to battle readiness," according to a Soviet document made available at the conference.

"Maybe the war has already started up there, while we are doing somersaults here," the commander was quoted as saying. "We're going to blast them now! We will die, but we will sink them all. We will not disgrace our navy!"

According to the document, the Soviet commander relented after conferring with other officers.

While the Americans were able to get the Soviets to agree on Oct. 28 to withdraw the missiles from Cuba, they were unable to get the Soviets to persuade the Cubans to allow inspections.

Soviet documents portray Mr. Castro as having been angered by the Soviet suggestion of inspections as infringing on Cuba's sovereignty.

"Recent events have considerably influenced the moral spirit of our people," Mr. Castro was quoted as saying to Anastas I. Mikoyan, the Soviet first deputy prime minister, who was in Havana in early November 1962. "They were regarded as a retreat at the very moment when every nerve of our country had been strained."

Mr. Mikoyan responded that developments were moving so rapidly that a decision had to be made quickly.

"At the moment the main objective consisted of preventing an attack," the envoy wrote in the document. "We thought the Cuban comrades would understand us."

But a Nov. 16 letter to Mr. Mikoyan from Nikita S. Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, revealed Soviet impatience with the Cubans' rejection of inspections and their pledge to shoot down American spy planes.

"Cuba, which now does not even want to consult with us, wants to practically drag us behind it by a leash, and wants to pull us into a war with the Americans by its actions," Mr. Khrushchev wrote. "We cannot and will not agree to this."

Cuba never did allow inspections, but by Nov. 20, the United States lifted its naval blockade.

"In a sense, that is the message of this entire conference," Mr. Sorensen said in an interview. "It is very clear that the world was on the brink of a nuclear war, so close. Yet it was also very clear that not one of the three governments involved wanted a war."

In April 1963, Mr. Castro traveled to the Soviet Union and was promised economic and security assistance, which continued to flow until the Soviet Union's collapse in the early 1990's.

Tucked among documents in the briefing books prepared for the conference is a recounting of a conversation between Mr. Mikoyan and Ernesto Guevara, a hero of the Cuban revolution who was known as Che and a confidante of Mr. Castro.

"We will always be with you despite all the difficulties," Mr. Mikoyan told Mr. Guevara.

"To the last day?" Mr. Guevara asked.

"Yes, let our enemies die," Mr. Mikoyan replied. "We must live and live. Live like Communists. We are convinced of our victory."

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How Soviet sub officer saved world from nuclear conflict
Daily Telegraph (U.K.) - By David Rennie in Washington - 14/10/2002

Only the caution of a Soviet naval officer saved the world from a nuclear fight to the death during the Cuban missile crisis, an unprecedented meeting hosted by Fidel Castro was told this weekend.

Robert McNamara, who was the American defence secretary when the confrontation took place 40 years ago, said it could "easily" have become a full-scale conflict.

The world has long known that it came to the brink of war during the 13-day crisis after American spy planes confirmed that Moscow had deployed nuclear missiles in Cuba, only 100 miles from Florida.

Only later did the West discover how close it came during a naval skirmish between an American destroyer and a Soviet B-59 submarine off Cuba on Oct 27, 1962.

The destroyer dropped depth charges near the submarine to try to force it to surface, not knowing it had a nuclear-tipped torpedo.

Vadim Orlov, a member of the submarine crew, told the conference in Havana that the submarine was authorised to fire it if three officers agreed. The officers began a fierce, shouting debate over whether to sink the ship. Two of them said yes and the other said no.

"A guy named Arkhipov saved the world," one of the conference co-hosts, Thomas Blanton, of George Washington University, told the Washington Post.

The conference studied thousands of newly declassified intelligence documents and photographs from American archives. Guests included many who were in leading positions. Besides Mr McNamara, there were other aides to President J F Kennedy: Arthur Schlesinger Jr and Theodore Sorensen. Ethel Kennedy, the widow of Robert Kennedy, also attended.

Despite the atmosphere of reconciliation, fostered in part by Mr Castro's public condemnation of the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, for "misleading" Mr Kennedy over the presence of the missiles, old tensions still surfaced.

Dino Brugioni, a CIA analyst who interpreted the first U2 spy plane photographs of the missiles, argued fiercely with Russian delegates who said the Soviet Union never intended to fire them.

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Missile crisis standoff left Castro resenting Soviets
South Florida Sun-Sentinel - By William E. Gibson - October 14, 2002
 
WASHINGTON -- Forty years ago today , an American U-2 spy plane secretly swooped over western Cuba and shot photographs that revealed the first hard evidence of Soviet ballistic missile sites in close range of the United States.

The photographs shocked President John F. Kennedy, who led the United States into a dramatic 13-day standoff with the Soviet Union known as the Cuban Missile Crisis.

This story had a happy ending, a worldwide cry of relief when the two superpowers pulled back from the brink of war. Some experts on U.S.-Soviet relations trace détente -- a policy marked by reduced tensions and arms-control agreements of the 1970s and '80s -- to the peaceful resolution of the missile crisis.

Yet this suspenseful episode, perhaps the most dangerous moment in world history, cemented an antagonistic relationship between the United States and Cuba that outlasted the Cold War and stubbornly persists today.

When Cuban dictator Fidel Castro talks about the U.S. "blockade" of Cuba, he is comparing the U.S. trade embargo to the monthlong naval phalanx that put the Caribbean island under quarantine four decades ago.

When the Bush administration today calls Cuba a sponsor of terrorism and a potential bioterrorist threat, its suspicions reflect a Cold War mentality and a constant stream of alienation that goes back to the missile crisis and before.

"It's famous for being the point where both superpowers looked over the brink and began to back away. It did lead to a hotline between Washington and Moscow and much more willingness of both sides (Soviet and American) to engage in arms-control discussions," said William LeoGrande, a professor of political science and expert on Cuba and Central America.

"As for U.S.-Cuba relations, they were as bad as they could get before the missile crisis, and the missile crisis confirmed them as being bad. The effect was to confirm Cuba as the enemy of the United States yet also constrain the U.S. from direct military force against Cuba," LeoGrande said.

In October 1962, at the height of the Cold War, the immediate task before Kennedy, Khrushchev and their advisers was to prevent nuclear war. Recently uncovered documents indicate the risks of annihilation were even greater than the participants had imagined.

Tension mounts

Military convoys rumbled down South Florida's highways and many Americans around the country were digging bomb shelters even before Kennedy disclosed the U-2's photographs and warned the Soviets that any nuclear missile launched from Cuba would be regarded as an attack on the United States.

"On the main highways we were seeing tanks going south to Key West and Homestead, not one but hundreds of them, with military jets flying overhead," recalled Jaime Suchlicki, director of the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami. "You knew something serious was happening."

In Washington, Kennedy met with his Executive Committee of top advisers and after seven days of intense debate ordered a naval quarantine around Cuba -- approved on Oct. 20, 1962, and announced two days later -- to prevent delivery of Soviet offensive weapons. Robert McNamara, defense secretary at the time, later recalled going to these meetings wondering if the world would come to an end.

"The record points to even more danger than people like McNamara thought. And McNamara thought there was a significant possibility he would not live to see the sunrise," said Thomas Blanton, executive director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University.

"During the crisis, U.S. intelligence never detected a single nuclear warhead. They knew there were missiles and missile sites and they just had to assume there were some nuclear warheads. Now we know the Soviets had nuclear weapons in Cuba all over the place."

Kennedy faced a decision on whether to launch a pre-emptive strike to destroy the missile sites, similar to the decision President Bush faces today on whether to invade Iraq to block acquisition of nuclear weapons.

"When some military officials recommended a pre-emptive air strike of missile sites followed by invasion, Kennedy asked, `How sure are you that we can get them all.'" Blanton said, referring to transcripts of the meetings. "They said, `Well, honestly, 90 percent.' And that was one of the reasons he decided not to do a pre-emptive strike."

Castro's `secret speech'

With warheads already ensconced in Cuba in various places, "the chances of some kind of nuclear exchange, if only by accident, was even greater than was known at the time," Blanton said.

The United States also underestimated the extent of Castro's anger toward the Soviet Union in the wake of the crisis. Furious that the Soviets had struck a deal with Kennedy behind his back, Castro scorned his ally for leaving Cuba to stand alone against the wrath of the North American colossus.

The full force of Castro's sense of betrayal and vulnerability was revealed in a recently uncovered text of a "secret speech" he delivered to his Soviet comrades in 1968.

"As late as January 1968, Cuba felt extraordinary antagonism toward the Soviet Union," said Philip Brenner, professor of international relations at American University and co-author of Sad & Luminous Days, a book just published about the aftermath of the crisis.

The "secret speech," Brenner said, debunks the long assumption that by the mid-1960s Cuba was merely an agent of the Soviets spreading monolithic communism to other parts of Latin America. The Soviets actually were trying to curb Castro's foreign adventures, the speech indicates, because they feared it would undermine Soviet leadership in the Third World and enflame relations with the United States.

Weeks after the missile crisis, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev expressed worries that an "irrational" Castro would renew tensions and possibly provoke war, newly released documents show. Cuba "wants practically to drag us behind it with a leash, and wants to pull us into a war with America by its actions," Khrushchev warned in a letter dated Nov. 16, 1962, to diplomatic aides in Cuba.

U.S. officials had always assumed that Cuba was a puppet of the Soviet Union and they didn't need to deal directly with the Cubans, Brenner said. "Rather than taking dictation from the Soviet Union, they were resisting every effort to pressure them to stop this policy [of exporting revolution.] We misunderstood the Cuban mindset and would have better served our interests by dealing directly with Cuba rather than going through the Soviets."

Some evidence indicates that Kennedy had some knowledge of Castro's bitterness and tried to exploit it by exploring back-channel discussions that might pull Cuba away from the Soviet orbit. According to Brenner and other scholars, an unofficial emissary, a French journalist, was actually meeting with Castro on Kennedy's behalf in Havana when Cuba got word that Kennedy had been assassinated.

Lasting impact

Castro gradually patched up relations with his Soviet patrons, and the United States settled into a hardline policy toward Cuba that continues today. Both sides abided by the agreements that were made in an exchange of letters between Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, setting the course of U.S.-Cuba relations through the Cold War and beyond.

Kennedy had forced the Soviets to back down and withdraw their missiles, but in exchange he agreed to discretely remove U.S. missiles based in Turkey. More important for this hemisphere, Kennedy also promised the Soviets that the United States would never invade Cuba, a bitter pill for many Cuban-Americans.

"It guaranteed the permanence of Fidel," said Suchlicki, the Cuban exile historian. "It allowed Fidel Castro to practice world politics with some impunity, including supporting terrorist groups and guerillas in Latin America. Fidel did whatever he wanted with that umbrella and protection.

"Ironically, he was humiliated because the Soviets negotiated directly with the U.S., but in the long historical view he emerged victorious."

Brenner contends that the missile crisis nevertheless left Castro feeling more vulnerable than before, betrayed by the Soviets and constantly fearful that the United States would violate its agreement and try to overthrow him. This fear, further fueled by U.S.-instigated assassination plots and the tightening embargo, prompted a mania for security and suppression of any signs of political opposition within Cuba.

Echoes of the missile crisis still resound today, more than a decade after the demise of the Soviet empire.

Though Castro abandoned his foreign interventions and the Pentagon long ago concluded that Cuba posed no security threat to the United States, the Bush administration continues to list it as one of the states that sponsors terrorism, with the capacity to develop bio-chemical weapons.

The confrontational relationship has taken many forms over the past 40 years, spanning the terms of nine U.S. presidents, yet its underpinnings remain firmly in place. In that sense, the missile crisis remains a standoff without end.
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After 40 years, a closer look
Boston Globe - By Marion Lloyd, Globe Correspondent, 10/14/2002

US spy pilot returns to site that touched off Cuban Missile Crisis

SAN CRISTOBAL, Cuba - Captain William Ecker's first glimpse of this unremarkable patch of Cuban countryside lasted only a few seconds, but it made an impact that rippled throughout the world.

The date was Oct. 23, 1962. Ecker, a retired US Navy reconnaissance pilot, flew the first low-level flight over a Soviet missile site in San Cristobal, an agricultural community 75 miles west of Havana.

The photos he brought back to Washington confirmed that the Soviet Union was deploying offensive nuclear missiles in Cuba, just 80 miles south of Florida, and pushed President John F. Kennedy into a nuclear showdown with his Soviet counterpart, Nikita Khrushchev.

Yesterday, Ecker, 78, returned to the site for the first time along with other veterans of the Cuban Missile Crisis, including Kennedy administration officials, retired Soviet generals, and Cuban military officers.

The field trip came at the end of a three-day conference marking the 40th anniversary of the most dramatic episode of the Cold War.

''It's kind of nice to be back,'' said Ecker as he toured the remains of a Soviet missile bunker, the only surviving evidence of the once-extensive military installations in Cuba. Today, the site is used as a training base for Cuban army cadets. Swing sets and picnic tables have replaced the ammunition stockpiles and troop tents.

In 1962, the Soviets had more than 40,000 soldiers stationed on the island to guard several dozen medium- and long-range nuclear missiles, as well as hundreds of tactical nuclear weapons.

For the missile crisis veterans, most of whom are now in their 70s and 80s, the visit evoked vivid memories.

''I am kind of a different person since I took that photo,'' said Ecker, who was accompanied by his wife, Hazel, of Medford, Mass. Ecker told how moments after returning to his base in Florida, he was ordered to fly immediately to Washington to debrief the top US military commander, General Maxwell Taylor, and hand over the spy film. He was later awarded a medal of valor for carrying out the dangerous mission.

''The photo I took helped Kennedy back down Khrushchev and [Adlai] Stevenson at the UN,'' he said. In a pivotal moment of the 13-day crisis, Stevenson, Kennedy's ambassador to the United Nations, caught the Soviets when he produced the proof of the missile site in San Cristobal before the UN General Assembly. Previously, Khrushchev had insisted that the Soviet Union did not have such weapons in Cuba.

''Imagine all that in just two to three seconds,'' Ecker said, referring to the time it took him to blow by San Cristobal in his F-8 fighter jet.

Ecker's big moment in history was brought to public attention by Kennedy's nephew Christopher Kennedy Lawford. Lawford, who joined Ecker yesterday at the missile site, played the pilot in a film about the crisis, ''13 Days.''

''It's amazing to be here with these guys. Really amazing,'' said Lawford, who earlier sat beside President Fidel Castro of Cuba at a private showing of the film in Havana in 2000.

Asked how his mission differed from the movie version, Ecker said that while he was fired on, he was never hit by Soviet antiaircraft fire. He said vultures flying over another Soviet base posed a greater danger, since a collision could take off a plane's wing.

''If you really want to protect your missile site, put a bunch of dead mules all around it, the buzzards will come, and you'll be safe,'' he joked.

Another key figure visiting the site was Anatoly Gribkov, 84, the Soviet general who was in charge of the secret missile deployment in Cuba. He argued that despite fears in Washington, the missiles were never intended to be used in a preemptive strike against the United States, but rather as a deterrent against an imminent US attack on Cuba.

''Not a single missile was operational,'' he said, pounding his fist against his chest. ''Everything possible was done to prevent an unsanctioned launching.''

Gribkov described security measures that included housing the warheads at least 90 miles away from the missile sites, which were scattered throughout Cuba. However, he told how a jittery local commander ordered warheads sent to a missile site on Oct. 26, at the height of the crisis, without having received orders from Moscow.

Details on Soviet security lapses were among several new pieces of information to surface during the weekend conference, which was the sixth focusing on the missile crisis.

During the last meeting, in 1992, scholars and veterans learned from declassified documents that the Soviets already had tactical nuclear weapons on the island - information that would have drastically changed Kennedy's thinking.

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Cuban conference relives missile crisis
BBC - Monday, 14 October, 2002
The silos were very near to seeing action

A conference in Havana marking the 40th anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis has ended with a visit by participants to sites related to the dispute that brought the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war.
The delegates - who include politicians, military figures and academics from the US, Russia and Cuba - travelled to an abandoned silo west of Havana where Soviet nuclear missiles had been deployed.

I'm very glad I'm seeing it here for the first time instead of on the back porch of the White House headed for me!

Former Kennedy aide Ted Sorensen 

Amongst those present were the Soviet general who commanded the silo, Anatoly Kribkov, and the US spy plane pilot, William Ecker, whose aerial photographs were used to expose its existence.

The crisis ended when the Moscow agreed to remove the missiles in return for the withdrawal of American nuclear missiles from Turkey.

Photographic evidence

Captain Ecker recalled how the last time he visited the site on 23 October he passed it in a matter of seconds as he made a low-flying pass over the silo in an F-8 jet, gathering information.

"I was only here for about two or three seconds the last time. I was smoking, between 400 feet and 500 feet (120 and 150 metres)," he said.

Captain Ecker took the vital photos

"I knew there was something there, but I didn't know exactly what until the film was developed in Florida," he added.

After taking the black and white pictures Captain Ecker flew straight to Washington where he was immediately sent into a briefing with President John F Kennedy and the US joint chiefs of staff.

"The pictures I took that day were Kennedy's evidence to back down Khrushchev," Captain Ecker said.

For his actions Kennedy later awarded the pilot with the Distinguished Flying Cross.

Emotional visit

Former Kennedy aide Ted Sorensen was present at the briefing in Washington.

"I have these extremely strong feelings standing on this site where the photos were taken - the photos we were shown in the briefing room," he said at the missile silo.

"It could have been the end of the world, but here we are 40 years later - Americans, Cubans, Russians," he added.

When inspecting a medium range Soviet R-2 missile on display Mr Sorensen said: "I'm very glad I'm seeing it here for the first time instead of on the back porch of the White House headed for me!"

Although the Russian general in command of the missile post denies that the warheads were ever operational.

"Not a single warhead was affixed to a missile. We never received any order from Moscow to bring the missiles to full combat readiness," said General Gribkov.
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Cold War Protagonists Tour Cuba
Associated Press - By ANITA SNOW

SAN CRISTOBAL, Cuba (AP) - Retired Navy Capt. William Ecker stood Sunday before the warhead bunker he photographed from 500 feet four decades ago, giving President Kennedy extra evidence that Soviet missiles were being stockpiled in Cuba.

``I knew there was something there, but I didn't know exactly what until the film was developed in Florida,'' Ecker, 78, said as a group of key actors from the Cuban missile crisis toured sites related to the Cold War drama. ``I was really only here for two or three seconds.''

After the film was developed in Jacksonville, Fla., later that day of Oct. 23, 1962, Ecker continued on in the same RF-8A plane to Washington. There, he was rushed to a briefing with Kennedy and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

``The pictures I took that day were Kennedy's evidence to back down Khrushchev,'' said Ecker, who now lives in Punta Gorda, Fla. ``(U.S. Ambassador) Adlai Stevenson later showed them at the United Nations.''

The black and white photograph of the bunker, now whitewashed and surrounded by towering palm trees, showed several men standing on the roof and several in front. What appears to be construction materials are piled up off to the side. ``Probable Nuclear Warhead Bunker Under Construction San Cristobal Site 1,'' reads the title given by CIA photo analysts.

Other photographs taken by Ecker's team showed an apparent missile launch site at this military installation about 80 miles west of Havana. One image showed large tent-like constructions that CIA analysts said appeared to be sheltering medium-range missiles that could travel up to about 1,500 miles, along with a missile erector.

Wearing a black navy pilot cap, Ecker pulled out his wallet to show the black and white photograph taken the following year when Kennedy stood before him on the tarmac at the naval base in Key West, Fla., to award him the Distinguished Flying Cross.

The visits Sunday followed a two-day gathering of American, Cuban and Russian protagonists in the missile crisis drama, which brought the world to the precipice of nuclear destruction.

``I have these extremely strong feelings standing on this site where the photos were taken - the photos we were shown in the briefing room,'' said former Kennedy aide Ted Sorensen, who was present when Ecker was summoned to Washington. ``It could have been the end of the world, but here we are 40 years later - Americans, Cubans, Russians.''

Studying thousands of newly declassified materials from the governments involved, conference participants learned that fast-moving events nearly spun out of control and brought them closer to nuclear disaster than they earlier imagined.

Cuban President Fidel Castro participated in the conference's closed door sessions on Friday and Saturday as did former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara.

Later, the former rivals said good-bye late Saturday with a warm handshake as McNamara left Havana calling for an end to the risks of nuclear catastrophe.

McNamara suggested moving ``toward eliminating the risk of destruction of nations by nuclear weapons. That risk is unacceptable today. We ought to address it.''

After McNamara left the conference Saturday evening, Castro said that the former American defense chief mentioned that he was now 86 and probably would not be around for the next missile crisis conference 10 years from now.

``But he exhorted me to attend,'' joked Castro, who is now 76, and said McNamara's good wishes were ``very kind.''

The missile crisis began in mid-October 1962 when President Kennedy learned that Cuba had Soviet nuclear missiles capable of reaching the United States. The crisis was defused two weeks later when the Soviet Union agreed to remove the missiles.

Former Kennedy aides Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Richard Goodwin also attended the conference, as well as former CIA analyst Dino Brugioni, who interpreted American spy photos of Soviet missiles in Cuba.
 
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The U.S. ignored a warning from Germany in 1962.
La Jornada - October 13, 2002

The government of the Federal Republic of Germany warned the U.S. about the eventual presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba in August of 1962, two months before the breakout of the crisis which brought the world to the brink of a nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union, reports the German magazine Der Spiegel, in its Monday edition

An investigation based on the declassified documents of the ministries of Foreign Relations and Defense, revealed that West German diplomats in Cuba observed a growing movement of Soviet personnel on the island that month.

According to the version given by Der Spiegel, the Federal German embassy pointed out to its government on August 17, 1962 that medium range missiles had been imported into the island.

An informant in Cienfuegos reported that "heavy materials were unloaded at
the port of Casilda and delivered to the construction site of a Soviet base
and perhaps missiles, in a perimeter within Rodrigo, Amaro and Santa
Domingo",  a place where 40 launchers of SS-4 medium range missiles with
nuclear warheads had been located, the magazine reported.

The Foreign Relations Ministry of Bonn passed on the information to the US
government, but the US dismissed it as speculation, recalled Konrad
Gracher, the second in command at the German embassy in Havana.

Meanwhile, some 20 members of the US House of Representatives introduced a
bill to normalize relations with Cuba. "The best way to support democratic
change and human rights in Cuba is to promote trade and travel which would
engage the Cuban people", indicated the Democratic Representative, Cal Dooley.

Translation: Luis Martin

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A Precedent That Proves Neither Side's Point
Washington Post - By Jefferson Morley - Sunday, October 13, 2002

President Bush and Teddy Kennedy don't agree about much, but they do agree that the Cuban missile crisis is a relevant story today. As Americans debate whether to wage preemptive war against Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, both the president and the younger brother of President John F. Kennedy are citing the events of October 1962 to justify different courses of action.

In his speech to the nation last Monday, Bush dressed his policy in JFK's mantle. "As President Kennedy said in October of 1962: Neither the United States nor the world community of nations can tolerate deliberate deception and offensive threats on the part of any nation, large or small. We no longer live in a world, he said, where only the actual firing of weapons represents a sufficient challenge to a nation's security to constitute maximum peril."

But Sen. Kennedy, in a Sept. 27 speech at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, maintained that his brother's actions 40 years ago were anything but Bush-like.

"When missiles were discovered in Cuba -- missiles more threatening to us than anything Saddam has today . . . some in the highest councils of government urged an immediate and unilateral strike," Kennedy declared. "Instead the United States took its case to the United Nations, won the endorsement of the Organization of American States, and brought along even our most skeptical allies. We imposed a blockade, demanded inspection, and insisted on the removal of the missiles."

The Cuban missile crisis seems to be everyone's favorite reference point these days, but the analogy, while appropriate, can be overdrawn. Today there is no equivalent of an actor like the Soviet Union. While the sense of existential threat is similar, the ideological context is completely altered. Indeed, the differences are as illuminating as the similarities in understanding the bureaucratic power struggle underway in Washington.

For the president, likening his actions to JFK's widely admired handling of the missile crisis makes his own course of action feel less novel and risky, and more legitimate and responsible. By praising a Democratic president, Bush and his advisers also give their policy a non-partisan sheen. With polls showing that support for war against Iraq has actually slipped over the past month, Bush seems to recognize that if he is serious about risking American lives and wealth, he must reach beyond his Republican base. His challenge is to show that his course is substantively, not just rhetorically, like JFK's.

In some ways, the comparison seems apt. Forty years ago, Fidel Castro's Cuba occupied the role of the bête noire of U.S. foreign policy, just as Iraq does today. A charismatic former guerrilla leader, Castro did not have Saddam Hussein's sinister persona or atrocious human rights record, and he had a broader base of public support within his own country and abroad. But Washington viewed Castro, like Hussein, as a destabilizing foe. In the summer of 1962, the United States was secretly planning to assassinate him and overthrow his communist government. Pentagon contingency plans for invading Cuba were nearing completion.

To defend his revolution, Castro had secretly accepted the Soviet Union's offer to install intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Cuba, hoping to deter an expected U.S. invasion. When U.S. surveillance planes took aerial pictures of Soviet missile silos under construction in the Cuban countryside on Oct. 14, 1962, the Kennedy White House felt duped by the Soviet emissaries who had been insisting, publicly and privately, that their military assistance to Cuba was purely defensive in nature.

No other moment in American history so closely resembles America's predicament today. The first parallel: Just as Kennedy saw the Soviet missiles in Cuba as a menace, Bush perceives Iraq's efforts to obtain weapons of mass destruction as an imminent threat to U.S. security.

A second parallel: Both presidents used diplomatic means -- the United Nations and satellite photos -- to rally world opinion. Kennedy's ambassador to the United Nations, Adlai Stevenson, showed photographs of the missile sites to great effect. Similarly, President Bush used satellite photos last week to document Iraq's efforts to rebuild its nuclear facilities.

A third parallel: Just as Kennedy used the threat of war to secure the removal of weapons of mass destruction from Cuba, so Bush mobilizes against Iraq. As U.S. forces mobilized for an attack on Cuba, Kennedy told the Soviet Union the United States would "eliminate" the missile sites if they were not dismantled first.

But the dynamics of Washington in October 2002 are nearly the reverse of October 1962. Back then, the doves were found in the White House, while hawks dominated the Congress, State Department and Pentagon. Now, hawks dominate at the White House and civilian leadership of the Pentagon, while Congress is deferential, and the armed services, the CIA and State Department (led by former general Colin L. Powell) are the most dovish forces.

As Ted Kennedy notes, his brother rejected the counsel of hawkish advisers, such as former secretary of state Dean Acheson and Maxwell Taylor, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They favored attacking Cuba without delay or diplomacy. Instead, JFK imposed a blockade on the island. In an effort to deescalate the conflict, at least rhetorically, JFK called his action a "quarantine" because under international law a "blockade" is an act of war. Bush, by contrast, has deployed dire rhetoric, and last week added new conditions if Iraq wants to avoid war.

Much more than the Bush administration today, President Kennedy left open the possibility of a peaceful solution. After Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev extracted a promise from Kennedy -- never put in writing -- that the United States would not invade Cuba, Khrushchev agreed to withdraw the missiles.

Bush's invocation of the Cuban missile crisis obscures the reservations of the armed services and State Department today. The contemporary military leadership, which came of age in the Vietnam era, is much more cautious about launching a unilateral war -- even to eliminate an imminent threat. While active-duty officers are bound to follow civilian orders, a previous Joint Chiefs chairman, John Shalikashvili, has urged the Bush administration not to launch a preemptive war without having exhausted diplomatic options. Former NATO commander Wesley Clark and former Central Command chief Joseph Hoar also said Bush should do more to gain international support -- a position more dovish than that of many leading Democrats.

Bush's comparison with 1962 also seeks to legitimize preemptive action against a nation that has not attacked the United States.

"What would you call the Cuban missile crisis action by President Kennedy?" Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld asked at a Sept. 26 congressional hearing. "In my view, establishing what he called a quarantine, what the world thought of as a blockade, and preventing, if you will, the Soviet Union from placing nuclear missiles in Cuba, that was . . . certainly anticipatory self-defense, it was certainly preventative, and we were very close to a crisis of historic proportion. And I think it's not unfair or inaccurate to say that he . . . engaged in preemption."

However, the records of the Kennedy White House are abundantly clear: JFK imposed the naval blockade as a way of buying time to pursue a peaceful solution and forestalling the demands of Pentagon hawks that he take preemptive military action. As many hawks complained at the time, Kennedy's naval blockade did nothing to ease the threat to the United States, because the Soviet missiles were already in Cuba.

By contrast, Bush has cast doubt on diplomatic possibilities, arguing that Hussein is untrustworthy. The position staked out by Powell, an avid student of the Cuban missile crisis, is actually more akin to JFK's. Like Kennedy, Powell advocates exploring every diplomatic option first while holding out the real threat of going to war. Like Kennedy, Powell has defined disarmament, not removal of the offending regime, as the chief U.S. goal.

Like other past episodes, the Cuban missile crisis can, in the end, provide no prescription for the present, only ways of thinking about today's dilemma, especially the key issues of preemptive attacks and the unknowable risks of combat.

Historians agree that most of Kennedy's advisers felt that a preemptive attack was incompatible with American ideals. In 1962, Bobby Kennedy described an attack on Cuba as a "Pearl Harbor in reverse," a view echoed this August by House Majority Leader Richard K. Armey (R-Tex.), who said, "I don't believe that America will justifiably make an unprovoked attack on another nation. It would not be consistent with . . . what we should be as a nation." But there's no evidence that Bush or his closest advisers share this sentiment. (Armey backed last week's congressional resolution granting Bush wide latitude to use force.)

With the benefit of hindsight, the risks of conflict can also be seen more clearly. The Pentagon brass could not assure Kennedy that even a massive U.S. strike would eliminate the possibility that Cuba might use weapons of mass destruction. When a congressional delegation urged an invasion of the island, Kennedy said such an attack would be "one hell of a gamble."

He was right. At a 1992 conference in Havana attended by former U.S., Soviet and Cuban officials, retired Russian officers revealed something that U.S. war planners in 1962 did not know: Soviet military commanders in Cuba had short-range nuclear weapons at their disposal. Phil Brenner, an American University professor and historian of the missile crisis, says, "Had a local Soviet commander fired one of these, it would have been the start of a general nuclear war."

But while Kennedy feared what he didn't know, the hawks did not. After the missile crisis, Kennedy's critics argued that he had overestimated the chance of nuclear war and could have ousted Castro without undue risk. That argument is much harder to make in light of the new historical record.

So what does the Cuban missile crisis tell us? First, that the credible threat of war made a last-minute peaceful solution possible. Second, that when it comes to preemptive war against a foe whose capabilities are unknown, you can't be too careful. Thus Kennedy's relatively dovish approach to the crisis of October 1962 does not constitute a precedent or persuasive argument for Bush's more hawkish course today. In the end, Kennedy threatened war but chose not to seek "regime change" via invasion, and settling for disarmament via diplomacy. That clearly is not Bush's preferred course, at least not yet.
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CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS - Letter to Castro did little to ease atomic showdown
Sentinel - By Matthew Hay Brown - October 13, 2002

HAVANA -- On the most volatile day of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the United States sent Fidel Castro a message claiming the Soviet Union was about to betray him, according to papers released Saturday.

The bid to drive a wedge between Castro and the Soviet leadership, prepared by U.S. officials but sent as a letter from the Brazilian government, asserted the Soviet Union was negotiating to withdraw nuclear missiles from the Caribbean island in exchange for concessions from NATO.

In fact, the United States and the Soviet Union had not reached a deal, and the Pentagon was readying an attack on the missile sites within 48 hours.

The letter, released at a 40th-anniversary conference on the crisis, is the only known attempt by the United States to communicate with Cuba during the 1962 standoff. Castro on Saturday acknowledged receiving the message and said he ignored it.

The U.S. discovery of Soviet missile bases in Cuba on Oct. 14, 1962, forced a confrontation that brought the superpowers to the brink of global thermonuclear war.

"Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missiles is now in preparation on that imprisoned island," President Kennedy announced in a televised address Oct. 22. "The purpose of these bases can be none other than to provide a nuclear-strike capability against the Western Hemisphere."

Kennedy ordered a blockade on the island, mobilized troops for an attack and demanded that Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev withdraw the missiles.

Oct. 27 is widely considered the most dangerous day of the crisis. In rapid succession that afternoon, an American U-2 spy plane strayed into Soviet airspace, a second U-2 was downed by an anti-aircraft battery in Cuba, and a Soviet submarine commander readied a nuclear strike on a U.S. destroyer. New surveillance photographs revealed the Soviet missiles had been placed on their launchers, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended an airstrike and invasion to start within 48 hours.

That day, Kennedy's Executive Committee of National Security Advisers approved the letter to Cuba. Kennedy reportedly thought it was poorly drafted; Castro on Saturday agreed.

The two-day conference drew veterans from all sides of the confrontation, including Castro, former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and former Soviet KGB agent Nikolai Leonov.

Other documents released Saturday indicate the crisis, generally considered to have ended when Khrushchev agreed on Oct. 28 to take back the missiles, lasted well into November, largely because Cuba balked at Soviet concessions to the United States.

Khrushchev had agreed to withdraw the weapons in return for a public pledge by Kennedy not to invade Cuba and a secret commitment to pull U.S. missiles out of Turkey. Castro, who had proposed a five-point plan including a U.S. withdrawal from the naval base at Guantanamo, had been left out of the negotiations.

Although the missiles were withdrawn, nuclear tactical weapons remained in Cuba until Nov. 20, according to documents. Castro said Saturday that Cuba never had control of the weapons and never intended to keep them.
 
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U.S. Tried To Divide Cuba, U.S.S.R.
The Hartford Courant - By MATTHEW HAY BROWN - October 13 2002

HAVANA -- On the most volatile day of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the United States sent Fidel Castro a message claiming the Soviet Union was about to betray him, papers released Saturday show.

The bid to drive a wedge between Castro and the Soviet leadership, prepared by U.S. officials but sent as a letter from the Brazilian government, asserted the Soviet Union was negotiating to withdraw nuclear missiles from the Caribbean island in exchange for concessions from NATO.

In fact, the United States and the Soviet Union had not reached a deal, and the Pentagon was readying an attack on the missile sites within 48 hours.

The letter, released at a 40th anniversary conference on the crisis, is the only known attempt by the United States to communicate with Cuba during the 1962 standoff. Castro on Saturday acknowledged receiving the message and said he ignored it.

The U.S. discovery of Soviet missile bases in Cuba on Oct. 14, 1962, brought the superpowers to the brink of global thermonuclear war.

"Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missiles is now in preparation on that imprisoned island," President Kennedy announced in a televised address Oct. 22. "The purpose of these bases can be none other than to provide a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere."

Kennedy ordered a blockade of the island, mobilized troops for an attack and demanded that Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev withdraw the missiles.

Oct. 27 is widely considered the most dangerous day of the crisis. In rapid succession that afternoon, an American U-2 spy plane strayed into Soviet airspace; a second U-2 was downed by an anti-aircraft battery in Cuba; and a Soviet submarine commander readied a nuclear strike on a U.S. destroyer. New surveillance photographs revealed the Soviet missiles had been placed on their launchers, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended an airstrike and invasion within 48 hours.

That day, Kennedy's executive committee of national security advisers approved the letter to Cuba. Kennedy reportedly thought it was poorly drafted; Castro agreed Saturday.

The two-day conference drew veterans from all sides of the confrontation, including Castro, former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and former Soviet KGB agent Nikolai Leonov.

Other documents released Saturday indicate the crisis, generally considered to have ended when Khrushchev agreed on Oct. 28 to take back the missiles, lasted well into November, largely because Cuba balked at Soviet concessions to the United States.

Khrushchev had agreed to withdraw the weapons in return for a public pledge by Kennedy not to invade Cuba and a secret commitment to pull U.S. missiles out of Turkey. Castro had been left out of the negotiations.

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40 Years After Missile Crisis, Players Swap Stories in Cuba
Washington Post - By Kevin Sullivan - Sunday, October 13, 2002

HAVANA, Oct. 12 -- There was pandemonium on the Soviet B-59 submarine. A U.S. destroyer was lobbing depth charges into the water as a warning: Surface or you will be attacked. The explosions pounded the sub's hull like blasts from a sledgehammer. Oxygen was running out. Crewmen were fainting.

Tensions were extreme: It was Oct. 27, 1962, the height of the Cuban missile crisis.

Officers on the Soviet were screaming for the captain to sink the U.S. ship. What the Americans did not know nearly blew up the world: The Soviet sub, and three others in the waters off Cuba, each carried one torpedo tipped with a nuclear warhead.

Vadim Orlov, a crewman on the Soviet sub, recounted the little-known story here this weekend during a conference marking the 40th anniversary of the missile crisis.

Historians have long noted that the United States and the Soviet Union came within a whisper of nuclear war during the 13-day standoff, after the United States discovered that Moscow had secretly installed nuclear missiles in Cuba.

The account, from Orlov and J.W. Peterson, a crewman from the U.S. destroyer, made it clear that the Cold War enemies came far closer than anyone ever realized to stumbling into a nuclear holocaust.

Former defense secretary Robert S. McNamara said that a nuclear attack on a U.S. ship could easily have escalated into a full-scale nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Orlov, who published a book earlier this year on the events, said that came within one word of happening: The sub was authorized to fire its nuclear torpedo with the approval of three officers aboard; two wanted to shoot, the third said no.

"A guy named Arkhipov saved the world," said Thomas S. Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, a research group at George Washington University that organized this week's conference with the Cuban government, and arranged the declassification of thousands of new documents that the participants are reviewing.

It has been a weekend of casual talk about nuclear annihilation. The conference, in a sprawling hotel on the outskirts of Havana, brought together men from a generation that nearly destroyed a world still getting the feel of its nuclear muscles.

The participants have come here, they said, to learn more about an episode that changed their lives in ways that still make them shudder. They said they have come to make sure it does not happen again, and to offer lessons for today's crises, most notably President Bush's deliberations about whether to strike Iraq.

President Fidel Castro of Cuba sat on one side of the room in a stiff blue suit, his famous black beard gone thunderstorm gray, his signature cigars long since given up. Just past his 76th birthday, his voice has grown smaller.

Gray-haired former Russian generals sat along one flank of the conference table. They had not lost the Soviet gift for cement-thick oratory, giving long speeches about throw-weights and tonnages. Across from them, surviving members of President John F. Kennedy's administration were lined up like a living page from a history book. McNamara sat in a blue and white polo shirt. Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. looked out through thick glasses, wearing his trademark bow tie, addressing his old adversaries with sharp logic and perfect diction.

Ethel Kennedy, widow of Robert F. Kennedy, sat behind McNamara with fine posture and fashion, a living reminder of other prices paid during a tumultuous era.

Kennedy speechwriter Theodore C. Sorensen was remarkably youthful and trim in a black polo shirt. Fellow Kennedy aide Richard Goodwin, his hair wild and curly, sat alongside him and told Castro a story about meeting Ernesto "Che" Guevara, the legendary revolutionary, at a party in Uruguay in August 1961.

Castro laughed as Goodwin spoke of sitting cross-legged on the floor talking to Guevara about hemispheric tensions. He said Guevara gave him a mahogany box filled with Cuban cigars, which Goodwin delivered to President Kennedy. He said Kennedy immediately grabbed one and lit it up. Then, in an echo of the CIA's attempts to kill Castro with poisoned cigars, Kennedy joked that he probably ought to have made Goodwin test a cigar first, just in case.

William Ecker, 78, a retired U.S. Navy captain, was a pilot who flew low-level sorties in an F-8 fighter jet to photograph Soviet missile installations in Cuba. His close-up pictures taken on Oct. 23, proved beyond doubt the existence of the missiles. On Sunday, the conference participants were scheduled to tour the remains of the site that Ecker photographed.

"It's not just a conference of remembrance, it's also a conference of reconciliation," Sorensen said. "And that is a pretty good message to a world on the verge of war."

Also sitting on the American side of the conference table was Dino Brugioni, a former CIA analyst who interpreted the first U-2 spy plane photos that showed missiles in Cuba. Brugioni, now 80, has insistently challenged the Russian participants on their version of events.

Russians participants said they never intended to fire the nuclear missiles that were positioned on Cuban soil, and that they were careful to keep the warheads and the missiles in separate locations. But Brugioni, in a calm and precise voice, pointed to spy-plane photographs, declassified by the National Security Archive, that showed trucks loaded with warheads parked next to the missiles on their launch pads.

In an interview, Brugioni recalled the events of one day during the crisis, Saturday, Oct. 27, 1962, when events seemed to be spinning out of control.

On that day, new surveillance photos showed that the missile sites were now fully operational. He said the missiles could be fueled and launched on six to eight hours' notice. A U.S. U-2 spy plane had been shot down over Cuba. On the other side of the world, another U-2 strayed into Soviet airspace and Soviet MiG fighter jets scrambled to intercept it, adding to already white-hot tensions. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had not been seen in three days, adding to speculation that he had been overthrown by hard-liners.

Brugioni's said his boss at the CIA returned from briefing Kennedy on the new spy-plane photos. "How did it go?" Brugioni said he asked. "Not good at all," Brugioni said he replied. "The president is very concerned."

"I called my wife and I said, 'If you get another call from me, put the kids in the car and head for Missouri,' " said Brugioni, who brought his 22-year-old grandson to the conference. "October 27 is a day I'll never forget. The planet could have been destroyed."

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The Missiles of 1962 Haunt the Iraq Debate
New York Times - October 13, 2002 - By TODD S. PURDUM

WASHINGTON — FOR 13 days starting Oct. 16, 1962, "the world stood like a playing card on edge," as Norman Mailer put it, while President Kennedy and his closest aides faced down the threat of Soviet missiles in Cuba. Forty years later, Washington and the world are again on the brink, and debates about the lessons of that long-ago October are as fresh as the morning headlines.

Then, as now, the threat was nuclear weapons and the risk was a wider war. Then, as now, the midterm elections were approaching and a president put in office by a razor-thin margin battled doubts about his reputation in the world. Then, as now, some of the president's aides urged a pre-emptive strike and invasion, while others counseled diplomatic isolation backed by the threat of force.

But much has also changed since the crisis that historians have called the most dangerous moment in recorded time. Then, it was uniformed commanders and some Congressional leaders who pushed hardest for military action, while a president all too familiar with World War II combat was skeptical. Now it is uniformed commanders scarred by Vietnam and politicians shaped by its legacy who most urge caution, while civilian Pentagon officials and a president who saw no combat as a home-front National Guard pilot seem more disposed toward force.

Even as a grizzled group of President Kennedy's New Frontiersmen met this weekend with Fidel Castro at a commemorative conference in Havana to review hundreds of newly released documents, current hawks and doves here summoned snippets from the already voluminous historical record to buttress their cases.

Campaigning for his first term 40 years ago this month, Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts was warned by his brother's aides not to so much as mention Cuba, lest the Soviets read too much into his words. Last week, as the Senate's reigning liberal lion, he took to the floor to recall that "many military officers urged President Kennedy to approve a preventive attack" to destroy the Soviet missiles before they became operational. But, he said, their brother Robert argued that would amount to "a Pearl Harbor in reverse," and he added: "That view prevailed. A middle ground was found and peace was preserved."

Hours later, Mr. Bush made a televised speech to the nation on the dangers posed by Iraq's efforts to acquire nuclear weapons, and cited President Kennedy's words to warn: "We no longer live in a world where only the actual firing of weapons represents a sufficient challenge to a nation's security to constitute maximum peril." Mr. Bush's aides say Mr. Kennedy wouldn't have succeeded if he hadn't been genuinely ready to start shooting, and by week's end Congress went along with the president, voting overwhelmingly to authorize him to use force.

"It's like fighting over biblical passages, and what the devil said," said Fred I. Greenstein, an expert on presidential leadership at Princeton. "On the one hand, there is the Kennedy who arrived at the judgment that we can't let those missiles stay in place. But Kennedy also did triple cartwheels to perform in as cautious and unprovocative a way as possible with the Soviet Union. He was not dealing with Saddam Hussein and a bizarre banana non-republic, but with Soviets who had proved throughout the cold war to be rational actors."

Some of Mr. Bush's advisers have pointed to the Kennedy decision to impose a naval blockade on Cuba — and to threaten drastic action if the missiles were not removed — as an example of pre-emptive military action. But Kennedy loyalists say the point was precisely the opposite. "The whole purpose of it was to avoid an American attack," a participant in the discussions recalled last week. "And the reason it was called a quarantine and not a blockade is because a blockade is an act of war. We were trying to find a way of communicating more forceful than the English language. It was communicating, not pre-emption."

In 1962, President Kennedy was taken with Barbara Tuchman's new book, "The Guns of August," a history of the unintended chain of consequences that led to the devastation of World War I. He was obsessed with avoiding similar miscalculations.

This fall, White House aides have been reading another provocative work — by Ms. Tuchman's daughter, Jessica Tuchman Mathews, the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The institution produced a report advocating a new regime of "coercive" weapons inspections in Iraq, backed up by force and aimed at disarming Mr. Hussein without resorting to war. Most military commanders faulted the idea as impractical, but Mr. Bush incorporated an echo of it in his proposal for a United Nations resolution that would force Iraq to submit to much more stringent inspections or face the consequences.

"There are never two choices in foreign policy," Ms. Mathews said the other day, "and the right answer is not to choose an unacceptable one, but to look for a third. I think it's fair to say, in the missile crisis doing nothing was unacceptable, and so was going to war with the risk of nuclear holocaust." She added: "The other key lesson was, give your opponent some room to maneuver. Don't back him against the wall."

One problem with this argument: a version of it has already been tried for the decade since the Persian Gulf war. Kenneth M. Pollack, who as a C.I.A. analyst and national security official in the 1990's helped formulate the strategy of containing Iraq through economic sanctions and limited military actions, has reluctantly concluded in a new book, "The Threatening Storm" (Random House), that an invasion of Iraq is now the best approach.

"The fact that a war against Iraq could be potentially quite costly should make us think long and hard about whether or not we should embark upon such an endeavor, but it should never be an absolute impediment," he writes. "Often, the costliest wars are the ones that are the most important to fight."

Perhaps the biggest challenge of any conflict is the unknowns. A C.I.A. analysis released last week supported President Bush's portrait of Iraq's efforts to acquire nuclear weapons, but did not echo the White House's depiction of an immediate threat. In fact, it said, Mr. Hussein might be most inclined to unleash devastating weapons against the United States if he was convinced an American strike was inevitable.

In the missile crisis, the debate over invasion proceeded in ignorance of a threat that only came out 30 years later: the Soviets already had not only missiles but tactical nuclear warheads on the island before the quarantine began, and were ready to use them in the event of an attack.

"I now conclude that however astutely the crisis may have been managed," former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara said in Havana last week, "luck also played a significant role in the avoidance of nuclear war by a hair's breadth."

Graham T. Allison, the Harvard professor who wrote "Essence of Decision," a seminal study of the crisis recently revised with Philip D. Zelikow (Addison Wesley, 1999) noted another element: President Kennedy's willingness to take a secret gamble on Sat. Oct. 27, the last full day of the crisis. The president's advisers worried that the blockade was failing; a U-2 surveillance pilot had been shot down over Cuba; the missiles were becoming operational.

"Everybody's been on overdrive for two weeks and is fraying, and there's a sense of `Well, I guess we played out this hand and it didn't work,' " Professor Allison said. Then the president circled back to another possibility: A parallel American withdrawal of obsolete Jupiter missiles from Turkey. He sent Robert F. Kennedy to convey all this to the Soviet ambassador.

"Thus you had this rather bizarre package," Professor Allison added. "A public ultimatum to the Soviets, `missiles out by next week,' and a pledge not to invade, then a private ultimatum that said, `We really mean this,' and then, finally, a secret carrot, that if the missiles are withdrawn, then within six months, the missiles in Turkey will not be there, though Bobby insisted there could be no quid pro quo."

These details, too, were not confirmed conclusively until 20 years later. Is it just possible that the Bush administration could be working on some similar secret diplomacy now, say, exile for Saddam Hussein?

"I certainly hope so," said President Kennedy's special counsel, Theodore C. Sorenson.