On What Really Happened to Create the "Cuban Missile Crisis'

"Either this nation shall kill racism, or racism shall kill this nation." (S. Jonas, August, 2018)

Mongoose collection. No, its' not a meerkat, nor does it fly.
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Introduction:

According to a report on President Vladimir Putin's favorite US TV service(Fox"News," what else?), he did indeed make a serious threat to use "tactical" (what a great cover-up name for THE instantaneous weapon of mass destruction) nuclear weapons if in Ukraine things begin to go seriously South (that is towards the Black Sea) for Russia and its interests. A few days later, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that they would only be used defensively. So who knows? Our species and many others on Earth may well be facing the possibility of a "nuclear Armageddon." For it is highly unlikely that the use of one "small" (ho, ho, ho) nuke would stop there. (Of course after all the nuclear dust settled, say in 10,000 years, the Earth and the surviving species, might find itself much better off without the only self-mass-destructive one. But that is another story.)

However, the possible prospect of "Armageddon" does raise thoughts of earlier such events, most prominently, the so-called "Cuban Missile Crisis." Although a close reading of sources describing the events does reveal the most important features of it, in the common telling they have been and are still, glossed over. President John F. Kennedy is commonly made out to be an heroic figure who "stared down the Russians" and "forced (Nikita) Khrushchev to pull his missiles out of Cuba," in return for the use pulling U.S. Intermediate range ones out of Turkey.

At the center of "Operation Mongoose" the code name for the planned invasion was the secretive (to the extent he could be) Cold Warrior (Gen., ret.) Edward Lansdale. (The mongoose is a small rodent-like [but isn't] mammal found in many parts of the world.) He was sometimes referred to as the real-life U.S. James Bond. He even looked the part. How much Lansdale was involved with "Mongoose" is to this day not fully known. But he was almost certainly something of a player in the story as it evolved along the East Coast of the United Sates in the summer of 1962, as he was in so many U.S. "covert ops." Of the time primarily aimed against national liberation movements). And as it was told to me during that summer by an Army Captain who was part of the developing operation, "Operation Mongoose" unfolded like this.

The "Untold Story"

The untold story of the "Cuban Missile Crisis" was another one of those "buried stories" that litter American history when they are inconvenient truths like the "Gulf of Tonkin Incident, which gave President Lyndon Johnson the excuse he needed to widen the U.S. participation ion the Viet Nam War. (Except that it was based on a lie too.) In the summer of 1962, having graduated from medical school that June, I happened to be doing part of my rotating internship at Lenox Hill Hospital at an affiliated hospital in Western New Jersey, the Hunterdon County Medical Center. For a time, I dated a nurse who happened to have a brother who was a captain in the United States Army. When he was home on leave during that summer, I happened to spend some time with him. He was hardly political and seemed very happy to be in the Army. I asked what he did in the Army and he told me "Oh, we are getting ready to invade Cuba," just like that. Very matter of fact. Sort of like Sunday in the Park with George.

All up and down the East Coast, he told me, a major invasion force was being assembled. If Kennedy was going to invade Cuba, he was going to do it following an earlier version of the Powell Doctrine. No half-baked venture like the totally ill-planned Bay of Pigs fiasco. JFK was going to hit hard, (just like his father advised FDR not to do in the face of the Hitlerian threat, right up until Pearl Harbor, by which time he was gone). This was well before there was any "crisis," well before there was any public notice of the situation.

When the "crisis" did occur, it was obvious to me (and certainly others) at the time, that what had happened was that the Soviet Union and Cuba had gotten wind of the very real major U.S. invasion threat, had at Castro's request demanded that the US stand down, that the US did not, that Khrushchev then sent the missiles in the direction of Cuba (to be added to a small number that were already there), probably never intending to actually set them up there. Nevertheless, by so doing Khrushchev did achieve his goal, and of course Castro's, of aborting the US invasion. That is, they won. Neither Cuba nor the USSR cared a whit about how the US spun it at the time, and have spun it ever since. The US invasion was thwarted; that's what counted.

And no, I do not remember the officer's name nor do I know that he would have ever confirmed the story to me after October, 1962. But tell me the story he did, as if it was something that was going to happen in just the normal course of events. Further, at a later date, I referred this account to a friend of mine, a West Point Graduate who was a commissioned officer in the Army at the time and asked him if it were true. "Oh yes," he said. "Everyone who was in the Army along the East Coast knew about it." Presumably, they were told to keep quiet about it, and so just about every one of those involved, except my friend the Army Captain (and perhaps a few others), did.

And whaddaya know. JFK emerges as the hero who saved the world from nuclear annihilation. With various commentators putting forth such thoughts as "where is JFK when we need him?" and re-telling the story of his exploits with PS-109. Oh really? Some hero.

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This column is based in part on a previous column of mine: Click Here