Red Heat: Conspiracy, Murder, and the Cold War in the Caribbean - Hardcover

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Alex von Tunzelmann is the author of Red Heat: Conspiracy, Murder, and the Cold War in the Caribbean and Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire. She was educated at Oxford and lives in London.

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The Secret War

The plot was aimed at New York: the most famous city in the richest nation on earth, and the most sought-after prize for any anti-American terrorist. Reports said it was put into motion by a cell of fanatical young men, who saw the United States, with its interventionist foreign policy, as the world's oppressor.

A series of sensational attacks had been planned to hit almost simultaneously across the northeastern United States, with vast and indiscriminate loss of life. The targets were chosen because they were symbols of American wealth or the American military. New York was going to burn, and the world was going to watch.

That morning, New York was saved. The date was 17 November 1962. The fanatical young men were Cubans. They had planned to bomb Macy's, Gimbel's, and Bloomingdale's department stores during the Christmas rush and, simultaneously, to hit military installations and oil refineries. It was announced to the press that agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation picked them up just in time, mostly from a costume jewelry business, and also broke up what it claimed was a "sabotage school" run by Cubans who had been linked to their country's representation at the United Nations. From Washington, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy issued a statement praising the FBI. From Havana, Prime Minister Fidel Castro claimed that the arrests were "without foundation."1

History has few perfect parallels. On 11 September 2001, when a different group of anti-American fanatics did pull off an even more dramatic act of terror in New York City, there were plenty of differences between their fundamentalist Islamic ideas and those of the Cuban communists forty years before. But 17 November, coming just a fortnight after the Soviets had agreed to remove missiles from Cuba, had some similar themes. The United States' attempts to promote its own brand of freedom, democracy, and free market capitalism had offended third-world ideologies. They rallied around an icon of anti-Americanism—in 2001, Osama bin Laden; in 1962, Fidel Castro. Both men were the sons of privileged families. Both became revolutionaries. Both drew their strength from their oppositional position to what is sometimes (and not only by its critics) called the American empire, though others prefer the term American hegemony: the political ambitions, military adventures, and economic programs of the United States abroad. Both of their movements—fundamentalist Islam and communism—served the same purpose in a crude but effective type of American domestic politics. They could be portrayed simply and powerfully as an ultimate evil bent on the destruction of the United States. Against them, the nation could be rallied.

On that basis, both attacks would attract the attention of conspiracy theorists, some of whom asked whether the impression made on the general public was so beneficial to the American government's aims that it might have staged the attack itself. In the case of 17 November, the shocking thing is that the conspiracy theorists may well have been right. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had suggested in March 1962 that they could stage a terrorist campaign in Miami and Washington, and blame it on the Cuban government. There is no question that they were prepared to kill civilians in the process. Ideas put on paper included sinking boats full of real refugees fleeing from Cuba to Florida, and attempting to assassinate Cuban exiles. "Exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots, the arrest of Cuban agents and the release of prepared documents substantiating Cuban involvement also would be helpful," the chairman of the Joint Chiefs wrote.2 Repeatedly, Robert Kennedy himself suggested staging terrorist attacks on American military and diplomatic bases in Cuba and the Dominican Republic, and claiming that they were the work of Fidel Castro, to justify an all-out invasion of the sovereign state of Cuba.3 As these plots have come to light, it has looked increasingly like the official story of the supposedly "Cuban" attempted bombing of New York cannot be taken at face value. The question that must be asked about 1962 is not whether it is feasible that the government of the United States might have resorted to such techniques—evidently, it might—but what could have been going on among the palm trees on a couple of islands in the Caribbean to provoke a superpower to such extreme action.

In October 1962, John F. Kennedy and Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev would take their nations to the brink of a nuclear holocaust, a war of unimaginable destruction. The crisis was provoked by a band of bearded guerrillas, mostly in their twenties and early thirties. Two and a half years earlier, these guerrillas had improbably assumed control of a modestly sized island, previously notable in the American consciousness for cocktails, casinos, and pretty girls. They had allowed the Soviet Union to place nuclear warheads within striking distance of Washington, D.C. Never in its history had the United States been so threatened. Never had the world come closer to nuclear war.

For thirteen days, the possibility that the world might end veered terrifyingly close. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II had shown all too clearly what nuclear war looked like. A blinding flash of white light. Then the slow, ominous billowing of a mushroom cloud. For miles around, buildings, trees, all structures flattened into rubble. Close to the center of the blast, nothing remains but the shadows of human forms, their entire living bodies incinerated in a second by a flash of intense heat. Tens of thousands die instantly. Farther away, victims are blinded, scorched, and have the skin ripped off their flesh. In the weeks that follow, those who were close to the blast develop radiation sickness. They cannot eat. They bleed internally. Their hair falls out in clumps. Tens of thousands more die. In the years afterward, survivors experience high rates of leukemia and cancers of the organs. The total killed by the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is estimated at between 150,000 and 400,000.

These two bombs—the Little Boy at Hiroshima, and the Fat Man at Nagasaki—were considered to have been relatively inefficient. By 1962, the Soviet nuclear arsenal in Cuba alone was thousands of times more powerful than the Little Boy or the Fat Man. The American nuclear weapons ranged against the Soviet Union in Europe and on the mainland of the United States were more powerful still. If even a small number of these instruments of death was used, it is no exaggeration to estimate that millions would die, millions more would suffer, and the world would never be the same again.

In Cuba, parents rubbed olive oil into their children's skin, believing it would repel napalm. In Texas and Virginia, gun stores sold out of rifles—bought not to fight invading Soviets, but to defend rural properties against potential refugees from bombed cities. In London, Trafalgar Square filled up with demonstrators shouting "Hands off Cuba!" Police manhandled them into vans. In Chile and Bolivia, there were riots. In Venezuela, saboteurs blew up an American oil pipeline. In Prague, demonstrators smashed the windows of the American embassy. Shops across the Soviet bloc ran out of salt and cooking fat, as people panic-bought supplies for a nuclear winter. Housewives at the American military base at Guantv°namo Bay, in Cuba, were told to tie their pets up in the yard, leave their house keys on the dining room table, and stand outside with their children, awaiting the buses that would evacuate them. "For some strange reason I felt compelled to defrost the refrigerator," remembered one, "although I made a mess of the job by allowing the drain to run over and spilled the water all over the floor. I poured a little over a quart of milk...