October 2009

The Secret of San Cristobal

     
      Forty-seven years ago, on October 22, President John F. Kennedy revealed that the Soviet Union was secretly installing strategic nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba. More than 40 were to be emplaced, capable of obliterating nearly every major American city. The two superpowers confronted each other at the brink of nuclear holocaust.

      Much has been written about the thirteen days of the missile crisis, and the heroes who helped avert Armageddon. Certainly Kennedy was one. He skillfully forced Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to capitulate by devising a patient strategy of carrots and sticks. Several members of the president’s team of advisers have also been heralded. John McCone, the intrepid CIA director, notably among them.

      There were Russian heroes. Khrushchev, except for the fact that he had belligerently provoked the crisis in the first place, might be thought of that way; he recognized that retreat, and the disgrace that accompanied it, were preferable to war. His disarmingly personal correspondence with Kennedy during and after the crisis reflected a man deeply troubled by what he had wrought.

      Another Russian, Oleg Penkovsky was indisputably one of the heroes of those frightening days. A colonel in military intelligence, he was “the spy who saved the world” according to the authors of a book by that title. Penkovsky’s contribution was in fact monumental. He provided American and British intelligence with blueprints and detailed information about Soviet missile systems.

      So, when CIA analysts studied U-2 photography taken on October 14, 1962, they knew almost immediately, and with certainty, that the vague tracings of a large excavation near San Cristobal in Pinar del Rio province in western Cuba had all the earmarks of a missile base under construction.

      Yet for many years students of the crisis wondered why it was that the U-2, soaring for just a few minutes over a thin slice of Cuban territory, was directed to that exact location.

      Elie Abel, a New York Times reporter who wrote the first substantial book about the missile crisis endeavored to unlock the mystery. In an oral history recorded for the Kennedy Library in Boston, he recalled that:

      McCone would not answer. The secret he was protecting would be kept for many more years, and the full details would not be disclosed by the CIA until 1992. It turned out the epochal U-2 flight had nothing to do with Penkovsky or elaborate technical intelligence collection systems.

      Rather, the secret of San Cristobal was broken by three Cuban heroes, arguably the most indispensable of all the heralded figures of those thirteen days. The Cubans remain anonymous. Their identities have not been revealed by the CIA, and they never come forward to claim the fame and respect they earned.

      One was a covert CIA agent, a resident of Havana, identified only as “Julio” in a book by the CIA’s chief officer in Miami at the time. Julio communicated by secret writing, and in September, 1962 told of “a large zone in Pinar del Rio . . . heavily guarded by Soviets.” He identified four towns that formed the corners of a trapezoid. Little San Cristobal was one of them.

      Soon, two Cuban refugees with corroborating information arrived in Miami and were interviewed at the Opa Locka debriefing center manned by bilingual intelligence officers. One described a Soviet military convoy he had seen before departing Cuba. It included a 65 to 70 foot long trailer, “the longest I have ever seen.” He believed it was carrying “large missiles.”

      The third anonymous Cuban hero had observed a similar tableau before emigrating. Traveling from his home in Havana to Pinar del Rio, he also saw a large Soviet military convoy. There were “flatbed trailers, seven of which were carrying what looked like huge tubes.”

      With such specific information, from three independent sources, the CIA scheduled the U-2 specifically to photograph the San Cristobal area as the suspected location of a strategic Soviet missile installation. The rest is history.

      Sadly, however, the identities of the three Cubans --arguably among the most important heroes of the missile crisis-- remain, even today, locked away in CIA archives.