*
Early Friday morning George went to the White House Situation Room.
President Kennedy had created this suite in the West Wing basement where previously there had been a bowling alley. Its ostensible purpose was to speed communications in a crisis. The truth was that Kennedy believed the military had kept information from him during the Bay of Pigs crisis, and he wanted to make sure they never got another chance to do that.
This morning, the walls were covered with large-scale maps of Cuba and its sea approaches. The teletype machines chattered like cicadas on a warm night. Pentagon telegrams were copied here. The President could listen in to military communications. The quarantine operation was being run from a room in the Pentagon known as Navy Flag Plot, but radio conversations between that room and the ships could be overheard here.
The military hated the Situation Room.
George sat on an uncomfortable modern chair at a cheap dining table and listened. He was still mulling over last night’s conversation with Greg. Had Greg expected George to throw his arms around him and cry: ‘Daddy!’? Probably not. Greg seemed comfortable with his avuncular role. George had no wish to change that. At the age of twenty-six, he could not suddenly start treating Greg like a regular father. All the same, George was kind of happy about what Greg had said. My father loves me, he thought; that can’t be bad.
The USS Joseph P. Kennedy hailed the Marucla at dawn.
The Kennedy was a 2,400-ton destroyer armed with eight missiles, an anti-submarine rocket launcher, six torpedo tubes, and twin five-inch gun mounts. It also had nuclear depth-charge capability.
The Marucla immediately cut its engines, and George breathed more easily.
The Kennedy lowered a boat and six men crossed to the Marucla. The sea was rough, but the crew of the Marucla obligingly threw a rope ladder over the side. All the same, the chop made it difficult to board. The officer in charge did not want to look ridiculous by falling into the water, but eventually he took a chance, leaped for the ladder, and boarded the ship. His men followed.
The Greek crew offered them coffee.
They were delighted to open the hatches for the Americans to inspect their cargo, which was pretty much what they had said. There was a tense moment when the Americans insisted on opening a crate labelled ‘Scientific Instruments’, but it turned out to contain laboratory equipment no more sophisticated than what might be found in a high school.
The Americans left and the Marucla resumed course for Havana.
George reported the good news to Bobby Kennedy by phone then hopped into a cab.
He told the driver to take him to the corner of Fifth and K Streets, in one of the city’s worst slum neighbourhoods. Here, above a car showroom, was the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center. George wanted to understand this art and had asked for a special briefing and, since he worked for Bobby, he got it. He picked his way across a sidewalk littered with beer bottles, entered the building, and passed through a security turnstile; then he was escorted to the fourth floor.
He was shown around by a grey-haired photo interpreter called Claud Henry who had learned his trade in the Second World War, analysing aerial photographs of bomb damage from Germany.
Claud told George: ‘Yesterday the navy sent Crusader jets over Cuba, so we now have low-level photographs, much easier to read.’
George did not find it so easy. To him the photos pinned up around Claud’s room still looked like abstract art, meaningless shapes arranged in a random pattern. ‘This is a Soviet military base,’ Claud said, pointing at a photo.
‘How do you know?’
‘Here’s a soccer pitch. Cuban soldiers don’t play soccer. If it was a Cuban camp it would have a baseball diamond.’
George nodded. Clever, he thought.
‘Here’s a row of T-54 tanks.’
They just looked like dark squares to George.
‘These tents are missile shelters,’ Claud said. ‘According to our tentologists.’
‘Tentologists?’
‘Yes. I’m actually a cratologist. I wrote the CIA handbook on crates.’
George smiled. ‘You’re not kidding, are you?’
‘When the Soviets are shipping very large items such as fighter aircraft, they have to be carried on deck. They disguise them by putting them in crates. But we can usually work out the dimensions of the crate. And a MiG-15 comes in a different-size crate to a MiG-21.’
‘Tell me something,’ said George. ‘Do the Soviets have this kind of expertise?’
‘We don’t think so. Consider this. They shot down a U-2 plane, so they know we have high-altitude planes with cameras. Yet they thought they could send missiles to Cuba without us finding out. They were still denying the existence of the missiles until yesterday, when we showed them the photos. So, they know about the spy planes and they know about the cameras, but until now they didn’t know we could see their missiles from the stratosphere. That leads me to think they’re behind us in photo interpretation.’
‘That sounds right.’
‘But here’s last night’s big revelation.’ Claud pointed to an object with fins in one of the photos. ‘My boss will be briefing the President about this within the hour. It’s thirty-five feet long. We call it a Frog, for Free Rocket Over Ground. It’s a short-range missile, intended for battlefield situations.’
‘So this will be used against American troops if we invade Cuba.’
‘Yes. And it’s designed to carry a nuclear warhead.’
‘Oh, shit,’ said George.
‘That’s probably what President Kennedy is going to say,’ said Claud.