What was the deal that ended the Cuban Missile Crisis?

Sunday, nine in the morning

The end came over the radio. At nine on the morning of Sunday, October 28, 1962, Washington time, Radio Moscow read a letter from Nikita Khrushchev to John F. Kennedy. The Soviet government, it said, had ordered the weapons “which you describe as offensive” dismantled, crated and shipped back to the Soviet Union. Moscow used the radio because a coded cable would have taken hours, and the Kremlin feared an American attack within a day or two.

Kennedy answered the same day in a short written statement. He welcomed “Chairman Khrushchev’s statesmanlike decision to stop building bases in Cuba” and turned at once to the next job: making sure the missiles really left.

The public half

What the world saw was simple. Moscow would remove its missiles under observation; Washington would lift the quarantine and promise not to invade Cuba. Kennedy had offered exactly that in his letter of October 27, which pledged, once United Nations arrangements were in place, “to give assurances against an invasion of Cuba.”

In November, Soviet freighters sailed home with the missiles lashed on deck, and their crews pulled back the canvas so that low-flying American planes could count them. Moscow also agreed to take away its IL-28 jet bombers. On November 20, Kennedy announced that he had ordered the quarantine lifted. Pressure on Castro’s government would go on, he told reporters, but it was “very different from any intent to launch a military invasion of the island.”

One man was left out. Fidel Castro had not been consulted, learned the news from the wire services and, furious, refused to let UN inspectors onto the island. Without them, the no-invasion pledge was never written into a formal agreement.

The secret half

The other half was settled on the evening of October 27, when Robert Kennedy met the Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin, at the Justice Department; the meeting itself is told in what happened on Black Saturday. The fifteen American Jupiter missiles in Turkey, which Khrushchev’s second letter had demanded, would go within four or five months, on one condition: Moscow must never say so in public.

The paper trail shows how carefully that was hidden. Three days later, Robert Kennedy wrote up the meeting for Secretary of State Dean Rusk. His memorandum says he told Dobrynin there could be no quid pro quo. A typed sentence at the end of that paragraph was crossed out:

If some time elapsed, and per your instructions, I mentioned four or five months, I said I was sure that these matters could be resolved satisfactory.

By April 1963 the Jupiters had quietly left Turkey, and the thirty in southern Italy went too; American Polaris submarines in the Mediterranean took over their targets. Both governments denied any trade, and the secret came out only in the 1980s, as the men who had kept it began to talk.

Who won?

In public, Kennedy looked like the winner and Khrushchev like the loser. Kennedy told his aides not to gloat. Some of his commanders saw it the other way: the Air Force chief, General Curtis LeMay, grumbled by one account, “We lost.” In Moscow, Khrushchev’s colleagues removed him in October 1964 and counted the Cuban gamble among his failures. Seen from the Kremlin, the result was not all loss: Cuba kept its revolution and was never invaded, and the Jupiters were gone.

Kennedy did not live to see Khrushchev fall. He was assassinated in Dallas in November 1963, a few months after the two governments had opened a direct line between their capitals and agreed to ban nuclear tests in the air, the first steps of the age of mutually assured destruction.