From: jeffreydanielrubard@gmail.com   
      
   The Cuban missile crisis on Saturday, October 27, 1962, reached its moment of   
   maximum peril, but John F. Kennedy was determined not to miss his regular   
   swim. The president usually swam twice a day, just before lunch and just   
   before dinner, often with his    
   longtime aide Dave Powers. Kennedy’s doctors had prescribed swimming for his   
   back, but it was also a way of relaxing. Originally built for Franklin   
   Roosevelt, the indoor pool in the West Wing basement had recently been   
   refurbished with a mural of a    
   sailing scene in the Virgin Islands—a gift from the president’s father.   
      
   Returning from his midday swim, Kennedy passed by the Oval Office before   
   heading up to the residence for lunch. The phone rang at 1:45 P.M. It was   
   Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and the news he reported could hardly   
   have been worse: an American U-   
   2 spy plane had gone missing off Alaska and may have strayed into Soviet   
   territory. This was more than just an unfortunate incident: the intrusion into   
   Soviet airspace by an American military plane at the height of a nuclear   
   showdown between the two    
   superpowers was a dangerously provocative act.   
      
   October 27 was the day that would come to be known around the White House as   
   â€œBlack Saturday.â€� Five days had gone by since Kennedy’s televised   
   address to the nation revealing the presence of Soviet nuclear missiles in   
   Cuba, and events were spinning    
   out of control. Earlier that day the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, had   
   upped the ante in the diplomatic negotiations by demanding the withdrawal of   
   American missiles from Turkey. An American U-2 spy plane had been shot down   
   over eastern Cuba. The    
   island had been sealed off by an American blockade, and U.S. warships were   
   challenging nucleararmed Soviet submarines in the Caribbean.   
      
   A few minutes after McNamara’s call Roger Hilsman, the chief of intelligence   
   at the State Department, came running up the stairs from the basement office   
   of McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy’s national-security adviser. Hilsman had just   
   learned that the    
   Soviets had scrambled MiG fighters to intercept the missing U-2, and that the   
   U.S. Strategic Air Command (SAC) was scrambling American fighters in response.   
   After two days without sleep, Hilsman was exhausted, but he fully understood   
   the significance of    
   what was happening. The Soviets might well perceive the U-2 incursion as a   
   harbinger of an American nuclear attack.   
      
   Hilsman expected a furious outburst from the president, or at least some sign   
   of the panic he himself was beginning to feel. Instead, Kennedy responded with   
   a short, bitter laugh.   
      
   â€œThere’s always some son of a bitch who doesn’t get the word.â€�   
      
   J.F.K.’s calm exterior belied a deep frustration. His experiences in World   
   War II, as the skipper of a PT. boat in the South Pacific, had taught him an   
   abiding lesson about modem warfare: a commander in chief, however well   
   informed, however powerful,    
   cannot possibly exercise complete control over the battlefront. Mistakes were   
   an inevitable consequence of warfare, but in previous wars they had been   
   easier to rectify. The paradox of the nuclear age was that American power was   
   greater than ever before†  
   ”but it could all be jeopardized by a single, fatal miscalculation.   
      
   AS THE U-2 CROSSED INTO SOVIET AIRSPACE, AT LEAST SIX INTERCEPTOR JETS TOOK   
   OFF FROM SOVIET AIRFIELDS. THEIR MISSION WAS TO SHOOT THE INTRUDER DOWN.   
   The historian turned Kennedy aide Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. would later   
   describe Black Saturday as “the most dangerous moment in human history.â€�   
   The Strategic Air Command had increased its readiness level to DEFCON 2—one   
   step short of nuclear war—   
   and nearly 3,000 American nuclear warheads were targeted on the Soviet Union.   
   Fidel Castro had gone to the Soviet Embassy in Havana to urge Khrushchev to   
   consider using nuclear weapons to “liquidateâ€� the imperialist enemy once   
   and for all.    
   Unbeknownst to Kennedy, the Soviets had dispatched nuclear warheads to two   
   missile sites in Cuba, ready to destroy American cities. And at dawn on   
   Saturday morning, also unknown to Washington and reported here for the first   
   time, Soviet troops had moved    
   nuclear-tipped cruise missiles to a “firing positionâ€� 15 miles from the   
   U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay.   
      
   While it has long been known that an American U-2 blundered over the Soviet   
   Union at the height of the crisis, the full story of this mission has never   
   been told before. The U.S. government’s investigation into the incident   
   remains secret. The story is    
   reconstructed here from a handful of newly uncovered official documents, from   
   interviews with U-2 pilots and SAC command staff, and from the unpublished   
   journals of the 36-year-old air-force captain who could have inadvertently   
   triggered a nuclear war.   
      
   Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska   
      
   Saturday, October 27, 1962; 4 A.M. E.D.T.   
      
   (12 AM. Alaska)   
      
   Charles W. Maultsby fervently wished he were somewhere else. He could have   
   been racking up combat experience over Cuba like many of his fellow U-2   
   pilots. Or the brass might have sent him somewhere warm, like Australia or   
   Hawaii, where the 4080th    
   Strategic Wing also had operating locations. Instead, he was spending the   
   winter in Alaska, where it was bitterly cold and you rarely saw the sun.   
      
   He had tried to get some rest before his long flight to the North Pole, but   
   had managed only a couple of hours’ fitful sleep. Pilots had been entering   
   and leaving the officers’ quarters all evening in their heavy snow boots,   
   laughing and slamming    
   doors. The more he tried to sleep, the more awake he felt. In the end, he gave   
   up and went down to the operations building, where there was a vacant cot. He   
   set his alarm for eight P.M. on Friday night Alaska time, four hours before   
   takeoff.   
      
   The mission was to collect radioactive samples from the Soviet nuclear tests   
   at Novaya Zemlya. Compared with flying a U-2 over hostile territory and taking   
   photographs of missile sites, the assignment lacked glamour. The participants   
   in Project Star Dust    
   did not usually fly anywhere near the Soviet Union. Instead, they flew to some   
   fixed point, such as the North Pole, to inspect the clouds that had drifted   
   there from the nuclear-testing site, more than a thousand miles away. They   
   collected the samples on    
   special filter paper. Often there was nothing, but sometimes, when the Soviets   
   had conducted a big test, the Geiger counters clicked away furiously.   
      
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)