MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: HIDING THE SOVIET DEPLOYMENT

Thirty-second Chapter in a Series Chronicling the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962

An “Awesome Logistical Challenge”

Soviet General Anatoli Gribkov recalls—dryly—the "awesome logistical challenge"  the General Staff’s planners had been told to pull off:

…"assemble and outfit nearly 51,000 soldiers, airmen and sailors; calculate the weapons, equipment, supplies and support such a contingent would need for a prolonged stay; find 85 freight ships to transport men and gear; put them to sea and ensure them the right reception and working conditions on their arrival in Cuba. Meanwhile, conceal the entire operation and complete it in five months." (Emphasis added)

Maskirovka at Work

Operation ANADYR was Russian maskirovka (denial and deception) at its most elaborate. Only a police state could have pulled it off. Here’s how it worked.

The Name “ANADYR”

“Anadyr” is a port in extreme northeastern Siberia. No place in the world could be less like sub-tropical Cuba—which, for the Soviet mind, made it the perfect cover for ANADYR. So were all those fur hats, skis, parkas, and winter boots to be loaded aboard ships bound for the Caribbean.

Nothing in Writing

The original ANADYR document was a hand-written memorandum—one copy only.

That extraordinary caution continued throughout ANADYR’s staging phase. Because typists might talk, and because American intelligence agencies routinely analyzed Soviet radio traffic, hand-written orders were hand-carried to the military units assigned to ANADYR.

The Embarkation Ports

Fifty years ago this month, the Soviet Union began to assemble the freighters that would carry ANADYR personnel and equipment to Cuba.

Because some units assigned to ANADYR were stationed near Leningrad and some in the Ukraine, ships would sail from three ports on the Baltic and from four southern ports on the Black Sea. The eighth ANADYR embarkation port was Murmansk in the Soviet Arctic.

Dispersing the deployment among northern and southern ports would cut down travel time for deploying units and help conceal ANADYR’s huge size.

Hiding the Movement of Men and Matériel

The Soviet military took extraordinary precautions to conceal ANADYR units traveling to their embarkation ports:

• Military units traveled only at night.
• Some port cities already closed to Westerners severely restricted their inhabitants’ movements.
• In the port areas, troops were confined incommunicado and under guard.
• Messages between Moscow and embarkation ports were carried by couriers, rather than telephoned or radioed.
• The captains’ orders, in sealed envelopes, were to be opened only at sea in the presence of political officers. Once memorized, the orders were to be destroyed.
• Even troop indoctrination information about Cuba was jumbled up with information about other nations to keep clerical personnel from guessing where Soviet troops were going.

When the freighters were loaded,

• Non-military trucks, vans, and small vehicles were carried uncovered on ships’ decks to lead Western observers to conclude that the ships’ holds held only industrial or agricultural equipment.
• Military equipment carried on deck was camouflaged to make it look like deck housings. Even field kitchens were camouflaged.

These extreme deceptions would be tested in late July when ANADYR ships began to disgorge their contents in Cuban ports.

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Sources and Notes

A principal source for this chapter is James H. Hansen’s excellent “Soviet Deception in the Cuban Missile Crisis: Learning from the Past.” Central Intelligence Agency: Studies in Intelligence. Vol. 4 No. 1 (posted April 2007; last update June 2008). According to a footnote to this article, Hansen served in both the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). His footnotes cite some of the same works I use in this series:

• Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble.” Khrushchev, Castro and Kennedy, 1958-1964. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997
• Dino Brugioni’s Eyeball to Eyeball: The Inside Story of The Cuban Missile Crisis (Robert F. McCort, ed.). New York: Random House, 1991
• James G. Blight, Bruce J. Allyn, and David A. Welch, Cuba on the Brink: Castro, the Missile Crisis, and the Soviet Collapse. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2002.
• Raymond L. Garthoff, Reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis (revised edition). Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1989
• Generals Anatoli I. Gribkov and William Y. Smith, Operation ANADYR: U.S. and Soviet Generals Recount the Cuban Missile Crisis. Chicago: edition q, inc., 1994. Gribkov’s description of the “awesome logistical challenge” ANADYR represented appears on p. 23; his identification of the eight ANADYR embarkation ports appears on p. 29.

The three Baltic ports were Kronstadt, near St. Petersburg; Leipaya, in Latvia; and Baltiysk, in the Russian oblast of Kaliningrad wedged between Lithuania and Poland.

Murmansk, the fourth northern port, lies at about 70° N, just south of the Barents Sea, the pathway from Arctic Russia to the Atlantic.

The four Black Sea ports were Sevastopol and Feodosiya, both in the Crimea; Poti, on the South Georgian coast; and a place Gribkov spells “Nikolayev.”

The Ninth Edition of the National Geographic Atlas of the World lists eight places beginning “Nikolayev,” none of them on the Black Sea. The Atlas does show a major Ukrainian city named “Mykolayiv” situated a short distance up the Inhul River, which feeds into the Black Sea northeast of Odesa (current spelling). “Mykolayiv” may be the modern Ukrainian spelling of Gribkov’s “Nikolayev.”