Throughout the summer and early autumn of 1962, the Soviet Union covertly shipped medium-range ballistic missiles, warheads, and tens of thousands of troops to Cuba under the code name Operation Anadyr. The buildup, still undetected by American intelligence in early October, would trigger the Cuban Missile Crisis within weeks, the closest the Cold War came to direct nuclear conflict between the superpowers.
Nikita Khrushchev authorized the secret deployment partly to protect Fidel Castro's revolution after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, and partly to offset the strategic imbalance created by American Jupiter missiles already stationed in Turkey, within easy reach of Moscow. Soviet ships disguised military cargo as agricultural equipment, and soldiers sweated through the Caribbean heat in civilian clothes to maintain the fiction of a routine aid mission.
By early October, thousands of Soviet personnel and dozens of missile components had already reached the island, though American U-2 spy planes would not photograph the launch sites under construction until October 14. The thirteen days of crisis that followed brought the world to the edge of nuclear war, with U.S. warships blockading Cuba and Kennedy's advisors debating airstrikes that could have triggered Soviet retaliation.
The crisis resolved on October 28 when Khrushchev agreed to withdraw the missiles in exchange for a secret U.S. pledge not to invade Cuba and to remove missiles from Turkey. The quiet, unnoticed shipments arriving in early October were the opening moves of a confrontation that permanently changed how the superpowers managed nuclear brinkmanship, leading directly to the creation of the Moscow-Washington hotline.
Key people: Nikita Khrushchev, Fidel Castro, John F. Kennedy