Operation Anadyr almost ended in nuclear war

On September 8-9, 1962, as part of the secret operation Anadyr, the first Soviet ballistic missiles were delivered to Cuba.

“The beginning of the concentration of the missile division in Cuba is September 8, 1962. On this day, the ship “Omsk” arrived at the port of Kasilda with the personnel and equipment of the regiment of Colonel Sidorov I.S. This flight delivered the first 6 R-12 missiles to Cuba (medium-range missiles with a range of more than 2 thousand km – S.I.). However, the field position area for this regiment has not yet been approved. After unloading the vessel, it was necessary to remove the equipment and cargo from the pier, but since there was still nowhere to march, it was necessary to choose an area near the port for the concentration of the arrived units of the 514th missile regiment. But this choice turned out to be unsuccessful. After the sea tide, the personnel and equipment were cut off from the road leading to the port. As a result of this, during the day, the engineering platoon made a columned path through the thickets, ”-

reported in the monograph of the candidate of historical sciences Sergey Karpov “Operation” Anadyr “”. (Moscow, edition of the Higher Academy of the Strategic Missile Forces, 2009).

Thus began a grandiose operation in its scale, the result of which was the Caribbean Crisis, which almost ended in a nuclear conflict between the two superpowers. And the Americans, indeed, had something to worry about. In some 200 km from their coast, it was planned to place 40 medium-range missiles with nuclear warheads of 1 megaton: 24 R-12 missiles with a range of more than 2 thousand km, 16 R-14 missiles with a range of more than 4 thousand km. The total strength of the group of Soviet troops was to be about 46 thousand people. To ensure the redeployment of such a powerful group of troops across the ocean, it was planned to use at least 80 large-capacity ships of the Ministry of the Navy.

As described in the book by Sergei Karpov, the decision to prepare for the creation of a group of Soviet troops on the island of Cuba was made on May 20, 1962 at an expanded meeting of the Defense Council (this meeting was attended by the entire Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee, the secretaries of the CPSU Central Committee and the leadership of the USSR Ministry of Defense) :

“In view of the strict secrecy of the issue under consideration, no protocol was kept. The only person who took notes during the meeting and given orders to the Minister of Defense Marshal of the Soviet Union Malinovsky R.Ya. was the head of the Main Operational Directorate of the General Staff and, at the same time, Secretary of the Defense Council, Colonel General Ivanov S.P. It was these notes that formed the basis for the preparation of proposals by the Ministry of Defense for the Chairman of the Defense Council Khrushchev N.S. regarding the creation of a Group of Soviet Forces in Cuba.

Even the choice of its name indicates the atmosphere of special secrecy in which the operation was being prepared: as Sergey Karpov writes, it was named after one of the northern rivers, as if letting the enemy know that the exercises, under the guise of which a grandiose redeployment of troops was carried out, would be carried out somewhere in the north.

More specifically, the issue of the nature and extent of military assistance to Cuba was discussed at a meeting of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the CPSU on May 24, 1962, during which “the Anadyr event was approved in its entirety and unanimously.” The next day, at the next meeting, which Khrushchev gathered, it was decided to entrust negotiating with Fidel Castro to a candidate member of the Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee, First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan Sharaf Rashidov.

“The group of Rashidov Sh.R. arrived in Cuba on May 29 and, contrary to all expectations, the Cuban leadership agreed to the proposal of the USSR almost immediately, ”says Sergei Karpov in a monograph.

On July 10, 1962, an advanced reconnaissance group of Soviet military specialists went to Cuba under the guise of agricultural specialists. In July-August 1962, in the Soviet ports of the Baltic, Black and Barents Seas (Kronstadt, Liepaja, Baltiysk, Sevastopol, Feodosia, Nikolaev, Poti and Murmansk), weapons, military equipment and personnel were loaded on sea transports in a high secrecy regime. The fact that the ships were heading to 11 Cuban ports, their captains learned from secret instructions only after the passage of Gibraltar. In total, 41 ship trips were carried out using 31 ships to relocate parts of the Strategic Missile Forces by sea. The diesel-electric ships Indigirka and Aleksandrovsk were used to deliver nuclear warheads to Cuba.

“Due to the exceptional importance of the cargo, N.S. personally reported on the dispatch of the Indigirka and Aleksandrovsk. Khrushchev. The first ship to sail was the Indigirka on September 16, 1962, with 90 nuclear weapons on board. On October 7, the Alexandrovsk took a course to the coast of Cuba, on which 68 nuclear warheads were loaded, ”we read in Sergey Karpov’s monograph.

On October 21, the dry cargo ship Khirurg Vishnevsky with units of the 564th missile regiment was the last to depart from the Nikolaev port on October 21 as part of the Anadyr operation.

As described in the book by V.V. Shevchenko “Unrecognized. Caribbean Crisis in Memoirs and Documents (Rostov-on-Don, ed. Altair, 2017), an American reconnaissance aircraft photographed ballistic missile launch sites being equipped on October 14, 1962. After that, the situation began to worsen every day. The crisis threatened to escalate into a global nuclear missile catastrophe. In this extremely tense situation between the leaders of the USSR and the USA – Nikita Khrushchev and John F. Kennedy – intensive negotiations began. As a result, the US President gave a guarantee not to invade Cuba if the USSR removed offensive weapons from there. The Soviet side, agreeing with this, also insisted on the elimination of the American missile base in Turkey. Thus, an armed clash was averted.

Sergei Ishkov.

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