There aren’t enough palm trees, the Soviet general thought to himself. It was July 1962, and Igor Statsenko, the 43-year-old Ukrainian-born commander of the Red Army’s missile division, found himself inside a helicopter, flying over central and western Cuba. Below him lay a rugged landscape, with few roads and little forest. Seven weeks earlier, his superior—Sergei Biryuzov, the commander of the Soviet Strategic Missile Forces—had traveled to Cuba disguised as an agricultural expert. Biryuzov had met with the country’s prime minister, Fidel Castro, and shared with him an extraordinary proposal from the Soviet Union’s leader, Nikita Khrushchev, to station ballistic nuclear missiles on Cuban soil. Biryuzov, an artilleryman by training who knew little about missiles, returned to the Soviet Union to tell Khrushchev that the missiles could be safely hidden under the foliage of the island’s plentiful palm trees.
But when Statsenko, a no-nonsense professional, surveyed the Cuban sites from the air, he realized the idea was hogwash. He and the other Soviet military officers on the reconnaissance team immediately raised the problem with their superiors. In the areas where the missile bases were supposed to go, they pointed out, the palm trees stood 40 to 50 feet apart and covered only one-sixteenth of the ground. There would be no way to hide the weapons from the superpower 90 miles to the north.
