On the back of Nuclear Folly I was recommended to go and also read the Max Hasting's account of the Cuban Missile Crisis in his "Abyss", to hear as it were a slightly more westernised version of events, although still with his keen critical, investigative journalistic integrity (see below, a longer listen but it was well worth it):
Again he took no prisoners and was at pains to be far reaching in research as well as being balanced. Another epic listen broken up over several weeks. Why the thought of Russian nuclear missiles 90 miles from the US shore created the stir it did in the US was a main theme, whereas Europeans were well accustomed to it. This was the basic error of Khrushchev's thinking that lead to him to make such a mad adventurous gamble was explained. The tangled escalation of events, twisted tortuously in an insane manner that no fictional book would think worthy of a plausible plot-line. The cast of war-minded American Generals who felt goaded into action and belittled by not invading Cuba. The minor comical character that took world stage that became the latter villain of the piece to my mind was Castro. Just when a safe passage was in sight, navigated by others he tried to vaingloriously grab the tiller and cast teh ship onto the rocks. After listening to it, I am not sure how we made it here, As Kennedy himself stated, he thought there had been a one in three chance of nuclear war.
A lighter read needed next!
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MAX HASTINGS - ABYSS: THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS 1962 - Reading today's press, it looks like fact, fiction and history are all meeting to end the world as we know it! In 1983 the USSR reckoned that NATO’s Able Archer exercise was a smokescreen and that NATO was planning to deliver a genuine nuclear first strike. So we have to ask, was the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis "the most perilous event in history"? When compared with NATO's Able Archer Exercise in 1983, we doubt the Cuban Missile crisis was “the most perilous event in history” but such a comparison may be splitting hairs as both events came perilously close to starting a nuclear war and today with Putin on edge matters might be even worse.
As to be expected though, Max Hastings certainly did his chosen non-fiction topic justice in his book about the Abyss we all faced in 1962. Mind you the subject matter would be riveting had you not read about it beforehand. The extent to which John F Kennedy took his NATO partners into his confidence during the Cuban crisis remains debatable. In 1962, the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, colloquially known as SuperMac, was supposedly JFK’s chief confidant and adviser throughout the crisis. What were the consequences of that?
For starters it meant that anything JFK (via the CIA) and/or SuperMac shared with MI6 about how best to manage the crisis may have been shared with Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro via Kim Philby (or others unknown in his circle) who was then still of importance to the USSR albeit no longer in MI6. In addition, Dr Richard Alan Fairclough (ex MI1 and a leading British scientist) was a close confidant of SuperMac. Since then Richard Fairclough (aka Roger Burlington) featured in The Burlington Files series of fact based spy novels which were centred on the life and times of his son Bill Fairclough (aka Edward Burlington, MI6 codename JJ).
The absence of some of the forgoing information in any book of note about the Cuban missile crisis might raise questions as to its completeness. On the other hand, one could ask were the Fairclough family involved in the seventies in the Haitian equivalent to the Cuban Bay of Pigs? Who knows but just because someone claims they know the truth is never the whole story! Before it's too late we had all best read Beyond Enkription, the only novel published to date in The Burlington Files series, to find out what has been disclosed to date on all these issues. As for today's concerns, hopefully in 50 years from now we can read about today's Kim Philby and Oleg Penkovsky. In the meantime, if you think you know all there is to know about these things, have a look at a brief but intriguing news article dated 31 October 2022 about Pemberton’s People in MI6 in TheBurlingtonFiles website.
My nerves were just about settling after reading Abyss then reading the above has sent me hand lunging towards the drinks cabinet!
Hope you enjoy a refreshing cup of tea!
It was a near tea experience, but the alcohol was closer ;)
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