Now I Know (12 page)

The Navy, for its part, began to worry. With the public eye now focused on Ballard’s expedition, the Navy feared that his initial reason for being at sea would come to light. But apparently, no one thought to ask. Ballard’s secret mission did not become public until after the fall of the Soviet Union.

In 1961, the United States undertook a series of unsuccessful campaigns in Cuba, attempting to overthrow Fidel Castro and his regime. These campaigns—including the Bay of Pigs invasion—ultimately failed. The Soviet Union, Cuba’s staunch ally at the time, reacted by working with Castro to build a secret nuclear weapons site on the island. Cuba is a stone’s throw away from the continental United States, and had the weapons base been completed, any nuclear missiles there would have been able to hit American soil.

On October 12, 1962, a U.S. recon plane captured images of the base being built, sending the White House (and the American people) into panic. The United States imposed a military quarantine on Cuba, denying the Soviets the ability to bring in any weapons, and insisted that the base be dismantled. The Soviets publicly balked, and anyone alive at the time (and old enough to remember) needs no refresher: The world was on the brink of nuclear war. Roughly two weeks later, on October 28, 1962, the two nations came to an agreement, staving off what could have been a tragic result.

However, if it weren’t for a Soviet naval officer named Vasili Arkhipov, there is a good chance none of us would be here today. The day before the Americans and Soviets found a middle ground, Arkhipov was aboard a submarine patrolling the waters near Cuba. American naval forces surrounded the submarine and began dropping depth charges—a tactic the U.S. Navy used to get submarines to surface, not one intended to destroy the (assumed to be) enemy submarine.

Unfortunately, the submarine’s captain either forgot about this tactic or was unaware of it, and—underwater, unable to contract Moscow—believed war had broken out. Soviet protocol at the time allowed for the use of nuclear torpedoes if the three highest-ranking sailors on the ship believed it proper. The captain and a third officer concluded it was. Arkhipov, the second in command, objected—and, thankfully, prevailed. The ship surfaced without starting World War III.

More than twenty years later, nuclear war was barely averted once again. By the early 1980s, the Soviets had developed an early warning system that aimed to detect an incoming nuclear missile attack. The system allowed the Soviets to, if need be, respond with a retaliatory missile attack. Without such a system, the incoming missiles would likely destroy or disable the Soviet arsenal before it could be deployed. The protocol was simple: If the monitoring station discovered missiles headed for the Soviet Union, the leadership there was to notify its superiors. The powers that be would then decide whether the U.S.S.R. should launch its own strike, and, given the tensions at the time, it is likely they would have.

On September 26, 1983, the monitoring station detected an incoming missile. Then, it detected four more. Stanislav Petrov, the lieutenant colonel and ranking officer on site, did something incredible: He unilaterally decided that the monitoring equipment had erred, and he declined to report the “attack” to the Kremlin. Petrov based this belief on a few key factors. First, the equipment was very new and believed to be a bit buggy (although not to this degree); and second, Petrov believed that a U.S. strike would involve hundreds of warheads, not five.

Petrov turned out to be correct. The satellites were not functioning properly and the “missiles” were phantoms. Ground-based systems, a few minutes after the satellites erred, saw nothing, corroborating Petrov’s belief. But Petrov did not view himself a hero. Later in life, he said that he was just doing his job and, in fact (quite literally), he did nothing at all.

In April 1961, roughly 1,500 American-trained Cuban exiles invaded their homeland in an attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro’s government. That assault, now referred to as the Bay of Pigs invasion, ended in failure. The Cuban militia overwhelmed the attackers, capturing 80 percent of them and killing most of the other 20 percent. The political fallout in the United States was massive, and the desire of Americans to further engage Cuba in battle was understandably low. Further, other nations questioned America’s attack on a neighboring sovereign, especially one that had shown little in the way of aggression toward the United States and was already the subject of American economic sanctions.

But the Cold War was in full force. The United States saw Cuba as a surrogate for the Soviet Union and having a Soviet stronghold just ninety miles off Florida troubled the leadership of the American military. The Department of Defense (DOD) and the military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) felt the need to revive civilian interest in overthrowing Castro and liberating Cuba. Absent a Cuban strike on Americans, though, this seemed unlikely, and no such Cuban strike appeared imminent.

So the DOD and JCS proposed to create such an attack themselves. A fake one, aimed at turning public opinion against Castro and in favor of continued military action against Cuba.

The plan, devised in 1962 and code named Operation Northwoods, had a simple yet striking goal: “to place the United States in the apparent position of suffering defensible grievances from a rash and irresponsible government of Cuba and to develop an international image of a Cuban threat to peace in the Western Hemisphere.” The details, outlined in an appendix to an originally classified document titled “Pretexts to Justify U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba,” included:

• Using friendly Cubans, pretending to be enemy fighters, to stage a fake (as in, there’d be no actual firearms discharge) attack on the U.S. base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, complete with mock funerals after. This plan may have included blowing up grounded planes and/or igniting ammunition stores on base to suggest sabotage—and of course, the fake saboteurs would be “captured.”
  
• Blowing up a U.S. ship (again, unoccupied) somewhere near or within Cuban waters, and blaming the assault on Cuba’s air force or naval batteries.
  
• Creating a group of fake Cuban terrorist cells, targeting Cuban refugees in the United States. The plan allowed for some bodily harm to come to the targets—“to the extent of wounding”—and also called for “sink[ing] a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated).”
  
• Painting U.S. fighter jets to look like Soviet MIGs and then harassing civilian flights with these planes—potentially looping in the commercial pilots to help convince passengers of the ruse.
  
• Potentially shooting down an aircraft traveling from the United States to Central America, purportedly transporting college students (but actually empty), as it passed over Cuban air space.
  

In almost all cases, the plan was designed to avoid killing American civilians, although the same could not be said for “boatload[s] of Cubans” destined for Miami. Regardless, the total death toll from Operation Northwoods was zero. Then-President John F. Kennedy rejected the idea and removed its lead proponent, General Lyman Lemnitzer, from his position as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The United States and Canada, by and large, have been peaceful neighbors—especially since Canada became a
de facto
independent nation under the British North America Act in 1867. But although the two nations are friendly and, typically, allies, things can change. And in 1927, the United States planned for just a scenario.

At the time, Canada was still mostly under British control, and even though the United States and the United Kingdom were friendly—they fought on the same side in the Great War—things could change quickly. The United States was concerned that the UK’s imperial desires, albeit unlikely, could extend back to the United States and America was not going to be caught unprepared. The U.S. Army, therefore, developed “War Plan Red,” a comprehensive strategy to foil any British expansion into its former colony.

War Plan Red assumed that in the case of war, Britain had two significant advantages. First, the British navy was a formidable force, able to control the seaways and therefore the U.S. export economy. Second, the UK controlled Canada and could use it as a staging ground for an invasion of the United States. The American plan was to strike Canada first.

Specifically, U.S. forces would invade Nova Scotia, hoping to take Halifax, which (American strategists assumed) would be the focal point for the British navy in North America. If this failed, the U.S. would try to take New Brunswick, isolating Nova Scotia from the mainland. After securing that region, American forces would target Quebec City, further separating east from west; Ontario, taking control of much of Canada’s manufacturing (at the time); Winnipeg, a railway transit hub; and Vancouver, as a way of controlling the Pacific ports. War Plan Red only laid plans for military action in the Western Hemisphere—America never intended to attack the British Isles. Rather, the plan was to hold Canada hostage, so to speak, in hopes that Britain would agree to a peace treaty to free its largest New World territory. Although the plan never came into play, it probably would have worked. The UK never had a plan to attack the United States, and was willing to let the U.S. overtake Canada if push came to shove—so long as the United States did not blockade the British Isles.

In 1974, the United States declassified War Plan Red, which created a temporary ripple in U.S./Canadian relations—but it quickly passed.

The United States and Britain have been adversaries at war, officially, twice: the American Revolution and the War of 1812. In more modern times, the two nations have been allies. But for a few months in 1859, the two sides were again hostile, meeting each other in the field of battle, with over 400 American soldiers (and roughly a dozen cannons) facing off against more than 2,000 British troops—and five British warships.

The good news: the total casualty count from the war was one—one pig, that is.

After the War of 1812, most of the Pacific Northwest was jointly occupied by both the United States and the United Kingdom. Over time, the two nations came to an agreement—the Oregon Treaty—that divided the territory at the 49th Parallel, forming the modern border between the state of Washington (U.S.) and the province of British Columbia (Canada). An exception was made for Vancouver Island, which was placed entirely under British control even though it dipped below the 49th Parallel. The Oregon Treaty specifically drew the line of demarcation separating the two at “the middle of the channel which separates the continent from Vancouver Island.”

The problem?

The San Juan Islands.

The San Juan Islands form an archipelago, now part of the state of Washington. They sit in the middle of that unnamed “channel” and create three separate “middle” channels. For a dozen years after signing the Oregon Treaty, neither side particularly liked the other’s interpretation of which channel was the true divider. The United States preferred the Haro Strait, a channel running west of the archipelago, whereas the UK preferred the Rosario Strait, the channel running to the archipelago’s east. This question of ownership caused practical problems. The British Hudson Bay Company set up a sheep ranch on San Juan Island (the largest island in the archipelago of the same name), located between the Haro and Rosario Straits; a few dozen Americans settled there as well.