19621776 Club
A Soviet freighter slips toward Cuba, cargo hidden under secrecy
The Poltava sails as part of a Soviet operation already four months underway to arm Cuba with nuclear missiles.
By the fall of 1962, Nikita Khrushchev had already committed to a secret gamble: placing nuclear missiles ninety miles from Florida. On September 15, the Soviet ship Poltava set out across the Atlantic bound for Cuba, one more voyage in a covert supply chain that had been running since May under the codename Operation Anadyr. American officials had no confirmation the missiles were already in transit. A month later, U-2 photographs proved Senator Kenneth Keating's August warnings correct, and the world learned how close the missiles already were…
