Cold War author brings secrets of averting nuclear war to Naples

The Friends of Collier County Public Library are going to save themselves a lot of coffee money on Michael Tougias' talk Monday morning. Tougias' chilling tales of four U.S. brushes with nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis will provide all the caffeine needed.

And more. That this planet is not a fried dough ball is a miracle by Tougias' reckoning.

The author became intimately familiar with little-known details of Cold War brinksmanship for his upcoming book, "Above and Beyond: John F. Kennedy and America's Most Dangerous Cold War Spy Mission" (Public Affairs/Hachette Book Group; $28.99 hardcover; $18.99 Kindle).

The audience for the opening Friends' nonfiction lecture series will get a window into his research. It includes interviews with players who were involved in the events, official archives and mountains of tape-recorded meetings . 

The tapes are what put John F. Kennedy in its title. Kennedy had every minute of the White House meetings during the Cuban missile crisis secretly recorded. There are some 400 transcribed pages mapping the lines that gave authority for an attack on Cuba. In the  end, Tougias said, Kennedy pulled back from his generals' pressure to respond to Soviet Union attacks of American U-2 planes. 

"It scared the hell out of me," he said of his findings with Casey Sherman, his co-author. What frightened Tougias most was that, in the end, many of the split-second decisions were being made by people on the front lines, not in Washington or Moscow.

"I never knew that Major Rudy Anderson was blown out of the sky by surface-to-air missiles fired by the Soviets without (Nikita) Khrushchev's blessing," he said. Soviet generals on the ground had decided to bring down the spy plane Anderson was flying.

Further, the U.S. military had a precedent for knowing they might. A spy pilot who had flown over the island just days before, now retired Brig. Gen. Jerry McIlmoyle, had been shot at. The incident was kept secret, even from President Kennedy, according to McIlmoyle. 

McIlmoyle recorded a video of his recollections for Tougias. He had been told by a three-star general, McIlmoyle recalled, that what he'd reported hadn't happened — and that his intelligence report was being destroyed. Still, McIlmoyle warned Anderson, who was scheduled to fly over Cuba later. Anderson chose to fly.

More: Watch Jerry McIlmoyle's recollection of his U-2 flight over Cuba

"He’s kind of this American hero nobody knows about. He put his life in mortal danger.," Tougias said. 

Crazily, the tensions were being raised to hair-trigger at the same time all the way across the U.S. continent, Tougias added.

"The very moment he was being shot and killed, another U-2  spy plane of ours that is taking radioactive samples basically over the North Pole gets blinded by aurora borealis — the northern lights. He loses his way, because in these U-2 spy planes, they’re operating partially by celestial navigation. He flies into Soviet airspace.

"So the Russians think this might be the beginning of World War III. They send up four Russian MiGs to shoot him down," he said. The pilot's mayday call summoned U.S. fighter planes.

"And what really blew my mind is that on our fighters, because we are preparing for nuclear war, they had taken off the air-to-air missiles they use in combat.

"In their place they put in air-to-air nuclear missiles. So now our guys are going up to fight the (Soviet fighter jet) MiGs with nuclear weapons. That’s all they have. And they have the authority to use their nuclear weapons when they see fit."

The hows and whys that kept the United States on this side of nuclear war are in "Above and Beyond," much of which was actually written in Naples, Tougias said. The author, whose book, "The Finest Hours," became a film, has written 10 historical books, and fittingly, two of them center around the Gulf of Mexico.

His father owned a home in Naples, and for 25 years Tougias vacationed here, eventually coming to live before his  father's death. The younger Tougias spent much of his time here writing.

The other book largely written here is "So Close to Home" (Pegasus; 222 pages, $16.32 hard cover, $14.16) which describes the ordeal of a family who survived the only German military incursion into American waters during World War II, Tougias who is a motivational speaker as well as an author, had the good luck of talking to a group in which a member knew the sole survivor of a family who floated in the Gulf for hours after their ship, the commercial transport Heredia, was sunk. 

Tougias will talk about the the book, for which he miraculously stumbled across the U-boat captain's diary. It had been held by the British Nation Archives after the attacking u-boat was sunk by a destroyer from that country.

"It was like winning the lottery. Having his diary, we changed the story a little bit so the chapters switched between what's happening to the family and what's  happening aboard the uboat," he said.

"The commander was only 29 years old, and reading the diaries, you came to understand him and respect his position." 

There were heroes on both sides he said. One was Ina Downs, matriarch of the Downs family, who eventually recorded her memory of the terrifying ordeal.

The other was Erich Wurdemann, captain of the u-boat, who ordered his men to stop holding him up in the water and save themselves. Tougias learned that from records of the surivors' debriefing by the British navy.

Finding their depositions and the diaries were extreme good luck, he said.

But that potential is what moved Tougias from writing history from centuries past to modern stories. Tougias was providing text for a book on "Ten Hours Till Dawn," the story of survivors at sea during a 1978 blizzard, when he came across the audio tapes of the boats in distress. 

When he learned some tapes might exist of a ship captain's radio transmissions, "I got up the courage to call his son. What he said just blew me away.

He told me, 'I’ve been waiting my whole my life for a writer to call. I’ve got 10 hours of audiotape of what my father said aboard the ship."

It was a cathartic push, the Massachusetts native said. I said 'Oh, my God, I don’t have to be like Sebastian Junger and speculate about what happened. Because they’re telling me right on the radio tapes.'"

"That changed my whole career."

If you go

Who: Michael Tougias, author of 10 history books, including "The Finest Hours," "Rescue of the Bounty," "So Close to Home" and the upcoming "Above and Beyond," opening lecture of the Friend of the Collier County Library nonfiction series

When: 9 a.m. Monday breakfast, 9:30 a.m. lecture and book signing

Where: The Country Club of Naples, 185 Burning Tree Drive, Naples, FL 34109
Breakfast at 9 am; Lecture at 9:30 am; Book signing after lecture

Tickets: $45

To buy: 239-262-8135 marlenekern mkern@collierfriends.org

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