Foreign Relations: A Fishing Tale

If U.S. words could scare Nikita Khrushchev out of Cuba, his technicians would be homebound from Havana right now. After four hours of debate, in which U.S. Representatives unleashed all their anger at the Soviet buildup in the Caribbean, the House passed the Senate-approved resolution reaffirming the right of the U.S. to use force—if needed—in the spirit of the Monroe Doctrine. Secretary of State Dean Rusk talked, mainly about Cuba, to some 40 foreign ministers from all over the world as they gathered at the United Nations in New York. Rusk also laid the groundwork for an informal meeting this week in which he could zero in on just the Latin American foreign ministers. There was vague talk of stepped-up surveillance of Communist military activity in the Caribbean and tougher economic sanctions against Cuba, in each case through collective hemisphere action.

Not Bothered. If any of this bothered either Khrushchev or Fidel Castro, they rather handsomely managed to conceal their dismay. Castro announced that the Soviet Union had agreed to help build “a fishing port” in Cuba to “facilitate the operations of the Soviet fishing fleet in the area of the Atlantic.” With a bland air, Castro explained that he was “surprised to learn the extraordinary number of fishing boats that the Soviet Union has on all the seas.” The Soviet newspaper Izvestia echoed the line of innocence: “The implementing of this agreement will not only allow Soviet fishermen to increase their catch of herring in the Atlantic, but first of all will also help Cuba to create her own fishing fleet and cadres of trained fishermen.”

It was all one whale of a fish tale. The North American Air Defense Command had long tracked the Soviet trawler fleet operating near U.S. coastal waters. There are some 3,000 of these ships afloat, and many do much more than fish. Heavily laden with electronic snooping gear, their real function is military surveillance. They patrol off missile-launching Vandenberg Air Force Base in the West, off Cape Canaveral in the East, along strategic points in the Atlantic and Pacific missile ranges. They have even cut underseas communications cables.

Snoop Ships & Subs. The new “fishing port” will be, in fact, a Soviet naval base. It will supply and repair the Soviet snoop ships, eliminate the need for their long trips home. The equipment required to maintain this fleet can be used just as well to service submarines and torpedo boats. Said New York’s Republican Senator Kenneth Keating: “If we fall for this new bait, we will be the biggest suckers of them all.”

For the U.S., the week brought only one encouraging note—and that was pretty far out. Both West Germany and Turkey—NATO partners of the U.S.—announced that they would comply with U.S. requests to stop shipping Communist cargoes to Cuba. Late tabulations showed that ships flying the flags of nations supposedly friendly to the U.S. have been twice as active in such traffic as Soviet-bloc vessels. In the past three months, ships owned by firms headquartered in Great Britain have made 61 trips to Cuba. West German vessels 20, Norwegian 18, Greek 17, Swedish 8. Last week there were 55 ships en route to Cuban ports, only seven of them flying Soviet flags. The British, the Norwegians, the Greeks and the Swedes remained deaf to U.S. pleas.