The disparity in number of warheads between the Soviet Union and the West was also being discussed when deploying missiles to Cuba took root in Khrushchev's mind as a way to compensate for these disadvantages.

[2] The initial deployment plan for Operation Anadyr was drafted by General Anatoly Gribkov and two of his assistants sometime after a meeting of the Soviet Defense Council on May 21, 1962, at which Khrushchev's basic idea was discussed and approved.

[2] Troops were transferred by 86 blockade runners, which conducted 180 voyages from ports at Baltiysk, Liepāja, Sevastopol, Feodosiya, Nikolayev, Poti, Murmansk, and Kronstadt.

Oleg Penkovsky, a double agent in the Soviets' GRU intelligence service primarily working for Britain's MI6, provided details of the missile placements to the United States.

The parameters of Anadyr demanded that both medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles be deployed to Cuba and operable before their existence was discovered by the United States, and the Soviet General Staff and political leadership turned to radical measures to achieve this.

Thus, both American analysts and rank-and-file Soviet soldiers, prone to starting rumors and leaking information, would most likely have expected the operation to be a military exercise in the northern vastness of the USSR.

[7] In the early planning stages of Operation Anadyr, only five senior officers on the General Staff were privy to the details of the deployment or its actual location.

They alone prepared every feature of the enterprise, enough work to keep scores of staff busy for weeks, but so stringent was the demand for secrecy that no one else was allowed into this small coterie.

During the wait, Soviet soldiers kept busy by constructing false superstructures with plywood to hide the ships' defenses, and even on-deck field kitchens.

[9] Instructions to the troops and ship crews were carried by special couriers to prevent Western intelligence services from intercepting electronic communications regarding the operation.

[11] The Soviet ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin, was a primary instrument in transmitting diplomatic assurances that only defensive weaponry was being supplied to Cuba.

Throughout the duration of Operation Anadyr, Bolshakov assured the Kennedy brothers that Moscow had no aspirations of turning Cuba into a forward strike base.

Bolshakov lost their trust only when the president was shown photographs, taken by a Lockheed U-2 surveillance aircraft, of Soviet ballistic missiles on Cuban soil.

On September 11, the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union claimed that the USSR was supplying exclusively defensive weaponry to Cuba to deter American aggression, and that it had no need to place offensive weapons outside of its own soil.

The KGB waged a deception campaign in support of Anadyr that involved feeding partially or even wholly correct information to the Cuban émigré community in Miami, Florida.

American imagery analysis of the Soviet vessels sailing for Cuba had proven fruitless; no indication that the ships carried anything other than non-military equipment was visible.

On October 23, six Vought F-8 Crusader reconnaissance aircraft gathered clearer images from a lower altitude that provided definitive proof of the deployment of Soviet nuclear weapons.

[21] (Some of the destroyer crews harassed the Soviet submarines by dropping hand grenades overboard, making it clear that depth charges could follow at any time.

Anatoly Petrovich Andreyev's diary entries describe constant dehydration and sweating in temperatures ranging from 37 °C to 57 °C, and infected rashes—due to lack of water for hygiene—were reported in 100% of personnel.

Operation Kama ended ignominiously, with three submarines forced to surface within visual range of American ships and the fourth unable to do anything beyond avoid capture.