Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story Of American Submarine Espionage

Eleven — The Crown Jewels

The feeling had to have been one of disbelief. Rich Haver looked at the report on Seawolf's latest patrol, then at his other intelligence reports. There was just no other way to line up the facts.

It had been easy to blame Seatvolf and her crew for blowing one of the most important intelligence operations of the last ten years. Or so it had seemed at the time. After all, Seawol f had slammed tons of steel down on the Soviet cable. That had to have caused a break in communications or at least some static. Why else would the Soviets have sent a survey ship to Okhotsk? How else would they have found the cable tap?

In fact, the Soviets did more than find the tap. They reached down and lifted the large recording pods-both of them-out of the water. There was no hiding what they were-or for that matter, who had put them there. Inside of one was a part emblazoned with the words "Property of the United States Government."

Haver had checked and rechecked his time lines. There could he no mistake. None of this was Seawolf's fault. The Soviet survey ship had been on its way to the area before Seawolf fell on the cable. It had taken a meandering route to Okhotsk, a trek that suggested camouflage, all the way from the Baltic Sea on the Atlantic side. There was, however, almost no chance that U.S. intelligence was going to miss a ship heading toward the tap site. Both in the Barents and in Okhotsk, the U.S. maintained around-the-clock surveillance with satellites, land listening stations, in short, any means possible. That was especially easy in Okhotsk. The sea was so empty any ship that went in and loitered was hound to stand out. Now, that surveillance had paid off with one horrifying realization. The search for the taps almost had to have been deliberate. And if that were the case, Haver knew there was one glaring possibility, the worst possibility-that Seawol f hadn't shown her hand at all. The Soviets may have been tipped. There might very well he a spy.

This was not going to go down well in the Navy or the NSA. That much was clear to Haver as he listed a spy among the reasons why the tap could have been discovered in a report dated January 30, 1982, the day that just happened to be his thirty-seventh birthday. But while Haver expected distress, what he got back was outright skepticism. Top admirals decided he was seeing ghosts again, just as they had believed a few years earlier when he had raised an alert about a possible spy or communications leak in the Atlantic. Now here he was seeing spies in the Pacific.

What Haver was saying seemed unbelievable. If he was right, there was not one but two spies. One man couldn't he responsible for the problems in both oceans. Anyone with operational knowledge of Atlantic submarine trailings in the late I 970s was almost guaranteed to be out of the loop when it came to the Pacific tapping operations. Besides, the cable taps were about the best-kept secret in all of cold war intelligence. No, top admirals concluded, Haver was seeing shadows in coincidences. The Soviets, they figured, had probably just found the Okhotsk tap on a maintenance run to the cable.

Only a few in the Navy saw Haver's report, and they gave his warnings little thought. This was a time when the United States was facing a more immediate and tangible threat. The Soviets seemed to be engineering another big change in their missile-sub strategy, one more dangerous than their move back to the bastions in the Barents in the late 1970s. They were now holding some of their missile subs even closer to their coasts, in "deep bastions" such as the White Sea and the once nearly desolate Okhotsk, and they were hiding others under a nearly impenetrable shroud, the Arctic ice.

Haver and other bright young analysts still felt sure that the Soviets were chiefly trying to protect their missile subs from attack in the early stages of a war, and the early returns from the cable-tapping in the Barents seemed to back up this idea. But if they wanted to, the Soviets also could use the Arctic cover to launch a first strike, and the United States would have less warning than ever before. A missile shot from a Delta in a Soviet bastion in the Barents could take less than thirty minutes to travel the 3,500 nautical miles to Washington, D.C. But a missile traveling from even the northern reaches of the Arctic's Baffin Bay, which sits just above Canada, could cut that time to less than twenty minutes.[18]

Indeed, the Soviets' shift to the Arctic was a brilliant move. After all, it had never been lost on either side that the shortest distance between the United States and the Soviet Union was over the top of the world. Both nations had already aimed their huge arsenals of landbased missiles across the North Pole. But although both had been exploring the Arctic with submarines for decades, neither the United States nor the Soviet Union had been able to develop the technology to fight in the exotic Arctic environment effectively.

The Arctic is also the one area of the world where the prey has the distinct advantage over the hunter, where it would be hugely difficult for U.S. forces to root out the Soviet missile subs and destroy them. For one thing, there are thousands of miles of shallow ice-filled seas where the Soviets could scatter their subs. Even the most massive boats could disappear in these shallows, drift silently along with the ice, and allow the currents to decide direction. And by taking the shallow route through the Kara Sea, the Laptev Sea, and the Beaufort Sea around to the North American side, a Soviet sub could end up among the icebergs of Baffin Bay above Canada, the fjords along the west coast of Greenland, or even the channels that reach clear down to the Hudson Bay inside of Canada.

A submarine hiding motionless would be almost silent, while any attack submarine seeking it out would become the loudest and best target around. U.S. scientists had tried for years, with only limited success, to devise sonar that could compensate for conditions in these marginal ice areas where temperature and salinity layers, the din of near-constant storms, ice crunching upon ice, and the barks of seals and walruses combined to make tracking other subs nearly impossible.

No wonder an alert ran through the Navy, over to the Pentagon, and into the Oval Office when Soviet missile subs began slipping into the Arctic. At stake was nothing less than the ultimate nuclear advantage. And now the U.S. government needed to know: Was this simply another defensive move, a Soviet counterfeint in the game of deterrence? Or were the Soviets positioning for a possible first strike? Were Soviet leaders as insane and evil as President Ronald Reagan and his supporters were proclaiming? Or were the Soviets just afraid that Reagan was as hostile as his rhetoric?

Adding to these fears was the fact that the Soviet Union was building a new and powerful generation of missile subs: the Typhoons. The first was already in sea trials, and satellites had caught sight of at least three more of the subs under construction at Shipyard 402 in Severodvinsk. They were nuclear monsters, squat and bulbous and by far the largest undersea craft constructed by any nation-half again as large as the Trident missile subs, which the United States had put to sea in late 1981. While both classes of submarines stretched almost as long as two football fields, the Typhoon was twice as wide as the Trident.

The Soviets also were building four large underwater "tunnels" at a new submarine base at Gremikha near the tip of the Kola Peninsula, about 150 miles from Murmansk. Blasted out of the adjacent hillside, the granite tunnels were large enough to accommodate the Typhoons and seemed designed to give them protection from nuclear attack.

That the Typhoons would be ice-ready seemed obvious. They were protected by two pressure hulls within a third outer hull, and they had flat, retractable how diving planes, a shielded propeller shaft, and a reinforced steel sail. Hiding in the Arctic, it would be easy enough for a Typhoon to push its massive bulk through ice cover several feet thick for an attack on the United States. A Typhoon could carry twenty SS-N-20 nuclear missiles, each 50 feet long and able to hold ten warheads programmed to hit different targets as far as 4,500 nautical miles away. This was a boat built to survive, a boat built to ensure that, in the event of nuclear war, key U.S. military centers and cities would not.

The United States needed more than ever to divine the Soviets' intentions, to get right inside their minds. And that meant the cabletapping operation had to continue, even though the Okhotsk tap had been discovered. Seawolf was too old and too broken to ever send back to the Soviet coast. Future missions would be left up to Parche.

Meanwhile, it would be up to the rest of the sub force to keep learning about the technical capabilities of the Deltas and the Typhoons, to try to carry the crucial game of trailing to the Arctic, and to do something that had eluded the U.S. Navy for forty yearsdevelop a true Arctic capability. And so admirals turned again to one civilian scientist who had long insisted on studying those icy waters when few others in the Navy showed much interest: Waldo K. Lyon, the director of the Navy's Arctic Submarine Laboratory in San Diego.

The Navy learned early on that Lyon's impish physical stature was hugely misleading. Partially by sheer will, partially with his ability to enlist the support of at least one top admiral or CNO every year, Lyon had kept his lab alive and working to unearth the secrets of the Arctic ice since the end of World War II, when he had first become convinced that the Soviets would ultimately learn a lesson from the Nazi captains who had taken their U-boats under the ice's edge to target Allied supply ships. He had kept the lab running despite skepticism so fierce that the CNO handbook back in 1950 included the line: "It's fantasy to think about using the Arctic Ocean."

Still, Lyon had won enough backing to inspire the sub force to send at least one sub to the Arctic almost every year since Nautilus traveled beneath the North Pole in the late 1950s. Lyon had been up that way more than twenty times himself, and he or someone from his lab rode along on every one of those trips, helping to map routes tinder the ice and to experiment with different types of sonar.

But it was only now, at sixty-seven years old, that he was being called out of relative obscurity by a bunch of admirals who were suddenly terribly interested in the Arctic. Somebody suggested sending some of the older U.S. missile boats to hide under the ice, a seemingly perfect tit-fortat. Rickover, on the verge of being forced to retire by Secretary of the Navy Lehman, came up with his own proposal to build an experimental Arctic sub, one with a hardened hull and little more than a hump for a sail. He had tried his usual tactics to push the project through, bypassing the Navy and the Pentagon and sending Lyon and the proposal straight to the House Armed Services Committee. But all that ever came out of this effort was a letter to Lehman written by House staffers who were stunned that nearly a quarter-century of Arctic submarine expeditions hadn't left the United States ready to fight beneath the ice. Rickover had to let the fight die when Lehman finally forced him to retire at age eighty-two in January 1982.[19]

Later, one admiral confided to Lyon that the Navy would never build an experimental Arctic sub, because doing so would show the Soviets that the U.S. Navy was unable to fight under the ice. Besides, a plan to develop an Arctic sub would compete with another proposal now before Congress: the Navy wanted funds to build a new class of super-subs, one they were claiming could do just about anything. Some in the Navy were calling the boat "Fat Albert." It was, in fact, the highly controversial Seawolf class of attack submarines, the SSN-21 s, which were to follow the Los Angeles-class boats that were replacing the Sturgeon class.

Looking on, Naval Intelligence also liked the idea of a new class of submarines. Intelligence officers figured that any new technology would give the Soviets another problem to solve, another distraction. Besides, the intelligence officers believed that by announcing plans to build new and better submarines, the United States would send the message that the Soviets would never have the edge, no matter what they did.

All of this talk about new ice operations and new submarines helped distract attention from plans to send Parche hack out to the Barents. This trip worried planners more than the return to Okhotsk had. The Barents cable carried the most sensitive information, and even if the Soviets had found the tap in Okhotsk by accident, reason might have led them to at least keep tighter watch on the Barents, especially if they suspected another tap but had been unable to find one. The round-the-clock surveillance of the tap site hadn't shown anything unusual, but it was hard to know for sure. Okhotsk was desolate; any activity was going to be pretty obvious. The waters of the Barents, on the other hand, were so active, that a Soviet search for a second cable tap could have been camouflaged by the usual traffic.

There was also the possibility, though most Naval Intelligence officers thought it a long shot, that Haver was right, that there was a spy. If that was the case, the Soviets might he keeping careful track of Parche herself. They might even know that Parche had invaded the Barents through the Arctic.

But what if Parche were sent by a different route, a very different route, one that could confuse any efforts at surveillance? The word was put out to the crew: Parche was leaving earlier than usual, in April instead of late summer, and she was going to go south, on an "endurance mission," south past the Equator, away from the Arctic, away from the Soviet Union. She would travel along the U.S. Pacific coast, past Central America, and down along South America to Cape Horn.

What was held back was that Parche would ultimately round the Cape and head back north through the Atlantic for the Barents. She would also have to swing wide of the Falkland Islands, where Britain and Argentina were at war. It was the most indirect route anyone could have thought of, save for a trip through Antarctica. It was a feint of masterful misdirection and it would also allow Parche to avoid the heavy ice she would have encountered, since she was leaving so early in the year. Parche would have to travel more than 15,000 nautical miles each way, a round trip that would make the mission last nearly five months. She was to go entirely underwater.

"They want to see how long we can last," the men began telling one another as they unknowingly repeated their own cover story. "We are going for a record."

As Parche was loaded for a possible 150 days at sea, so many cans of food were hoisted aboard that the men had to cover a toilet seat with a plank in order to transform one of the heads into a pantry. After that was filled to the ceiling, the upper-level operations passageway was crammed with enough food to make it completely impassable. Anyone trying to reach the wardroom had to walk through the captain's quarters, through his bathroom to the executive officer's bathroom, and out of the XO's door, emerging to take a right at the first cleared path.

Commander Peter J. Graef was at the helm for this trip. Graef, the father of six, looked out for his crew, and they knew it. If he wasn't in the conn, Graef was probably playing cribbage in the wardroom, riding an exercise bike he had stashed in the engine room, or sitting with one of his chiefs. Rank didn't matter to him, Parche did. He believed every minute he was on board that he was at the high point of his career. What was to come after, he once told one of his men, "just doesn't matter, it's all downhill."

As he led his crew out for their "Odyssey 82," some of the men were reveling in their special celebrity. Others just reveled. "Animal" was on board, so dubbed because he delighted in breaking his own record for time lapsed between showers and because he alternately entertained and tortured his mates with his "stink-off" contests. Then there was "Bumper Car," who had acquired his name because he liked to walk through the sub bouncing off walls saying, "Look at me, I'm a bumper car." There was also a quartermaster called "Big Bird." He weighed in at more than 300 pounds, and he couldn't move through any of the hatches on board without somebody shouting, "Open, shut."

As far as the crew was concerned, the best diversion of all came from one of the youngest officers, Lieutenant Timothy R. Fain. The men saw him as a "raghat" just like them. He sported a goatee and shared their disdain for officer decorum. They targeted Fain's good nature for their most daring pranks. Their favorite was "EB-Greening" him-grabbing Fain and mummifying him with the leaf-green duct tape favored by the Electric Boat company because it could withstand sea pressures. It had been developed to seal up small cracks in equipment, but on Parche it was used primarily to bind and gag Fain. On this trip, he would be left green-wrapped for Graef on the wardroom table, and he would be similarly bandaged and left in the tunnel on the way to the reactor compartment as a surprise for the engineer officer.

The XO, Timothy W. Oliver, had less patience for the crew's antics, especially after the door to his compartment somehow ended up beneath the engines, then in the "wine cellar," a space by the bilges, and on into other hiding places around the boat. "No movies tonight!" Oliver would shout, echoing-by all accounts, unaware James Cagney's portrayal of a blowhard supply-ship captain in Mr. Roberts.

Parche might have been headed toward a mission more daring than any depicted a couple of years later in The Hunt for Red October, but she was manned by a crew taking its cues from M *A *S *H.

There was just one moment when everyone on hoard was certain of their position, and that was when they crossed the Equator. In a ceremony that had been repeated on many submarines, first-timers were initiated, and humiliated, as they paid homage to "King Neptune." They were forced to eat a bilious concoction off the King's belly, quite literally the stomach of one of their more-experienced mates.

There were no such celebrations when Parche finally entered the Barents. This time, her divers were installing a new kind of tap pod. The clamps were gone. Instead, this pod was designed to break away and remain on the sea bottom if the Soviets tried to raise the line for any reason.

Other procedures also had been changed since the Soviets found the Okhotsk tap. After Parche's divers laid the pod and her spooks had listened in for about a week, the submarine pulled out for comparatively safer waters before heading back in a week later to monitor the cable again. Graef may have been giving the recorders time to accumulate extra data for short-term review. The more likely alternative is that she came back in to add a second recorder or to lay a second tap in a new spot. That's what had been done in Okhotsk. Besides, the extra recording capacity would have been needed: Parche was scheduled for an overhaul after this mission and wouldn't come back to the Barents for two years.

Parche finally came home after being at sea for 137 days. For this "endurance op" she won another PUC, maintaining her streak of one Presidential Unit Citation for every trip to the Barents. This PUC, her fourth in four years, was signed by Reagan, who also sent Graef a box of cigars. The certificate used the standard language about "extraordinary heroism," but then it went on to say that Parche had "established new standards for endurance and excellence in underwater operations." The president had immortalized the Navy's cover story.

With Parche scheduled to be in overhaul throughout 1983, there was no other submarine that could be trusted to service the Barents cable tap. Seawolf was in the shipyard, recovering from storm damage, but her days of tapping Soviet cables were clearly over. Naval Intelligence never imagined Seawolf clunking and hanging around the Barents, and the Soviets' discovery of the Okhotsk tap had ended any tapping missions in that sea. When Seawolf finally did emerge from the yards, she would mainly be used to search for pieces of test missiles and other Soviet hardware in the open ocean.[20]

It also was still just drawing up plans to convert the USS Richard B. Russell (SSN- 687) into its fourth and final special projects sub.

So Naval Intelligence was without its best source of information during what would become one of the most tense years of the cold war since detente. The Navy was trying to learn how to trail the Soviets under the ice by following them there from their ports, but as the U.S. Navy sent more and more attack subs, the number of skirmishes with the Soviets in the Arctic increased. Not only that, trailing the Soviets under the ice was proving difficult. The Navy was most successful in the deep polar regions where the waters had sound properties most like those of the open ocean. That wasn't the case in the marginal ice zones.

Still, the Navy had no choice but to keep trying. There was enough Soviet activity that Admiral James Watkins, who had succeeded Hayward as CNO, finally told the American public that the latest front in the cold war had moved far up north. And, he said, "if there are forces in that area, we'd better know how to fight them." He added, "The ice is a beautiful place to hide."

It was now more critical than ever for Naval Intelligence to spread what it was learning about Soviet tactics and strategy throughout the sub force. The captains and spooks on regular surveillance subs were filing thicker patrol reports than ever, and even much of the information from the cable taps, once tightly guarded, was being distributed to submarine officers, although first sanitized to disguise the source. Naval Intelligence was so desperate to out-think the Soviets that it was even willing to rely on a little knowledgeable guesswork. A group of submariners and analysts were gathered and told to write up what they thought would be found in a Soviet submarine operating manual. When that was done, they were sent to visit and brief attack-submarine commanders on what they might expect to face at sea.

By now, it was clear that no one else was going to champion Rickover's idea for a special class of Arctic subs. Instead, the Navy had decided to try to give ice capabilities to nearly two dozen remaining Los Angeles-class subs, still scheduled for construction. Conceived as open-ocean aircraft carrier escorts, the original LA-class subs lacked some of the sophisticated electronic-surveillance equipment and icecapable sonar that had been built into Parche and other Sturgeon boats. That had left the nation's newest subs unable to handle what had become the most crucial spying operations as easily as the boats they were replacing.

Lyon had been asked to help research what changes were needed to allow the LA boats to do better under the ice, but his funding never seemed to come through. While under-ice operations were increasingly focused on attempts to develop torpedoes and sonar that could better distinguish between ice ridges and missile subs in the deep polar regions, Lyon kept arguing that the fleet commanders were ignoring the greatest problem-that no U.S. sub had the ability to hunt or maneuver well enough to fight within the marginal ice, where he was certain the Soviets were most likely to hide. Nobody of rank, it seemed, wanted to hear it.

Just as the Soviet sea threat was growing, relations between the superpowers were disintegrating. Yuri V. Andropov, a former director of the KGB who had succeeded Leonid Brezhnev as the Soviet leader in 1982, was spinning apocalyptic visions of a U.S. first strike that even many KGB experts saw as alarmist.

Then Reagan began stirring Soviet fears. On March 8, 1983, he outpreached the preachers at the convention of the National Association of Evangelicals, held that year in Orlando, Florida. He offered a laundry list of national and international evils: abortion, teen pregnancy, clinics providing teen birth control. After an impassioned plea for school prayer, he turned his attention to the Soviet Union.

"Yes, let us pray for the salvation of all of those who live in that totalitarian darkness, pray they will discover the joy of knowing God," Reagan intoned. "But until they do, let us be aware that while they preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the Earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world."

Moments later, he concluded, "So, in your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride, the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil."

Reagan had equated the fight against communism as the fight between good and evil before. But the phrase "evil empire" became one of those sound bites that gets repeated over and over. It definitely captured the fearful attention of the Soviets. Their concern that Reagan might consider a first strike was bolstered on March 23 when, less than two weeks after his "evil empire" speech, the president went on television to introduce the world to "Star Wars"-the strategic defense initiative (SI)l).

At first, the Soviets saw this plan to orbit lasers designed to blast Soviet missiles out of the sky as impractical. But Reagan's rhetoric, as interpreted by the KGB, further convinced some Soviet officials that the president was capable of ordering a first strike.

The Soviets weren't calmed either when, shortly after the evil empire and Star Wars speeches, the U.S. Pacific Fleet began its largest maneuvers since World War II. Navy warplanes from the carriers Midway and Enterprise flew over Soviet military installations on the Kuril Islands that mark the entrance to the Sea of Okhotsk. The show of force was another step in Lehman's efforts to get the Soviets' attention.

Following that, crucial arms control talks stalled as the Soviets protested a U.S. plan to place low-flying cruise missiles and Pershing lI intermediate-range ballistic missiles in West Germany and Italy. Then, on August 3 1, the Soviets shot down a Korean Airlines passenger plane, KAL 007, which had veered over Soviet military bases near the Sea of Okhotsk. All 269 people on board were killed.

Reagan accused the Soviets of premeditated murder, of knowingly shooting down the civilian airliner. Rather than admit that they had made a lethal mistake, the Soviets claimed that the airliner was a CIA reconnaissance plane. Following the KAI, incident, Soviet students at U.S. universities were called home on the grounds that anti-Soviet sentiment put them in physical danger. By the time Lech Walesa won the Nobel Peace Prize on October 6, the KGB was convinced that the award was part of a Western-Zionist plot to destabilize Eastern Europe.

Tensions mounted further on October 26, when Reagan ordered the invasion of Grenada. The United States claimed it was rescuing American medical students. But in the process, it overthrew the infant Communist government.

As all this was going on, the KGB was actively looking for signs that NATO and the United States were considering a first strike. The search, now a top priority, had been started by Andropov when he was still heading the KGB. It was code-named "Operation RYAN" for the Russian term for nuclear missile attack, Raketno Yadernoye Napadenie. According to Oleg Gordievsky, a high-ranking KGB officer who later defected to England, the KGB, throughout 1983, was pressuring Soviet agents around the globe to feed RYAN, to report alarming information even if they were skeptical of it themselves.

In the wake of the KAL shoot-down, the KGB Pushed RYAN agents even harder. By now, Andropov had fallen gravely ill, and one of his kidneys had been removed. He had not been seen in public since mid-August. But he was still in charge, and he still believed the world could be heading toward nuclear Armageddon.[21]

With Operation RYAN running wild and nearly unchecked, Gordievsky says there was a real danger of a catastrophic mistake. That was never more true, he says, than during November NATO exercises, code-named "Able Archer." From November 2 to November 11, the NATO forces were practicing release procedures for tactical nuclear weapons, moving through all of the alert stages from readiness to general alert. Because the Soviets' own contingency plans for war called for real preparations to be shrouded under similar exercises, alarmists within the KGB came to believe that the NATO forces had been placed on an actual alert.

RYAN teams were given orders to look for signs that NATO was about to start a countdown toward nuclear war: last-minute crisis negotiations between Britain and the United States; food-industry efforts to stockpile, such as mass butchering of cattle; or evacuations of political, financial, and military leaders and their families. The Soviet alerts eased after November 11, when Able Archer came to an end.

But there was little easing of the paranoia. That December, Marshal Nikolai V. Ogarkov, chief of staff of the Soviet armed forces, made a stunning public pronouncement. He said that the Soviets believed the United States "would still like to launch a decapitating nuclear first strike."

Reagan's secretary of State, George P. Shultz, met Ogarkov's announcement with outright disbelief. Shultz was certain that this had to be just more talk. But in January 1984, the Soviets followed through on a threat made during the dispute over the Pershing 11 missiles. Offering their own show of force, they sent some Delta missile submarines back out into the Atlantic to cruise off U.S. shores along with the Yankees that were still routinely patrolling there. The aim was to show that the Deltas could hit targets throughout the United States as easily as the Pershings in Germany could target the Soviet Union. Ironically, the Soviet move actually put the Deltas just where the U.S. Navy could track them most easily. But the implied threat was nonetheless clear. Both sides were stepping up the normal catand-mouse game, trailing one another more aggressively than ever.

The Reagan administration now realized that it had to try to calm things down. The incendiary rhetoric in Washington came to an abrupt halt. Shultz began talking privately with Soviet diplomats to try to dispel the tension and renew a dialogue about arms control. Reagan took the new line public in a speech on January 16, when he said, "We are determined to deal with our differences peacefully, through negotiations." He also touched again on the vision he had evoked when he made his Star Wars proposal. "As I have said before, my dream is to see the day when nuclear weapons will be banished from the face of the earth."

After a while, the Soviets began to soften as well. Andropov died that February, and his successor, Konstantin Chernenko, signaled that he might be willing to talk about arms cuts. He attached a condition, however, that Reagan wasn't willing to go for. Chernenko wanted Reagan to drop Star Wars. The Soviets feared the technology could enable the United States to launch a first strike without fear of retaliation.

Throughout, the intelligence community was struggling to keep up with these events. The CIA launched a study to try to figure out why the Soviets seemed to have gotten so edgy, and as U.S. satellites captured the first images of Soviet missile tests in the Arctic, Naval Intelligence and the NSA began anxiously planning Parche's return to the Barents.

Parche left for the Barents shortly after yet another diplomatic scuffle, in which the Soviets boycotted the Olympic Games in Los Ange les, answering the U.S. boycott of the games in Moscow four years earlier. When she returned, it was clear that she had brought home far more than even the most optimistic intelligence officials had hoped for. The taps had been recording all through the alert sparked by Able Archer and had captured a detailed look at the Soviet Navy's nuclear strategy. This was an ear to the Soviet Navy's nuclear command-andcontrol structure as it was placing some of its missile submarines on high alert, rehearsing for war. Some former intelligence officials say this information simply confirmed the picture that had been emerging from the taps about how the Soviets planned to use their missile subs. But other former CIA, NSA, and Navy officials say that Parche's take from this mission was so critical to their understanding of the Soviets that it qualified as "the big casino," or "the crown jewels."

Based on the tap data, they say, U.S. intelligence realized that some information collected by human agents had been dead wrong. The tap recordings chronicled the dispersal of key Soviet ships and submarines and offered a new picture of the state of Soviet readiness. Just as some of the younger Navy analysts had postulated years earlier, the emphasis was going to be on protecting missile subs. In the early days of a crisis, the Soviets planned to move some of their Typhoons and Deltas into safe bastions. Those bastions would be guarded by the bulk of Soviet attack subs and warships. Attack vessels would also ride shotgun as the missile subs made a dash for the safety of the Arctic ice.

This was the strategy that had so worried the Pentagon. The Soviets had engineered a way to avoid NATO forces waiting to attack at the mouth of the GIUK gap as well as any NATO sub that tried to follow Soviet boats into the Barents. Still, Parche had carried home confirmation of one more crucial fact that eased the Pentagon's worst fears: The Soviet Union was not preparing for a first strike from the sea. As one former intelligence official says of the tap data, both from this and other missions: "It conveyed a notion that, while preemptive war was an option, the Soviet forces were not designed to go for a first strike."

The bottom line was this: the balance of power was changing. Soviet technological advances-the increased missile ranges, the hardening of submarine sails and hulls to withstand the ice-had placed the Soviet Union on the verge of achieving nuclear parity with the United States in the last major area where it had lagged behind. Now that the Soviet Union could better protect its missile subs, it had in its grasp that allimportant "strategic reserve," a nearly invulnerable second-strike force. In the Soviets' view, this would make it even less likely that the United States would ever launch a first strike against them.

President Reagan was briefed on the findings, but he left it largely to the Navy and Defense Secretary Weinberger to grapple with the strategic military implications. Lehman and Watkins had been arguing for several years that if war came, the Navy would have to go up under the ice and try to root out the Soviet missile submarines, and they now decided to make this the Navy's official strategy. Their decision was based in part on extensive war games in which U.S. officials had been asked to act as they thought Soviet commanders would. And there were assumptions made, most notably that any major crises would take months to build, giving the Navy plenty of time to flood attack subs into the Barents, pick up Soviet missile subs leaving port, and "tag" them-follow them to their patrol areas.

Heady from their successes trailing submarines in the deepest waters of the Arctic, most admirals didn't want to hear Lyon's continued warnings that it was a lot easier to play tag than hide-and-seek. He was certain that the Soviets could lose a trail easily where the U.S. subs couldn't find them, in the shallow-water marginal ice zones. The admirals were even less interested these days in his critiques of the design modifications for the new LA-class submarines. In fact, after forty years as the Navy's key Arctic expert, Lyon was inexplicably under orders to stay away from the redesign of the LA-class boats.

Navy leaders acknowledge that the sub force would have taken big losses by trying to blast into the Soviet bastions or roust their missile subs from tinder the ice. But they also say they had no doubt that they could have beaten many of the Soviet subs to their war positions. To test that theory, they sent more than two dozen attack subs surging from Atlantic ports toward the Soviet Union one Sunday. Every intelligence sensor was aimed at recording the Soviets' reaction, and not a single one picked up any sign that the scramble had been noticed. Besides that, Navy leaders were counting on the fact that U.S. crews were better trained than their Soviet counterparts and had spent far more time at sea given how much of the Soviet fleet was usually broken down and out of service. And if the Soviets were willing to confine themselves to the Arctic and their home waters, the U.S. subs would know roughly where to hunt their prey. They also would have prior knowledge of favorite Soviet patrol areas from surveillance ops and from the sonobuoys now peppering the marginal ice where SOSUS didn't reach.

The limits and the advantages of the U.S. strategy were voiced most bluntly by Watkins, who was the chief of Naval Operations from mid1982 until mid-1986. He says the Soviets' strategy of pulling back their missile subs was "probably smart" and initially did make it more difficult to destroy them. But he also believed that if the Soviets started a nuclear war with land missiles, the United States could eliminate "a very large percentage" of the missile subs that they would have positioned to make a second strike from the sea.

Still, any strategy that allowed for even a few enemy missile subs to fire at U.S. targets was a far cry from the days when most of the Soviet Yankees traveled the seas with unknown and lethal shadows that could prevent them from shooting at all. And for intelligence officials, it was a huge relief to realize that the Soviets were not readying to use their improved position to start a war.

Ironically, the 1984 run-the trip that brought home the "big casino"-was the first of Parche's five missions to the Barents that would fail to win a Presidential Unit Citation. (Instead, Parche was given a Navy Unit Commendation, the next highest award.) Parche may have supplied the United States with an amazing wealth of critical information, but her own role in the ongoing cold war drama was becoming more routine.

Actually, Naval Intelligence was now hatching a plan to access the Soviet cable in real time, without having to wait for a submarine to travel there at all. The concept had been kicking around NURO since the mid-1970s, when some officials envisioned linking the Okhotsk tap by cable to Japan. John Butts, the director of Naval Intelligence, and his team were now pushing an ambitious idea to lay 1,200 miles of cable between the Barents taps and Greenland. He envisioned barges that would look so perfectly innocuous that no one would ever dream that they were involved in stretching and laying his imagined cable. And he saw a full-time staff of linguists and cryptologists dedicated to translating and decoding the material as it came in.

The plan was grand. In fact, it was grandiose. Some of Butts's colleagues began to joke that he was trying to take over the world. They watched, wondering whether Butts and his aides would realize they were getting more than a little carried away. They waited as Butts tallied up the $1 billion cost. The intelligence committees in Congress didn't wonder or wait. They simply made it clear they were going to sink Butts's plan, barges and all.

Throughout all of this, the two superpowers continued talking about shedding, or at least shrinking, their nuclear arsenals. And when Chernenko died in March 1985, the old Soviet guard all but died with him. For its new leader, the Politburo reached into a younger generation to find fifty-four-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev. He had been convinced ever since the Able Archer panic that the Soviet Union had to get back to the negotiating table. Now, as he took up his post as general secretary, he seemed more willing than any of his recent predecessors to consider major changes in U.S.-Soviet relations.

Indeed, he made his first move late on the day of Chernenko's funeral. "The USSR has never intended to fight the United States and does not have such intentions now," Gorbachev flatly declared to Bush and Shultz. "There have never been such madmen within the Soviet leadership, and there are none now."

During these first steps toward conciliation, U.S. authorities made startling discoveries that reminded the nation that the days of spies and old-style cold warriors were not over. Rich Haver, it seems, hadn't been seeing ghosts at all.

It was early in 1985 when Bill Studeman, who was about to succeed Butts as director of Naval Intelligence, walked into Haver's office with a critical piece of paper. Haver, who was now the deputy director of Naval Intelligence, took it and read through the FBI's account of an interview with a woman named Barbara Walker, who had come to report that her husband, a former Navy chief, had been spying for the Soviets. The FBI noted that Walker had been living the good life, although his only visible means of support was a failing detective business.

Haver knew instantly that he was holding the answer that he and Studeman had sought back in the late 1970s when they tried to convince admirals to investigate a possible communications break.

John A. Walker Jr. was a retired Navy submariner and communications specialist. In 1967 he had been a watch officer in Norfolk handling communications with American submarines in the Atlantic. He had access to reports on submarine operations, technical manuals, and the daily key lists that were used to unscramble all of the messages sent through the military's most widely used coding machines. If the Soviets had gotten hold of any of this, they would have known that they needed to look over their shoulders, that their missile subs were being followed by much quieter U.S. subs. They also would have known just how quiet U.S. submarines were, and just how critical submarine-quieting technology was to the balance of ocean power.

Later, Haver and Studeman learned that Walker had given all this to the Soviets, and more. In fact, when Walker retired from the Navy in 1976, he had continued his espionage by drawing others into his scheme. First he recruited another Navy communications specialist, Jerry A. Whitworth, who continued Walker's access to the crucial key lists. In the early 1980s, Walker enlisted his brother Arthur, who worked for a defense contractor. And soon after that, Walker began using his son Michael, an enlisted man on the USS Nirnitz, a nuclearpowered aircraft carrier. Walker was caught only because his ex-wife wanted to prevent him from recruiting their daughter into a spy ring that had already swallowed their son.

The news was sobering. For all the years that the United States had been eavesdropping on the Soviets through the cable taps, the Soviets had been listening in on U.S. communications, and without the years of research, investment in technology, or risk to men's lives. In fact, Walker's ring had cost the Soviets less than $1 million over eighteen years, and for that money he had almost single-handedly destroyed the U.S. nuclear advantage.

Walker was arrested on May 20. The next day, Haver was assigned to write the damage report, largely because he had written much of it ten years earlier when he first tried to raise the alarm. But the damage was worse than even Haver had predicted. Walker also had passed crucial secrets about U.S. techniques for quieting subs, such as cushioning engine equipment to prevent vibrations from resonating through hulls. Indeed, around the time Walker was caught, U.S. sonar operators were reporting that they couldn't identify some of the newest Soviet attack subs until their own boats were right on top of the Soviets-or in some cases, were surprised by them. A few of the newest Soviet subs, the Sierras and the Akulas, were, in fact, nearly as silent as the U.S. Sturgeon class. (It later turned out that the Soviets also had been helped by Japanese and Norwegian companies, including a subsidiary of Toshiba Corporation, which had surreptitiously sold them the huge, computer-guided milling machines needed to make the propeller blades on Soviet subs much smoother and quieter.)

Studeman later testified before a federal judge, saying that Walker's ring might have had "powerful war-winning implications for the Soviet side." And when Vitaly Yurchenko, a high-ranking KGB officer, defected in July 1985, he told the CIA that the Walker-Whitworth ring was the most important espionage victory in KGB history.

Walker pleaded guilty that October and agreed to help authorities assess the damage in exchange for leniency for his son. The elder Walker received a single life sentence, with eligibility for parole after ten years. The deal was approved by Defense Secretary Weinberger, but Navy Secretary Lehman was furious. In his eyes, Walker's treachery was being treated as "just another white-collar crime."

Lehman rhapsodized that if it had been up to him, he would have applied one of the penalties for treason from back in the days following the American Revolution. The essence, as Lehman quoted it, was:

A month after Walker was sentenced, Lehman had one more body for his imagined gallows and Haver had caught his second ghost. This time it was Yurchenko who offered up the Navy's second spy.

Back in January 1980, when Yurchenko was working in the Soviet embassy in Washington, he had fielded a call from a man who would only say, "I have some information to discuss with you and to give to you."

The caller visited the embassy, but Yurchenko never learned his name or what he had to offer. Other Soviet agents had taken the case. That wasn't much to go on, but it turned out to be enough. The FBI began going through old recordings of Yurchenko's conversations that had been captured by wiretaps. Investigators found the call and played it back for some NSA employees. They recognized the voice.

Yurchenko's mystery caller turned out to be Ronald W. Pelton, a former NSA cryptologist, who was arrested on November 25, 1985. Some of the "information" he had been offering the Soviets turned out to be about the Navy's top-secret Okhotsk cable-tapping operation. Pelton had sold out the Okhotsk taps for $35,000. In an attempt to mask his own bankruptcy, he had exposed the nation's most criti cal submarine spy missions and risked the lives of the men on both Seawol f and Parche. Both subs had been sent to Okhotsk during the nearly two years that elapsed before the Soviets found the tap pods. Just why it took the Soviets so long to follow up on Pelton's tip remains unclear.

After Pelton was arrested, the Navy finally turned over Haver's old report to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the one he had written in January 1982 outlining his suspicions that a spy was responsible for the loss of the Okhotsk tap. The senators were furious. At a closed hearing, they lambasted Navy representatives for withholding the report for three years. And they were indignant that the Navy had risked 140 men's lives, sending Parche right back to the Barents despite Haver's suspicions that there was a spy.

William Cohen, a Republican from Maine, was one of the angriest lawmakers in the room. Cohen, who would become secretary of Defense under President Bill Clinton, demanded to know who had written the report.

From the back of the room, Haver stood up.

"Sir, I wrote the report." When one of the senators wanted to know how he could be so sure that this was his work, Haver cited the report's date and noted that he wasn't about to forget his own birthday.

Cohen wanted to know why the Navy failed to react to Haver's conclusion that the Soviets probably had foreknowledge of the cable tap. He wanted to know why nobody searched for a spy.

"They didn't believe it," Haver responded.

Cohen pressed on. Was it prudent, he wanted to know, to continue to operate the cable-tapping program, push it full tilt ahead, when there may have been a spy?

All Haver could do was repeat what he had said, that nobody believed he was right, that others in Naval Intelligence had failed to reach the same conclusion. Finally, in a gesture of loyalty, he tossed in that there had been some ambiguity. He did not say that he had never had any doubt, that he had known all along there was probably only one way to add up the facts.

There was one good bit of news for the Navy and the NSA in Pelton's arrest. Now that they knew who the spy was, they also knew that the Barents tap was still secure. Pelton's job and his security clearances simply hadn't stretched that far. As long as he was in the dark, so were the Soviets.

Pelton pleaded not guilty, and his trial was scheduled for May 1986. But that created another problem. Somehow the Navy and the NSA had to keep the glare of the trial off Parche, away from the Barents, and clear of yet another mission.

It wasn't hard to persuade a judge to agree to keep the proceedings devoid of any real details. But Bob Woodward and other Washington Post reporters were already digging on their own. They had a cabletapping story ready for the Post's front page.

Navy and NSA officials were frantic. Seawol f was in the Mediterranean at that moment trying to tap a cable that ran from West Africa to Europe as she sought to help out in a showdown with Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi. Seau,olf was working side by side in the Mediterranean with the NR-1 minisubmarine (though their efforts would not yield any worthwhile information). Not only that, but Parche was going to head back out to the Barents later in the year. She had to. The Soviets were being more aggressive than ever in the Atlantic. They had just sent a cluster of five Victor-class attack subs and for three weeks kept them so close to the East Coast of the United States that tracking them almost used up the Atlantic Fleet's store of sonobuoys.

An article now could be devastating. CIA Director William Casey threatened to prosecute the Post for revealing intelligence secrets. Reagan personally telephoned the Post's publisher, Katharine Graham, beseeching her not to publish, as priceless secrets were at stake.

In the end, the Post ran a limited story the day before Pelton's trial began. The article said little more than that Pelton had betrayed a high-tech and long-running submarine operation to intercept Soviet communications in Okhotsk. There was no mention of Halibut, Seawolf, or Parche. Not a word about the Barents or Libya. The trial disclosed no further details, and early in June, Pelton was convicted and given three consecutive life sentences plus ten years.

Their secret safe, Parche's crew shoved off in early September, with Commander Richard A. Buchanan at the helm. This was the sub's seventh Barents journey, the sixth trip via the Arctic route, and the second trip with Buchanan as her captain. It was a trip that would stand out from all of the rest.

Pelton's trial had left the crew nervous. By now, they would all had to have been lobotomized not to know that they were about to replicate the very sort of operation Pelton had given away to the Soviets.

The code name from Pelton's day, "Ivy Bells," was dead. Now there were a series of new codes, including "Manta" for the overall operation and "Acetone" for the tap itself, and even those codes were being changed continuously. The men knew, however, that whatever the NSA called the operation, the Soviets had been given a look at their strategies, at their plans, at how they did business.

Crew members talked about Pelton and the man they had come to call "Johnny Walker Red," often late into the night. They thought about how much classified information each man on Parche had handled. How many stacks of crypto material could easily have found their way to a photocopying machine if just one of them had the itch. They also talked about how hard the Navy had tried to keep secret from them the details of their own missions. It was galling. Secrecy, the men knew, couldn't be achieved through any terrific security measures, and it couldn't be preserved by trying to keep the guys on the boat in the dark. It could only be maintained because the men themselves found the idea of selling out to the Soviets unthinkable. And it could be lost when just one of them decided that maybe selling out wasn't so unthinkable after all.

Still, as the boat made her way toward the Barents, the men also had a sense of payback and daring. The Soviets may have had Pelton and Walker, but the United States had Parche. And by now, her crew had the drill down cold.

The trip through the Arctic went well. Parche was 20 or 30 miles from where she would retrieve the tap pods and plant new ones. She had already charted the corridor, the route she would take closer to Soviet shores. Over the years, various U.S. submarines had played chicken with the sonar buoys the Soviets had set up to pop out of the water and transmit should a sub try to pass. Before Parche arrived at the Barents, the buoys were all mapped out-the ones that worked, the ones that were duds. All she had to do was take a path through the duds, move in a little closer, and bend to the left.

Then the message came. Hold off. Wait. Don't move. Parche was by now just outside the 12-mile limit. But her path in was now sealed-by presidential order. On September 19, while Parche was still en route, Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze had deliv ered a letter to Reagan from Gorbachev. The general secretary had written that he wanted to push the arms negotiations along by meeting with Reagan. He gave two choices of locales, and the United States picked Reykjavik, Iceland, a quiet spot halfway between Washington and Moscow.

The meeting was set for October 11, 1986, a follow-up to the previous year's summit. At that meeting, there had been one sticking point, and that was Star Wars-Gorbachev wanted SDI eliminated. Reagan passionately insisted that SDI was the only way out of the precarious balance built on mutually assured destruction. He believed his lasers in space could forever erase the concept that peace depended on the threat that the United States and the Soviet Union could wipe each other out.

During that last meeting, discussion had often deteriorated into a shouting match, but in the heat of battle, Reagan and Gorbachev came to like and respect one another. In the end, they also came out with a joint statement saying they wanted to work toward a 50 percent reduction in strategic weapons and other arms cuts.

This second act being staged in Reykjavik promised to he the most unpredictable and remarkable superpower meeting ever. Both sides had agreed that rather than scripting everything in advance, they would just clear space for the two leaders to talk. No wonder there were such high hopes for this summit. No wonder Gorbachev unwittingly halted Parche in her tracks with his letter.

On board, the sense of history about to happen was lost on the men. They were certain they would be sent in to finish their task. For them, the summit just meant an uncomfortable and possibly dangerous wait.

"Let's get in, let's get out," one of the men began grumbling over and over to anyone who would listen. After a while, they were all saying it, in one way or another. They were so close to the prize, could almost see it, smell it, but their orders were to pull back, not to touch it.

It was irritating. It was worse than that. 'There was too much time to think, too much time to listen as one warship after another passed nearby. There was too much time to recognize that the president didn't want to be anywhere around if Parche was caught. The men had always known that what they were doing was illegal and that if Parche were ever found or forced to self-destruct, the United States would deny they had ever been there. It was just that now the message was louder than they wanted to hear.

A week passed. Then two. Parche was waiting, and by now, so was the rest of the world. October 11 came. Men crammed into Parche's radio room all day, trying to copy the news on the radio circuits, trying to follow what was going on. But neither they nor anyone on shore were allowed to hear the details. That had been the deal. No reporters, no reports, not until it was all over.

Reagan and Gorbachev were meeting in Hofdi House, an isolated structure on the bleak edge of the North Atlantic. Shultz thought it looked haunted, and Icelanders were convinced that it was. They sat in a small room, Shultz and Shevardnadze, Reagan and Gorbachev, two translators, and two note-takers. There against a single window, looking out onto turbulent and frigid waters that would perhaps ultimately wash over to where Parche sat beneath the Barents, the summit began.

Compromises were offered and concessions were made. Staff negotiators agreed that they could cut ballistic-missile arsenals in half, to roughly 6,000 warheads and 1,600 delivery vehicles on each side, and that they could also slash the number of shorter-range missiles. Reagan and Gorbachev themselves were talking about making these cuts over the next five years, and then eliminating the rest of their nuclear arsenals within five years after that. It was on the table, ten years to a nuke-free world. They were actually talking about the end of the terrors that had existed since the Manhattan Project, talking about forever rendering false Robert J. Oppenheimer's horrifying 1945 prophesy, "I am become death, destroyer of worlds," a quote from the Bhagavad Gita that the physicist intoned after the first atomic bomb had been tested.

Gorbachev still wanted Reagan to give up SDI, or at least limit Star Wars research to the laboratory and to agree to refrain from testing in space for ten years. Reagan wanted to conduct space tests, at least enough of them so that SDI could be deployed in ten years. At that time, he promised, the United States would hand the entire system, all of the technology, over to the Soviets.

Gorbachev wasn't buying it, and Reagan pleaded for resolution. "I have a picture that after ten years you and I come to Iceland and bring the last two missiles in the world and we have the biggest damn party in celebration of it!" He continued, "A meeting in Iceland in ten years: I'll be so old, you won't recognize me. I'll say, `Mikhail?' You'll say, `Ron?' And we'll destroy the last two."

They parried. Gorbachev said he might not be alive in ten years, that he was just entering his "danger period," and that Reagan had passed through his and could now count on making it smoothly to age one hundred.

"I can't live to one hundred worrying that you'll shoot one of those missiles at me," Reagan answered.

The argument went on. Reagan insisted that he had promised the American people he wouldn't give up SDI; Gorbachev insisted that the president would still have SDI even if he confined testing to the lab. Finally Reagan spoke the words that might have sounded like just so much lofty rhetoric in any other context: "It would be fine with me if we eliminated all nuclear weapons."

"We can do that. Let's eliminate them. We can eliminate them," Gorbachev shot back.

This could have been the defining moment. Maybe it should have been. But Hofdi House was living up to its reputation. The men were indeed haunted, by this single impasse.

"It is a question of one word," Reagan said, pleading for Gorbachev to give up his insistence that SDI proceed only in the laboratory.

"It's `laboratory' or good-bye," Gorbachev insisted. The meeting ended on that note.

Outside, a crush of international press was learning how close the two had come to an agreement. Reporters were rushing off to wire the world their postmortems that would declare the summit a failure.

Beneath the water, another wire reached Parche.

Word shot through the sub as a single line was quoted throughout the boat: "You are authorized to penetrate the 12-mile line." Parche was going in.

She was now only six or seven hours away from her mission. Conversation on board turned to other missions, other close calls. It was how the men admitted without admitting how scared they were. They talked about tracking Yankees and the ultra-quiet new Akula and Sierra attack submarines that had come out in the last couple of years. They called the Akula the "Walker sub" because the spy had inspired the Soviet move toward deadly quiet engines. In fact, Soviet technology was moving ahead so fast that more U.S. attack subs were being detected by the Soviet boats they were trying to trail. American subs were also being detected near the Soviet coasts. It was there that the spooks would hear the Soviets react in a burst of messages. The spooks had taken to calling the Soviet detection warning "stutter nine": in their code, eight bursts meant a suspected detection, nine meant one confirmed. The stutter came from repetition. The men talked about all this knowing all the while that on Parche detection was likely to mean self-destruction.

Maybe it was to avoid that fear that just about everyone was getting EB-Greened to the walls these days-Pharaoh's tomb under the Barents. But the mission was unfolding without a hitch. The divers went out, the spooks listened, the divers retrieved the pods and left others in place to keep collecting.

Slowly, quietly, Parche began the trip away from the cable to the point where she could signal the companion sub that all was well.

That's when they felt, heard, the ping, that awful sound of active sonar ringing through the hull. Someone above knew a submarine was there. Fortunately, there were two-Parche and her escort sub, some recall the USS Finback (SSN-670). Finback quickly moved in, got the Soviets' attention, acted like this was just another game of tag under the sea. It worked. Parche stole away.

They were hundreds of miles from the moor when they popped up an antenna. With sonar making certain no one was around, they sent a quick message to Washington: "Mission accomplished."

It took Parche about a month to reach the waters outside San Diego, where she stopped briefly on her way home. Bruce DeMars, who was now the admiral in charge of submarines, came out in a small motorboat to meet her and ride hack to port with the men. He was ecstatic. Casually dressed, he made it clear that nobody had to put on the spit and shine for him, not on this run anyway. DeMars carried his congratulations and videotaped copies of the New York Mets battling their way through seven games of the World Series. Baseball was the theme on the ride hack to port. As usual, the men's families, wives, and girlfriends were waiting for them on the pier when they arrived.

In Washington, someone else awaited Buchanan. President Reagan wanted to meet this captain, wanted to personally congratulate the man who had earned Parche yet another PUC. It would he Parche's fifth, on top of the three NUCs she also had won. The way the crew heard it, the brass was all there, the president, Vice President Bush, the CNO, members of the joint Chiefs of Staff.

Buchanan stood there, commander of the Navy's most sensitive spy sub, feeling like an E-1, the lowest-ranking man on a sub. Certainly he was the lowest-ranking man in the room. Then Reagan looked him in the eye and called him a modern-day John Wayne. It was the part of the story that Buchanan's men liked best. They figured Reagan had to be sincere. He had known John Wayne.