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

Appendix B FROM THE SOVIET SIDE

The U.S. Navy spent decades spying on Soviet submarines but never really knew much about what went on inside those boats, who their men were, or what they were going through. Periodically, word would come of horrible radiation accidents. The Pentagon was willing enough to share those incidents with the American public, along with constant and seemingly contradictory warnings about how big and dangerous the Soviet sub fleet was becoming. Now, with the end of the cold war, the Russian Navy has opened up and has been willing to offer some of the details about the tense days hack when the Soviet Navy scrambled to catch up to the Americans. Former Soviet submariners feel free to say what they never could before-that their commands put more emphasis on numbers and deadlines than on submarine safety. As a result, the Soviets suffered some of the most horrific accidents of the cold war.

In the early stages of the arms race in the mid-1950s, Khrushchev called for the Soviet Union "to catch up with and pass America." And so a fleet of nuclear submarines was designed and constructed, all in a hurry, all haphazardly. The work was so bad that in 1959 Commander Vladimir N. Chernavin (who would ultimately succeed Admiral Gorshkov as commander in chief of the Soviet Navy) refused to take one of the first Soviet nuclear attack submarines out of the yard for her first sea trials. He stood firm when his command was threatened, and he stood firm until his sub was repaired.

While Chernavin stood his ground, another submarine, the K-19, had already been sent to sea with the swing of a champagne bottle. That the bottle failed to break was one of those omens that every submariner, no matter what his rank, rate, or nationality, knew to be omi nous. It was an inauspicious beginning for the first Soviet nuclearpowered submarine to carry ballistic missiles.

In the summer of 1961, K-19 was setting out for exercises in the North Atlantic, exercises code-named "Arctic Circle." She was to play the role of an American sub, hide beneath the surface, and make her way through Soviet antisubmarine forces. After that she was going to leave the rest of the fleet and find a polyi va, a break in the ice. She would surface at the edge of the Arctic and conduct a practice launch of a ballistic missile.

The rest of the fleet stayed behind to continue their exercises as K-19 broke away to make a submerged transit through the Norwegian Sea. The waters were calm. There were no storms. Her crew was already counting down to the end of this cruise and their homecoming.

On July 4, at 4:15 in the morning, just as the sub reached a point about one hundred miles off of Jan Mayen, the small Norwegian island above Iceland, K-19's radiation detection equipment came to life. A reactor scrammed, shutting down. The fuel rods in her nuclear core continued to heat. The primary cooling circuit had failed. A pipe had burst, pumps had broken, leaving nothing to control the chain reaction, nothing to stop the rods from heating up, nothing to prevent them from getting so hot that they would melt through the reactor itself. As the fuel rods climbed past one thousand degrees, the paint began burning on the reactor's outer plating. There should have been a backup cooling system, something to stop catastrophe. But K-19 was an early design, a first attempt.

Captain Yuri Posetiev gave the order to surface. He tried to radio for help, but communications had failed. Meanwhile, engineers on board began desperately trying to improvise a new cooling system from the sub's drinking water reserves. They came up with a desperate plan. Several men were going to have to walk into the now highly radioactive reactor compartment and climb inside "the Boa's Mouth."

Lieutenant Boris Korchilov was on his first submarine cruise, and he was the first to volunteer. Others from the reactor team followed. These men, still boys really, made their way into the compartment. There they stood, a team of eight, welding pipes, connecting them to pumps and valves. They remained in the compartment for two hours, braving the heat and the invisible particles that shot through their bodies. Each received one hundred times the lethal dose of radiation.

Ivan Kulakov, a twenty-two-year-old chief petty officer, watched as they came out of the compartment, each man barely able to move, unable to speak, their faces changed beyond recognition. He watched horrified as the first team's efforts failed. As the cooling pumps came apart, it became clear that someone had to jury-rig the jury-rig. Kulakov volunteered. He was certain that he could do the work fastest. And he was just as certain that he was going to die trying.

Kulakov's mind played back the faces of those first eight men, a running loop that wouldn't stop as he walked through a lake of radioactive water, ankle deep. As the water soaked through his leather shoes, as the radiation began to burn his feet, he thought he saw the walls and water shine, perhaps glow.

His hands were burned as he opened valves to draw steam from the reactor. He could barely see. He could barely breathe. All he could do was pray that he could finish, make his way out without falling headlong into the horrible, painful, radioactive lake that was already destroying his feet.

Finally, he did get out, only to watch another valve fail, only to know he had to go hack in. He had already taken on five times the lethal dose of radiation. Outside the compartment were the living dead. Back inside, he was more certain than ever that he was one of them.

Then, just as the fuel rods reached 1,470 degrees, the pipes held, the valves held. The makeshift cooling system began to do its work. Kulakov stumbled out of the boa's mouth, and Captain Posetiev turned K-19 around in a run toward the fleet they had left still conducting exercises a lifetime ago, at least eight men's lifetimes ago. He knew he couldn't try for home. His entire crew would be fatally irradiated if he didn't get them off the sub fast.

The team of eight, those first men into the compartment during the crisis, died before the week was out. They were buried in lead coffins.

Posetiev lingered longer: three weeks. Other crewmen who had come too close to the outer door of the reactor compartment lasted a month, some a little longer, before they too succumbed. Kulakov, whose feet and hands were irreparably burned, managed to survive with transfusions and bone marrow transplants. He would always be crippled.

Even with all this, Moscow wasn't willing to let go of one of its few nuclear subs. Khrushchev was still racing the Americans. Men would one day be sent back into K-19, back into that reactor compartment. Only now, K-19 would bear a new name. She would be known as the Hiroshima.

In 1962 the Soviet Navy wanted very much to appease Khrushchev, who wanted very much to see a nuclear submarine launch a ballistic missile from underwater. His naval leaders came forward with a sub that they told him would give him just what he demanded, another success to herald in the Krasnaya Zvezda newspaper.

Khrushchev witnessed just such a test and was so delighted that he declared a reward for a perfect missile firing to the crew of the nuclear sub on display, the K-3, which had also just made a successful transit to the North Pole. Nobody would ever dare tell him he had just offered up an award for a clever illusion.

The Soviet Navy was still having too many problems getting its nukes to shoot, much less shoot straight, to risk yet another failure with Khrushchev looking on. So, instead of letting K-3 even make the attempt, commanders strategically positioned a Golf diesel sub near the nuke. Hidden and in anonymity, it was the diesel boat that made the perfect shot.

And so Soviet naval history marched on, intermingling the heroic, the tragic, and the comic.

It was June 1967, the eve of the Arab-Israeli War, and the K-131 had been sent to the Adriatic Sea, outside the Mediterranean, to await orders from command. Those orders came as the first shots were fired. Captain Vadim Kulinchenko was given fifteen hours to bring his sub in position to aim nuclear missiles at Tel Aviv.

The captain was flabbergasted. He knew he didn't want to fire nuclear weapons at Israel, but he also knew he wouldn't have to. In order to make it from the Adriatic to the Mediterranean, in order to race past Greece, past Crete, and arrive within reach of Israel's coast, K-131 would have to somehow reach speeds of fifty-seven knots. Her normal transit speed was twenty knots.

He had to make a show of trying, but when the war ended six days later, Kulinchenko, K-131, and her nuclear weapons were still in transit. Eventually he met up with his battle group in the Med, forty surface ships and ten diesel subs from the Black Sea fleet. The K-131 didn't belong with this group, she wasn't from the Black Sea. But for their show of force in the Med, the Soviets wanted one of their new Northern Fleet nuclear submarines. It was a beginning. Soon the Med would be the new battleground in the submarine wars.

For now, however, most of the Soviet Navy had little idea of what nuclear subs couldn't do, or for that matter, what they could. Indeed, before the war, when K-131 was on her way to the Adriatic, a supply ship helpfully offered fuel and water-although, the supply ship noted, those were two commodities it was running low on.

"We have fresh water, as much as you like," came the answer from the submarine. "We've just cooked it and are ready to give it to you." The Black Sea fleet didn't have nuclear subs, and the astonished supply crew had no idea that water and fuel were two of the things any nuclear boat can produce for itself.

One of the next Soviet subs to travel to the Mediterranean was the K3, the same sub that Khrushchev had rewarded for the nonexistent missile launch. Only this time, one of her officers, Lev Kamorkin, had a had feeling.

Two days before embarking from a port in the Barents, he walked with his five-year-old daughter and a friend, who recalls him confiding: "I don't know why, but I don't want at all to go to this voyage."

The feeling was so strong, the urge not to leave so powerful, that Kamorkin swore that this would be his very last trip on a submarine. Sadly for the little girl who listened as her father talked of his misgivings, Kamorkin was right.

On September 8, 1967, at 1:52 A.M., a fire broke out in one of K-3's oxygen generators. She was returning from that run to the Mediterranean and was near home, just off the North Cape of Norway, just about where Cochino had suffered her first explosion.

Showing much of the honor of Cochino's Rafael C. Benitez, Kamorkin raced to prevent the fires from blowing the torpedoes and sinking his boat. He ordered everyone out of the weapons compartment and stayed behind to let the ocean in and flood the room. As he watched the waters rise to cover the torpedoes, he knew that he had engineered his own death. He drowned alongside the weapons.

He would never know that forty of the men he had tried so valiantly to save would succumb to carbon monoxide poisoning and die moments after he did.

The sub already known as Hiroshima continued to cause problems for the Soviet sub command. In November 1969, she ran into the USS Cato with a blow that forced her into a steep bow-first dive, sending the huge volume of Navigational Astronomy tumbling down off a bookshelf and onto Captain Valentin Anatolievich Shabanov, who had been dozing. The collision also knocked out the sub's forward sonar and crushed the doors of her torpedo tubes.

Still, Hiroshima continued to operate long enough for one final disaster. In 1972 fire broke out on the sub when she was about six hundred miles northeast of Newfoundland. This time, twenty-six officers and crewmen were killed. There were twelve others who expected to die, men who were entombed inside the sub's stern compartment, unable to make it through the gassed portions of the sub. They stayed there for twenty-three days until Hiroshima limped home.

That those twelve men lived is the only happy ending ever written for Hiroshima. She is remembered and memorialized as the submarine that earned her name for fire, radiation, and death.

The Soviets added a twist to the at-sea espionage routine by supplementing their fleets of subs with surface trawlers (specially equipped to eavesdrop), known as AGIs. There was a certain genius in this since it was the cheapest and easiest way for the Soviet Union to post a sentry off all the major U.S. bases, both here and abroad. U.S. missile boats went to great lengths to avoid these trawlers. One sub even grounded in the late 1960s while trying to keep from being detected by an AGI lurking off of Holy Loch, Scotland.

Mostly, the trawlers just sat there, but sometimes they were downright brazen. That was the case in 1979 when the crew of one trawler operating near Guam reached out and grabbed a torpedo fired in a practice round by a U.S. missile sub USS Sam Houston (SSBN-704). The trawler just rushed up, made the snatch, then began heading in a slow crawl back to the Soviet Union. Operational commanders were dumbstruck. They were also at a loss at just what to do. After some debate, they decided that sometimes there is no alternative to sending an obvious message, a show of military force to make sure no other Soviet vessel ever tried anything this audacious again.

Within twelve hours, two aircraft carrier battle groups were sent from Yokosuka and the Philippines to corner the trawler. A day or two later, the trawler was boxed in outside of Okinawa. By now, the Navy had gotten the State Department involved, and messages were flying back and forth between U.S. diplomats and high-ranking Soviets. Finally, the trawler captain, who had stared down the American ships, dropped the torpedo over the side. Attached was a note, written in English, deft and to the point. The captain simply said the torpedo had come alongside his ship. To Naval Intelligence officers looking on, it seemed as though the Soviet was saying "look what I found," as if he had just landed a big fish and it was the most natural and innocent thing in the world.

In the late summer of 1985, the USS Baltimore (SSN-704) was sent to watch a Soviet Zulu IV sub in waters just above Norway. The U.S. Navy knew that the 1950s-vintage diesel sub was a research boat, one that had been seen loitering in the area before. The Baltimore prepared to make a pass beneath the Zulu when the American submariners saw a cable, about as wide as a man's arm, dangling from the Soviet sub. Then, through a murky underwater periscope view, they saw the Soviets lowering an open underwater sled with ballast tanks on either side. On the sled were one or more divers wearing suits reminiscent of those designed for outer space, with air hoses connected back up to the submarine. Silence was ordered on board Baltimore as the Soviet sled moved toward the ocean floor. Men were ordered to wear their rubber shoes, not to slam doors. The ice machine was turned off. So was the bug juice machine. The only thing left running in Baltimore's mess was the coffee-maker.

Soon, sonar reported the sound of what seemed to be digging in the sand, three hundred feet below the surface. Listening in on the Zulu's own onboard intercom, the Baltimore's crew realized that the Soviets were looking for an underwater communications cable.

Naval Intelligence officials knew that there was such a cable there, one running from Murmansk to northern England that had been laid in the days of the czar. It wasn't used anymore, and the Soviets had to have known that. Perhaps the Soviets were practicing. Perhaps they were preparing to try to match the U.S. cable-tapping feat that had been exposed a few years earlier. Or perhaps they were practicing to disrupt the cables that connected the U.S. SOSUS nets.

The oceans were rough, with swells reaching as high as thirty feet. Still the Zulu loitered, and still the Baltimore watched from one day to the next. On the third day, all sounds of digging, all noise in fact, stopped. Baltimore was inched closer and her crew realized that there was now a cable dangling from the Zulu, with no sled attached. It had been lost, presumably with its divers.

A stunned silence reigned on Baltimore. "I remember that everyone in the conn turned around and looked at each other," one crew member said, adding that it no longer seemed to matter which side anybody was on. "It was more like we realized a submariner was dead."