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

1

Although not even the president knew where the Polaris missile subs patrolled at any given time, they did have prescribed operating areas to run through, boxes made up of hundreds of miles of ocean that kept these first missile subs close to the 1,000-mile launch range of their targets.

There were also crucial safeguards to make it impossible for one madman, acting on his own, to start a nuclear war. First, any launch order had to match exactly the authenticator codes that varied by date and were kept on board the sub behind two sets of locked doors in a safe welded to a bulkhead in the control room. Two men held the combinations to open the safe and check the authenticator codes, which they showed to the CO and XO. Once the order to launch had been verified, three men had to use separate keys, also kept in safes, to actually launch a missile. The CO's key allowed him to activate the ship’s fire control system. The XO’s key armed the missile release mechanisms. Then, the mission control officer could use his key to fire the missiles. The process was supposed to take about fifteen minutes.

2

The U.S. public never knew just how afraid its government had become that the Soviets would escalate any naval confrontation. Just months earlier, a Soviet defector had presented what had become known as the "lronbark Papers" — details of Soviet plans to use tactical nuclear weapons against U.S. ships and subs if a war broke out at sea. President John F. Kennedy's advisers were haunted by the thought that the Soviet Union could have engineered the first crude steps of that plan. Indeed, Kennedy was afraid that any battle at sea might intensify the crisis, with or without nuclear weapons being fired. As he instituted the U.S. naval blockade of Cuba, a Soviet sub was spotted near two Soviet freighters. When Kennedy heard that, he asked his aides: “Isn’t there some way we can avoid having our first exchange with a Russian submarine? Almost anything but that!"

There were such exchanges, but none lived up to Kennedy's worst fears. U.S. surface ships and aircraft near Cuba spotted a handful of Soviet diesel subs and easily surfaced three of them.

Shortly after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, Navy commandos used diesel submarines to engineer the escape of prominent Cubans from Castro's regime. Over several weeks, commandos slipped from the subs and rowed to shore in inflatable rafts. The Cubans who were piloted back to the subs often had to dive 15 to 30 feet through dark waters to enter the submerged craft though special pressurized compartments. Many of those rescued likely would have been jailed or executed for plotting to overthrow Castro, according to former U.S. sailors involved in the operation.

3

Just as in the Korean War, little fighting took place at sea during the Vietnam conflict. Subs were sent on a few surveillance operations and diesel subs were used to land commandos. Perch and two former Regulus subs — Tunny and Grayhack — landed SEALs on beaches for several covert raids from 1965 through 1972.

4

As Craven and company began to look for the Soviet sub, and the chance to study Soviet technology from underwater camera c!ose-ups, other photographs had Admiral Rickover in the sub force convinced that U.S. national security had been greatly compromised. As top-secret photos go, these appeared to be pretty innocuous. A bunch of submariners off the USS Barb — the same sub that had monitored the Soviet search for the Golf — had created a cruise book to commemorate their months at sea on a previous mission in 1967. In some of the pictures, a few Barb men were photographed with either the engines or some part of the nuclear reactor in the background. When Rickover heard about that he flipped. Me insisted that all photos of his reactors, of any part of his reactors, remain highly classified. By the time he was done, the rest of the Navy had flipped too. Admirals began frantically trying to recall the 112 books distributed. Calls and memos criss-crossed the Pacific from Barb's captain to the commander of subs in the Pacific, to top submarine officers in Washington, back to Rickover. The FBI crime lab got involved, called in to determine if the photos could be blacked our to hide the offending reactor bits. The FBI decided chemical processes could undo the black out and make the bits visible. Finally, nearly nine months after the crisis began, the Navy determined that the classified background could be mechanically erased from the photos and the Barb men could have their cruise books back.

5

There was another subtle irony to the fact that it was Halibut that was going out to search for the Golf. The Soviets had, by now, become convinced that their sub was lost in a collision with the USS Swordfish (SSN-579), the only other sub to have been given some of Halibut's special capabilities in the 1960s. The Soviets had noticed that Swordfish had pulled into Yokosuka with a damaged sail and periscope shortly after the time they lost contact with their sub. Decades later; when Swordfish's captain, John T. Rigsbee, heard that, he was very surprised. It never occurred to him that the Soviets had even noticed that Stvordfish had been damaged, and it especially never occurred to him that they'd add two and two and come up with thirty-six. Stvordfish, he insists, just hit a chunk of ice in the Sea of Japan, far from where the Golf was lost. Actually, he was surprised that anyone even noticed Swordfish's bent periscope, because at the time it seemed all eyes were on Mount Fuji, which looked especially magnificent the day Swordfish pulled into port. Soviet intelligence, it seems, had not been gazing at the horizon.

6

In 1986, another attempt was made to examine the wreckage. This time Woods Hole’s Alvin submersible was sent down, toting the Jason Jr., a remote controlled, swimmer camera. The report from that expedition is still classified, but people with access to the findings say that the Jason could not enter the torpedo room. A team analyzing that expedition said as much in a letter dated January 14, 1987, that was declassified in 1998 along with the TAG report.

7

The TAG report docs agree with the court of inquiry findings in one profound way — both say there is no evidence that Scorpion was attacked. Still, lingering rumors and periodic news articles continue to place blame for Scorpion's loss on an attack by the Soviets.

8

Saxon and two others aboard Trieste also believe that they saw an object that looked like a body wearing an orange life-jacket near Scorpion's wreckage. They saw it in passing and could not go back immediately because the Trieste is not very maneuver-able. Liter, nobody could find any trace of the object. Craven says it’s entirely possible that someone could have attempted to get out at the last minute through an escape hatch. If there was a torpedo explosion, it would have had to have occurred reasonably close to the surface or the acoustic sounds would have been lost. However he also says that objects are sighted on the ocean floor all the time and often don’t turn out to be what they appear. Saxon says he can't be certain one way or the other, but he agrees that there is reason to believe Scorpion was close to the surface when she suffered her fatal mishap — her masts appear to be in the upright position, as if her commander tried to send out a last-minute message. It is also possible, however; that the masts were thrown up by mechanical shock or the explosive forces tearing apart the submarine.

9

Tightly coordinating their efforts with U.S. submariners, British subs sometimes helped till in what had become a nearly seamless round-robin surveillance of the Soviet ports in the Barents. There were only a couple of British subs trained for the task, and they went near Soviet shores only during spring and fall, but those subs were dedicated to the spy mission, and that's what their commanders and crews specialized in. They were good at it, and they were aggressive. The British Royal Navy just didn’t mind confronting the Soviets.

Once, a Soviet surface ship tried lining the Strait of Sicily near Italy with twin-cylinder buoys, and it seemed to U.S. intelligence that it was an effort to create an acoustic barrier — a sort of floating SOSUS net. There was great hand-wringing from the U.S. State Department to the Navy, debates about whether the United States should just go in and grab the buoys, when suddenly somebody noticed they had vanished. It turns out the British had a squadron of destroyers in Malta that went in and sank each and every one of the devices with naval gun fire.

10

Some of those missions were almost as far off the usual track as Bradley's imagined underwater cable, and not all of them were successful. In the early 1970s, a series of subs were sent to the Strait of Sicily to investigate what U.S. intelligence believed was a Soviet effort to plant an underwater system that would operate like SOSUS — one that seemed even more sophisticated than the sonobuoys that the British had destroyed a few years before. First the USS Tullibee (SSN-S97) was sent in and found a suspicious cable, suspended high above the seabed. Then Lapon was sent in to try to snag the cable, but failed. After that, the USS Seahorse (SSN-669) and Rickover’s NR-I were sent in. Seahorse used her sonar to find the cable, then guided the small crew of NR-1 to the spot for what may well have been the first intelligence mission for the minisub. Finally, NR-1 got close enough to discover the Navy had been turning underwater backflips to check out a sunken Italian telephone cable left over from World War II.

11

Zumwalt did have another edge. Submarine spying had received a boost in Kissinger’s and Nixon’s eyes in mid-1972, when U.S. surveillance subs detected one of the rare overt Soviet moves to intervene in the Vietnam War. Shortly after Nixon announced the mining of Haiphong Harbor, the Soviet Navy sent three Echo II subs toward Vietnam. After they were detected by U.S. subs, Washington sent a message to Moscow, essentially saying, send them back home, or they’re history. The subs left.

12

The Soviets had good reason to want the story quashed. Losing a sub and failing to find it was bad enough. It was even worse that the Americans had found it and tried to wrench it from the ocean, and worse still that the best Soviet intelligence officers had read about that in American newspapers. But making the whole matter even more humiliating was the fact that the Soviets had been forewarned about Project Jennifer — and ignored the warning. When Glomar went out on sea trials in early 1974, Anatoliy Shtyrov, a young Soviet officer, had tried to warn his boss, Admiral N. Smirnov, commander and chief of the Pacific fleet. As far as Shtyrov could tell, the lost Soviet submarine was the only item of value in the region where Glomar Explorer was sighted. By then, the Soviets had mapped out a general area where they believed their sub was lost.

Despite Colby’s intelligence that no hostile vessels had come near Glomar, Smirnov had responded instantly. He sent a high-speed surveillance ship to the area. It got there months too soon, months before the actual recovery attempt. The surveillance crew reported back to Moscow only that they saw a U.S. ship of “incomprehensible design the size of a soccer field” with “trusses resembling oil derricks” keeping station in the area. Three days later, Glomar left for the Hawaiian Islands and the surveillance ship headed for home.

When Glomar returned to the site on another test run in March 1974. Shtyrov convinced his superiors to send out another ship. But this time, the admirals refused to risk one of their best-equipped ships to the storm-racked winter waters of the Northern Pacific and agreed only to send a hydrographic expedition ship that was already out at sea. That ship’s commander decided Glomar was on a quest for oil and he soon left the scene. An old tug-boat took over surveillance, but stayed only ten days. When Glomar finally began the recovery attempt in July, Shtyrov again begged for a surveillance ship. By now, however, he had lost his audience. Besides, his boss just didn’t believe the Americans had the technology to go after a sunken sub. Smirnov refused to suffer the subject again, deciding he had no extra ships. Shtyrov, trying to go over his commander's head, was rebuffed with one line: “I direct your attention to the more qualitative performance of scheduled tasks."

Shtyrov never knew that his boss had crucial corroborating evidence sitting in his office. A note had been passed beneath the door of the Soviet embassy in Washington. It read: “Certain special services are taking steps to raise the Soviet submarine which sank in the Pacific.” It was signed, “A well-wisher.” The embassy sent a coded copy of the note to Moscow, where officials forwarded it to none other than Admiral Smirnov, who stashed it unheeded in his safe.

The story remained safe until the Soviet newspaper Izvestia published an account on July 6, 1992.

13

Seawolf was so noisy that the Navy took to sending a second sub to meet her as she approached the Sea of Okhotsk. The other boat would make sure no one was tailing Seawolf and create a noisier distraction when needed.

14

Parche was one of the last nine Sturgeon-class subs ever built — all of them ten feet longer than their predecessors and filled with all manner of extra eavesdropping gear. This small group of subs is considered the best the Navy ever put to sea for any espionage operation. Among these legendary surveillance boats were the USS Archerfish (SSN-678), the USS William H. Bates (SSN-680), and the USS Batfish (SSN-681). Parche did cable-tapping, but the others won awards for picking up crucial intelligence through more usual means — by creeping near the Soviet coast with antennas and periscopes breaking the waves.

15

The morale problems caused by all of this were taking their toll on the rest of the sub force as well. Men were retiring in record numbers, leaving many crews bottom-heavy with new recruits. That along with cutbacks that strained maintenance schedules created an unprecedented spate of accidents. In September 1977, Commander E. J. “Buzz" Galbraith of the USS Ray (SSN-6S3) knew he was operating at a disadvantage. His navigation equipment was in need of repair, his crew was green, and Ray was going to the Mediterranean, where shallow waters, tricky currents and changing temperature layers made it difficult to navigate even with the most experienced men. Still, as (hey left port, Galbraith believed he could carry the crew. He realized his mistake on September 20, when his sub drifted 14 mites off course and slammed into an undersea coral mountain off the Strait of Sicily. It hit so hard that men were hurled into bulkheads, the auxiliary diesel engine shifted on its mounts, and the steel cone covering Ray's sonar system was crushed. All told, seamanship error contributed to fourteen major incidents or accidents in the Atlantic sub fleet in the late 1970s — so many that the fleet's top sub admiral had to send out a cautionary note.

16

The CIA also adapted the miniaturized recording technology in the cable tap pods for land use and bribed a Russian construction worker to implant one against an important underground telephone cable in Moscow itself. Intelligence officials say this prized source of high-level communications was compromised in the mid-1980s by Aldrich Ames, the worst turncoat in CIA history.

17

Reagan's tale was missing some rather pertinent facts. What actually happened was that he virtually brought the house down, though not by virtue of his acting. The crew, told to treat Reagan's orders as they would their captain's, accidentally overheard the actor practicing his lines, and they responded.

“Answer all bells,” he said, giving the code for get underway, practicing to get just the right inflection.

“All back full.”

“All ahead two-thirds.”

The submarine began to jerk in every direction, back, forward, stopped, forward, left. The bow lines began to stretch, then pull until the aging pier that had moored the sub snapped into pieces of cracked wood and rusted iron, just as the sub’s captain raced to the bridge, yelling, “All stop, for God's sake, all stop!”

“Starboard stop.”

“Starboard ahead standard.”

“Left full rudder.”

18

Naval Intelligence began to notice that the Soviets seemed to be experimenting with the idea of hiding their missile subs under the ice in 1979. For the Soviets, a crucial moment came in the summer of 1981, when captain Leonid Kuversky drove his Delta SSBN into the desolate Arctic Ocean to see if he could manage to rise up from the ice and calculate a workable trajectory for his sub's sixteen ballistic missies. Kuversky succeeded beyond all expectations. For his initiative and courage, he was named "Hero of the Soviet Union," his nation's top honor. A gaggle of orders and medals went to his crew. The scientists and weapons designers who had traveled along received various state prizes in a ceremony that was held that October.

19

Several previous Defense and Navy secretaries had wanted to ease Rickover out, but his supporters in Congress and presidents like Carter had always stopped them. Reagan, however, stood firmly behind his Navy secretary, even though Rickover appealed to the president forcefully in an Oval Office meeting, calling Lehman a “piss-ant" and asking Reagan, “Are you a man? Can’t you make decisions for yourself?” Rickover took some revenge by hanging in his retirement office a picture of Benedict Arnold next to a portrait of Lehman.

20

By now, the Navy also had modified its two newest minisubs, Turtle and Sea Cliff to go much deeper than their original maximum of 6,500 feet, and among other things they were to help recover the pieces of test missiles that Seawolf found and that Air Force or Navy radar had tracked through “death smacks” into the ocean. Turtle had been refitted in 1979 to go to 10,000 feet. Sea Cliff was given a titanium sphere in the early 1980s to enable it to reach 20,000 feet, making it the first Navy vessel since Trieste I to go as deep as John Craven had envisioned when he was dreaming of a fleet of Deep Submergence Search Vehicles in the 1960s. Still, unlike the DSSVs Craven envisioned, both submersibles had to be hauled to dive sites on surface ships.

21

In the midst of all this tension, the Soviets sent a Victor III submarine to waters somewhere between the Carolinas and Bermuda. The Americans countered, sending a frigate, the USS McCloy, and a submarine, the USS Philadelphia (SSN-690), to trail the Victor. Before anyone knew it, the boats were all engaged in a tug of war, or was it a game of soccer? It happened on October 31,1983, and the prize was some of the best sonar technology the Americans had. The Victor moved in close to the frigate and accidentally snagged the ship's towed sonar array, tearing it free from American grasp. But within moments, the Victor was on the surface and floundering — her prize wrapped around her propeller. She had been disabled by her own intelligence coup. That much made the U.S. newspapers. But what happened next has never been reported. Philadelphia's crew maneuvered near the Victor, then went in tight and below to check out the sub. The next thing anyone knew the array was wrapped around the Philadelphia. The Americans had inadvertently snatched it back.

22

The lost boat, the Komsomolets, was a 6,400-ton prototype of a new class of Soviet nuclear sub known as the “Mike,” designed to dive much deeper than other full-size attack subs. It was the fourth Soviet nuclear submarine to sink during the cold war. While even more Soviet nuclear and diesel subs were crippled by reactor accidents, fires, or other mishaps, at least seven or eight sank outright.