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

Ten — Triumph And Crisis

Richard L. Haver could spin a tale and craft a briefing better than just about anyone in town. He was only thirty-three years old, one of many department heads at Naval Intelligence and a civilian at that, but he was also a prized protege i of Bobby Inman's, the man who had singlehandedly shielded the sub force from its one close encounter with congressional criticism. Haver had that same ability to mesmerize.

Admiral Stansfield Turner, the director of the CIA, knew that. So did Harold Brown, the secretary of Defense. That's why they had brought Haver with them on this spring day in 1978 to brief President Jimmy Carter in the White House Situation Room.

Turner made the introductions, while Haver looked around at the men assembled: the president, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, and White House Chief of Staff Hamilton Jordan. Vice President Walter Mondale was there as well, though he had just gotten back from a twelve-day trip to Southeast Asia and seemed to be nodding off. Haver wasn't worried.

He knew it was Carter's attention he had to hold and that Carter was a former nuclear engineer and a Rickover acolyte. He had been chosen for the nuclear submarine program in the early 1950s, but before the first nukes ever went out to sea, his father died and he was called home to run the family peanut farm. Still, Carter had never stopped viewing Rickover as a mentor. Indeed, the title of his campaign biography, Why Not the Best-, was taken from a phrase that Rickover used to grill him and other officers. As for Haver, he had been an intelligence officer, a spook who went out on Navy air reconnaissance flights during the Vietnam War. That's how he met Inman, who had overseen some of the Navy's wartime intelligence efforts. When Haver decided to resign his commission, it was Inman who had helped persuade him to become a civilian intelligence analyst rather than go to law school.

What Haver wanted to do now was bring Carter up to date on the Soviet nuclear threat and also lay the groundwork to win Carter's okay to begin planning a mission more daring than any that had been tried before. Naval Intelligence had learned that the Soviets were taking advantage of the 4,200-mile range of their new Delta ballistic missile subs, driving them out of reach of U.S. SOSUS nets below the Azores in the South Atlantic or holding the subs back in the Barents Sea. The subs in the Barents were being protected by surface ships and attack submarines-and they were just a shot across the Arctic from Washington, D.C., or any other target within an arc drawn from about South Carolina through Oklahoma to Oregon.

Haver assured Carter that intelligence networks and spy subs were working hard at collecting and analyzing the new information. Within Naval Intelligence, however, there was a raging debate about whether the Soviets' decision to hold missile subs hack in the Barents marked a true change in strategy or a momentary flux. Haver was among those who believed it likely that the Soviets were positioning to take a crucial nuclear edge away from the United States.

When the Yankee subs were the best the Soviet Union had, nearly every one sent within range of the United States had been in the line of fire of U.S. subs shadowing behind. If war had broken out, those subs could have sunk the Soviet boomers before they ever fired. Then, if both sides ever launched their land-based ICBMs, only the United States would have been left with a second-strike capability tucked away in the oceans. This was the edge the Navy had been preparing for ever since Whitey Mack first rode bronc on the Lapon. But the strategy relied on three things: that Soviet subs remained relatively noisy; that they never realized how often they were being followed; and that they continued to patrol in open seas where they could be trailed in the first place.

But when the Deltas were moved into the Barents, Haver and others started to seriously question some fundamental assumptions behind U.S. strategy. After all, practically since the cold war began, American planners had believed that the Soviet Navy was bent on challenging the United States on the high seas, that in a war Soviet attack subs would mainly try to sink U.S. ships resupplying Europe, just as the Germans had done in World War II. Now it seemed the Soviets might be doing a strategic about-face and, in the process, knocking over a cornerstone of U.S. nuclear strategy.

After giving a sense of these concerns, Haver reminded the president that the Navy had one other extraordinary way to keep tabs on the Soviets-the critical cable-tapping operation in the Sea of Okhotsk that Carter himself had approved just the year before. Then Haver went on to describe what Naval Intelligence was considering as a next, bold step.

What if the United States could tap cables in the Atlantic arena? What if a submarine could be sent to put a tap right in the Barents Sea, the very location of the Soviets' missile-sub bastions?

Halibut never could have done that, and neither could Seawolf. Both subs had been castoffs when they were given to the tapping operation, too old and too loud to sneak into these active waters. (As this briefing took place, Seawolf was out in the Pacific searching for missile fragments, looking for a chance to use a special retrieving claw that had been added to one of her camera-toting fish.) But the Navy finally had a boat that could do the job, a new sub just converted to hold deep-sea divers and the gear that could let spooks listen in on a new tap. She was the USS Parche (SSN-683), the sub that Inman and Vice Admiral Bob Long had pushed for after the Pike inquiry. She was a four-year-old Sturgeon attack sub, and she was quieter, faster, and much newer than any boat that had been given over to "special projects" before.[14]

Parche had new eavesdropping equipment that could support a modernized tap pod with far more recording capacity, and she was quiet enough to sneak right beneath the Soviets' powerful Northern Fleet to plant tap pods in the Barents.

As Haver talked, what had begun as a typical briefing turned into a dialogue, Navy vet to Navy vet. Carter began leaning so far forward in his chair that some of the men in the room began to wonder whether the president would wind up in Haver's lap. It was certainly clear that Carter was intrigued, and for now that was enough. Haver and his bosses weren't looking for formal approvals for the mission, not yet. They just needed to know that Carter was interested, that they could keep planning.

Getting this kind of early read was a good tactic in dealing with any president, but in Carter's case there was even more reason to move slowly, to sound him out. Despite his Navy background, Carter had been looking for ways to trim defense programs. He had spoken out against the new weapons systems being pushed by the Pentagon, and he was so forceful about the need to make peace with the Soviets that some in the military thought he was soft on communism.

Everyone in the room knew that sending Parche on such a mission, into crowded waters, carried far greater risk of detection and of antagonizing the Soviets than anything tried in the desolate Okhotsk. Parche would have to elude the dozens of Soviet warships and submarines that were constantly moving about the Barents. Not only that, but because any cable in the area probably ran alongshore, a geographical necessity, Parche would almost certainly have to plant the pod inside the Soviet's 12-mile territorial limit, and probably within the 3-mile-limit recognized internationally.

But Haver had invoked Carter's fascination more than his caution. Turner was nothing less than ecstatic when the president finally thanked them all for the briefing and asked to be kept informed. It seemed that Haver had not only sold Carter on a new mission but had probably guaranteed the success of the cable-tapping program for the next decade.

Still, as jubilant as everyone felt, there was one nagging concern that Haver hadn't mentioned to Carter. Haver couldn't help but feel that there was something eerie about the Soviets' shift in strategy and other recent moves. It was almost as if the Soviets had found their own way to read the Americans' minds. Only there wasn't enough evidence to be certain, no clear patterns, just glimmers within a series of curious changes in the way the Soviets were operating.

First, the Soviets were increasingly sending attack subs to escort the Yankees and Deltas still heading for the Atlantic. Along the way, the attack boats were circling the boomers as if looking for NATO subs that might be trying to trail. Second, Soviet subs seemed to be waiting to monitor U.S. naval exercises even before U.S. ships and subs arrived on site. A few times, Soviet subs had shown up in waters where U.S. exercises had been scheduled, then canceled. Other times, Soviet subs barreled right into the middle of exercises almost as if they were trying to see how the U.S. forces would react. Finally, the latest subs the Soviets had sent out on sea trials-Victor III attack boats-were much quieter than any of their predecessors, almost as quiet as U.S. subs. It was as if somehow the Soviets had caught on to the idea that silence could be crucial. Before, they had always seemed more focused on sheer quantity.

Was this all coincidence? Or was there a glitch in U.S. communications security? Could there be a spy? Inman had sent Haver and another intelligence officer, William O. Studeman, to the fleet admirals, seeking their help in searching for any possible communications leaks. But the admirals would have none of it. How could their coded communications, the most sophisticated in the world, have been compromised?

All Haver could do now was keep digging. Maybe some of those answers would be uncovered by Parche, if she could manage to find and tap a Barents cable. But Haver would have to wait to find out. The Navy, with strong input from the NSA, was first sending Parche to Okhotsk to plant a second recording pod right next to the first to greatly increase capacity at the tap site. She was being sent, in part, to prove herself before anyone dared to send her to that other, far more dangerous sea.

Prove herself she did, and after a near-perfect run Parche's crew came back with more than a bit of a swagger. The 140 men assigned to this new boat taunted the crew of Seawol f, now in dry dock and in pieces. They called her the "Pier Puppy" and joked that her men were assigned to "Building 575," after Seawolf's hull number. Seawolf's crew had already struck back though. In 1977, Seawolf's divers had planted a cow's skull next to the cable tap, just to give Parche's divers a good scare.

Both submarines were stationed at Mare Island, and their crews lived as neighbors, in wood-framed barracks on the east end at the edge of an old munitions depot, away from everyone else. Neither their proximity nor their shared status, however, prevented their intense rivalry, especially now that Parche was moving ahead, going out to sea, while Seawolf's men were stuck with the most thankless duty a crew can pull: overhaul. They were working hours almost as long as those of sea duty, and they were stuck, hot and sweaty, in a shipyard handling tasks that seemed more fitted to construction labor ers than submariners. Their wives, children, and girlfriends were nearby, but there was infuriatingly little time to see them as the men toiled relentlessly at the three R's of shipyard life: "Remove, Repair, Reinstall."

The nukes had it worst of all. Wearing canary-yellow antiradiation suits, they were saddled with the task of cutting their boat in half in order to remove and replace the spent reactor core. There was so much paperwork involved that they had taken to chanting, "Cut down another tree for nuclear power."

Rickover's reactor inspectors, the men the crew called "snakes," were everywhere, their special helmets sign enough to trigger a manto-man alert. The sign for "snakes on hoard" was passed with a quick flash of a two-fingered V.

There was just no glory in overhaul. Indeed, with the country's backlash against Vietnam, there was little glory in being in the military. It seemed that not even the government had respect for its armed forces. Navy pay wasn't keeping up with soaring inflation and interest rates that had skyrocketed into double digits. Longtime submariners were making about $15,000 a year in base and supplemental pay. There were news stories of Navy men on food stamps.'[15]

It seemed there was no refuge. Even the Horse and Cow was turning into a bikers' bar.

So Seau of f's crew watched with envy in 1979 as Parche prepared to shove off a second time toward a mission shrouded in mystery, the mission that had so fascinated President Carter. This time she was headed for the Barents.

She'd travel a route that had probably never been taken before, the one path that would bypass all of the Soviet choke points, just about the most difficult and dangerous way possible. Parche was going to travel north, due north from San Francisco, past Alaska, and through the narrow and shallow Bering Strait, where the U.S. and Soviet borders almost touch and where the ice could sink a sub faster than an enemy. From there, she would travel past the North Pole and back south into the Barents Sea. All told, Parche would have to transit farther than 5,500 nautical miles, much of it treacherous. There was good reason the Soviets would never expect Parche to slip into the Barents from this route.

There was one more precaution. Parche would not leave for the Barents until late summer, well after Carter's summit with Brezhnev. The two leaders met on June 18 and signed the SALT II Treaty, in which both sides agreed to limit the number of their nuclear-missile launchers.

Two weeks after the superpower summit, Parche's CO, John H. Maurer Jr., held a summit of his own-with the wives of his crew. The captain provided baby-sitters, light refreshments, and a description of the men's "extended deployment" that pretty much began and ended with dates of departure and return. He gave the women "FamilyGram" forms, so that they could wire quick messages to their hushands a few times over the three months Parche would be gone, and a two-page list of emergency numbers, starting with that of his wife Carol and going down through a litany of Mare Island doctors, dentists, firemen, and police. He also gave the women a checklist of all the tasks the Navy imagined would fall to them. Know when to tune up the car. Find the telephone numbers of the plumber and the electrician. Make sure your husband leaves a will. In return, the women were asked to give up their husbands for the duration.

There were the usual tears dockside as Parche shoved off that August. The magnetic white hull numbers denoting her as submarine number 683 had been taken down, leaving her anonymous as she passed beneath the Golden Gate Bridge and dove.

The crew was now in the hands of the man they called "Captain Jack." He was built thick and strong, and his crew thought him a bulldog, at once determined and playful. There was something about this captain who could walk into the torpedo room and wrestle with his men. There were some, among the torpedo crew especially, who were just crazy enough to beat the captain regularly. The wrestling matches fast became ritual-"the Tag Team Follies."

Maurer was to the Navy horn, his father an admiral. In fact, John H. Maurer Sr. had been commander of submarines in the Pacific in the late 1960s when Halibut was sent looking for missile pieces and before she set out after fantasy cables. Now his son was leading a crew top-heavy with senior chiefs, senior enlisted, and spooks on the most dangerous special projects mission yet.

Secrecy had been tight on Seawol f, far tighter than it had ever been on Halibut. But on Parche, the secrecy was nearly paranoiac. The crew itself had little idea of where they were going. The men were told only that they were being sent to see whether Parche could find her way beneath the frozen expanse and hack, perhaps detecting a few Soviet subs along the way.

As Parche neared Alaska, Maurer began preparing to move through the narrow Bering Strait submerged. Here, the waters were only 150 feet deep and the going was hazardous. Indeed, in a few months the passage would be impossible without the help of an icebreaker. Navigators and the captain were shrouded by curtains as they tensely plotted Parche's 2-3-knot crawl.

Once through the strait, Parche had to navigate farther north through the Chukchi Sea. Here the water was just as shallow, and the ice didn't melt even in summer. From outer space, this and other seas surrounding the pole look like a kaleidoscope as temperature and salinity patterns alter the very color of the water mile by mile. Parche's sonar bounced off the layers much as it bounced off solid objects, leaving Maurer and his crew nearly blind, much like a plane flying through thick cloud cover.

The crew maneuvered Parche forward slowly, cursing as they tried to decipher sonar echoes, never entirely certain whether something that sounded as if it were directly ahead was at their depth or some feet above. There was no way to really tell, not until they passed closer, close enough to risk collision. But Parche wasn't totally helpless. The Navy had been sending at least one submarine a year up under the ice since the 1950s. A special lab had been created to study sea ice to try to make it easier to operate in the strange and difficult environment. And the entire Sturgeon class of subs had been made "ice-capable": given upward- and forward-looking sonar that could help avoid ramming into the ice, special buoyancy controls, and hull modifications that allowed the subs to break through thin ice for emergency surfacings.

During these early Arctic operations, the Navy discovered that sonar pings sounded an awful lot like the mating call of the area's ring-necked seals. When the seals heard the submarine ping-a sweet tone that sounded like a singer moving across octaves-they answered: one seal calling back to the submarine, the next seal answering that seal, and another seal answering the one before. Blasting the sea, the seals inspired walruses to join in with their bell-like barks. On the early transits, the din went on for hours, seals answering subs and other seals, walruses answering seals, and walruses answering one another. Now Parche was using sonar designed to avoid courtship with the local mammals.

The passage was noisy, nonetheless. Around the sub were chunks of ice that had broken off from large bergs farther north. Those chunks had a disturbing tendency to pack themselves against one another or against land, creating heavy pressure ridges that reached down deep into the sea. Parche could easily encounter an area with less than five feet of clearance from bottom. It was almost impossible to move through without scraping some ice, sending a screech through the hull, nails across the chalkboard amplified. The ice chunks were heavy enough to snap a submarine's screws and leave a boat helpless.

The crew also had to be on the lookout for larger bergs that often floated south, creating huge obstacles between Greenland and Canada as well as on the other side of the pole, between Greenland and Iceland. It was an iceberg that had stopped USS Nautilus on an attempt to cross under the North Pole in June 1958. (Nautilus made the Pole, and history, a few months later.)

When Parche finally hit deep water, she could move ahead without obstacles. This 1,500-mile swim beneath the North Pole itself would be easy-depths of 1,000 to 12,000 feet left plenty of room to maneuver beneath the most massive icebergs. After that, Parche again had to maneuver through a tapestry of marginal ice before finally breaking through to the Barents.

Now it was time for the crew to begin readying the fish to drag along the sea bottom in search of communications cables. Given the surrounding terrain and the location of Soviet bases, it made sense that any underwater telephone cable would run from Murmansk and along the coast of the Kola Peninsula, which pointed down from the Arctic, form ing the thumb of the glove-shaped piece of land that marked Sweden and Finland as its fingers. The cable would probably stretch about 250 miles east to the tip, before it took a 40-mile hop across what the Soviets called the throat of the White Sea and looped into the Severodvinsk shipyard.

It made little sense to lay a tap in that bit of the White Sea where boats moved continuously from the shipyard out to the Barents. Instead, Parche would look for the cable in an area where it might be a little easier for her to hover for a while and not be discovered, such as along the granite cliffs on the northernmost coast of the Kola in that 250-mile run after Murmansk. The search inevitably would bring Parche within the Soviets' I2-mile territorial limit, and probably even inside the .3-mile limit recognized by the United States.

As Parche searched, men monitored the video images captured by the fish, looking for that vague line in the sand that could be a communications cable. They found it just about where operation planners had suspected it would be, farther out than 12 miles at some points, but a lot closer in at others. It was clear that this cable had to run from Severodvinsk to the major bases of the Northern Fleet, and on into fleet headquarters near Murmansk.

Finally, Maurer picked a spot for the tap. In Okhotsk, the cable stretched across an entire sea, and Halibut had been able to plant that tap about 40 miles offshore. It is not clear exactly how far from the coast this tap site was, but it clearly was a lot closer in than the Okhotsk tap had been.

Nobody had to be told that the closer Parche moved in, the more she risked discovery. Sonar crews monitored the constant traffic above as Parche's divers began their work. Nothing but luck could keep the crew safe from a direct hit by a Soviet sonar ping. If that happened, there were 150 pounds of HBX explosives on hoard, just as there had been on Halibut and on Seawolf.

The spooks were crammed into Parche's now-locked torpedo room, their eavesdropping equipment sitting on racks designed to hold weapons. While Halibut had the Bat Cave, Parche had no more space than any other late-generation Sturgeon sub. In fact, to make room for the spooks, most of Parche's torpedoes had been ditched. Now she carried just four live warshots, the minimum number any attack sub was allowed to carry on a mission.

It would take the spooks at least two weeks to sift electronically through the hundreds of lines running through the cable and choose which lines to record-and at what times-over the next year. The process relied on educated guesses and luck. Certain channels would probably he best in the summer months when the ice cleared from the Barents and the Soviets conducted naval exercises. Missile tests tended to be seasonal as well. But lines connected directly to headquarters could be active and profitably tapped year-round.

Some of the lines were unencoded, but many of them were encrypted to some degree. The spooks hoped to choose lines that the NSA would have a decent chance of decoding later. It also helped that the tap had evolved over the years. It weighed several tons, but miniaturization of the electronics and advances in recording technology now provided a greater recording capacity and some room for error.[16]

As all this was going on, a steady stream of Soviet ships and submarines continued to fill Parche's sonar screens. The activity got the crew members to talking. One man whispered that Parche was "very, very near Murmansk" and "really up against the Soviet coast." One chief found a more colorful way of describing their position to a young seaman. "This is so close you could look through a periscope and see people's faces on the beach if you came to the surface."

As they sat there, some of the men began to realize that no one had ever leveled with them about the dangers of this operation. As one man put it, "Here you've got one hundred some-odd guys willing to die, and they don't even know they're truly in a situation where they might."

Finally, the job was done. All Maurer had to do now was get his men out of there and get them home. The plan was to leave the immediate area of the tap and signal "mission accomplished" to a second U.S. submarine, which had been skulking nearby throughout Parche's operation. Had there been any indication that Parche was detected, it would have been this second sub's job to make a racket, become a decoy, and draw the heat.

Parche, of course, was maintaining strict radio silence, but she had been equipped with a special horn to send her signal. U.S. subs usually were wired for 60 megahertz, but Parche would signal at 50 megahertz, the Soviet standard. To the Soviets, it was hoped, the signal would sound like one of their own. To the men on board, the blast sounded like bongo drums. One quick beat on the bongos, and the message was sent. Parche waited for a reply, then headed for home.

For her feat, Parche received the Presidential Unit Citation, the highest award possible. Each man was given a certificate, with the presidential seal at the top and Jimmy Carter's signature on the bottom. It was an award that Halibut had won twice, Seawolf never.

"By virtue of the authority vested in me as President of the United States and as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States, I have today awarded THE PRESIDENTIAL UNIT CITATION (NAVY) FOR EXTRAORDINARY HEROISM TO USS PARCHE (SSN 683) for extraordinary heroism and outstanding performance in the conduct of a mission of vital importance to the National Security of the United States as a unit of the U.S. Pacific Fleet in 1979," the award read.

Buried in the hureaucratese that followed was one telling line. It praised Parche for operating "in the hostile environment of poorly charted ocean areas."

In 1980, Parche was scheduled to go back to the Barents tap, and Seawolf was scheduled to return to Okhotsk. But in February, a fire broke out on Seawolf during sea trials. A turbine generator blew up and began tossing balls of flame into the engine room while the sub was submerged. By the time Seawol f's crew could perform an emergency blow and surface, ten men had been overcome by black thick smoke. They were carried up to the deck and fresh air, and it was there they were photographed by a passerby. Instead of having a chance to win a PUC, to show the guys on Parche that Seawolf's men were just as good, they were awarded with a page 1 photo in a local newspaper captioned, "Seawolf Sons Basking in the Sun After Rigorous Sea Trials."

Seawolf went hack to dry dock for another year, and Parche again took her place on a run to Okhotsk in the summer. Parche also went back to the Barents that fall to plant a new tap and retrieve the first year's worth of recordings.

By now, Ronald Reagan was scoring big in the presidential campaign. Carter had been plagued by the hostage crisis in Iran. He also was hurt by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which killed any chance for ratification of the arms treaty he had just reached with Brezhnev. (Both of these events also led the U.S. sub force to step up surveillance of Soviet naval forces in the Indian Ocean.) Reagan was promising to get tough with the Soviets. To that end, he pledged to pour billions of dollars into rebuilding the military, and he put the Navy front and center in his plans. Painting the conventional picture of the Soviet Navy as increasingly bent on challenging the West in any sea-pretty much the opposite of what Haver believed might he happening when he briefed Carter-Reagan said he would expand the U.S. Navy to 600 ships from 450 ships to prevent the Soviets from snatching maritime superiority.

In fact, the Soviet fleet was growing. In November a U.S. satellite captured images of an enormous pile of steel and a newly enlarged dock at a Soviet shipyard. That and other evidence suggested that the Soviets might be building their first full-sized aircraft carrier. To many top Navy officials, the satellite images seemed to be proof that Rich Haver and other young analysts were wrong about the Soviet Navy pulling back, and that in fact the Soviets were still gearing up for battle in the open oceans. They might finally be ready to pour money into the kind of huge surface ships and supply vessels that they would need to create a true blue-water Navy. After all, aircraft carriers had always been used to project power outward, to sail to distant places and launch planes.

After his election, Reagan appointed John F. Lehman Jr., the campaign aide who had come up with the plan for the 600-ship fleet, as his Navy secretary. At only thirty-eight years old, Lehman was the youngest man in this century to hold the post. He was smart, quick, and outspoken about his hard-line stance.

"I believe that our former narrow margin of superiority is gone," Lehman warned Congress on February 6, 1981, just one day after he was sworn in. It didn't take long for him to earn a reputation as!'enfant terrible as he took control of the Navy in a way that no secretary had attempted in decades. Lehnian's plans included a radically new and aggressive naval strategy. He didn't talk much about what he expected the Soviets to do in a war. Instead, he wanted U.S. submarines, battleships, cruisers, and aircraft carriers to drive en masse right into the Barents and go after the Soviet surface and submarine fleets in their own waters. He was making, he declared, "a firm corn- mitment to go into the highest-threat areas and defeat the Soviet naval threat." Lehman became fond of describing Murmansk and the rest of the Kola Peninsula as "the most valuable piece of real estate on earth."

Soon, top admirals were grumbling that Lehman was a torpedo without a guidance system. Most liked his idea of a more aggressive strategy, but Lehman dismissed out of hand the protests of some admirals that it was suicide to drive aircraft carriers into the Barents where the Soviets could easily sink them with cruise missiles. He also shrugged off outside critics-academics and congressional staff members among them-who warned that threatening Soviet sea-based missiles too early in a war could backfire, prompting them to "use 'em or lose 'em."

This was the backdrop as Pentagon officials prepared to give Reagan his first briefing about submarine spy operations. It was scheduled for Friday, March 6, at 9:15 A.M., and was set to run 20 minutes. The luminaries who gathered in the wood-paneled Situation Room in the West Wing of the White House included Vice President George Bush, Chief of Staff James A. Baker III, Counselor Edwin Meese II and Richard V. Allen, the new national security adviser. Attending from the Pentagon were Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger; Admiral James D. Watkins, the vice chief of naval operations; Lehman, Haver, and Rear Admiral John L. Butts, now director of Naval Intelligence.

Weinberger and Watkins got things rolling by sketching the basics of the surveillance missions being run by regular attack subs. Then Butts stepped in to introduce Reagan to Seawolf, Parche and cabletapping. He made his presentation with a dramatic video and slide show that Lehman had told him would appeal to Reagan.

The president was, by all reports, mesmerized. Finally, he leaned over and asked his vice president, a former director of central intelligence, "Did you have something to do with this, George?"

Bush answered that some of these programs had run during his tenure at the CIA.

Then Rich Haver stepped in and, just as he had with Carter, began to describe how Naval Intelligence used the information the spy subs were collecting. Haver had slides too, but by now Reagan was itching for answers. He wanted to know if Haver thought the Soviets would be less willing to wage nuclear war now that they were facing him and his hard line in the White House. He also asked some of the same questions the analysts had been grappling with: How do the Soviets plan nuclear war? How do they train for it? How do they intend to fight it? Would a naval war go nuclear from day one, with Soviets using cruise missiles against aircraft carriers? And if it did, could it be contained at sea before anyone fired strategic ballistic missiles at the United States?

Again Haver succeeded in drawing a president into a dialogue. In a question and answer session that went on for nearly 15 minutes with Bush and Watkins fielding questions also, Haver explained the conventional view of war on the high seas and the long-held assumption that the Soviets would probably turn to tactical, short-range nukes early in those battles. He added that such a move had seemed likely to set off a broader nuclear war.

Then he offered some of the conclusions that his team of analysts had reached-that the Soviets appeared to be turning away from the conventional strategy and dedicating the bulk of their ships, attack subs and planes to protecting their missile subs in safe bastions close to home.

From here, Haver went on to plug Lehman's aggressive plan to confront those forces in Soviet waters. When Reagan seemed satisfied, Haver began to pack up the projector as Weinberger stepped in to carefully explain to the president what his role in the process would be, how he needed to sign off on all the sensitive espionage operations in advance. Weinberger took his time, talking slowly and very deliberately. He wanted to make sure that Reagan appreciated what was being asked of him.

Weinberger needn't have worried. Reagan was already hooked. Nobody had told him any of this when he was merely governor of California, home to the nation's most crucial spy subs. He had come to Washington still holding onto a view of the Navy built from equal parts of World War II fact and of World War II myth, the image of heroic men facing off against Japanese ships, their torpedoes sinking the enemy, dodging depth charges as they went along. This was an image dear to Reagan, and he loved to talk about how he played a submarine captain in the 1958 film Hellcats of the Navy.[17]

Reagan had a favorite story about those days, and he told it nowalbeit with only the details fit for screen-in Reagan's version, he effortlessly echoed commands whispered by a Navy officer and, with cameras rolling, set one of the nation's subs steaming out of San Diego in a Pacific sunset.

As Bush and Baker began trying to hustle Reagan along, the president was still talking about his experiences on the Hellcats set and his admiration for the submariners he met there. This briefing had already gone on for 45 minutes, more than twice as long as it had been scheduled to run. Reagan, however, was in no rush. Turning to Haver, the president asked, "Where do you get guys like this?"

"Sir, they're just Americans," Haver answered in his best for-thegipper style.

On that note, Reagan finally seemed ready to leave. It was clear he wanted Haver to keep trying to puzzle out Soviet strategy and that he had given his tacit approval for the next round of submarine spying missions.

All this occurred as Seawolf was ready to go to sea again. For the first time, the Navy could send both special projects boats out at the same time, in different directions to different seas.

Before Parche could leave for her 1981 run, however, Commander Peter John Graef, her new captain, ordered what he thought would be a routine drug screening. The last thing he expected was to nail nearly 15 percent of his crew for marijuana use-twenty-two crew members, including three officers. There was no debate. They were off the boat, and replacements were rushed in.

This was definitely not what Reagan had in mind during the briefing when he had asked Rich Haver where the Navy found "these guys," these superheroes of the cold war. Although, in retrospect, Haver's answer seemed far less corny. They were "just Americans" after all.

Staffing these boats had never been easy. Navy recruiters went through bizarre contortions to keep their secret and at the same time find men who wouldn't mind trespassing in Soviet seas for the purpose of cabletapping. As one young submariner described it, the recruitment process was more like an interrogation. Men in leisure suits brought potential projects men into smoky rooms and began demanding to know: Did the recruit ever use drugs? Ever get in trouble with the law? The questions were peppered with promises that the government had ways of learning every dirty detail. "If you ever jacked off behind the barn, we will find out about it," one kid was told.

Parche wasn't unique in her personnel problems, and the drug bust had intelligence officials worried. Seawolf's crew was disintegrating under the mounting frustrations of serving on a broken-down and cursed boat. The pressure inspired some of her crew to lose themselves in a marijuana haze. Some even proclaimed their drug use openly and loudly, just to get off of the Seawolf. Then there were Seawolf's isolationists, who were readying for the day when they would take singular stands against communism in mountaintop homes transformed into forts. These men had taken to going out to the mud flats near the base to practice with their non-Navy-issue assault rifles, blasting apart cans and at least one truck. One man sent a live round into his television. 'The rest of the crew, leery, sweaty, and exhausted, just looked on at the dopers and the gun fanatics.

Such tensions remained as Seawolf finally headed out toward Okhotsk. By now, Michael C. Tiernan had been the CO through three years of overhaul and tests. This was to be the first time he commanded the boat through an actual operation. A Seawolf crew that had once compared his predecessor, Charles R. MacVean, to Captain James T. Kirk on the Starship Enterprise now nicknamed Tiernan "Milquetoast." The men had tried to take him out to the Horse and Cow to loosen him up, but they didn't think it had helped.

Tiernan, in fact, was only slightly more popular than his new executive officer, J. Ashton Dare, whom the men referred to as "Jashton." If the men found Tiernan aloof, they found Jashton downright irritating. His father was an admiral, and it seemed to the men that he wasn't going to let anyone forget that. Worse for Jashton, he had replaced a crew favorite, Robert S. Holbrook, an officer who could chastise a man in the morning and redeem himself later that night by taking him out for a beer. Holbrook also had been the crew's good-luck charm. He had already survived an 85-degree dive on the diesel sub USS Chopper (SS-342), saved only when an enlisted man thought to throw her into reverse, driving her hack up toward the surface. Thereafter, Holbrook always wore a brass belt buckle adorned with Chopper's image, certain that it made him unsinkable. He had his men just as convinced.

As far as they were concerned, Dare had neither the mythology nor the charm to redeem himself. He was their favorite target as they looked for ways to fight boredom. On one test run, some of the men stole Dare's mattress and flushed it through the garbage chute and out of the boat. The XO somehow missed the joke.

In fact, humor was more than a little strained on this boat full of men who felt that they were being sent to Soviet waters in the equivalent of a Model T. By the time ice began forming on Seawolf's deck plates, morale was at an all-time low.

Things only got worse on station. Tiernan directed his crew to plant the sub next to the Soviet cable. The plan was to let Seawolf sit secure on bottom, balancing her bulk on two ski-like legs that the crew had taken to calling skegs. The skegs were a gift of imagination and technology, a safety device designed after that first terrible storm that had torn Halibut from her anchors. But as Seawolf tried to land with those skegs now, she came down hard right on the Soviet cable.

There was every chance that the fall had interrupted Soviet communications or sent a shot of static through the line, and there was every chance that the Soviets would send surface ships, blasting sonar, or repair crews to cone and investigate. But there was no sign of a Soviet search. By the time the tapping operation was completed, Tiernan decided to go ahead and finish a secondary operation. Seawol f was going to move further into Okhotsk, and she was going on another search for Soviet missile fragments. But just as it seemed certain that the Americans were going to survive their mistake, they came under assault-not from the Soviets, but from the sea itself.

Twin storms that had started hundreds of miles away, their winds swirling, were nearing Okhotsk. Beneath the sea, Seawolf sat too deep to put up an antenna, and the crew was unaware of the warnings flooding the airwaves about the cyclones moving up toward the Kuril Islands. The men didn't hear when naval command centers reported winds of S5 knots and swells leaping toward the sky. They didn't know when other craft were warned that the two storms had become one, a single, lethal typhoon.

Within days of the first warnings, thrashed air, bullet rains, and massive waves were combining to force their wrath below the surface, pounding down until Seawolf began to shudder. At first, the men believed they could easily weather the squall. Unlike surface mariners, submarine crews are trained to fear detection, depth charges, and torpedoes, but there is usually little to fear from storms. Run deep. That was the standard procedure. Submariners are indoctrinated from the start with the faith that the skies could open up all they like, winds could gust threatening all who skim the surface, but below, where dark and calm hold court, submarines reign.

Indeed, the 400 feet of water overhead, though shallow by submarine standards, would have been enough to frustrate most storms. But this typhoon was roiling even the depths. And for Seawolf, there was no going deeper. She would have to weather this out on the seabed.

Seawolf began rocking from side to side. Three divers were out, and they were being tossed. The rest of the crewmen, safer inside, were trying to act nonchalant. Squeezing past one another within Seawolf's cramped corridors, they offered comments about the storm as if they were discussing the weather back home. Still, the currents that were hitting Seawolf every twenty or thirty seconds were so violent that her skegs were lifting from the seabed. At first, the submarine rolled only a few degrees, then more. Objects inside went flying — with the submarine on bottom, nobody had thought to secure for heavy seas. Beauregard was knocked from his high perch in the torpedo room and fell to the deck with a resounding crash. For a moment the torpedomen feared their mascot, their favorite ceramic frog, would be erased from their ranks in an instant.With great relief they realized that only his stand was destroyed.

Outside the boat, the divers were losing their fight against the pull of the currents. One diver was sucked toward the rocking submarine and found himself beneath one of Seawolf's skegs. Something grabbed hold of him an instant later. Another diver? A lash of the current? Just as this man was about to he pinned, he was free.

Finally the divers were able to scramble into the unsteady shelter of the submarine. That was what Tiernan was waiting for. He signaled the end of the operation. He wanted his submarine in deep water. He wanted out of Okhotsk.

But Okhotsk was holding on. "Buddha," a reactor specialist who had earned his nickname for his size and despite his thick thatch of black hair, signaled the alarm first. He had been standing at a gauge for one of the heat exchangers that cycled cooled water before it went into the submarine's nuclear reactor. The temperature was not reading anywhere near correct levels. Something was clogging the system.

Checking valves, moving equipment, Buddha started yelling: "I've got sand in there, Jesus Christ!"

The nukes, those men who worked the reactor, came running, followed by Dare and Tiernan. They stood looking at a pile of sand. Seawolf's vents were sucking in muck, salt, the sea, and the seafloor into the cooling system. The storm began taking on new and terrible significance as they realized that the reactor was in danger of shutting down. Seawol f was at risk of losing all power.

Crewmen began checking other points where the submarine borrowed water from outside, cycled it through the boat, and cycled it back outside. Sand, little animals, snails, coral, and sea creatures had gotten into the generators, the main engines, the turbines, and the half-dozen or so critical areas on board. There were piles and heaps of the wet, partially living mass around the boat. No one was sure how much weight they had taken on as the wet mass was sucked in from Okhotsk's bottom. Worse, the sand was coming in because the seawater intake valves that should have been several feet above sea bottom were resting practically flat against it. Each time the storm rocked Seawolf, a little more sand was pumped over the skegs. The currents were forcing the sub to dig herself in. Somehow the engineers who designed those legs as safety devices had ignored the properties of currents that children learn about when they stand in the surf at the beach. Now, Seawolf's skegs were almost entirely buried. She was stuck.

Compartment by compartment, men began to fret. The machinist's mates knew that if the steam plant shut down, it could take a week to restart, if it restarted at all. The nukes worried that with the sand damage, the reactor might not start back up. The Seawolf was just not strong enough for this kind of a test.

No one, it seemed, was immune to the growing tension. An electrician's mate lost control and began yelling, screaming, crying. A medic was ordered to sedate him and send him to his rack. Others began to have chilling visions of blank epitaphs: somewhere lies this seaman, sent to do something in an unknown place and killed somehow in a war that didn't exist.

Seawolf was mired for nearly two days as the chiefs, the old salts who had ridden submarines for twenty years, joined forces with the junior officers. With Tiernan's approval they began trying anything they could think of. First they attempted to rev Seawolf's engines to see whether that would get her to pull up. That failed. Next they tried a controlled emergency blow, hoping the sudden loss of weight would send them floating out of the sand. It was dangerous-Seawolf might pull free, but she might also broach the surface, and that could mean detection and detection would mean a fight. Seawolf had few means of protection at her disposal. Most of her torpedo tubes had been used to store potatoes. There were still some torpedoes on board, but recent tests had proved them all but useless. Seawolf was the loudest thing in the water, so whenever she had launched a test dummy, its sonar guidance system turned the torpedo around and sent it hurtling back toward the sub.

Seawolf's only chance was to remain hidden as she freed herself. Carefully, the crew began to blow ballast, slowly, steadily, gently, first from the bow, then from the stern. Nothing. Try again, someone ordered tensely. A little more water this time, with the anchors down to prevent an accidental flight to the surface. Again nothing.

Another try, and the submarine seemed to move slightly, but only slightly. It was like trying to get a pickup truck out of a rut, rocking back and forth, hoping sooner or later to be able to push it out. But with sand still being sucked into the machinery, the men were in a race: would they get out before their systems shut down? All through the boat, men were trying to blow the sand out, but the submarine was sucking in more than they could discard. A key reactor system was already down to less than 50 percent efficiency, maybe as low as 35 percent.

Somebody came up with the idea of cutting loose the anchors that were there to steady the Seawol f as she sat on her skegs. Anchors might save the sub from broaching, but right now the two concrete mushrooms were also weighing her down. The order was given to cut them loose.

Seawolf began to rise. The main engines were being badly overworked, revving until it sounded as though a drill was whirring through the boat. Then there was a scratchy sound, more of a shriek really, loud enough that some of the men wondered whether their hearing would be forever affected.

The skegs remained partially buried. The gondola under the Seawolf's belly, the huge "clamshell" that was built to hold missile pieces, partially ripped away. But Seawolf was free.

As she limped home, she was dangerously loud in the water, louder than she had ever been. There was something dangling from below, a piece of skeg, the gondola. Whatever it was, it was making a lot of noise in the water as Seawolf made a slow race for the Kuril Islands and out to open ocean. Crucial systems parts worn down by sand were also grinding and seemed ready to give out any moment.

Then, somewhere in the Pacific, not far from Okhotsk, she was detected. A Soviet boat, probably a trawler, began pinging with active sonar. There was no way to outrun the trawler-the submarine was too hurt-and no way to hide, because whatever she was dragging banged against her hull even when she was sitting stock still. Any speeds faster than 6 knots brought a cacophony of sound, a drum section gone wild.

The Soviet pings rang through the submarine, adding to the din. The ringing would not stop. The Soviets chased, giving up the pursuit after only about twenty-four hours-for reasons that may have been as simple as a trawler captain's whim.

When Seawol f finally pulled into a closed dry dock, the men could see the damage. There were dents in her superstructure and pieces torn off as if she had suffered depth charges. The bilges were still full of sand, hundreds of pounds of it, though a significant amount had been moved to the men's bunks, jars of gray, grainy souvenirs.

There were no awards given for this mission, no formal recognition of the men's brush with death. A cruise hook, crafted much like a high school yearbook, mentioned the ordeal in only one cryptic cartoon memorializing the first and last leap taken by Beauregard the frog.

Back in port, the men trying to repair Seawol f weren't told how sand got into the diesel engines, how it got into the lobe oil system and ate up all of the bearings. Officials in Washington had far more serious fears. Following Seawolf's misadventure, satellites uncovered evidence that the Soviets had found the cable tap in Okhotsk. Nobody was sure how, whether the operation had been compromised by Seawolf's drop onto the cable or by a mole within the crew or, unthinkable as it seemed, among the few intelligence officers who knew about the taps in the first place.

But clearly it was crucial that someone discover how the Soviets had puzzled out one of the most secret U.S. missions.