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

Twelve — Trust But Verify

If the cold war wasn't quite over, it was definitely beginning to wane. Reykjavik had been the start, and both sides seemed to sense it. Even as the U.S. Navy gave chase to a cluster of Soviet Victor III attack subs off the East Coast in 1987, and as U.S. subs continued their pace of spy missions, something was changing, something that was at first almost intangible.

To he sure, Gorbachev continued to bristle about Star Wars and blew up in frustration at nearly every meeting with Shultz, at least once because he was convinced that the American people would never forgive Soviet acts of aggression dating back to the 1960 shoot-down of Gary Powers in his U-2 spy plane. But these tirades were almost all over the failure to reach a peace soon enough, or deep enough. Just two years after the paranoid reign of Andropov, the Soviet Union was saying it had had enough.

In fact, in May 1987 the Soviets announced a formal military doctrine-one aimed simply at defending their homeland. That December, Reagan and Gorbachev met in Washington, D.C., for the first follow-up summit to Reykjavik. They finally signed a treaty to eliminate an entire class of nuclear arms, the intermediate-range nuclear forces. It was the angry impasse over a similar INF treaty that, in 1983, had made some top Soviet officials fear that the United States was considering a first strike. Now, as both sides agreed to sign, there was only a shadow of the old hostilities.

"Doveryai, no proveryai-trust but verify," Reagan said, evoking an old Russian maxim at the signing.

"You repeat that at every meeting," Gorbachev teased, chuckling.

"I like it," Reagan agreed.

Who could have imagined Ronald Reagan kidding around with a Soviet leader? These two men were so ebullient that Gorbachev stopped his motorcade on the way to the White House so he could shake hands with the crowd. Reagan answered at the next summit by allowing Gorbachev to introduce him to the Soviet people milling about Red Square. Georgi Arbatov, the director of the Soviet Union's Institute for the Study of the USA and Canada, put it all into words: "We are going to do something terrible to you. We are going to deprive you of an enemy."

Still, while Gorbachev and Reagan had set the tone, it was going to take both sides some time to accept the enormity of what was happening, to believe that this friendship could last and that the cold war was really coming to an end. That much was clear as the top men in uniform began holding summits of their own.

Admiral William J. Crowe Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, met Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, the chief of staff of the Soviet armed forces. The marshal and the Joint Chiefs mixed socially. Crowe took Akhromeyev on a guided tour of a U.S. aircraft carrier. They even met in the Pentagon's "Tank," the secure room where top U.S. military men planned their moves against the Soviets. Still, as Akhromeyev sat with the Americans talking about newfound friendship, he could not disguise his frustrations over U.S. sub spying and tracking operations, which seemed unchanged from cold war days.

"You, you're the problem," he blurted out at Admiral Carlisle A. H. Trost, now the chief of Naval Operations. Not only were U.S. subs still lurking off Soviet waters, but Akhromeyev was convinced that he could track all of his own subs by simply following the American P-3 Orion sub-hunters in the air. It was a stunning revelation of just how effective U.S. antisubmarine efforts continued to be.

Trost simply tried to calm him down, saying that U.S. strategy was not intended to threaten anyone. But even as he faced Akhromeyev, Trost realized he was being given a took deep inside the Soviet psyche, and what he saw was different from what he had long believed. It had once all seemed so clear to him that Soviet forces were designed for aggression. But now Trost could see how strongly Akhromeyev believed that he had only been part of an effort to defend his country, a country surrounded by enemies, by NATO ships, submarines, and airborne sub-hunters.

Gradually, these men from such different worlds were breaking through to one another. They were connecting and realizing just what a shared experience the cold war had been. One telling moment came when Admiral Kinnaird McKee-one of the Navy's most successful sub captains, Whitey Mack's chief nemesis hack in the Lapon days, the man who had later become Rickover's successor as the submarine force's nuclear czar-sat swapping sea stories with a top Soviet admiral at a luncheon at the Pentagon. Also there was Rich Haver. When he was introduced as a Naval Intelligence analyst, Haver heard the Soviet translator mutter to his admiral, K. A. Makarov, something about "CIA."

The tense moment seemed to pass as McKee sat with his guest of honor, blowing the old ballast tanks. McKee reminisced about his days as captain of the USS Dace. At the time, Makarov had his own command of a 671-project sub, the kind, he pointed out helpfully, the Americans called "Victor." Then Makarov let slip that he had been near the Dace on one of its patrols, that he had known it was the Dace even then.

"I wonder who trailed whom," Haver said, knowing quite well that it was McKee's spotting and trailing of the first Victor during its sea trials in 1968 that had helped launch the admiral's career. Makarov gave Haver an icy stare and continued staring as he offered his answer through his interpreter: "Now is not the time to discuss that."

But that look said more. It seemed to acknowledge, "I know who trailed whom, and it wasn't me." These were old wounds, and Haver had supplied the salt. He had reminded the Soviets of the long years when they were behind, when they could have been called downright inept. They may have closed the gap in the final years of the cold war, but that hadn't eased the humiliation. Haver had broken a rule of this special glasnost, of this still-new and uneasy openness among military men, and when lunch was over, Makarov made that clear. "Tell this young man that when veterans get together, it doesn't matter who won or lost," he said through his translator. "It's enough that both survived."

Although Makarov's use of the past tense may have been a bit premature, it certainly fit the Soviet perspective. After that flurry of activity off the American coast in 1986 and 1987, Soviet submarines had been pulled back home. On the U.S. side, however, it was business almost as usual. Spy subs had gotten more cautious. Improvements in sonar and the electronics-intercept gear meant they no longer had to go quite as close to Soviet subs or shore to capture intelligence. (Los Angeles subs weren't as maneuverable in tight spots anyway.) The pace of operations had not let up. For instance, Submarine Squadron 11 in San Diego alone sent eight of its ten nuclear attack submarines out on surveillance operations in 1988, keeping up with the rate set during the height of the cold war. The USS Salt Lake City (SSN-716) operated for nearly seven months in the northern Pacific, followed by the USS Portsmouth (SSN-707), the USS Pintado (SSN-672), the USS La Jolla (SSN-701), and others.

The pace of operations was fueled by signs that the Soviets had finally learned to build subs as powerful and, more important, nearly as silent as American subs. There was a colossal irony to all of this: just as the Soviets had finally learned to construct first-class submarines, they were running out of money to build and operate them. But that realization had yet to filter down through the ranks on either side.

And so, out on Mare Island the pace of special projects operations didn't let up much. Seawolf had been retired in 1987, and Parche had gone into overhaul so that she could be modified to handle a wider array of potential projects. She was cut in half to fit in a 100-foot section that would hold new sophisticated equipment for cable-tapping and gear to allow her to retrieve objects from the ocean floor as Seawolf had. The overhaul was scheduled to take several years, but even so, the United States continued cable-tapping without pause, having readied Parche's replacement, the Richard B. Russell, named after the senator whose name had once been synonymous with a wink and a nod and nearly blank-check acceptance of all intelligence operations.

From 1987 through 1990, the Russell collected one award for each trip to the Barents-one Presidential Unit Citation and three Navy Unit Commendations. Her missions went on as Reagan left office in early 1989 and Bush came in, as Bush and Gorbachev picked up where Reagan and Gorbachev had left off, and even after Bush wrote privately to Gorbachev offering to help the Soviets retrieve one of their submarines that had been lost in the Norwegian Sea.[22]

Later that year, Trost was invited to Leningrad, the honored guest of the Soviet Navy. On this trip, a month before the Berlin Wall crum bled, he was given a firsthand look at how rapidly Soviet submarine capabilities were dwindling. The Soviets were having trouble keeping its subs at sea, paying for maintenance and running enough operations to train its crews. Trost was stunned by the changes that had taken place since he last visited the Soviet Union in 1971, a time when he knew his room had been bugged and he and his cohorts followed, so overtly in fact, that the Navy men had stopped in their tracks to offer to tell their Soviet shadow where they were headed. Now there seemed to be no spies. Instead, there were frank discussions, admiral to admiral, about the difficulties of keeping a navy running, about the futility of nuclear warfare. Indeed, Trost got his first look at Soviet submarine construction and the problems facing Soviet commanders: they saw subs on which sometimes only the officers spoke Russian and conscripts from the republics were so ill trained that only the officers could manage much of the critical maintenance necessary to keep the boats at sea. But perhaps the most telling moment occurred when Trost and the top Soviet admiral, Vladimir N. Chernavin, began joking, or half-joking, that their fates were linked. If either side failed to maintain an adequate-size navy, the other would have a terrible time justifying his defense expenditures. The world was changing from beneath them almost as fast as East and West Berliners had torn down the Wall with hammers, rocks, and their bare hands.

By now, top State Department officials had begun to worry about anything that could undermine Gorbachev as he continued to move toward closer relations with the United States. Their concern fell on the Russell cable-tapping mission that was scheduled for when Gorbachev and Bush were to meet again. In the end, the timing of Russell's trip was changed.

But one changed mission was not necessarily enough. Some diplomatic officials worried that the intelligence community was adapting too slowly from its long-held views of the Soviet Union. There was no doubt that after forty years the nation's spies were reluctant to be deprived of their enemy. What would happen to the intelligence agencies when nobody cared about the measurements of weaponry, of force? What would happen in a world when the most crucial information came not from covert efforts but from the Cable News Network and its twenty-four-hour reports about the sweeping social changes?

That the submarine force faced these questions with concern and some resentment was evident when retired and current officers met at the annual convention of the Naval Submarine League in June 1990. Around the world, shards of the Berlin Wall were being sold as souvenirs, but within the convention halls at a Radisson Hotel outside Washington, D.C., it was certain that nobody would be crying out for a "peace dividend," not a single man would eye the submarine fleet with a scowl on his face, a calculator in hand, figuring the myriad social programs that could be funded even in one boat's stead. The specter of the bean counters, however, loomed large, even in their absence.

The man who was now secretary of the Navy, H. Lawrence Garrett III, stood before the assemblage and warned that "budget-cutters are sharpening their knives, even as we speak." He failed to mention that the sharpest knife was coming from General Colin Powell, who had succeeded Crowe as chairman of the joint Chiefs of Staff and had just announced that the military budget would probably have to he cut by 25 percent over the next several years. Garrett, taking a far harder line, went on to dismiss any effect that perestroika and glasnost might have on the game of submarine spying. "The logic of nuclear deterrence has not changed just because the Soviet leader routinely presses the flesh on Pennsylvania Avenue," he thundered.

Other speakers were more moderate but still called for prudence and skepticism when it came to the Soviet Union. William H. J. Manthorpe Jr., then deputy director of Naval Intelligence, posed the question that was quickly becoming the rallying cry of the submarine force: "What will be the intentions of the Soviet leadership of the future? Can we depend on those intentions being benign? The answer, of course, is: No, I would not bet my country's security on it."

Before long, though, something happened that convinced even the most hard-line skeptics that the Soviet Union was no longer the most likely candidate to drag the United States into a war. Almost as if he realized that there was room on center stage for a new villain, Saddam Hussein stepped forward from Iraq and overnight annexed Kuwait. The United States had a new reason to fight, and this time it stood shoulder to shoulder with the Soviet Union, issuing an unprecedented joint statement denouncing the "blatant transgression of basic norms of civilized conduct" and calling for an arms embargo against Iraq. Secretary of State James A. Baker III would later proclaim that this was "The Day the Cold War Ended."

When war finally broke out in the Persian Gulf in January 1991, submarines played only a bit part. Still, the conflict dramatized the need to refocus defense efforts on regional conflicts, and with an eye to ensuring its place in future conflicts, the submarine force highlighted the role it had played against Iraq for all it was worth. The USS Louisville (SSN-724) and the USS Pittsburgh (SSN-720) together had fired a dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles against inland targets in Iraq. Other attack submarines stood guard for cargo ships in the Mediterranean, protecting vast quantities of war supplies. A string of subs from the United States and its allies-Turkey, Greece, Spain, Britain, France, and Italy-were positioned from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Suez Canal.

The war gave the sub force a chance to show its versatility, to show that it could do more than just chase Soviet subs and shadow Soviet ports. It also gave submariners themselves a sense that they could create a new mission-a comforting realization given the fact that any lingering doubts about Soviet intentions were soon to be wiped out by one dramatic event after another. Bush and Gorbachev announced a new deal to cut strategic stockpiles by one-third. Boris Yeltsin rescued Gorbachev from a reactionary coup, signaling the last failed gasp of the Communist hard-liners. And in a richly symbolic move, Bush also grounded the Strategic Air Command bombers that had been on nearconstant alert for thirty-two years.

The Pentagon began rethinking the nation's military strategy. The sub force knew it was going to have to re-create itself-just as it had been forced to do after World War II. It needed to find a new job and new enemies. There was no question that for much of the cold war submarines-missile and attack boats taken together-could stake claim to being the nation's most critical naval weapons. That made sense when the chief enemy had a fleet that was nearly as formidable. But the 1990s were bringing fundamental change, and it was already clear that the submarine was bound to fall from the pantheon. Like the clipper ships in their day, subs had been perfectly suited to their time, and they had so dominated that they defined an epoch.

For its part, the Navy started simply at first, writing new rules in mid-1991 legislating greater distances and caution for U.S. subs trailing Soviet subs. Then the Office of Naval Intelligence recommended that the number of missions off the Soviet coast be cut dramatically. No longer would the U.S. Navy try to maintain "cast-iron" coverage of the largest Soviet naval bases. No longer would one surveillance sub follow in the wake of another to Soviet waters. No longer would they keep constant watch, waiting for something-anything-interesting to happen.

Not even the vaunted special projects subs were sacred any longer. Desperate to update their fleet of spy satellites, the CIA and the Air Force began to eye the hundreds of millions of dollars still being invested in those subs. Because both Russell and Parche were in the shipyard throughout 1991, neither doing any missions, the rival agencies were able to suggest that two special projects boats might be too much of a luxury.

The process of attrition was stopped short by the surprising dissolution of the Soviet Union. On Christmas Day 1991, the Commonwealth of Independent States, a loose federation of republics, formally replaced the Soviet Union. Soon after, reports began coming out of a meeting of five thousand Russian military officers that painted a portrait of confusion, anger, and abject frustration. Members of the now-shattered Soviet Navy yanked the old hammer-and-sickle standards from their ships and began flying the flag of St. Andrew, which had marked Russian ships since the days of Peter the Great. Now U.S. Naval Intelligence desperately wanted to know who would get control of the Soviet missile subs and how they would be deployed under the new regimes.

Renewed surveillance had its price. On February 11, 1992, the USS Baton Rouge (SSN-689) collided with a Russian Sierra-class boat, among the newest and quietest to come out of the Soviet shipyards. Baton Rouge was tracking the Sierra near the 12-mile limit off Murmansk when the American commander lost his contact, which then struck Baton Rouge from below. Neither sub was damaged much, and nobody was hurt. But the incident was embarrassing.

Yeltsin quickly complained, and Baker met with him in Moscow to keep things calm. The next day, in an unprecedented move, the Pentagon publicly announced that the collision had occurred, and the Russian Navy began to complain publicly that the United States was still operating too close to its waters.

In the end, this embarrassment was what accelerated the shift in submarine surveillance away from Russia. The president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, chaired by retired Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, examined the special projects program. Shortly thereafter, Naval Intelligence was told that the board had decided that there was no longer any need for more than one special projects sub and that if the Navy was going to keep tapping underwater cables, then maybe it was time to find some cables in other parts of the world.

U.S. attack subs had already handled reconnaissance off countries like Lebanon and Libya, and in the mid-1980s two old missile subs had been converted to carry SEALs. The USS John Marshall (SSN- 611) had bobbed around in the Mediterranean for two months with fifty SEALs aboard during one crisis in Lebanon in 1989, waiting if needed to rescue hostages or mount a retaliatory strike.

Now as part of the Navy's new "From the Sea" military strategy, subs would ride shotgun for aircraft carriers and cruisers and take orders from task force commanders riding on those vessels. But the submarine force would also continue to lurk unseen near potential arenas of conflict and come up with the intelligence to "prepare the battlefield," before the task forces were ever called in. The term had been borrowed from the Army, but in this case it meant sending subs out two, three, four or more years before any anticipated conflicts to learn more about nations that loomed as potential foes, to determine their weaknesses, and to pave the way for U.S. victories in conflicts that would have fewer casualties because of these undersea efforts.

Iran, for instance, had already taken delivery of the first of three "Kilo" diesel submarines-silent and highly advanced boats built in Russia. A top Iranian admiral had boasted that he intended to use these subs to gain control of the Strait of Hormuz, the entrance to Persian Gulf ports and the starting point for about one-sixth of the world's oil. That was enough to send the USS Topeka (SSN-754) to the Persian Gulf to observe the Kilo's arrival in November 1992. It was typical of the new era of reconnaissance missions.

The new spy missions raised no agonizing debates at the National Security Council or within the White House, which was still approving all sub reconnaissance operations on a monthly basis. Still, there were accusations from Capitol Hill that the sub force was merely inventing enemies to keep itself employed. The Navy's answer was simple: some of the other targets had existed for years, and it was only the collapse of the Soviet Union that had offered the luxury of time and resources to allow subs to do a job they should have been doing all along. The enemies might he comparatively unsophisticated-an Iranian Kilo running on diesel power can't really be compared to the high-speed Akulas the Soviets sent out in the later years of the cold war. But the U.S. Navy would still need to know how the Iranians would operate the Kilos, would still need to find their blind spots. "Can you imagine the embarrassment to the U.S. Navy if the Kilos sank the USS America?" said one high-ranking Navy official. Pausing, he added, "Not on my watch."

The shift to these new missions was well under way when President Bill Clinton took office in early 1993. But as he and his administration laid plans for his first summit with Yeltsin, scheduled for the first week of April, they got hit by what seemed to he an anachronistic and unwelcome blast from the past.

On March 20, the USS Grayling (SSN-646) collided with a Soviet missile sub in the Barents Sea. Grayling had been shadowing the Russian sub 105 miles north of Murmansk, smack in the middle of the Northern Fleet's training range. The Russians claimed that their sub had been moving for more than an hour at a steady speed, course, and depth when Grayling left a huge dent in their starboard how. Nobody was hurt.

The incident was everything the State Department had been worrying about since the final days of Reagan's tenure. Yeltsin was in the midst of a political crisis in Moscow. News that his friends within the United States were still sending submarines tooling about Russia's most sensitive ports and bases wasn't going to boost his popularity.

At first, the Pentagon said Grayling had been trailing one of Russia's newest missile boats, a Delta IV, but the Russians insisted that Grayling had been hot on the trail of a Delta IIi, a class of subs that dated back to the late 1970s. This provoked more than a few stinging comments from other submariners, all along the lines that the Navy already had so much information on the Delta Ills that "we could build one from the hull up."

Clinton was furious, and so were his aides. In exasperation, one senior administration official complained of the Navy's leaders: "One wonders if they've read the newspapers."

The Russian defense ministry issued an angry statement expressing "great concern." It was one thing to take such risks during the cold war, but now? As Rear Admiral Valery Aleksin, the chief navigator, put it, "We walk on the razor edge. Once, this hunt will end up in a disaster. I am sure today, too, that if such a practice doesn't stop, the disaster is inevitable."

Clinton offered Yeltsin a formal apology and smoothed things over with him at the start of the summit in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he also pledged $1.6 billion in aid to support Yeltsin's reforms. Declaring the collision "regrettable," Clinton said, "I don't want it to ever happen again." He ordered a review of both the incident and the policies "of which the incident happened to be an unintended part."

That last part of Clinton's promise worried the Navy. There needed to be damage control, and fast. Rear Admiral Edward D. Sheafer Jr., who was now the director of Naval Intelligence, along with the captain who coordinated the submarine reconnaissance program, prepared a detailed briefing for top officials, including Clinton's new national security adviser, Anthony Lake, and his deputy, Samuel Berger; Strobe Talbott, the deputy secretary of State; and nearly everybody, it seemed, within the office of Secretary of Defense Les Aspin. The Navy team stressed that submarine spying had indeed changed with the times. Now, only 25 percent of the missions were directed toward Russian waters. The remaining 75 percent had turned to Middle Eastern waters to spy on Iran and enforce the economic embargo against Iraq, to the Adriatic to help seal off Bosnia from Western arms shipments, to the waters off of Haiti to enforce an arms embargo there and to monitor potential threats in the Far East. Finally the submariners marched out their new rallying cry, the one about "preparing the battlefields" around the globe.

It was a briefing as good as any offered up during the cold war, one that showed how quickly the submarine force had reinvented itself. By the time Sheafer and his staff were done, even they were astonished. Here they had thought the Grayling collision might sink their program, and instead, the Naval Intelligence team ended up chortling that the collision "saved our bacon." In their desperation, they did such an impressive job of touting the sub force that several administration officials were practically cheering, saying things such as, "Goddamn, it's a free ocean," and, "There's no prohibition against being outside another country's territorial waters." High administration officials who might never have focused on submarines and submarine spying were impressed that the Navy had changed so much without having to be dragged away from its old foe. The Navy even got the go-ahead to keep watching the Russians, albeit at this greatly reduced pace, as long as the reconnaissance was done more cautiously and judiciously.

Since then, the submarine force has fared relatively well under Clinton. Perhaps his biggest favor has been keeping alive the Seawol f pro gram: Clinton agreed to build three of the mammoth $2.5 billion attack subs rather than halt the program at one, as Bush had tried to do. Clinton said he was doing that to prevent the industrial base that builds submarines from shriveling and dying altogether. There was opposition from normally hawkish Republicans, who described the Seawolf as a cold war relic.

Clinton also okayed a plan to build another new class of attack submarines, one smaller and cheaper than the Seawolf. Quieter and much more versatile than the Los Angeles subs, this new class, known first as "the New Attack Submarine," or NSSN, and now the Virginia class, is designed for the array of new missions in shallow, regional waters. Clinton agrees that the Navy will need new subs after the turn of the century to replace some of the aging Los Angeles vessels. His support has taken some of the sting out of a dramatic downsizing of the force. From a high of ninety-eight in the late 1980s, the number of attack subs had fallen to sixty-six by 1998 and is now expected to dwindle to fifty early in the next century and even further as the Los Angeles subs are retired. The fleet of nuclear missile subs, which are still circling quietly in the oceans, will dwindle to ten to fourteen boats from a onetime high of forty-one.

The Navy is asking Congress for the cash to build the new subs and is arguing that they will be capable of operating not only near Third World countries but also up against Russian shores. The Seawolf is said to be as much as thirty times quieter than the early Los Angelesclass subs that came out in the 1970s, and ten times quieter than even the newest LA-class subs. Both Seawolf and the Virginia class will be especially useful for the new missions closer in to shores and for assisting in conflicts on land. They will carry Tomahawk missiles, be equipped with sonar designed to be especially useful in the shallows, and they will be configured to carry detachments of Navy SEALs and other special forces. The Navy also has been pouring money into creating underwater drones-and even small pilotless aircraft-that could be controlled by these submarines and swim out ahead to look for mines or fly out to do surveillance.

The subs in use now are also being upgraded with new microprocessing technologies to enable them to better communicate a variety of intelligence to commanders of task force battle groups, including email and photographs-even video-taken through their periscopes. This same technology is also likely to help subs with some of the other new missions the Navy has taken on since the end of the cold war. Subs have occasionally tipped the Coast Guard to suspicious trawlers in the Caribbean that have turned out to he carrying shipments of illegal drugs. And subs have been alerting surface ships to freighters suspected of trying to make illicit shipments of arms and other cargo in violation of U.S. embargoes.

Still, the U.S. sub force remains most concerned with countering the threat from other submarines, including new models of both diesel and nuclear boats. Russia has been supplying advanced Kilo subs to Iran and China. Even some Western nations, such as Germany, have been exporting advanced diesel subs to Third World countries. In addition, the Russians continue to view the submarine as the most important vessel in their Navy, and they have kept improving the Akulas, their quietest and most sophisticated nuclear attack subs. (There are still significant flaws in Russian technology. According to Naval Intelligence officials, the latest Akulas are very quiet below 10 knots, but they develop audible knocks at speeds above that and become easy to detect.) The Russians also have started to build an even more advanced replacement, known as the Severodvinsk class, which some U.S. officials fear could he quieter than the improved Los Angeles subs. When and if a proposed START II treaty is finally ratified by the Russian Durna, the bulk of Russian nuclear might will shift to the sea. As long as Russia still has the world's second most powerful sub force-as long as "The Bear Still Swims," as Navy briefers like to say-it needs to be watched, though now it has little money to send its subs to sea.

Clinton has agreed to continue the limited surveillance operations off of Russia, and his approvals have resulted in a few lonely sentinels lurking off Vladivostok and Murmansk, at least at times when the Navy has reason to believe the Russians might be engaging in an exercise or testing new equipment. It also is with Clinton's nod that the special projects spy program has continued, although its focus has shifted away from Russia. Government officials say that one of the special projects subs-probably Russell in 1992-went back to the Barents to retrieve the tap pods after the Soviet Union collapsed. Russell went cable tapping in other parts of the world before she was retired in nlid-1993. That's when Parche came back from her long overhaul, earning two more Presidential Unit Citations, in 1993 and 1994, and a string of Navy Unit Commendations. All told, Parche has now won at least seven PUCs, by far the most of any ship in Navy his tory. Details of exactly where Parche is going now have been tightly held, even more so than any of her cold war efforts, but those awards never would have been given had Parche not continued to pioneer new and dangerous missions. She can still tap cables, and since her refit, she can also retrieve military hardware off the ocean floor.

The Navy, it is clear, is also determined to hold on to her. When the rash of post-cold war base closings rang the end of the Mare Island Naval Shipyard in 1994, Parche was moved to Bangor, Washington, where she is the only attack sub to moor at a major Trident missilesub base. In 1995, 1996, and 1997, public records show that Parche continued to win Navy Unit Commendations. And the Navy has pushed her special technology forward and could even be using unmanned drones to swim out from Parche and handle much of the tasks of cable-tapping without risking her crew's lives.

Her targets are easy to guess at and no doubt reflect the Navy's broader intelligence concerns. Iran took possession of its third Kilo in January 1997. The cover of the 1997 issue of Worldwide Submarine Challenges, a Naval Intelligence annual, pictures a Chinese submarine and crew. Inside is a running litany of nations that present a potential threat, including two Asian nations, China and North Korea. China not only used one of its Kilos in highly threatening exercises off Taiwan in 1996 but fired land missiles as warning shots, forcing Clinton to send U.S. aircraft carriers to ensure that no attack took place. The Chinese are also using Russian technology to develop their own fleet of modern nuclear missile subs, and they have been testing land-based ballistic missiles with ranges long enough to reach U.S. shores. Chinese test missiles fired into the oceans would be invaluable to the United States if they were retrieved. Finally, concerns about North Korea have escalated greatly. The country repeatedly has used diesel subs to try to infiltrate commandos into South Korea.

Parche is still out there, as are other attack submarines bent on spying. The program that began with the first chill of the cold war continues.