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

Notes

This hook is based primarily on several hundred interviews we conducted with submariners, government officials, and intelligence officials, most of whom we cannot name. We do use names where we can. We also relied on many sources of public information to verify our facts and put them into historical context. Among other things, we consulted declassified patrol schedules of the subs in Navy archives, dug up published Naval Intelligence reports, and read numerous articles and books.

Throughout the hook, we relied on several standard reference works for basic information about the history, size, and capabilities of different classes of submarines. Among them were various editions of Guide to the Soviet Navy and The Ships and Aircraft of the U.S. Fleet, both written by the well-known naval analyst Norman Polmar and published by the Naval Institute Press in Annapolis, Maryland. We also consulted various editions of Jane's Fighting Ships and other publications of the authoritative British company Jane's Information Group Limited.

For a more detailed understanding of submarine tactics and technology, we also relied on Norman Friedman, Submarine Design and Development (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1984); Richard Compton-Hall, Sub Versus Sub: The Tactics and Technology of Underwater Warfare (New York: Orion Books, 1988); and Norman Polmar, The American Submarine (Annapolis, Md.: Nautical and Aviation Publishing Company of America, 1983). Handy resources for most submarine hull numbers were the United States Submarine Data Book, prepared by the Submarine Force Library and Museum in Groton, Connecticut, and a list of all nuclear-powered submarines distributed by Electric Boat Company, a division of General Dynamics Corporation. We obtained records of the awards granted to individ ual submarines from the official Navy awards office at the Navy Yard in Washington, D.C.

Much of the history of submarines we cite came from The Ultimate Naval Weapon-Its Past, Present, and Future by Drew Middleton (Chicago: Playboy Press, 1976). Chapters 1–4 were invaluable for their insight into the history of submarines, as was Friedman's book and Polmar's The American Submarine.

Main interviews: Rafael C. Benitez, Harris M. "Red" Austin, and other crew members of USS Cochino.

In various parts of this chapter, we also drew on the following government documents, articles, books, and other sources:

Jan Breemer's Soviet Submarines: Design, Development, and Tactics (London: Jane's Information Group Limited, 1989) provides a good description of the advanced German snorkel submarines and how they were divided among the Soviet Union and the Western Allies after World War II. The changes involved in converting America's fleet submarines into snorkel boats such as the Cochino and the Tusk are described in Polmar's The American Submarine and in a "Welcome Aboard" brochure, USS Tusk, in the Tusk file at the Ships History Branch of the Naval Historical Center, Washington, D.C.

The U.S. Navy's early fears that the Soviets would build a large fleet of advanced snorkel subs are chronicled in an article by Breemer entitled "The Submarine Gap: Intelligence Estimates 1945–1955," in Navy International 91, no. 2 (February 1986): 100–105. Breemer notes that U.S. intelligence began receiving reports as early as 1948 about Soviet test launches of missiles from the decks of submarines (Soviet Submarines, pp. 88–89). Some of this information comes from declassified issues of the ON] Review, a fascinating internal magazine published each month by the Office of Naval Intelligence from 1945 through 1962. These publications are available at the Operational Archives Branch, Naval Historical Center.

Information about Operation Kayo comes from "The Reminiscences of Rear Admiral Roy S. Benson," an oral history set down in 1984 and quoted with the permission of Paul Stillwell, the director of history (reference and preservation) at the U.S. Naval Institute, Annapolis, Maryland. It is part of a large collection of oral histories of former naval officers that Stillwell and others have put together. Retired Admiral Robert L. J. Long, a former vice chief of Naval Operations and commander in chief of U.S. forces in the Pacific, first mentioned Operation Kayo to us. As a young officer, he served on the USS Corsair and was detached before it accompanied Cochino on the ill-fated mission.

Deck logs for the USS Sea Dog and the USS Black fin, on file at the National Archives, Suitland Records Center, Suitland, Maryland, show that both made deployments from Pearl Harbor to areas off Alaska's Aleutian Islands in May and June of 1948. Lawrence Savadkin, a World War II submarine hero who was the executive officer of the Sea Dog, described the intelligence goals of their missions in an interview.

In addition to extensive interviews with Benitez and Austin, we drew parts of our account of the Cochino's final mission and sinking from several documentary sources. The most comprehensive was the declassified version of the Cochino patrol report filed by Commander Benitez on September 8, 1949, which is available at the Operational Archives Branch of the Naval Historical Center. Excerpts from the report also were included in "The Loss of the Cochino," ONI Review (February 1950): 57–66. The Cochino's daily deck logs were lost when it sank, but the logs from the Tusk, the Corsair, and the USS Toro are on file at the Suitland Records Center.

The loss of the Cochino made front-page headlines in most large American newspapers in 1949. One of the most detailed articles we reviewed was James D. Cunningham, "Tears and Smiles Greet Cochino and Tusk Survivors at Sub Base; Officers Give Details on Tragedy," New London (Connecticut) Day, September 8, 1949. And a Navy public relations officer, Commander William J. Lederer, interviewed some of the surviving crew members for a dramatic article, "Miracle Under the Arctic Sea" (Saturday Evening Post, January 14, 1950), and for a book, The Last Cruise (New York: William Sloane Associates, 1950). We have drawn only a few details from Lederer's hook that seemed to come directly from the survivors' recollections. But our chapter differs in several crucial respects because both Austin and Benitez said Lederer's account was overdramatized and included information that was purposely altered by the Navy. In fact, Austin wrote a letter to the Saturday Evening Post to complain about these changes, and he saved the responses that he got from both Benitez and Lederer. Benitez wrote to Austin on February 3, 1950, that Lederer's "story as originally written was very far-fetched and what actually appeared was a compromise." Lederer acknowledged in a letter to Austin on March 2, 1950, that the Navy had reviewed his manuscript and that there were "certain things which I `fixed.' For example, I altered the timing of the piece because I didn't want the Russians to be able to measure back and estimate where the Cochino sank; I made small changes in such parts where the truth might make the relatives of men feel had; and I left out certain things which might give clues to confidential means of communicating."

One fact that Lederer did not reveal, of course, was Austin's true mission. Lederer described Austin simply as a "communications technician." Austin's background as an electronic-intercept specialist was first disclosed in "USS Cochino," Cryptolog (Fall 1983); Cryptolog is a publication of the Naval Cryptologic Veterans Association, a group that includes some of the spooks who rode submarines. But that article did not discuss what Austin was trying to accomplish on the Cochino, and our account is the first that reveals the Cochino's role in helping to set off a new era of submarine spying.

Lederer's article and book also omitted any mention of the faulty foul-weather gear and boots that dragged some of the Tusk crew members to their deaths. This problem was documented in the Tusk log for August 25, 1949. Retired Rear Admiral Eugene B. Fluckey, who was the Atlantic submarine fleet's legal officer at that time, also confirmed in an interview that the foul-weather gear given to the men on the Tusk was "an experimental suit that nobody had tested. But the only thing is when you're in the water, it turns you upside down. And they got hung with their boots up."

On the Soviet side, we drew our description of the Soviet naval bases near Murmansk from "Kola Inlet and Its Facilities," ONI Review (September 1949). And the Soviets' suspicions that the Cochino was on a spy mission were cited in Associated Press articles that appeared on September 3 and 19, 1949, in the New London Day and on September 21, 1949, in the New York Herald Tribune.

Main interviews: Former crew members of the USS Gudgeon and other diesel submarines and former top officials from the U.S. subma- rive force, the Office of Naval Intelligence, and the Naval Security Group, which employed the Russian linguists and other spooks who rode on the subs.

Government documents, articles, books, and other sources: The dates of the Gudgeon's deployment in the summer of 1957 come from its daily deck logs on file at the National Archives, Suitland Records Center. The logs show how many miles the Gudgeon steamed each day and other basic facts, but they give no hint that it was on an intelligence mission.

A listing of all of the diesel submarines that made surveillance deployments during the Korean War-and descriptions of the difficulties some encountered with icy weather and primitive reconnaissance equipment-are included in the interim evaluation reports that were prepared every six months during the Korean War by the commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. They are in the files of the Operational Archives Branch at the Naval Historical Center.

U.S. intelligence officials have long believed that a U.S. surface ship sank a Soviet sub that came close to an aircraft carrier attack force in 1951, early in the Korean War, according to two former intelligence officers. The United States was so concerned that the Soviet Navy would try to help the North Koreans that surface ships were under orders to protect U.S. warships by depth charging any possible hostile submarines, and in this case, one force depth charged a suspected Soviet sub and then saw no signs that it had survived. Asked about this, current Russian Navy officials said they knew of no sub losses around the time of the Korean War, and then said it would be too difficult to check navy archives or reach a definitive answer.

The U.S. Navy itself used one sub in a direct combat role during the Korean conflict, sending the diesel boat, USS Perch (SS-313), to the shores of North Korea in 1950. On board were U.S. troops and sixtythree British Royal marines. Although Perch was detected, commandos managed to hoard rubber rafts and make their way to shore. A bombing raid staged by the United States that night helped draw fire away, while the men landed, blew up a culvert, mined a tunnel, and destroyed a train. One British marine was killed by enemy troops. This tale is well recounted in Submarines at War: The History of the American Silent Service by Edwin P. Hoyt (New York: Stein and Day Publishers, 1983), pp. 299–303.

The monthly issues of the ON[Review provided an excellent source for tracking the rapid growth of the Soviet submarine fleet throughout the 1950s. The information about the Soviet Whiskey crew that was ravaged by gases on a 30-day test came from retired Soviet Navy Captain First Rank Boris Bagdasaryan, who served on that sub and was interviewed by a Russian military reporter, Alexander Mozgovoy, whom we hired to do research for us. The unconfirmed intelligence reports that the Soviets were modifying some of their Zulu-class subs to carry missiles were mentioned in "Developments and Trends in the Soviet Fleet During 1956," ONI Review (secret supplement] (Spring-Summer 1957): 9-10.

The encouragement of regular Navy officers to receive intelligence training and thus engage in the world's "second-oldest profession," one with "even fewer morals than the first," appeared in the article "Postgraduate Intelligence Training: An Avenue to Rewarding Service," ONI Review (August 1957): 337.

President Eisenhower's hesitancy about approving U-2 flights in the mid-1950s is described in chapter 2 of Graham Yost's Spies in the Skies (New York: Facts on File, 1989), a book about the evolution of U.S. spy satellites.

We drew some background details about the Gudgeon's captain, Norman G. Bessac, from his official biography on file in the Operational Archives Branch at the Naval Historical Center.

The Soviet version of "Hansel and Gretel" was cited in "Trends in Communist Propaganda," ONI Review (May 1955): 226. The Soviet offers to American pen pals to swap pictures were mentioned in "Security Control of Technical Data," ONI Review (April 1951): 127.

The first nuclear-powered submarine, the USS Nautilus, was commissioned on September 30, 1954, and sent out its historic message, "Underway on nuclear power," at the start of its first training deployment on January 17, 1955. The USS Seatcol f became the second nuclear-powered sub to go into service when it was commissioned on March 30, 1957. The personal background and political savvy of Admiral Hyman Rickover is well covered in two excellent books: Rickover: Controversy and Genius, a full-scale biography by Norman Polmar and Thomas B. Allen (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), and The Rickover Effect: How One Man Made a Difference, a memoir by one of Rickover's former associates, Theodore Rockwell (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1992). The adventures of the Nautilus in becoming the first submarine to reach the North Pole are chronicled in Nautilus 90 North, a book written by its second captain, Commander William R. Anderson, with Clay Blair Jr. (New York: Harper & Row, 1959).

Middleton's The Ultimate Naval Weapon notes that the World War II fleet boat named the USS Gudgeon (SS-21 1) also had a major success: it was credited with the first American kill of a Japanese U-boat.

The Soviets' August 26, 1957, announcement of their first successful intercontinental ballistic missile test is mentioned in "Soviet Scientific and Technical Developments, 1957," ONI Review (May 1958): 214. It also is discussed in Peter Pringle and William Arkin, SLOP: The Secret U.S. Plan for Nuclear War (New York: W. W. Norton, 1983).

A series of Navy press releases about the Gudgeon's trip to circumnavigate the globe and take part in Eisenhower's "People to People" program are in the file on the Gudgeon at the USS Bowfin Submarine Museum and Park in Honolulu.

One of the young officers on the USS Wahoo when it was caught near a Soviet beach in 1958 was William J. Crowe Jr., who rose to become an admiral and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush. He described the Wahoo's perilous encounter with the Soviets in his memoir The Line of Fire: From Washington to the Gulf, the Politics and Battles of the New Military (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993).

Russian military officials now say there were several reasons they showed greater restraint in dealing with spy subs than spy planes. Soviet warships dropped low-capacity "drill bombs" instead of full depth charges, officials told our researcher Alexander Mozgovoy, in case American subs like the Gudgeon had made navigational errors and found themselves in Soviet territory accidentally. The Russian officials also said that the smaller, grenadelike charges were used in keeping with their regulations for warning foreign submarines encroaching upon their territorial waters, rules that included this method of signaling them to leave.

Some of the hysteria about the possibility that Soviet subs were coming close to American shores in the late 1950s was fueled by U.S. Representative Carl Durham, a Democrat from North Carolina who chaired a joint House-Senate committee on atomic energy. He was quoted in an Associated Press dispatch on April 14, 1958, as saying that 184 Russian submarines had been sighted off the U.S. Atlantic coast in 1957 alone. Mrs. Gilkinson's sharp eye for foreign submarines was reported in the "Monthly Box Score of Submarine Contacts," ONI Review (January 1961): 38. The man from Texas was mentioned in "Monthly Box Score of Submarine Contacts," ONI Review (January 1962): 27.

In describing the expansion of SOSUS in this and subsequent chapters, we drew on an excellent declassified history of many of the Navy's antisubmarine warfare programs, "Sea-Based Airborne Antisubmarine Warfare 1940–1977," vols. 1–3, prepared by a Navy consultant, R. E Cross Associates, Ltd., Alexandria, Virginia, in 1978. It is available at the Operational Archives Branch of the Naval Historical Center.

Admiral Jerauld Wright's proclamation, the case of whiskey he offered as a prize, and the USS Grenadier's surfacing of the Soviet Zulu are described in "The Wright Stuff," U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings (December 1984): 74–76. The article was written by retired Navy Captain Theodore E. "Ted" Davis, who was the Grenadier's captain during the chase. In an interview, Davis said he saved one bottle of Jack Daniels as a souvenir and divided the rest among his crew. He kept the sealed bottle on a shelf in his study until a housekeeper helped herself to a taste one day in the late 1970s. Not long after that, retired Navy Captain William L. "Bo" Bohannan, who had been the Grenadier's engineer, came to visit. Recalled Davis, "I said, `Well, now that it's open, we may as well drink the whole damn thing.' So we sat down and drank it all."

The July 1959 issue of the ONI Review also discussed the Grenadier's feat and its importance in confirming the intelligence reports that some Zulus had been converted to carry missiles. This article, "Soviet Submarine Surfaced by U.S. Forces Off Iceland," (292–295), was accompanied by four photographs of the Zulu taken by the Grenadier. The article also noted that as soon as the Zulu surfaced, crew members scurried up onto the deck to paint over the sub's identifying number (82) and rig a canvas over the top rear of the sail. Naval Intelligence suspected that this part of the sail housed two vertical missile-launching tubes, and the article said that an analysis of the photographs indicated that the tubes "may be larger than previously estimated," meaning that the missiles also may have been slightly larger than the United States had expected.

The diary of George B. Kistiakowsky was published as A Scientist at the White House: The Private Diary of President Eisenhower's Special Assistant for Science and Technology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976). The entry we quote (p. 153) describes a special intelligence briefing that Kistiakowsky received on November 12, 1959.

The dates of all forty-one deterrent patrols made by Regulus missile subs from September 1959 through July 1964 are listed in the July 1997 issue of the Submarine Review, an excellent quarterly published by the Naval Submarine League, a nonprofit group made up of current and former submariners and other people who support the submarine force. The four diesel subs that carried the guided missiles (the `G' in the standard submarine number designations stands for `guided') were the USS Grayback (SSG-574), the USS Tunny (SSG-282), the USS Growler (SSG-577), and the USS Barbero (SSG-317). One nuclearpowered sub, the USS Halibut (SSGN-587), made seven Regulus patrols from February 1961 through July 1964. Retired Navy Commander Herbert E. Tibbets, who served on the USS Growler, showed us the S-M-F pin designed for members of the "Northern Pacific Yacht Club."

In describing the pervasive safety problems with Soviet nuclear subs, we drew on research by Mozgovoy, our Russian stringer; Joshua Handler, a former research coordinator for Greenpeace, the international environmental group; and a large body of articles that have appeared in the Russian press since the end of the cold war. We recount the reactor accident on the Hiroshima and other similar incidents more fully in Appendix B.

The scrambling of the early Polaris subs during the Cuban Missile Crisis was described to us in interviews with retired Vice Admiral Philip A. Beshany and other former submarine officers. President Kennedy's fears about encountering Soviet subs early in the crisis were quoted by his brother, Robert F. Kennedy, in his book Thirteen Days (New York: Signet Books, 1969), p. 70. For information about the U.S. Navy's surfacing of Soviet diesel subs during the crisis, we drew on "Cordon of Steel: The U.S. Navy and the Cuban Missile Crisis" by Curtis A. Utz, a historian at the Naval Historical Center's Contemporary History Branch. His 48-page study was published by the Naval Historical Center in 1993 as the first in a series of reports on "The U.S. Navy in the Modern World."

Main interviews: John P. Craven; former submarine, Naval Intelligence, and Naval Security Group officials; former crew members of the USS Halibut.

Government documents, articles, books, and other sources: In describing the Navy's general lack of enthusiasm for deep-sea exploration and how that attitude changed after the Thresher's sinking, we drew on several news and magazine articles. The June 1964 issue of National Geographic was particularly intriguing, with articles such as "Thresher: Lesson and Challenge" by James H. Wakelin Jr., and "Tomorrow on the Deep Frontier" by Edwin A. Link. We also relied on two books. One, Mud, Muscle, and Miracles: Marine Salvage in the United States Navy (Washington, D.C.: Naval Historical Center/Naval Sea Systems Command, 1990), was written by Captain C. A. Bartholomew, a top Navy salvage engineer. The other, The Universe Below: Discovering the Secrets of the Deep Sea (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), was written by William J. Broad, a science reporter for the New York Times.

The full sequence of events that caused the USS Thresher disaster has never been conclusively determined. Just a few minutes before Thresher sank, a Navy salvage ship monitoring the tests received a sonar-type message from Thresher saying it was experiencing minor problems and was trying to blow ballast, or release high-pressure air to force water out of its ballast tanks and propel itself to the surface. Officers on the salvage ship then heard the sounds of air under high pressure, followed only, as that maneuver failed, by sounds of the "Thresher breaking apart. A Navy court of inquiry later concluded that a piping system probably had failed in the engine room, letting loose a violent spray of water that damaged electrical circuits and caused a loss of power.

Rickover always denied that his reactor controls and procedures were to blame. But in Death of the Thresher (Philadelphia: Chilton Books, 1964), Norman Polmar has suggested that an unexpected reactor scram, or shutdown, may have been a crucial factor in the Thresher's demise. Polmar and his coauthor, Thomas B. Allen, also make this point in Rick over: Controversy and Genius, in which Rear Admiral Ralph K. James, chief of the Bureau of Ships during the Thresher's construction, is quoted as saying: "I feel from what I know of the inquiry in which I participated, what I know of the ship itself, and events that occurred up to that time, that a failure of a silver soldered pipe fitting somewhere in the boat caused a discharge of a stream of water on the nuclear control board and `scrammed' the power plant." Then, according to James, "because of inadequate design of the nuclear controls for the plant, power on the boat was lost at a time where [sicl the depth of water in which the submarine was operating forced enough water into the hull that prevented her from rising again because they couldn't get the power back on the boat" (p. 433). While Rickover never acknowledged any blame, he did shorten the time that operators had to wait to restart the reactor after a scram-from ten seconds to six.

The plans to create Deep Submergence Search Vehicles, minisubs capable of retrieving objects from the ocean floor, were detailed in Navy fact sheets in the 1960s, some of which are available in the files at the USS Bowfin Submarine Museum and Park in Honolulu. The dates of each stage in the Halibut's conversion to a special projects submarine come from official histories of the ship and articles in the Mare Island Grapevine, a newspaper that covered the Mare Island Naval Shipyard and base near San Francisco, and from the files of the Vallejo (California) Times-Herald.

Rickover's drive to create the small, nuclear-powered NR-1 submarine also is recounted in Polmar and Allen, Rickover: Controversy and Genius (pp. 435–443). Polmar and Allen devote a chapter (pp. 269–293) to Rickover's idiosyncratic techniques for interviewing applicants for his nuclear-powered submarine program and the worst horror stories that came out of it. Many of the people we interviewed told similar tales. Bartholomew, Mud, Muscle, and Miracles, and Broad, The Universe Below, also describe the efforts to recover the nuclear bomb off Palomares, Spain.

The fact that Rickover always wanted to know what was going on in the submarine intelligence programs-and was insulted at the thought that he should have to sign a secrecy oath like everyone elsecame from interviews with two former high-level Naval Intelligence officials. As one of them put it, "Rickover wanted to know everything the reconnaissance programs were producing, what they were doing, where they were operating, and he refused to ever sign a security oath. He absolutely wouldn't sign it." Referring to several men who served as directors of Naval Intelligence in the 1960s, this source added: "There were legendary stories of Rickover shouting and screaming at them, summoning them, demanding to know what was going on and refusing to sign," and they were all "reluctant to cross" him.

Main interviews: Former top Pentagon, submarine, Naval Intelligence, and CIA officials; John P. Craven; and former crew members of the USS Halibut.

Government documents, articles, hooks, and other sources: The code name "Operation Winterwind" is mentioned in the Halibut's official command history for 1967. The documents do not disclose that Halibut was trying to locate parts of a Soviet ballistic missile or give any hint about the nature of her "assigned special project." They do, however, give the dates for what crew members say were two "test search operations"-practice runs off Hawaii-and the first attempt to locate the Soviet nose cone. The first test occurred from March 16 to April 4, 1967, and crew members say it was on this run that the Halibut found the boxlike object that had floated before crew members on the surface ship could weigh it down with anchor chains. Halibut made a second brief test run, July 10–20, 1967, to check the cameras on its fish. Crew members say the first attempt to find the Soviet missile parts took place on what the command history describes as "a 57-day special mission," from August 28 through October 24, 1967. Crew members say the second deployment to look for missile pieces-the one during which Charlie Hammonds fell overboard-took place from mid-January to April 11, 1968.

A series of six articles by Christopher Drew, Michael L. Millenson, and Robert Becker, published January 6-11, 1991, in the Chicago Tribune and the Newport News Daily Press, contained the first public disclosure of Halibut's role in locating the Golf submarine. Craven described her search for the Golf in very general terms in a letter to a subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee in early 1994, and William J. Broad followed with an article in the New York Times on February 7, 1994. Roger C. Dunham, who was a reactor officer on the Halibut in the late 1960s, has written a fictionalized account of the search for the Golf in Spy Sub: A Top Secret Mission to the Bottom of the Pacific (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1996). The Navy required Dunham to change the boat's name-the star of his book is a submarine called the USS Viperfish-and modify crucial technical details.

The split in opinions over the CIA's plan to build the Glomar Explorer and try to recover the Golf submarine was evident in several interviews with former high-level Navy and Pentagon officials. In an interview that took place a few months before he died in 1991, Frederick J. "Fritz" Harlfinger II, the former director of Naval Intelligence, said the CIA "did the craziest things. The CIA always got in our way."

But Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, the chief of Naval Operations in the late 1960s, said that along with the skeleton of the Soviet sailor, his most vivid memory of the Velvet Fist photos was that the Golf "was intact enough to make the judgment that we could raise it." Moorer dismissed Craven's and Bradley's idea of just blasting open parts of the Golf and sending a mini-submarine to try to retrieve the missile warheads and coded-communications gear. "Yeah, but there's no way you could be sure you got all the crypto stuff-I mean, how they thought you were going to get inside of it and make a thorough search. And so, if we were going to do anything, we might as well go all the way," Moorer said, adding with obvious irritation: "There's always some son-of-a-bitch can figure out a better way to do, but he don't have to do it."

Melvin Laird, President Nixon's secretary of Defense, acknowledged in an interview that "some people thought you didn't have to try to recover the whole thing just to get the important pieces like missiles and crypto." And in recommending construction of the Glomar Explorer just a year or so after the USS Scorpion had sunk, he added: "I felt that the technology was important because we might be able to use it with one of our submarines if we got in a problem. That really had more to do with it as far as I was concerned because I was always worried about crews getting trapped. So that had a lot to do with it. You didn't have to do that much as far as the Russians were concerned. But I was thinking about it in a different way. This idea that it was just done for that one submarine is a mistake."

Laird also added one other interesting historical note. Some critics have questioned whether Howard Hughes, the paranoid and reclusive billionaire, ever knew that his companies were involved in an effort to raise a sunken Soviet submarine. But, Laird said, "I remember talking to Howard Hughes about it too."

Main interviews: John P. Craven, former top submarine and Naval Intelligence officials, and torpedo experts who asked not to be identified.

Government documents, articles, and other sources: The safety concerns of former Scorpion crew member Dan Rogers were first disclosed, and are explored in more detail, in Stephen Johnson, "A Long and Deep Mystery: Scorpion Crewman Says Sub's '68 Sinking Was Preventable," Houston Chronicle, May 23, 1993. We also interviewed Rogers. Johnson's article includes the quote from the letter that Scorpion Machinist's Mate David Burton Stone wrote to his parents about the poor condition of the ship's equipment. Johnson was also extraordinarily generous in sharing many other aspects of his extensive research with us.

The Navy's difficulties in tracking Soviet subs in the Mediterranean Sea in the late 1960s are discussed in R. F. Cross Associates, Ltd., SeaBased Airborne Antisubmarine Warfare 1940–1977, vol. 2. More details of the collision between the USS George C. Marshall and the Soviet sub are in Appendix A. Retired Navy Commander Herbert E. Tibbets, the former skipper of the USS Cutlass, described in an interview the game of chicken involving the Scorpion and the Soviet destroyer.

The main concerns fueling the notion that Scorpion was destroyed by Soviet forces were disclosed in an article by Ed Offley: "Game of `Chicken' Led to Loss of Scorpion 25 Years Ago," that ran both in the New London Day, May 23, 1993; and as "Remembering the Scorpion-Evidence Points to an Underwater Dogfight as the Sub's Demise," in the Virginian-Pilot and Ledger-Star (Norfolk, Virginia), May 30, 1993. Offley quotes Jerry Hall, an enlisted man who worked as an aide at the Atlantic Fleet submarine command in 1968, as saying he heard talk among more senior officers that on its way home from the Med, Scorpion had been diverted to "brush off" a Soviet attack sub that was trying to trail a Polaris missile sub leaving the port at Rota, Spain. But our sources who had top Navy jobs flatly denied that in interviews. They acknowledged that Scorpion had been diverted, but they said its real mission-checking into the Soviets' baffling balloon activities-was much less provocative. And in recounting details of Scorpion's final radio communications, which indicated that it had collected a few photographs of the balloon activity and then cleared that area, these officials said there was no reason to suspect that it was engaged with any Soviet vessels when it sank.

In one recent article in the May 21, 1998 Seattle Post-Intelligencer titled "Navy Says Sinking of the Scorpion Was an Accident, Revelations Suggest a Darker Scenario," Offley suggested that Scorpion may still have been close to Soviet vessels when she sank. But no one who examined the wreckage found any evidence of an attack, and search teams hack in 1968 were told all Soviet vessels had been far from the scene.

The information that we attribute to "declassified Navy documents" at various points in the chapter comes from more than seventy pages that the Navy released to the Chicago Tribune and other news organizations under the Freedom of Information Act on October 25, 1993. The most important document was the final report of the findings of the Navy's court of inquiry that investigated the Scorpion disaster in 1968 and 1969. Citing cold war secrecy, the Navy did not make the report public at that time. Instead, the Navy and the Defense Department simply issued summaries in news releases, dated January 31, 1969, saying that the "certain cause" of Scorpion's loss could not be determined. The news releases-which are masterful examples of government obfuscation-did not disclose that the court of inquiry had concluded that the most likely cause of the Scorpion's loss was some type of torpedo accident; indeed, the releases included several misleading statements that made that possibility seem improbable. The Navy did not declassify the court of inquiry's report until 1984, when Ed Offley, then a reporter at the Norfolk papers, petitioned for the documents and wrote the first comprehensive story examining how the court had come to believe that a hot-running torpedo was the most likely culprit. That article, "Mystery of Sub's Sinking Unravels," was published on the front page of the Virginian-Pilot and the LedgerStar on December 16, 1984, and included the first interview with John Craven on his role in finding the Scorpion's wreckage. Christopher Drew also described the hot-running torpedo theory in "How Scorpion Killed Itself: Navy Discloses Sub Sunk by Own Torpedo 25 Years Ago," Chicago Tribune, October 26, 1993.

Our own reconstruction-and the disturbing new information about how torpedoes were being rushed out to the fleet despite rampant safety failures-is based largely on extensive interviews with John Craven and various torpedo experts and weapons engineers. Early in May 1998, we attempted several times to reach Rear Admiral Arthur Gralla who headed the Naval Ordnance Command when Scorpion was lost and to whom the safety engineer's alert about the torpedo battery failures was addressed. He was traveling abroad and did not return messages. He died a few weeks later.

The 1970 examination of the Trieste photos of Scorpion's wreckage was analyzed and written up in the Navy's "Evaluation of data and artifacts related to USS Scorpion (SSN-589)" prepared by the Scorpion advisory group and released in 1998. Among the people we called upon to help us evaluate that report were Ross E. Saxon, who dove down to the wreckage on Trieste; Robert S. Price, who re-analyzed the acoustic data after Craven retired; several submarine officers who served in Scorpion's era, and various weapons safety experts. The review of the work of the first Technical Advisory Group set up to help find Scorpion in 1968 under John Craven was also released in 1998, "The Scorpion Search 1968, An Analysis of the Operation for the CNO Technical Advisory Group (TAG)." The letter summarizing the Jason's findings was released in the same group of documents, "Scorpion Artifacts," January 14, 1987, signed by Peter M. Palermo.

Robert Price, research engineer at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory, which was at White Oak, Maryland, and separate from the Naval Ordnance command, says that when his team went back in 1969 or 1970 and examined the original acoustic data, their read on it was far different than Craven's. For one thing, Price and his team believed that the first sound that registered at the Canary Island's hydrophone was not the sound of an explosion of either a torpedo or the main battery that powered Scorpion. "The acoustic evidence we examined does not indicate why the sub went down," Price says, "All we know is that it wasn't a full-scale outside-the-hull type explosion which would be very loud."

Instead, he says, the first sound recorded was the implosion. The subsequent sounds that began 91 seconds later, he says, were likely caused by the tail of the submarine rattling around inside the auxilliary machine space after two sections had telescoped. Further, he says that a model submarine sent down in a one hundred foot tank began to spiral on the way to the bottom almost immediately, suggesting that there was no predicting the direction Scorpion would have fallen.

His data does not shed light on why Scorpion went down. He also does not know why Scorpion was found just where Craven had predicted, using his very different interpretation of the data. That, Price says, may have been coincidence, or luck.

Though he did not know about the malfunctioning torpedo batteries, Mark A. Bradley provided the best published analysis of the newly released documents in "Why They Called the Scorpion `Scrap Iron,"' U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, July 1998, pp. 30–38.

In describing the months of searching for the Scorpion's wreckage, we owe a large debt of thanks to Jack W. Davis Jr., the president and publisher of the Newport News (Virginia) Daily Press, who granted us access to the newspaper's voluminous files of news stories on the Scorpion. Many of the articles provided helpful background. One that we relied on in describing the Mizar's role in the search was Alexander C. Brown, "The Cruise of the Mizar in Quest of the Scorpion," Newport News Daily Press, December 15, 1968. The Daily Press files also included copies of the original press releases about the court of inquiry's findings, and we quoted from the one issued by the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Public Affairs), "Navy Reports Findings of the Court of Inquiry on the Loss of the USS Scorpion," January 31, 1969, no. 80–69. We also interviewed retired Rear Admiral Robert R. Fountain, the former Scorpion executive officer who helped with Craven's tests in the submarine simulator.

The bitterness among the survivors of Scorpion crew members at the Navy's failure to tell them the truth about the possible reasons for the boat's sinking came through clearly in several news articles. Barbara Baar Gillum expressed her disappointment in a sidebar story by Stephen Johnson, "The Explanation That Never Came," Houston Chronicle, May 23, 1993; William H. McMichael, "What Happened on the Scorpion?" Newport News Daily, Press, October 31, 1993, and Mike Knepler, "Families Mark 30th Anniversary of the Loss of Norfolk Sub Scorpion," Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, May 26, 1998, also brought home the poignant suffering that the families have endured.

Main interviews: Former crew members of the USS Lapon, the USS Dace, the USS Ray, and the USS Greenling, and former top submarine and Naval Intelligence officials.

Government documents and other sources: George T. "Tommy" Cox, the singing spook, copyrighted and pressed 3,500 copies of his own album of 13 submarine songs, Take Her Deep, in 1978 and easily sold his entire supply at stores near Navy bases. Other songs had titles like "Big Black Submarine," "Diesel Boats Forever," and "Sailor's Prayer." There also was a poignant ode called "Scorpion."

The dates of some of the deployments mentioned in this chapter come from annual command histories for the Lapon, Dace, Ray, and Greenling, some of which are in files for each of those subs at the USS Bowfin Submarine Museum & Park in Honolulu and at the Submarine Force Library & Museum at the Naval Submarine Base in Groton, Connecticut. An unclassified excerpt from Vice Admiral Arnold E Schade's congratulatory message to the Lapon on October 13, 1969, is in a file on the Lapon at the Groton museum. That file also contains an unclassified excerpt from a message sent to the Lapon on October 22 by Admiral Ephraim P. Holmes, the commander of the Atlantic Fleet: "FOR C.O. I HAVE SEEN THE RESULTS OF THE LAPON'S EXPLOITS ON TWO PREVIOUS MISSIONS, BUT THIS HAS TO BE THE BEST. THE PERFORMANCE OF YOU AND YOUR FINE CREW IN THIS MOST DEMANDING TASK HAS BEEN SUPERB." Both messages were originally coded top-secret. In an

interview, Admiral Schade said the significance of the Lapon's feat was easy to see: "That we were able to do it, trail them, that was it. In fact, that was about all we wanted to know. What were the weak spots? If we had to go after them, how would we find them, detect them, and destroy them?"

Main interviews: Former crew members of the USS Tautog, former top Pentagon and Navy officials, retired Soviet Navy Captain FirstRank Boris Bagdasaryan, and Rear Admiral Valery Aleksin, the former chief navigator of the Russian Navy.

Government documents and other sources: The fact that two U.S. attack subs were fooled by Soviet missile drills and radioed warnings in the early days of trailing the Yankees was disclosed to us in an interview with a former high-level U.S. submarine official. He said: "Our submarine in trail was always alert to any activity of the Soviet that indicated he was getting ready to launch. Like the opening of the outer doors of the missile tube, fourteen or sixteen of those things banging open, like flooding the tube, this is a critical indication that he's getting ready to launch. We would then be instructed to, the hell with security, get up and get the word out with as much early warning as possible.

"We did discover they were conducting a drill a couple of times. Instead of opening sixteen tubes, they opened two. Instead of flooding sixteen, they'd flood two. This, of course, was critical to their own training, to do that, and so we, the first couple of times, panicked everybody, but we learned to live with it." In those two instances, he said, the trailing American subs quickly rose to periscope depth, stuck up their radio antennas, and sent warnings hack to military command authorities. "But luckily it was a thing where they'd get up and transmit and then they very soon thereafter would be in a position to say, `Cancel, it is a drill,' and within three or four minutes we'd be in a position to follow up and take away the urgency of this thing." He said some of the first subs involved in these trailings taped the sounds of the Soviet drills so other attack sub captains could listen to them and know what to look for. After that, he said, "It was a waiting thing. It was just that one period in the beginning that everybody got a little goosy."

This official and several other former senior Navy officers said that, to avoid mistakes, U.S. attack subs involved in such trailings did not have the authority during the cold war to attack Soviet missile subs on their own; even if they radioed in an alert that the Soviet sub's missile doors were opening, they had to wait to receive orders from shore before taking further action. But if hostilities had broken out, that would have changed. "A sub captain's orders would depend on whether it was peacetime, we were already at war, or we were on heightened alert because of the possibility of war," one retired admiral said. He added that there normally would be "a range of orders, with the most aggressive coming, of course, if we were at war."

The reaction of Soviet Navy Commander-in-Chief Sergei G. Gorshkov to the collision between the USS Gato and the Soviet Hotel-class sub K-19 was described to our researcher Alexander Mozgovoy by two Russian naval officers. They are Rear Admiral Vladimir Georgievich Lebedko and Captain Second-Rank Valentin Anatolievich Shabanov. Shabanov was the captain of the K19 in November 1969, and Lebedko was a deputy submarine division commander. Both were on the K19 at the time of the crash.

The information that Gato was armed and ready to fight after the collision, and that its captain prepared false mission reports showing his boat had broken off her patrol two days before the accident, comes from a front-page article in the New York Times on July 6, 1975, by Seymour M. Hersh. Former Gato crew members told Hersh that, immediately after the crash, Gato's weapons officer ran two decks below and prepared for orders to arm the sub's torpedoes, including some with nuclear warheads. "Only one authenticationeither from the ship's captain or her executive officer-was needed to prepare the torpedoes for launching," Hersh wrote. "No order came from the Gato's captain because the Soviet vessel-obviously confused-made no attempt to pursue the Gato." Hersh also quoted crew members as saying that the Gato's captain was ordered by the Navy's Atlantic Fleet command to prepare twenty-five copies of a top-secret after-action report alleging that the sub had broken off her patrols two days before the date of the collision because of a propeller shaft malfunction. He also was told to prepare six accurate reports describing the collision and the events right after it and to deliver those by hand to a unit of the Atlantic Fleet command. Navy officials acknowledged both the collision and that some falsified reports were prepared.

Part of the background sketch of the Tautog captain, the late Commander Buele G. Balderston, is taken from his official Navy biography. Other information comes from an interview with his widow, Irene Balderston. The dates of the Tautog's deployment to the western Pacific June 8 through July 1, 1970-come from the sub's official command history for that year. The history, prepared by Balderston, lists the deployment simply as a "Training Cruise." just like in the Atlantic, there also was a competition among sub captains in the Pacific. And when Balderston took Tautog out in mid-1970, the USS Flasher (SSN-613), under CO Emsley Cobb, had just won a Presidential Unit Citation for the first long trailing in the Pacific-after following a Hotel 11-class missile sub for more than twenty days.

In describing the threat posed by Soviet Echo II submarines to U.S. aircraft carriers operating off Vietnam, we drew on R. F. Cross Associates, Ltd.'s declassified study Sea-Based Airborne Antisubmarine Warfare 1940–1977, pp. 2, 68–70.

Now that the Soviets had so many nuclear subs, the Pacific Fleet followed the earlier lead of the Atlantic command and quit sending diesel boats to spy off the Soviet coast. It was the end of a swashbuckling era, and diesel vets coined a romantic phrase-"Diesel Boats Forever"-to try to keep them alive, at least in their memories. Some diesel subs still did surveillance ops in less hazardous areas, such as in the Med and off Cuba, where Spanish-speaking spooks rode diesels in 1969 and 1970 to check on Soviet efforts to build a port for Russian subs in Cuba. The Navy later transferred many of the diesel subs to various allies with small navies and retired the rest.

The Tautog's collision with the Echo II was first revealed publicly on January 6, 1991, in the submarine series by Drew, Millenson, and Becker published January 6-11, 1991, by the Chicago Tribune and the Newport News Daily Press. Based on interviews with Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, who was about to be promoted from chief of Naval Operations to chairman of the joint Chiefs of Staff at the time of the collision, Rear Admiral Walter L. Small Jr., who was commander of submarines in the Pacific in 1970, and several Tautog crew members, that series reported the conclusion of U.S. officials that the Echo II had sunk. Both Moorer and Small said in the interviews that they were told verbally that the Echo had sunk. In an interview for this book, former Defense Secretary Melvin Laird said that he had been given the same tragic news, and that he immediately passed it on to President Nixon. "I briefed the president. The president knew." Asked whether he recalled Nixon's reaction, Laird said: "No, you never knew what kind of reaction he had. He was glad to get the information."

Before the series was published, the Soviet Navy did not respond to repeated requests by the Tribune and the Daily Press for comment on the incident. But in the spring of 1992, Alexander Mozgovoy located Boris Bagdasaryan, a former Soviet submarine commander who announced that he was the captain of the Echo that had collided with Tautog. Mozgovoy published Bagdasaryan's assertions in a Russian newspaper in 1992. He since has asked Bagdasaryan numerous questions on our behalf. Though there are a few discrepancies between what Bagdasaryan and the Tautog crew members recall, there seems to be little reason to doubt that they are talking about the same collision.

Main interviews: Former top Navy, Naval Intelligence, CIA, and NSA officials and crew members of the USS Halibut.

Government documents, articles, books, and other sources: We based our description of Petropavlovsk and the Kamchatka Peninsula on information and photographs provided by Joshua Handler after a visit there.

The most comprehensive history of the Navy's development of saturation diving techniques is Papa Topside: The Sea Lab Chronicles of Captain George F. Bond, USN, ed. Helen A. Siiteri (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1993). Bond, who died in 1983, was a Navy medical doctor who pioneered ways for divers to live and work at much greater depths. Reporting to John Craven, he supervised the experiments with the Navy's SeaLab habitats in the I 960s. For technical information, we also relied on the NOAA Diving Manual: Diving for Science and Technology, 2d ed. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Commerce/National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, December 1979); we found it in the library at the Navy Yard in Washington, D.C. The divers involved in the cable-tapping were neither Navy SEALs nor the regular Navy divers who helped perform maintenance on ships and subs. They were instead a special group of saturation divers who worked for Submarine Development Group One, a Navy detachment that included the Halibut. SUBDEVGRU 1 was created in August 1967, according to a Navy brochure, "to operate as a permanent Naval command with deep ocean search, location, recovery and rescue capability." By the early 1970s, the detachment included Halibut; Trieste 11; Turtle and Sea Cliff, two new mini-subs that initially could go as deep as 6,500 feet to recover objects or do ocean research; surface ships equipped to assist in submarine rescue operations, and one Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicle. The development group was headquartered in San Diego and had an office at the Mare Island Navy base, where Halibut was docked.

Our discussion of the "40 Committee" draws mainly on two sources: Seymour M. Hersh, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (New York: Summit Books, 1983); and the final report of a special House intelligence committee, chaired by Rep. Otis G. Pike, as reprinted in the Village Voice, February 16, 1976.

One example of the local headlines that publicized the Navy's cover story for Halibut was "Navy Bares Secret Role of M.I. (Mare Islands Sub," Vallejo Times-Herald, September 25, 1969. The article said that the Halibut "will be the lead mother submarine for the development, installation and evaluation of a rescue system which has been determined to be necessary to cover the potential loss of submarines on the continental shelf. The system will include a completely self-contained navigation, search, location and personnel rescue capability, using a deep submergence rescue vehicle which will be carried aboard Halibut."

In describing NSA headquarters, we relied predominantly on James Bamford's groundbreaking study The Puzzle Palace: A Report on NSA, America's Most Secret Agency (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982). Former CIA officials have said the operation to tap car-phone conversations of Soviet leaders ended after the Washington columnist Jack Anderson disclosed it in a news article in the early 1970s. Anderson has said that his government sources told him the operation had ended before he wrote about it. One other deal reached with the Soviets in 1972 was the Incidents at Sea agreement, which was meant to put an end to the games of chicken and other harassment between U.S. and Soviet surface vessels. At the U.S. Navy's insistence, the agreement did not place any restrictions on submarines operating below the surface.

We drew our accounts of arms control negotiations mainly from three books: Gerard Smith, Doubletalk: The Story of SALT I (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1980); Paul H. Nitze, From Hiroshima to Glasnost: At the Center of Decision-A Memoir (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1989); and Hersh, The Price of Power. Hersh's hook and Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr., On Watch: A Memoir (New York: Quadrangle/New York Times Book Co., 1976), give detailed accounts of the tensions between Kissinger and Zumwalt.

Former Halibut Chief John White made his comments about leaving the sub's crew in an interview with us. "There's not too many people who got away with what I did and who didn't get busted for it," he said. He acknowledged that he and the chiefs were drinking beer the night he decided not to go back aboard Halibut, although he denies anyone drank too much. "I wouldn't say I was sober as a judge," he added. He insisted that his decision to leave the sub in the middle of the deployment was "totally unrelated" to the nature of its mission and was not meant to he any type of protest. But he declined to say what his motivation was.

Main interviews: Seymour M. Hersh; William E. Colby; Otis Pike; Aaron Donner, Edward Roeder III, and other former staff members of the Pike Committee; John P. Craven; former crew members of the Glomar- Explorer; and former top Navy, CIA, and Naval Intelligence officials.

Government documents, articles, books, and other sources: Some of the difficulties that Hersh faced in researching the Glomar story are described in Harrison E. Salisbury, Without Fear or Favor: The New York Times and Its Times (New York: Times Books, 1980). William Colby's memoir, Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), also provided excellent background, particularly on his fencing with Hersh over Hersh's article on the CIA's domestic spying.

We interviewed Hersh several times, and interviewed Colby once before he died in 1996. Colby said that when he heard that Hersh had gotten a tip about the Glomar operation, "it scared the living daylights out of me. I didn't ask any more. I knew we had a problem." Asked whether he was worried that the Glomar operation could have threatened detente, Colby said: "We always knew we had a hot potato on our hands." Still, he said, Kissinger was always "fully supportive. Kissinger's idea was that it was my business… it was my problem, it was my money." And Colby remained adamant that the gamble to recover the Golf was worth taking: "The answer I give to that is: What would the Russians have given to have a full American submarine in their hands? The nuclear weapons. The command and control system. The communications system. The war planning. All of it." He also dismissed Craven and Bradley's idea of making a more limited recovery attempt with a deep-diving mini-sub by saying: "On any engineering job, you have different ways of proceeding."

We drew our description of the location of the patrol areas of the Soviet Yankees and the continued expansion of SOSUS from R. E Cross Associates, Ltd., Sea-Based Airborne Antisubmarine Warfare 1940–1977, volume 2. Several submarine force officials described in interviews how they kept track of Soviet submarines during the Yom Kippur War.

In the interview with us, Colby said he thought the "real genius" in the planning of the Glomar operation was in the choice to use the secretive Howard Hughes and the manganese cover story. Colby also was blunt in saying that no matter what legal justifications the CIA lawyers might have drafted, "obviously we were secretly trying to steal this submarine. If they had known we were after that, it would have been legitimate for them to be able to try to stop us." Colby also said it was obvious that the CIA was sending Glomar into a potential Pueblo-like situation. Asked what Glomar's crew would have done if the Soviets had tried to board her, he said: "Probably dodge and weave." He added: "We had some protection…. We had a deal with the Navy. They were just down at Pearl Harbor," where Naval Intelligence was assiduously monitoring every Soviet communications frequency possible while the Glomar was at sea.

We drew most of our technical description of the Glomar and how it used Clementine, its steel arm and claw, in trying to lift up the Golf from Roy Varner and Wayne Collier, A Matter of Risk: The Incredible Inside Story of the CIA's Hughes Glomar Explorer Mission to Raise a Russian Submarine (New York: Random House, 1978). Collier helped recruit many of the oil-field roughnecks who operated the Glomar's huge machinery, and he and Varner later interviewed them and some government officials to piece together a detailed account of what happened on the ship. Another book, Clyde Burleson's The Jennifer Project (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1977), also provided helpful background information, particularly about the Glomar's design and technical capabilities. Because almost everything written about the heavily shrouded Glomar operation contains some mistakes, we went through both of these books carefully with our intelligence sources to avoid picking up any errors.

Hersh's story on the CIA's domestic spying led the New York Times on December 22, 1974, with a headline spread over three columns at the top of page 1: "Huge CIA Operation Reported in U.S. Against Anti-War Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years." Charging the CIA with "directly violating its charter," Hersh wrote that the agency had "conducted a massive illegal domestic intelligence operation" and compiled dossiers on ten thousand or more American citizens. CIA operatives, the story said, had been shadowing war protesters and infiltrating antiwar organizations. Colby always insisted-and repeated again in our interview-that Hersh "blew it all out of proportion" by using the word massive. Colby added in the interview: "We were engaged in a few things we shouldn't have done." But, he said, "if he had left the word massive out, it would have been very hard to contest." Colby also said he attacked the Hersh story publicly at that time because "there was a good chance the agency was going to he destroyed. I was fighting for its survival."

Colby's campaign to try to keep news organizations from breaking the Glomar story was described in Salisbury, Without Fear or Favor, and in two news articles that drew on declassified CIA documents: George Lardner Jr. and William Claiborne, "CIA's Glomar `Game Plan,"' Washington Post, October 23, 1977; and William Claiborne and George Lardner Jr., "Colby Called Glomar Case `Weirdest Conspiracy,"' Washington Post, November 5, 1977. The quote from Jack Anderson about why he went ahead and broke the Glomar story on his radio show comes from Martin Arnold, "CIA Tried to Get Press to Hold up Salvage Story," the New York Times, March 20, 1975.

The hest analysis of the lack of success of the Glomar operation remains the first detailed one-Hersh's first article, "CIA Salvage Ship Brought up Part of Soviet Sub Lost in 1968, Failed to Raise Atom Missiles," on the front page of the New York Times, March 19, 1975. Hersh also interviewed Wayne Collier extensively for a follow-up article: "Human Error Is Cited in '74 Glomar Failure," the New York Times, December 9, 1976. Hersh made some errors, such as initially overstating the number of bodies recovered with part of the Golf. But in describing how little of value was gained through the Glomar operation, he was right on the mark, while the Washington Post consistently wrote that the operation was relatively successful, and Time magazine published an article stating that it was a total success and the entire Golf submarine had been recovered. In our interview, Colby, who had previously declined to say much about the Glomar operation, finally confirmed that only part of the Golf was recovered. And while he said that some of the information gleaned from it was "useful," the sub "was not raised."

Hersh's story on the Holystone operations-"Submarines of U.S. Stage Spy Missions Inside Soviet Waters"-appeared on the front page of the New York Times, May 25, 1975. His follow-up on the Gato collision appeared in the Times on July 6, 1975.

Our description of the Pike Committee's conclusions comes from its final report, as reprinted in the Village Voice on February 16, 1976. After the full House voted not to release the report, it was leaked to the Voice by the veteran CBS newsman Daniel Schorr, who describes what happened in his book Clearing the Air (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, '1977).

Main interviews: Former top Navy, intelligence, and White House officials and crew members of the USS Seawol f and USS Parche.

Government documents, articles, books, and other sources: For President Jimmy Carter's background as a submarine officer and his general defense policies as president, we reviewed two of his hooks, Why Not the Best? (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1975); and Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President (New York: Bantam Books, 1982). Our description of the briefing for him on the activities of the special projects subs is based on interviews with former high-level officials who were familiar with it. Because of the sensitivity of the decision to tap Soviet cables in a second location, we should note that Richard Haver did not discuss the Barents taps with us in any fashion. In fact, we deliberately avoided describing as characters in this chapter or the next anyone who did talk to us about the operation.

The pulling hack of Soviet missile subs to the bastions was discussed in general terms in a number of articles in trade journals such as the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings and the Submarine Review during the I 980s. An excellent discussion of the initial differences in opinion among Navy leaders and analysts about what this Soviet move meant appeared in Gregory L. Vistica, Fall from Glory: The Men Who Sank the U.S. Navy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995). Vistica, a former reporter for the San Diego Union-Tribune who now works for Newsweek, set out to chronicle the Tailhook sex scandal and some of the problems with the Navy's leadership that seemed inevitably to lead to it. But he also delved into how Naval Intelligence formed its views of the Soviet threat, including the discussion about what to make of the satellite evidence in November 1980 that the Soviets might be building an aircraft carrier. Vistica's book also gave the first public description of the briefing on submarine spying that was given to President Ronald Reagan on Friday, March 6, 198 1. We also interviewed officials who attended that briefing, as well as crew members of the USS Besugo (SS-321)-the diesel submarine used in filming Hellcats of the Navy-who watched Reagan closely as he practiced barking out his orders and who saw the pier break.

Information about drug use among Seawolf and Parche crew members came from crewmen on those boats. Frederick H. Hartmann's book Naval Renaissance: The U.S. Navy in the 1980s (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1990), provides good background on how pervasive this problem once was in the Navy as a whole. He cited a Department of Defense drug-use survey in 1980 in which 47 percent of the respondents in the Navy and the Marines acknowledged using marijuana, compared to 40 percent in the Army and 20 percent in the Air Force. Only 2 percent of the Air Force respondents reported using cocaine, compared to 6 percent for the Army and i i percent for the Navy. Alarmed by these and other similar findings, Admiral Thomas B. Hayward, the chief of Naval Operations, released a videotape in December 1981 to be shown to every man and woman in the Navy. Hartmann recounts how in this message Hayward announced a new "pride and professionalism" program and delivered a stern warning to the people who were using drugs: "Not here, not on my watch, not in my division, not on my ship or in my squadron, not in my Navy." This program, enforced with huge numbers of random drug tests, sharply reduced the amount of illicit drug use in the Navy.

The dates of the missions by the Seawolf and the Parche are derived from official command and other histories for the ships found in Navy archives. Also helpful was the "cruise book"-an album of photographs, inside jokes, and crew rosters put together by Seawolf crew members and given to everyone who was on the 1981 mission. For information about the massive storm system that assaulted the Sea of Okhotsk and imperiled the Seawolf, see the Mariners Weather Log (published by the U.S. Department of Commerce/National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) 26, no. 2 (Spring 1982): 89; this volume gives the weather reports for October, November, and December 1981.

Main interviews: Former officials of U.S. intelligence agencies and former members of the crew of the USS Parche.

Government documents, articles, books, and other sources: After the cold war ended, the KGB placed a photograph of one of the two cabletap pods that it had recovered-along with some of the data-recording equipment that had been inside-on display in the Russian Ministry of Security's museum at the notorious Lubyanka Prison. On a visit there, our Russian researcher Alexander Mozgovoy was shown a small plate on the data-recording equipment that identified it as belonging to the U.S. government. Russian officials told Mozgovoy that the tap pods had been recovered about 60 kilometers, or roughly 38 miles, off of Kamchatka in the Sea of Okhotsk. They also said that one of the pods was clearly newer than the other and had more sophisticated recording equipment that made extensive use of microprocessing technology. The Russians confirmed that the devices were nuclear-powered and could work for about 125 days. Mozgovoy also obtained the picture of the tap pod that we have included with the photographs in this book.

Waldo K. Lyon helped us in interviews with the portion of this chapter that fell within his amazing area of expertise: the scientific properties of Arctic sea ice and their troubling implications for submarine warfare. Lyon fought tirelessly throughout the 1980s to try to persuade Navy officials to take more account of his views. Born in 1914, he had long operated with the energy and vigor of two men. He continued to work at the Arctic lab-and also was a national senior badminton champion-in his seventies. In his eighties, he was still fighting a 1997 order to raze the building that houses one of the few giant pools in the world where scientists can "grow" Arctic sea ice and conduct experiments. Lyon, who died in May 1998, wanted the lab mothballed intact so that study could he revived quickly should there be a war, and he found it hard to believe that the submarine force had not recognized the importance of saving the facility. He believed that the lesson from German tactics in World War II and the Soviets' shift to the ice proved that potential enemies will again use the almost impenetrable cover to attack U.S. targets on shore or at sea. He noted that even a simple diesel sub could easily hide in the ice and that, without further study, the United States would remain vulnerable.

Another good source on Lyon's early work (the first two or three decades of it) is The Reminiscences of Dr. Waldo K. Lvon, a 297-page oral history in the collection at the U.S. Naval Institute, Annapolis, Maryland.

The stunning scene when Admiral Rickover appealed to President Reagan to block Lehman's efforts to retire him is recounted in full detail in the introduction to John F. Lehman Jr., Command of the Seas: Building the 600-Ship Navy (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1988). Rickover's retaliation-putting up the picture of Benedict Arnold near John Lehman's-was recounted in Rockwell, The Rickover Effect, (p. 364).

Rickover was still an icon, but even some veteran submariners thought it was time for him to go-and that the demands of his reactor safety bureaucracy had gotten out of hand. In 1981, one sub captain, Commander Ed Linz, resigned his command of the USS Kamehameha (SSBN-642) to protest the management of the sub program. He said some officers had so little time to focus on seamanship skills that he feared a nuclear sub might run aground "due to total incompetence in basic navigation and ship handling, but the reactor-control division records would be perfect as it hit." Rickover died in July 1986.

Odyssey 82 was the name of a cruise hook put together by crew members on the Parche that year.

Admiral Watkins's quote on the Arctic ice as "a beautiful place to hide" for Soviet submarines was cited by Compton-Hall, Sub Versus Sub, p. 97. In a lengthy interview, Admiral Watkins also explained to us why he thought the U.S. sub force still could have countered the Soviets under the ice, as well as some of the moves he and others made to intimidate the Soviets psychologically. One of the most fascinating involved Watkins's decision to allow the U.S. Naval Institute-a private, nonprofit organization that works closely with the Navy-to publish the first edition of Tom Clancy's submarine novel The Hunt for Red October in 1984 even though some admirals believed it would enable the Soviets to learn more about U.S. submarine capabilities.

Watkins told us that about two-thirds of the technical information in Clancy's novel is on target and the rest is wrong, and that it typically overstates U.S. abilities. Rather than blocking publication of the book, or attempting to correct the misperceptions, when Clancy submitted his manuscript to the Navy for clearance, Watkins said he decided to let the book go forward as it was. "The Hunt for Red October did us a service," he said. "The Soviets kind of believed it, and we won the battle, and therefore it was a significant part of the noncostly deterrence of submarines."

Along the same lines, Watkins said that he was "sending a signal" to the Soviets by allowing detailed papers on the new forward U.S. maritime strategy to be published in the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings in 1986. While some in Congress questioned his move, he testified that the public declarations told the Soviets: "Don't risk either conflict or serious conventional war with the United States, because you are going to run into a hornets' nest and one of those is going to be at sea and you're not going to win that one." Publication of both the novel and the strategy, he added, demonstrated that "we had the resolve, we had the plan."

Another former official said the Navy also funded undersea expert Robert D. Ballard's search for the wreckage of the Titanic as part of this game of psychological warfare against the Soviets. Ballard found the Titanic in 1 985 and explored its wreckage with the mini-sub Alvin in 1986. This official said the Navy's aim in supporting Ballard's highly publicized missions was to show the Soviets that "we could find things underwater and look inside" so that they would think "we were not merely 10 feet tall but 20 feet tall." He said all these efforts to intimidate the Soviets-and make them think they could not compete with the United States-were encouraged by the late CIA Director William Casey.

Much of the information about the tumultuous year in U.S.-Soviet relations in 1983 comes from George Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State: The Memoirs of George P. Shultz (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1993). The sense of paranoia among Andropov and other KGB officials is vividly described in chapter 13 of Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story (New York: HarperCollins, 1990).

In explaining the importance of hiding a second-strike capability on submarines, Admiral Watkins also said: "The mission of the strategic deterrent at sea is not first strike. It is called war termination strategy. That's where it fits. So the first strike was the intercontinental ballistic missiles, obviously. The land-based missiles were the potential first strike and probably the most destabilizing of the elements of the deterrent.

"The maritime forces, while they were large in numbers of warheads, were there for the war termination strategy, which said: How do you win such a thing? Who wins? Well, we both know that nobody really wins. But who wins the battle is going to be largely a function of how much you have left after the first exchange. And while this is an insidious game, and I'm not trying to say I love the game, that's the reality of when you get into offensive weaponry on both sides as a strategic deterrent, as opposed to strategic defense."

Watkins also said he believed very strongly that the Soviets weren't going to launch a first strike. "We briefed the joint Chiefs, we briefed the president on what we thought we could do, why we thought we could do it, and I think we felt very comfortable, and I believe that that self-confidence was transmitted to the Russians in a variety of ways-by the strength of our resolve at our incidents-at-sea agreements, our discussions, by the maritime strategy publication itself, by their intelligence-gathering network on the sophistication and ability and capability of our submarine force, by a variety of publications and unclassified speculation and so forth, over a long time.

"Their intelligence sources were good, and we wanted them to know how self-confident we were. That's the role it plays. It's not a matter of charging up there and shooting up a lot of ballistic missile submarines as being the goal to prevent them from even launching first strike. No. That's not the way they would deploy their submarine force, and not the way that we would deploy ours.

"It was far deeper than that. These were the backup forces necessary to-you might say-undergird a nuclear exchange, and our job, of course, was to set up a deterrent that would make it unwise to do that, and we did it. And I believe it was one of the reasons that we were able to bring the Russians to their knees in the cold war. Because they could not win that battle, and therefore, why continue?"

Bob Woodward first described Admiral Butts's proposal to lay cables in the Barents and relay information from taps on Soviet lines in real time in Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981–1987 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987). Veil also gives the best previously published description of how the Soviets found the taps in the Sea of Okhotsk and how the White House and the intelligence community sought to keep the Washington Post from publishing what it knew about the tap operations in 1986. But even though Veil outlines Butts's costly proposal, neither Woodward's stories in the Post nor his book say that the Navy already was tapping Soviet cables in the Barents.

The only public indications that the Navy was involved in tapping cables in the Barents have come in brief statements in three other books that also mention Butts's proposal: Angelo Codevilla, a former Senate staff member who reviewed intelligence budgets from 1977 to 1985, notes in Informing Statecraft: Intelligence for a New Century (New York: Free Press, 1992) that the Sea of Okhotsk taps had been so valuable that "by the early 1980s the U.S. government had begun a multibillion-dollar project to make the flow simple and instantaneous. It involved tapping a Soviet undersea cable near the northwestern city of Murmansk with an American cable, buried under the sands of the Arctic Ocean's floor, and reaching all the way to Greenland. This intrusion into Soviet communications would have provided foolproof, timely warning of any Soviet decision to go to war." Still, Codevilla added that this idea eventually fell victim to "a classic bureaucratic coup de grace. Powerful factions within both CIA and NSA had opposed the directcable tap because it would have been expensive and would have taken money from current programs" (pp. 163–164). In Fall from Glory, Greg Vistica cites an unnamed defense source who said that the Navy had experimented with, and then abandoned, plans for an undersea plow that could "lay a cable from Greenland directly to the pods on the north coast of the Soviet Union, thus eliminating the submarine's work" (p. 72). And in The Universe Below, Bill Broad states that in addition to the Sea of Okhotsk, the cable tapping "feats were repeated" in the Barents. He cites an interview with Codevilla where he added that the cables to Greenland would have been made of fiber optics and would have been so long that they would have needed special devices to boost the signals. He also stated that the project-"a massive industrial undertaking on the seafloor, the likes of which had never before been attempted"-became the most expensive item in the intelligence budget before "the plug was pulled" (pp. 82–83). Before Blind Man's Bluff, nobody has ever written any more about how the Navy was tapping cables in the Barents, and nobody has identified Parche as the sub that laid the taps, or described how extensive and hazardous these operations were.

Two books give the full history of John Walker and his spy ring: John Barron, Breaking the Ring: The Bizarre Case of the Walker Family Spy Ring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987); and Pete Earley, Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring (New York: Bantam Books, 1988). John Lehman offers his ghoulish advice on what kind of punishment Walker should have received in Command of the Seas (pp. 133-34). Studeman's assessment of the damage that Walker did was included in an affidavit he wrote as part of the criminal case against Jerry Whitworth. It is on file in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, and a copy is included in Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, "Meeting the Espionage Challenge: A Review of United States Counterintelligence and Security Programs," September 23, 1986. The tale of Toshiba's treachery in selling the advanced propeller-milling equipment to the Soviets is well summarized in Ralph Kinney Bennett, "The Toshiba Scandal: Anatomy of a Betrayal," Reader's Digest (December 1987). In the case of Ronald Pelton, we drew mainly on the coverage of his trial by Woodward, Patrick Tyler, Susan Schmidt, and Paul W. Valentine in the Washington Post and Stephen Engelberg and Philip Shenon in the New York Times. Rich Haver's appearance before the Senate Intelligence Committee and a summary of the contents of his report about the Soviets' discovery of the taps in Okhotsk were described to us by former government officials familiar with them.

Our quotations from what Reagan and Gorbachev said to each other in Reykjavik all come from Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, ch. 36 ("What Really Happened at Reykjavik"). Shultz notes in that book that he usually kept careful notes of his meetings with key leaders and/or contemporaneous notes taken by others.

Interestingly enough, Shultz told us in an interview that while he supported risky, "military-oriented" intelligence missions like the cable tapping, he also thought much clandestine intelligence was overrated. "The most important information-people have to keep reminding themselves-is what you get by just common observation," he said. "I always felt-I don't want to distinguish among newspapers-but I always felt that the dispatches of Bill Keller, who wrote for the Neu.' York Times, were about as rewarding reading about anything that was going on as anything I read. And he didn't have any clandestine sources or what not. He was just a smart guy who got around.

"And I think that as a general proposition, the basic State Department reporting, using open sources, and observation, and talking to people, give you the basic picture. Sometimes you can be even misled by what you pick up in some clandestine way. Because there is a feeling that if you got it by some secret means, it must be very important." Laughing, he added: "And it may he that it's not anywhere near as important as things that are just obviously there."

Main interviews: Admiral Carl Trost and other current and former top Navy officials.

Government documents, books, articles, and other sources: Admiral Crowe describes Marshal Akhromeyev's visits in detail in chapter 16 of The Line of Fire. Admiral Trost, in an interview, described the meeting with Akhromeyev in the Joint Chiefs' "Tank" as well as his own travels to Russia and conclusions about the Soviet Navy. Akhromeyev committed suicide after the failed coup against Gorbachev in 1991.

The activity of the submarines in Squadron 1 I was included in its official command history for 1988.

Bush wrote to Gorbachev to offer the Soviets help after their prototype for an advanced "Mike"-class nuclear attack submarine sank in 8,400 feet of water 270 miles north of Norway. It sank after a fire broke out on board, and 42 crew members were killed.

Transcripts of speeches from the Naval Submarine League's convention in 1990 were reprinted in the organization's quarterly magazine, the Submarine Review, later that year. The role of U.S. attack submarines in the Persian Gulf War and details of the Navy's new "From the Sea" maritime strategy have been described in numerous news articles and in brochures prepared by the Navy. The Navy publicly released a report of an investigation into the collision involving the USS Baton Rouge, and we also drew from news articles about both that and the Grayling collision in the New York Times and the Washington Post, which published the quote from the unnamed senior administration official wondering whether top Navy officials "read the newspapers" before undertaking such missions.

There also have been numerous articles in the major daily newspapers, the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, and the Submarine Review on the plans for, and capabilities of, both the new Seawolf and the proposed NSSN attack submarines, as well as extensive coverage on how much the submarine force is being cut back from cold war levels. The Submarine Review's practice of reprinting Sub League convention speeches from top Navy officials has made it easy to keep track of all the changes in the sub force, from new technology to the new roles and missions. One recent article in the general pressRichard J. Newman, "Breaking the Surface," U.S. News & World Report, April 6, 1998, pp. 28-42-also provides a comprehensive look at what the sub force is focusing on now.

Two articles noted the USS Parche's move from Mare Island to a new port in Washington State: Ed Offley, "Secret Nuclear Navy Submarine Finds New Home," Seattle Post-Intelligencer [the article title as it appeared in the Times-Picayune (New Orleans), November 24, 1994]; and Lloyd Pritchett, "Will Top-Secret Sub Be Able to Slip into Area Quietly?" Bremerton Sun, August 8, 1994.

Both Offley's and Newman's stories suggest that Iran and China would be good targets for cable-tapping by the Parche.

Gates's decision to bring the videotape of the funeral held for the men on the Golf was ultimately motivated by the fact that the United States wanted to inspire Russia to offer up information on missing American servicemen in Vietnam. Before that, "We had never confirmed anything to the Russians except in various vague senses," he said in an interview. "Shortly after the USSR collapsed, the Bush administration had told the Russians through an intermediary that we couldn't tell them any more about what had happened on Golf/Glomar. But then when we started asking the Russians about what had happened to U.S. pilots shot down over Vietnam, and if any U.S. POWs had been transferred to Russia and held there, they came back and said, `What about our guys in the submarine?"'

At the time, the administration told the Russians only that there were no survivors and that there were only scattered remains. Later, Gates says, "It seemed to me, as I was getting ready for the trip, that there would be symbolic value in terms of assuring the Russians that, from the CIAs standpoint, the cold war was over." It was then that he decided to give them information about the Glomar. He planned the move as a surprise, he says. "We didn't tell the Russians what I was bringing. We told them I was bringing a gift for Yeltsin of historic and symbolic importance. They were dying to know what it was. For once, we kept a secret. I guess Aldrich Ames was not brought into the picture."

Main sources: U.S. and Russian submariners and navy officials, Joshua Handler, Alexander Mozgovoy, and news articles cited in the text.

Main sources: U.S. and Russian submariners and navy officials, and articles in Russian newspapers and magazines. The most detailed account of the reactor accident on the Hiroshima came from the May 1991 issue of Soviet Soldier, in an article titled "Ivan Kulakov Versus a Nuclear Reactor," pp. 28–31.

Since the end of the cold war, the Russian Navy has been much more open about what went on than the U.S. Navy, and numerous articles have appeared in the Russian press detailing submarine disasters and disclosing other problems. Our researcher, Alexander Moz govoy, wrote some of these articles for various publications. Several articles have described the travails of the K-19 and the drama of the reactor accident that killed eight of its crew members in 1961. (An additional twenty-two men ultimately died from radiation poisoning.) The episode involving the USS Baltimore and the Soviet Zulu 1V sub was first reported in the series in the Chicago Tribune and the Newport News (Va.) Daily Press in 1991.