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

Four — Velvet Fist

Halibut's one success left Craven convinced that she was ready to start filling the Sand Dollar wish list. And over at Naval Intelligence, nobody was more anxious to believe him than Navy Captain James F. Bradley Jr.

Bradley, forty-six years old, had just taken over as the Navy's top underwater spy, and now he was meeting with Craven regularly in his unmarked, soundproofed suite on the fifth floor of the E Ring of the Pentagon. Three sets of locked doors barred trespassers. Guarding the entrance was a receptionist armed with a well-practiced look of confusion and a standard answer to unwanted inquiries. She always said that she knew nothing of Bradley or of his staff. His official Navy biography listed his assignment simply as "Naval Operations, Navy Department"-no specifics, nothing more.

Nothing in the public record suggested that Bradley had a hand in crafting intelligence missions for every attack submarine in the nation's fleet. And nothing suggested that he now was responsible for crafting Halibut's first real missions.

Bradley and Craven knew they weren't going to be able to keep taking money from other Navy departments to support Halibut indefinitely, not without very high-level hacking. Rickover was already gunning for them, in part because their submarine, considered a "special projects boat," was one of the few nukes he had trouble controlling. They needed results, and they needed them fast if their deep-sea search idea was going to survive.

The way Bradley saw it, all of the Soviet missiles that other spy submarines had monitored through launch and splashdowns or crash were only words on a list unless Halibut could prove her worth and make them into something more. Otherwise, the $70 million and thousands of hours of work poured into refurbishing her might as well have been tossed into the seas.

The Soviets had been developing missiles at a phenomenal rate ever since they were forced to back down during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Test shots fired from rocket centers deep within the Soviet Union, and others fired from submarines, had splashed down out in the Pacific. U.S. subs had been focused on trying to film these tests and capture readings that could help determine the telemetry of the weapons. These subs took great risks, sneaking into waters all but cordoned off by Soviet ships conducting at-sea launches and monitoring splashdowns of land-based missiles, the remains of which were scattered in shards over a vast sea bottom, bits of black metal strewn about by the force of splashdowns, implosions, and ocean currents. What Bradley wanted most were missile nose cones that held the guidance systems and dummy warheads that could provide a good estimate of the weapons' size, power, and yield. Finding the pieces wouldn't be easyHalibut may have been able to find a test object carefully placed in the water, but how would she fare now that her destination was far less exact and her quarry was in northern Pacific waters commonly patrolled by Soviet vessels? Detection now, in the summer of 1967, would be diplomatically disastrous. Just that June, the United States and the Soviet Union had seemed close to blows when both sides sent armadas of ships and submarines to the Mediterranean Sea during the Arab-Israeli War.

Nevertheless, Bradley wanted a miracle, and not just one. He wanted Halibut to find so much Soviet treasure, ferret out so much intelligence, that the Pentagon would have no choice but to build a fleet of special projects subs. Craven wanted much the same and that bonded the two men as a team.

Like Craven, Bradley came from a seafaring family. Both men shared an awe for the unexplored and hazardous depths, as well as a sense of amazement at what Halibut was about to dare. But Craven's Brooklyn bravado was a direct contrast to Bradley's midwestern pragmatism. Bradley had no Civil War family yarns to tell. There were no skulls and crossbones in the Bradley past-only the stars tattooed with coal dust and a pocket knife on each of his father's knees and a great black and yellow tattooed tiger leaping across the old man's stomach. It was on his father's left arm that Bradley had taken his first world tour, tracing the fourteen tattooed flags that marked the ports of call of his first naval hero, his dad, who was a boatswain's mate in President Theodore Roosevelt's "Great White Fleet."

Bradley joined the Navy not to fulfill long-held family obligations, but because on the eve of World War II he believed he had to choose between images of mud-filled army trenches or valiant battles in sunsprayed seas and pretty girls featured in the 1940 movie Navy Blue and Gold. Bradley found himself in battle less than a year after graduating from the bottom half of his Naval Academy class in 1944. Despite that, he had so much fun tooling through the sea in diesel submarines that he later refused Rickover's invitation to join the nuclear Navy.

It was a move tantamount to turning down the first stock offering of IBM or AT&T. It was already clear that the high-profile nukes would soon become the best route to a set of admiral's stars for most of his peers. But Bradley was not like the other white-gloved candidates coming out of the Naval Academy. He would rather down a margarita than a martini, shaken or stirred, and if anyone had ever tried to serve him a cucumber sandwich, he probably would have doused it in Tabasco sauce. He ate Tabasco with everything except cake and ice cream.

Brawny, handsome, and stubborn, he had moved into intelligence backwards and sideways. He didn't take either of the two diesel subs he commanded out on spy missions. But he had taken a turn practicing cocktail party intelligence, mainly quizzing naval attaches and diplomats from other countries in the late 1950s when he was an assistant naval attache in Bonn. He landed that job because he had studied German at Georgetown University, adding to the already colorful vocabulary he had picked up as a twelve-year-old playing Little League for a church team in the German section of St. Louis.

When the job of director of undersea warfare opened up in the Office of Naval Intelligence in 1966, Bradley had a pal who happened to be the assistant to the director of Naval Intelligence. This was a time when Rickover was refusing to spare any of his nuclear submariners for landlocked staff jobs, so the job had to go to a diesel submariner, and it went to Bradley.

Bradley enjoyed the irony that he was now directing the spy missions for Rickover's nuclear fleet. Indeed, the captain enjoyed this almost as much as his beloved Tabasco sauce.

For his part, Rickover could never forgive Bradley his slight, his refusal to join the admiral's elite society, any more than Rickover could tolerate the ill-kempt irreverence of other diesel submariners. He thought Bradley was a "freebooter" and hated the fact that he couldn't control him. But by the late summer of 1967, Bradley was less concerned with appeasing Rickover than with proving that his spy program could come up with the goods.

Much of Bradley's beloved diesel fleet was on the sidelines now, as the Atlantic Fleet had quit sending diesels off Soviet waters. The Pacific Fleet had fewer subs and was slower to get nuclear ones, so it still made good use of its diesels, sending them both to the Soviet Union and into the shallower waters off China to monitor efforts there to develop nuclear missile subs. (The Pacific Fleet even sent diesel subs to monitor France's nuclear weapons tests in the South Pacific.) Just before Bradley got to Washington, two U.S. diesel subs had smashed into freighters while on surveillance missions off Vietnam."[3]

But while mistakes like these were hastening the end of the diesels' reign, nuclear submarine commanders were being encouraged to take as many risks as diesels ever did-or more. Indeed, as the nukes took over, most fleet commanders were still willing to overlook incursions into Soviet waters and detections that stopped short of collisions.

The commanders knew as well as Bradley that the risks were worth it if it meant catching Soviet missile subs as they came out of port. Once they hit the open waters, they were far more difficult to track; even the expanding SOSUS listening nets covered only a small portion of the oceans. This problem was becoming more urgent because after all the years of worry in Washington, the Soviets had finally begun to send missile subs-mostly Golf-class diesels-on regular patrols off of U.S. coasts. The Air Force also was desperate for help in learning the capabilities of the newest Soviet land-based missiles test fired into the oceans.

And so began "Operation Winterwind," Bradley's plan to grab one of the most important items on the old Operation Sand Dollar wish list. At the Air Force's request, he was going to send Halibut out to find the nose cone from a Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile. It didn't matter to Bradley that Halibut still had no capacity to actually retrieve anything. He figured that if Halibut could simply track down shards of a missile and mark where they lay with signal-emitting transponders, the Navy could figure out a way to retrieve them later. The transponders should remain active for up to seven years, time enough to come up with a plan, perhaps time enough to allow Craven's team to build one of those deep search vehicles to move in for the final grab.

This time Halibut was being led by Commander C. Edward Moore, a man fresh from "charm school," the training ground for prospective commanding officers (PCOs) where they were grilled in the working of nuclear reactors. Run by Rickover's minions, the reactor courses were exercises in desperation and frustration, one where candidates were hammered mercilessly. Rickover himself took delight in warning the PCO's that at least a third would fail. He and his men relentlessly interrogated candidates about the details of circuit breaker theory, physics, anything in the thick stack of reactor manuals, testing to see which third that would be.

Now Moore had inherited a boat plagued with a temperamental reactor and Rickover's rancor. Built solid like a wrestler, Moore faced his task with quiet determination. His hair, already graying, would go just a hit lighter on this command, but he rarely complained out loud, and almost never about Rickover himself-though he would periodically aim a curse at some of the admiral's more overtly sadistic subordinates.

As Halibut moved more than 400 miles north of Midway, only Moore and a few officers knew what she was after-not even the handpicked, specially cleared denizens of the Bat Cave had been told. Their leader, Lieutenant Commander John H. Cook III, a thirty-oneyear-old electrical engineer with the dual title of operations officer and project officer, mentioned only that they were to scan the ocean hottom 17,000 feet down for any object larger than a garbage can.

Things started out well enough. The team laid a transponder grid on the ocean floor, using Halibut's torpedo tubes to launch more than a dozen of the signal devices. Each had a unique sound signature that could be triggered by remote control from the sub. As each transponder hit bottom, navigators plotted its precise location using a satellite navigation system.

Craven wasn't aboard while all this was happening, but his spirit was. Most of Halibut's crew believed the cover story he had craftedthat the 8-foot-long transponders were underwater mines. The transponders had even been marked with munitions codes and deliv ered to Halibut via a Navy munitions depot. To make sure the crew was convinced, Craven gravely warned the men to deny that mines were on board.

It took thirty-six hours to set the grid. After that, the men launched one of the fish. Most of the crew had been told that the mechanisms were a new type of towed sonar, but the "special projects" crew crammed inside the Bat Cave's tiny control room knew better.

The video signals still weren't coming through. Instead, the men were trying to "see" the bottom by sonar images sent up through the fish. They sat, staring into the gray shadows sent up to the screens, trying to separate one wash of shadow from another, to distinguish what might have been key objects from passing fish, from rocks. There were also panels displaying digital readouts to track the mechanical fish's altitude from the bottom as it swam along illuminating its own path, taking photographs that nobody would see until it was hauled back into the sub.

Things became even more difficult when the Univac 1124 crashed. This time, though, the Bat Cave crew was ready. Armed with a hand calculator carried on board by a Westinghouse engineer, the men did the job for which the computer had been designed. Not long after that, though, Halibut's gremlins almost got the better of the mission. This time the problem was caused in part by a weakness Craven had knowingly left alone, a calculated risk. The hydraulically powered cable spool was smaller than it should have been. To fit within the seven-foot gap between the submarine's pressure hull and the top of the deck, the spool could be only six feet wide. As a result, the seven-mile-long braided steel cable had to be wound so tight that it was stressed to its limit.

Craven had calculated that the cable should stand up nonetheless. But he forgot something. Overall, the cable itself was strong enough, but it was actually made up of a bunch of separate strands wound together. The strands themselves were built of shorter lengths welded together to stretch 7 miles, and each weld was a weak point. It was one of those welds that had snapped, leaving a loose wire jamming the device designed to hoist the cable, and leaving the fish dangling aimlessly at the end of the line. In a desperate effort to prevent the loss of the second of the $5 million devices, a crowd of men began working together to hoist the two tons of aluminum and managed to get the fish back on board and through the tube that launched it. Then Halibut sur faced. Over the next three days, her men pulled the entire 35,000-foot cable off its spool, laid the steel out in the Bat Cave in a seemingly endless figure eight, then rewound the entire expanse-only this time in reverse. The idea was to make sure the broken section remained wrapped around the spool when a fish was sent back out. The effort worked, but the men still never found a piece of missile.

When Halibut slipped back to port late that October, Craven was waiting on the dock. He had already figured out that Halibut couldn't go out again with a welded cable. He put out word through the Secretary of the Navy's research and development office. He wanted a seven-mile-long weldless cable. The Navy began contacting contractors, explaining only that it needed seven miles of continuous cable, no welds, for a classified project. From oil-drilling companies to elevator companies, vendors came to the Pentagon. One man couldn't bear the suspense. "You just have to tell me," he blurted out. "What building is this for?"

Not a single company could meet the Navy specification for 37,500 feet of weld-free cable. Finally, U.S. Steel agreed to modify its cablemaking process. Even then, it would take three months-until January 1968-to spin the seven miles of steel. When the cable was finally finished, Bradley decreed that it was time again to try to catch a missile.

Halibut's departure came roughly at the same time the North Koreans captured and boarded the USS Pueblo, an intelligence ship that spied from the surface. Pueblo was in international waters, intercepting radar signals, when the Koreans attacked. It was an audacious move. The Koreans sprayed the ship with gunfire, and Pueblo's crew, their ship only lightly armed, didn't dare fight hack. When the Koreans moved to prevent the crew from destroying the ship's espionage equipment and records, one American was killed and three others were wounded. In the end, the Koreans stole some of the United States' most highly sensitive cryptographic gear, and U.S. intelligence officials were convinced that the gear would be handed over to the Soviets.

Back on Halibut, all started out well. She made it back to the transponder grid without incident. This time the fish swam without a snag. Grainy sonar images played continuously on the screens of the Bat Cave, a fuzzy reproduction of a far-off planet 17,000 feet below.

The submarine and her crew searched for nearly two months, but there was still no sight of a Soviet missile. Then the cable system broke down again, and the electronics that communicated with the fish shorted out. All this was nothing new. The crew had long ago figured out how to jury-rig a quick fix at sea. The entire operation should have taken less than an hour. The problem was that it had to be engineered on the surface. The men would have to brave Halibut's deck, in the 3:00 A.M. dark.

Up until now, day had blurred into night for these men 300 feet below sunlight. Drifting deep in the quiet of their underwater universe, they had felt little of the big ocean swells above. But now, Commander Moore had no choice. His men would have to face the rough waters of the surface.

As he gave the order to blow ballast, a three-man repair crew began to squeeze into their uncomfortable wet suits. Among them was machinist's mate chief Charlie Hammonds. He waited until Moore gave the order. The captain had been watching the swells, waiting for a time when the deck wasn't taking on water. After a while he gave the nod.

"Flip on your light," said senior chief Skeaton Norton as Hammonds readied to climb out the hatch onto Halibut's hull. Over their wet suits, the repair crew wore life jackets decorated with small, canister-shaped, battery-powered strobe lights. They had been designed for the Air Force, part of jet-fighter pilots' rescue packs.

"I'll turn it on in time," Hammonds answered in his typical hardnosed fashion. The mechanic was gruff, 5'8" tall, balding, and muscular. He was a loner but had been dubbed "Uncle Charlie" on hoard.

"You'll turn it on before you step out that door," Norton answered in his toughest chief-of-the-boat voice.

Hammonds knew an order when he heard one. He answered with a simple flip of a switch.

In the night black and fog, the tiny jet-fighter light barely illuminated Hammond's face as he stepped out and hooked a safety line through an open notch on the safety track that ran almost flush with the deck the length of the sub. He made his way down the wet, narrow black deck, then over to the front of the sail where he grabbed hold of a rail. He was in as good a position as any submariner could be, considering that he was standing outside at night, on a submarine, in the middle of the rolling ocean.

Then the ocean reached out, as if it were trying to pull the entire submarine back down into the depths where she belonged. A rogue wave rose higher than sixty feet, reaching over the conning tower, crashing gallons through the open control room hatch, washing over the deck and grabbing Hammonds along with it. He was pulled toward the front of the submarine, his safety line running the length of the track. The line should have been enough to hold him on board, and it would have been enough had the wave been less powerful, had he been pulled less far. Only Hammonds was pulled all the way forward, near the torpedo room hatch, to another notch in the safety track, there by design to allow men to hook their lines on and secure themselves. Only now, as Hammonds zipped past, that tiny notch became his exit from the track. Suddenly unlatched, he was washed into the rough waters.

Inside the conning tower, that same wave caught a young lieutenant who sprained both arms as he desperately held on. By the time he emerged sputtering, he could see Charlie Hammonds was gone. Men on deck began shouting: "Man overboard!"

Now a lot of people were shouting that. They began to search according to drill, what would have been normal routine on a surface ship. But this was a nuclear submarine. And submarine crews had come to spend most of their time below decks and underwater. Back in the diesel clays, the days of Cochino and Tusk, this kind of casualty was a constant threat. But now, few if any men serving in the nuclear Navy had ever experienced this, and the recovery drill for a man overboard was seldom practiced.

"Who's lost?"

"What happened?"

"It's Charlie. We lost Charlie."

The chorus went on as men raced to their battle stations. One of the officers jumped up to the periscope. Halibut continued to rock hack and forth, creating a dizzying view of the waters outside.

"I see a light out there," the officer shouted.

"Stay on it," someone, probably the captain, shouted hack.

Hammonds was seventy-five yards away, off the starboard beam. Halibut had been moving slowly forward and away from him.

"Back emergency, back emergency," Moore shouted to the engine room, fully aware that if they lost sight of Hammond's light, he might never be found.

The engine room poured on power, kicking Halibut into reverse. The sub vibrated, then bucked, as her screws churned against her forward momentum. Someone shouted into the loudspeaker from the engine room that the sub's engines were overheating.

"Keep your bell on!" Moore yelled back. He knew hacking at too high a speed for too long could overheat the turbines, but he was convinced Halibut could take it. She had been designed for emergency maneuvers. Besides, there was no choice but to take the risk. They had to get to Hammonds.

By now there were men on both periscopes, probably the executive officer and the lead quartermaster. They stared out into the black desperately trying to hang on to the distant glow of Hammonds's tiny light as other men set up a far more powerful search light.

Four divers scrambled into their wet suits and raced to the control room. Two went out on deck and into the water. Another man stood beneath the bridge hatch, sweltering in his wet suit, ready to jump into the ocean if the other divers got into trouble.

Cook scrambled toward the Bat Cave shouting that he was going to reel in the fish.

"Fuck the fish," Moore shouted after him.

Cook went on anyway.

Captain Moore climbed out and onto the sail with a pair of binoculars, and began tracking Hammonds's light himself.

Storm and ocean in his eyes and ears, Hammonds couldn't see Halibut bearing down on him. He was swimming frantically without any direction. Then he heard a voice in the distance, a voice saying, "Hold on chief, we're going to get you." Hammonds relaxed. It was the most important thing he could have done. In his wet suit, hypothermia wasn't going to be the problem, but panic kills. He held onto that voice, the voice of his captain, even as his tiny light blinked out. Moments later Halibut was alongside him. Divers leapt into the water, and tied a line under his arms. Then he was pulled aboard. He had been in the icy water fifteen minutes, and Moore knew it was only luck that the chief hadn't been lost for good. The moment he was lowered through the hatch, Hugh "Doc" Wheat, the crew's corpsman, began treating him with brandy, the most effective medicine on board.

Hammonds just kept repeating, "I couldn't see anything, I couldn't see anything." He was shivering violently. Doc Wheat prescribed more brandy. Chief Gary L. Patterson asked for brandy as well, but Doc wasn't going for it. He was brought to the showers to be warmed, then put to bed. Still, it would take hours for the shock to wear off, hours the crew spent decorating Halibut with signs declaring, "Welcome back, Charlie. How was liberty?"

The humor may have been lost on Hammonds. His crewmates would tell and re-tell the tale of his harrowing swim at every Halibut reunion for years, but Hammonds would never show up to listen. Still, while they were at sea, Hammonds amazed everyone by going back out onto the deck, almost daring the ocean to try again. Nobody expected it of him. Just about any other man might have stayed below, might have been too terrified to face the rolling waves. But as long as Hammonds was on the boat-and he would be for another monthhe would refuse to give in to fear.

In early April, Moore turned his boat for home. He was coming back empty-handed. He and his men never did find a missile. But he was also coming home with every single one of his men, and he didn't mind the trade-off, not one bit. Besides, he was about to get the chance of a lifetime to redeem himself and his submarine.

Halibut pulled into Pearl Harbor on April 11, 1968, the sixtyeighth anniversary of the day the Navy purchased its first submarine. The enlisted men attended the "Submarine Birthday Ball," and the officers gathered at what the locals called the "Pink Lady," the Royal Hawaiian Hotel on Waikiki Beach. There, they made their way through three or four cases of champagne that one of them had stacked under their table, as well as a case of liquor that had been swiped from an admiral's suite.

As they celebrated, an amazing detective story was unfolding. A dozen Soviet ships had poured out into the Pacific, moving slowly, hanging away at the ocean with active sonar. They were obviously looking for something. Soon it became clear that the Soviets were looking for one of their own. They had lost a submarine.

The USS Barb (SSN-596) had been sitting off the Soviet port at Vladivostok when the frantic search began. Barb's CO Bernard M. "Bud" Kauderer had never seen anything like it. Four or five Soviet submarines rushed out to sea and began beating the ocean with active sonar. The submarines would dive, come back to periscope depth, then dive again.

The Soviets made no effort to avoid detection, no effort to hide. Their cries filled airwaves, shattering the air around Vladivostok with unencoded desperation.

"Charlie, Victor, Red Star, come in."

"Red Star, come in."

"Red Star, come in, come in, come in."

Back on shore, U.S. intelligence agents gathered around electronic intercept monitors and listened in. Barb watched, keeping radio silence. A message flashed in from shore command: "Stay on station." Kauderer felt a flash of frustration. He had planned on turning for home, planned on arriving in time to attend his only son's bar mitzvah. But now his boy would become a man without him. Kauderer was legally forbidden from telling his son why.

As Barb and other U.S. surveillance craft listened, it was clear that the Soviets had no idea where to find their submarine. Back in Washington, Bradley thought that he might know better.

For some time, Bradley's Office of Undersea Warfare had been keeping a long and frustrating vigil over an obscure set of Soviet submarine communications that U.S. intelligence had never figured out how to decode. The Soviets were using sophisticated transmitters that compressed the communications into microsecond bursts. Bradley thought the key to finding the missing sub lay in these indecipherable bursts of static.

Intelligence officers had figured out that the transmissions were coming from Soviet missile submarines on their way to and from patrols within firing range of U.S. shores. The United States had been monitoring and recording them using a series of reception stations that were built upon German technology-dozens of antennas were strategically placed along the Pacific Coast and in Alaska.

After a while, it didn't matter much that the bursts couldn't be decoded. There was a wealth of information to be found just within the pops and hisses. Slight variations in frequency distinguished one Soviet submarine from another, and the Soviets were so regimented that their submarines created a running itinerary for U.S. intelligence to follow as they ran, tag-team style, through the 4,000 miles from Kamchatka to one of their main patrol stations 750 to 1,000 miles northwest of Hawaii. A burst typically was sent when the submarines hit the deepsea marker just outside Kamchatka. Another was sent as they crossed the international dateline, about 2,000 miles away from the Soviet Union at 180 degrees longitude. A third marked their arrival on station.

It was as if they were saying "We are leaving…. We have hit 180 degrees longitude…. We are on station." The progress reports continued as the subs headed back to Kamchatka, and Bradley's men believed they could almost hear within the static the Soviet requests for fresh milk, fresh vegetables, vodka, women.

Now Bradley's team searched the communications records and found what they were looking for almost immediately. A Golf II submarine-one of a class of diesel subs that filled in between the first Zulu subs converted to carry missiles and the coming of the first Soviet nuclear-powered missile subs-had left port on February 24, 1968. The sub had been transmitting as usual until it hit midcourse. Then the transmissions stopped. There was no message when it crossed 180 degrees longitude; none saying it had left deep water; nothing that could be construed as a request for milk or fruit or anything else that would mark a safe return.

Bradley rushed the news to the Navy's top admirals: the Soviets had indeed lost a submarine, one that carried three ballistic missiles. He believed that the sub had to have gone down between the last burst transmission and the next expected one that never came, but the Soviets weren't looking anywhere near the area Bradley had pinpointed.

What if the United States could find the sub first? There in one place would be Soviet missiles, codehooks, a wealth of technological information-and Bradley thought he had the means to find it. Halibut might not have been able to find a relatively small missile fragment, but a submarine was a much bigger and better target.

Halibut Commanders Moore and Cook were called to Washington. Waiting for them were Rear Admiral Philip A. Beshany, deputy chief of naval operations for submarine warfare, Craven, and Albert C. Beutler, who supervised Halibut's work.

"We've got some intelligence that the Soviets may have lost a submarine in the Pacific," Beshany announced as soon as the men walked in. Then Beshany filled in the details and the punch line, that Halibut was going after the Soviet Golf.

From Beshany's office, Craven rushed Moore and Cook in to see Paul Nitze, secretary of the Navy. This time, the officers were grilled on Halibut's failure to find any missile fragments. Craven held his breath while Cook offered up a spiel that rivaled the best that Craven himself could have delivered.

Failure or not, Cook said, Halibut's crew had now had time to work out the kinks in their equipment. The men could, he insisted, find a submarine if given the chance. It wasn't a hard sell. There was no other craft in the Navy that could attempt this kind of a search as long as the Soviets were out in force. Cook's optimism was enough to send the secretary straight to the White House to seek the okay.

Craven, Moore, and Cook could do nothing now but pray for the final go-ahead. They barely had time to kneel. Within a few hours, Nitze telephoned Beshany, who called Moore, Cook, and Craven back into his office with the news.

"You have a new mission."[4]

Craven now began looking for any other evidence that might further pinpoint the location of the Golf. He was convinced that there had to be other audible signs of a sub going down, so he contacted Captain Joseph Kelly, the man chiefly responsible for expanding the SOSUS net of underwater listening devices that the Navy had been laying throughout the oceans.

Kelly's staff ran through a series of SOSUS records, looking for signs of death: the convulsive terror of an implosion followed by the smaller explosions that together indicate a submarine falling to the ocean bottom. But as Kelly's staff searched, they found no massive aberrations that would indicate a powerful implosion. There was, however, a tiny blip on their paper tapes, a little rise indicating a single loud pop. It was right in the area where Bradley believed the Soviet sub had gone down.

What if, Craven reasoned, the Golf had somehow flooded before hitting crush depth? She would have fallen without a searing, deafening, blinding, cataclysmic, implosive crash of steel. Her death would have been much quieter than that. Craven needed to know what a sinking submarine sounded like, one going down with hatches open, filling with ocean water, internal and external pressure equalizing long before the boat reached crush depth. There was only one way to find out.

Craven and Bradley prevailed upon the Navy to sink a submarine in sacrifice, a submarine whose death could be taped. The Navy gave him an old diesel submarine, a warhorse that had probably escaped countless Japanese torpedoes during World War 11. Now she would suffer a vainglorious end.

World War II submarines had been executed before, made targets for torpedo practice. But those boats went out running, their engines on, their rudders wedged into position. There was something almost noble about that kind of death, downed with a single shot like a valiant old steed.

This submarine, on the other hand, was just given up to the waters, while SOSUS engineers recorded her descent. She died silently, which was just what Craven and Bradley had expected. Now, they reasoned, if a submarine with every hatch and watertight door carefully opened went down silently, then another boat might go down with a small pop if one of its watertight doors had remained shut. So, calling on data from other hydrophones that had also picked up the pop, Kelly and Craven triangulated what they believed was the Golf's most likely position: 40 degrees latitude and 180 degrees longitude. That put her just about 1,700 miles northwest of Hawaii, where the water was more than 3 miles deep.

Beshany still wasn't convinced. He believed there would have to have been implosions. The fact that the Soviets weren't anywhere near the area also caused him doubts. But he had nothing else to go on. So he gave the nod, and Halibut was sent to the spot Craven had pinpointed.[5]

She set out on July 15, her orders kept secret from the men on board. Even the occupants of the Bat Cave were told little. Most assumed they were going hack to look for the Soviet missile that had eluded them before.

As a fish was sent out, sonar gray again replaced images from a video camera that still didn't work. Watching the monotone miles roll by on a continuous taped-together sheet was dizzying. The men's eyes stung as they forced themselves to focus, looking for shadows that seemed foreign to the Pacific bottom. Their shifts never lasted longer than ninety minutes. After that, the sky-blues in the Bat Cave began to quiver with gray ghosts.

Day and night, Halibut trolled back and forth. The site that Craven, Bradley, and Kelly had targeted still left five miles of sea to search. The Soviet submarine could have drifted a long way before it fell the three miles to the bottom.

Every six days or so, the fish was hauled back into the submarine so that the still film could be collected and developed. This went on for weeks. Still nothing. Then the haze was interrupted.

"Captain Moore, Captain Moore." It was the ship's photographer bursting out of the Halibut's tiny darkroom, suddenly completely aware that he hadn't been looking for a missile this time. He was at once stunned and certain he had found his target.

It was a perfect picture of a submarine's sail. The photographer was shaking so hard Moore worried for a moment that he'd collapse. There it was, Halibut's first success, a view of the steel tomb of about one hundred Soviet sailors.

At Moore's orders, the fish dove again, down to the spot captured in the photograph of the sail, down to where the Soviet Golf looked as though someone had carefully driven her 16,580 feet to the ocean bottom and parked.

Sonar and camera gobbling up everything in the area, the fish collected new detail with each dive. There was a hole blown nearly 10 feet wide, just behind the Golf's conning tower. There must have been an explosion, probably on the surface, given the quiet recorded by SOSUS, and it probably came from a hydrogen buildup that could have occurred as the Soviet crew sat charging the diesel submarine's 450-ton sulfuric acid battery. Although severely damaged, the submarine looked basically intact.

The photos also showed that small hatches had been blown off, exposing two missile silos. Inside the first was twisted pipe where a nuclear warhead had once sat calmly waiting for holocaust. Inside the second silo, the warhead was completely gone. The third silo was intact.

Then the fish's camera found something else, something that shocked even Moore. It was the skeleton of a doomed sailor, probably just an enlisted man, a kid, lying alongside his submarine, alone, his crewmates probably entombed within. One of his legs was broken and bent almost at a right angle, perhaps from the shock of the explosion that destroyed the submarine. Maybe that's what had killed him. Or maybe he had drowned as he fell the three miles to the ocean floor.

The boy had to have been out on deck when the submarine was destroyed. He was dressed in foul-weather gear, a brown sheepskin coat buttoned up to his neck, thick wool pants, and heavy black military hoots. Now the clothes warmed only his stark white hones.

Bones, a bare skeleton-by all accounts, that should have been impossible. Little or nothing lived this far down in the ocean, the experts had said. But there he was, and there was something else in those photographs. Tiny, carnivorous worms wriggled around the body they had already eaten hit by horrific hit.

No one who saw the Soviet boy-submariner could forget him, not anyone who saw the 22,000 photographs Halibut brought home on September 9, 1968.

Bradley code-named the pictures "Velvet Fist" after the gentle way they were snatched from the ocean. All those millions of dollars, all those hours poured into Halibut, had finally paid off. He rushed the plunder straight to the new director of Naval Intelligence, Frederick J. "Fritz" Harlfinger II, who had taken the post while Halibut was still out to sea.

This was a man who had been the Defense Intelligence Agency's assistant director of collection, a polite word in intelligence circles for theft. Working with the Syrians and the Israelis a few years earlier, his team had managed to steal a Soviet MIG fighter jet. During the Vietnam War, they handed the Pentagon a Soviet surface-to-air missile. They also managed to pilfer a Soviet missile in Indonesia and the engine from a Soviet plane that crashed near Berlin.

But the Velvet Fist photos were unprecedented. As far as Harlfinger was concerned, presenting these to the president was the perfect way to start a new job.

Under Harlfinger's direction, Bradley created a montage of forty photographs to show to the top Navy ranks and up at the White House. First stop was Beshany at submarine command.

"American technology is pretty terrific," Beshany thought as he experienced his first brush against the Velvet Fist. He would forever compare Halibut's feat to a helicopter hovering 17,000 feet in the air with a small camera at the end of a line taking pictures in a dense fog.

Soon after, Harifinger presented the photographs to President Johnson, who was so impressed that Naval Intelligence officers would congratulate themselves for months.

In January 1969, Richard Nixon was sworn in as president. Shortly after, the phone rang in Bradley's office. It was Harlfinger.

"Get your ass over to the White House, and take Velvet Fist with you.

Alexander Haig, then deputy to Nixon's National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, wanted to see the photographs. Haig was so impressed that he demanded that he become the guardian of Velvet Fist.

Bradley called Harlfinger for help, pulling him out of a meeting. "Haig wants to keep the material," he reported.

"Fuck him," the intelligence chief answered.

But ignoring Haig was easier said than done. "He wants to show this to his boss and to his boss's boss," Bradley said.

No one needed to explain to Harlfinger that Haig's "boss's boss" just happened to he the new president of the United States. Harlfinger had played enough politics over the years to know when it was time to concede.

"Okay," he relented. The photographs could be left with Haig, but only for twenty-four hours.

That was time enough for Haig to bring the material to Kissinger. Later, it would he Kissinger who made the presentation to Nixon. Nixon was fascinated. So much so that word got back to the CIA.

While the agency's analysts had long been interested in what the regular spy subs managed to pick up, it had generally left control of the operations to the Navy. But now, the CIA and its director, Richard Helms, were suddenly and intensely interested in the ocean deep. Helms began to engineer a takeover, CIA-style. First, he created a new level of bureaucracy, a liaison agency that would supposedly pool the resources of Naval Intelligence and the CIA. It would be called the National Underwater Reconnaissance Office (NURO).

This wasn't the first time the CIA had made this kind of arrangement. In 1961 the agency decided to share control over the satellite operations with the Air Force by creating a joint venture dubbed the National Reconnaissance Office.

NURO was supposed to be divided evenly between Navy and CIA staffers. At its top ranks, it was. Its director was John Warner, Nixon's new secretary of the Navy. Bradley would be staff director. Heading up the CIA end was Carl Duckett, its deputy director for science and technology. But from the day NURO was formed, the CIA took charge. Bradley could spare only a few people for the new office. His entire staff in the undersea part of Naval Intelligence numbered only about a dozen. The CIA, however, had no such constraints. It moved in with eight permanent staffers and more consultants loyal to the agency.

Worse, it was becoming increasingly clear to Bradley and Craven that the CIA couldn't tell a submarine from an underwater mountain. By now, the two men had come up with a plan for retrieving the best of what was on board the Soviet Golf. Their idea was to eventually send mini-subs to grab a nuclear warhead, the safe containing the Soviets' "crypto-codes," and the submarine's burst transmitters and receivers so that the Navy could finally decode all of the message traffic it had been collecting.

The two men had already proven that the Golf's hull could be opened without destroying everything inside. They had borrowed Army demolition experts to test their theory. With a large steel plate shielding various fragile and flammable objects set up in a pool of water, plastic explosives were affixed to a tiny area and detonated. The blast left a small doorway, barely singeing the articles behind the steel.

That's really all anyone needed to do: open a small doorway and reach in. The rest of the Golf could be left buried at sea. The military had watched these submarines being built in overhead photography for ten years. Naval Intelligence knew the Golf II down to nearly every nut and bolt. The rockets that the Golfs used to launch their nuclear payloads were primitive, with ranges of only 750 miles. Both the United States and the Soviet Union had already engineered rockets with 1,500 mile ranges. There was little to he gained in attempting the impossible job of pulling up thousands of tons of already antiquated gear from the bottom of the ocean. Besides, it would take years to develop the equipment for such a salvage attempt.

Carl Duckett and his CIA loyalists listened politely to the more abbreviated plan. But when they came back with their answer, Craven and Bradley were dumbstruck. The CIA recommended picking up the whole submarine and intended to build a massive crane-laden ship to reach down and grab the Golf.

Craven and Bradley couldn't believe it. The Golf may have hit bottom at 100 knots or more, accelerating 70 feet per second as it fell. It may have looked intact, but it was probably as fragile as a sand castle. Touch it hard enough, and it would disintegrate.

"You can't pick up the goddamn submarine, or it will fall apart," Bradley blurted out. "Oh, no, Jesus Christ almighty. You people are in a tank. That's a pipe dream."

Bradley may have been right, but the CIA held the power in Washington and usually got what it wanted, even when what it wanted was, in Harlfinger's opinion, crazy and impossible. (Former CIA Director Richard M. Helms says now that he never even heard of the alternative that Bradley and Craven had proposed.)

The CIA, however, wasn't alone in its enthusiasm. Chief of Naval Operations Thomas H. Moorer loved big, fascinating technological projects and was captivated by the CIA plan. Here was a chance to snatch a whole submarine and get back at the Soviets for North Korea's capture of Pueblo. Besides, he wasn't convinced that Bradley and Craven's method could recover all of the key gear on the Golf.

In the end, Defense Secretary Melvin R. Laird gave the final approval to the CIA plan, acknowledging that he did so despite the fact that "some people thought it was a nutty idea." Laird rationalized the exercise. Creating a ship to lift the Golf from the Pacific might also give the United States the ability to retrieve its own submarines if they were lost.

Laird consulted Howard Hughes, the billionaire recluse whose shipping company was hired by the CIA to build the ship that would try to hoist the Golf from the ocean floor. That ship would be called the Glomar Explorer, and the effort code-named "Project Jennifer."

Craven watched these wranglings, no longer surprised by a national intelligence program run by politics. He may have been cynical, but he was certain that the CIA was looking for a project that would funnel hundreds of millions of dollars to Hughes to pay off Nixon's heavy political debts.

Whatever the reason, Nixon quickly approved the CIA plan. And Bradley and Craven were left to whisper their dissent to themselves and to one another. No one else, it seemed, cared to listen. If anything, Craven was rewarded for his protest by being shut out of the operation. The largest deep-water undertaking ever was going to go forward without the guidance of the men who had made it possible.

It would also go forward without Halibut's Commander Moore. It was time for Rickover to make his move, to crack down on this world that had tried to exclude him. The admiral had stood by when Moore's predecessor claimed higher authority for Halibut than Rickover's Naval Reactors Branch. Rickover had observed tens of millions being poured into Halibut while he himself came under fire when NR-1's $30 million budget ballooned to $90 million. He had bided his time while Nixon awarded Halibut the Presidential Unit Citation (PUC), the highest submarine award possible. And he was unmoved when Moore won the Distinguished Service Medal for finding the Golf.

All the while, Rickover's reactor specialists at the shipyard were focused on Halibut. Her men became so agitated under the constant scrutiny that Moore suspected they were making mistakes just to give Rickover's men something to mark down, just enough so that the men would he satisfied and leave. Crew members weren't admitting as much, but Moore knew the tension was getting to them, just as he knew that it was only a matter of time until Rickover had the ammunition he was looking for. He was going to send a fleet-shaking salvo that no submarine, no matter its mission or its accomplishments, was beyond his reach or the reach of his safety inspectors.

He got his opening early one morning in 1969. Halibut had been moved to the Mare Island Naval Shipyard, just out of San Francisco. Her reactor was being refueled while her officers were distracted by yet another refit designed to enhance Halibut's deep-sea capabilities. Rickover was scheduled to come to the sub that day, only nobody on board knew when. Moore was back at his shore quarters, six blocks away from Halibut's dock, when the admiral arrived at Mare Island, dressed as usual in civilian clothes.

Rickover first encountered a pair of Marine guards who refused to let him past the gate. That wouldn't have been too much of a prob lem-these men might not have recognized Rickover in person, but they would have known his name. All he had to do was show his identification, and that, he refused to do. He was infuriated that anyone at a sub base could fail to recognize him on sight. He crashed the gate. Later, Moore would hear that the admiral raced down the causeway on foot, guards in chase. He was caught and again asked to show his identification. By the time the guards had been satisfied, Rickover stormed straight to the office of Robert Metzger, his reactor-safety chief on Mare Island. Still infuriated, Rickover decided not to go to Halibut himself. Instead, he sent a representative, one of the men who had traveled with him from D.C. In doing so, Rickover set the stage for history to repeat itself.

Just about anyone on the sub would have recognized Rickover immediately and no one would have questioned him. Nobody, however, knew his representative, so the young submariner serving topside watch did what he was supposed to do. He approached the man and asked for identification, then called down to the duty officer who ended up denying Rickover's man access.

When Moore heard about all of this, he immediately sought out Rickover. The admiral didn't give him much chance to smooth things over. Instead, he barked, "Moore, you ought to worry about your career." Then he demanded, "And what are you going to do to the duty officer who denied us access?"

Rickover never did bother to inspect Halibut, but the sub would feel his wrath. The constant review of Halibut reactor operations continued. Halibut's crew knew there was enough to find, if you noted every small move, a wrong wrench used, a failure to exactly follow procedures, and more.

Moore was removed from command of Halibut three months after his run-in with Rickover. Although the move was wrapped in the paper of a usual transfer, few people doubted that Rickover was behind it. "That to me was one of the numerous irrational personnel actions that the gentleman was capable of doing and did do," says Rear Admiral. Walter L. Small Jr., then commander of submarines in the Pacific. Rickover was going to dismiss anyone he wanted to dismiss "whether he had the authority or not."

Much of Moore's wardroom chose to resign from the Navy-some in silent protest over Rickover's treatment of their captain, others simply to avoid the endless barrage. Even Doc Wheat, the corpsman who had poured the brandy that revived Charlie Hammonds, had come under fire when Rickover's crew deemed that the records of the crew's radiation exposures were a mess.

Moore was moved to the Pentagon to work with the deep submergence group, and ironically ended up being part of the team seeking missions for Rickover's beloved NR-1. Rickover had engineered Moore's firing, but he hadn't gotten rid of him. And despite Rickover's ire, Moore made full captain along with the rest of his class. He had too many favorable fitness reports, had accomplished too much, for anyone to deny him, even Rickover.

But full captain or not, Moore had lost his boat. It was a bizarre reward. After leading the Navy's boldest undersea spy program, Moore would never command at sea again.