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

Six — "The Ballad Of Whitey Mack"

Commander Chester M. Mack, a 6'6" maverick known as "Whitey," after his pure blond pate, looked through his periscope out onto the Barents Sea. He was here in search of a new and lethal Soviet ballistic missile submarine that NATO had dubbed, without mirth, the "Yankee."

It was March 1969, and in one terrifying technological leap, the Soviets had finally come out with a nuclear-powered missile sub with a design that seemed borrowed from Polaris and that might be capable of striking the White House or the Pentagon from more than 1,000 miles offshore. It was Mack's job to learn more about it.

Mack had driven his sub straight through the Barents, the zealously guarded training area for the Northern Fleet, the Soviet Navy's most advanced and powerful. He was traveling with the arrogance of somebody who knew he was at the helm of one of the Navy's newest subs, a Sturgeon-class attack boat armed with the latest sonar and eavesdropping equipment. He was also traveling with a lot more luck than most, because in this game of hit and miss, he had just found what he was looking for.

There in front of his scope was a Yankee, 429 feet long, 39 feet across, weighing in at 9,600 tons. Mack sidled Lapon up to within 300 yards and stared.

"Holy Christ, that son-of-a-hitch looks like a Mattel model," he blurted out. The submarine was indeed a Polaris look-alike, from the shape of its hull down to its sail-mounted diving planes. The image was broadcast down in the crew's mess on a television wired to the periscope-what submariners called "periviz." Later, Mack would even air reruns, the sight was that striking.

Mack hooked a Hasselblad single-lens reflex camera onto the periscope and held down the shutter. The film advanced on a motorized drive as Lapon moved slowly forward, Mack lifting her scope out of the water for only seven seconds at a time in an effort to avoid detection. With each peek of the periscope, he grabbed a few photos, each time capturing another small portion of the massive boat. It would take seven of the photos pasted together to show the entire Yankee.

During the years the first Yankees were under construction, U.S. intelligence had collected little more than fuzzy images captured by spy satellites showing the Soviets were preparing to mass-produce the new weapon. But over the last year, as the Yankees ventured out on sea trials, U.S. surveillance subs had been moving in for a closer look at this nuclear monster decorated with sixteen doors hiding sixteen portable missile silos. The Yankee seemed a huge advance over the other ballistic missile subs the Soviets had put to sea, the diesel-powered Zulus and Golfs and the first nuclear-powered missile boats, the Hotels. None of those boats had inspired the same fear the Yankee inspired now. The earlier subs were loud and easy for SOSUS and sonar to spot. Now the U.S. sub force was faced with a crucial question: Did the Yankee mimic more than Polaris's shape? Was it possible that, just six years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviets were positioned to launch a first strike with little or no warning? If the subs were as silent and deadly as they seemed, then, at the very least, the Soviets would have matched the United States in creating a second-strike capability, a way to punch hack if all their land missiles and bombers were destroyed.

Captain James Bradley knew his spy program had already produced a lot of critical information about the development of Soviet subs and missiles. Photographing the sunken Golf had been a technological coup. But the Golfs posed little threat compared to the Yankees, and nothing was more important now than learning how to find these new subs, how to destroy them.

Photos of a Yankee did only so much good. The U.S. Navy and its NATO allies needed to see these boats in action, see just where they carried their missiles, needed to collect sound signatures to ensure that the subs could never pass SOSUS listening nets unheard, and so that surveillance subs and sonar buoys dropped by P-3 Orion sub-hunter planes could recognize the threat as it passed.

Someone had to get close to a Yankee in action, and he would have to stay close enough for long enough to give the United States ammu nition to counter the new threat. For this, almost any risks were warranted.

As pumped up as Mack was from his photographic feat, he knew that the real star of the sub force would he the man who accomplished a long trail. Other commanders knew it too, and even the loss of Scorpion was not enough to kill the fighter-jock bravado that the new mission was sparking within the ranks. But Mack was feeling quite proprietary about the Yankees now, and he was certain he could be the guy to get in close and stay there. He was sure of that even though nobody else had been able to. Mack had that kind of an ego.

In fact, everything about this thirty-seven-year-old commander was big. His towering, 240-pound frame didn't quite fit through Lapon's low hatches and narrow passageways, and he was almost always bent over in the control room, littered overhead with a maze of piping and wire. Submarines were just too small to contain Whitey Mack. He was a larger-than-life renegade, much like the heroes in the novels he devoured by the basketful. He saw himself as the hero in a story he was writing as he went along, a story ruled by his own tactics and sometimes by his own rules.

He had never attended the Naval Academy. Instead, he was recruited into Officer's Candidate School by a brash ROTC XO at Pennsylvania State University who bragged that he won his wife in a poker game. Mack himself was the son of a Pennsylvania coal miner, and he held up this lack of official polish as a badge of honor. Mack labeled himself a "smart-ass kind of guy," and he faced down his superiors with piercing blue eyes and a brand of brass that had nothing to do with epaulet stars. With wry irony, he sported a homemade pair of Russian dolphins alongside his standard American dolphinsthe emblem of the U.S. submarine fleet-and he liked nothing better than to rush about his submarine shouting obscenities in Russian.

"A faint heart never fucked a pig." That was Lapon's motto and it had been ever since Mack's first voyage on the sub when he used the phrase to announce his decision to follow a new Soviet sub close to her territorial waters. (The line was recorded on a continuous tape running in Lapon's control room.) Although, when the subject carne up once in front of an admiral, Mack delicately altered the phrase to "A faint heart never won a fair maiden."

Mack had plunged into command of Lapon in late 1967, first by horse-trading with other commanders for the men he believed would create an all-star crew, then by installing all manner of experimental, and often unauthorized, equipment on his submarine. He alternately inspired and mercilessly drove his men. He alternately impressed and badgered senior admirals, until he was allowed to skip the usual months of U.S.-based shakedown training and head straight into the action.

To a large degree, Mack was emblematic of his era. Throughout the sub force, captains who avoided risks were branded with nicknames such as "Charlie Tuna" or "Chicken of the Sea." Still, Mack left his superiors-not to mention other commanders who prided themselves on their own daring-debating whether he was dangerously blurring the line between valor and recklessness. To be sure, those close-up photos of the Yankee were as valuable as any intelligence anyone had gotten lately, but Mack had also taken other immense risks for limited intelligence return.

Lapon had already been detected in the Barents once under Mack's watch. It may have been a glint of sunlight off her periscope, no one was sure, but suddenly the men in Lapan's radio shack heard a Soviet pilot sending out an alert in Russian: "I see a submarine."

When Lapon's officer of the deck pointed his periscope toward the sky, he saw a helicopter pilot who seemed to be looking right at him. "He's got the biggest fucking red mustache I ever saw!" the officer exclaimed.

"That's close enough," Mack said, breathless, as he raced from his personal quarters into the control room, still in his skivvies. "We better get the hell out of here." With that, he got his boat out of Dodge before the Soviets had a chance to mount a full search.

Mack also had driven so close to two Soviet subs conducting approach and attack runs that Lapon ended up in the path of one of their torpedoes. Mack knew that, for an exercise like this, the Soviets were shooting duds. But he had no intention of proving his point by letting the torpedo hit. Instead, he sent the order to the engine room that kicked Lapon into high speed. Flying "balls to the wall," as submariners say, Mack outraced the weapon. (The incident occurred just after he had taken Lapon out searching for Scorpion, though well before anyone realized that a torpedo might have killed that boat.)

Two spooks on board, George T. "Tommy" Cox and Joseph "Jesse" James, were so shaken by the incident that when they later tried to grab a smoke in the radio room, neither man could steady himself long enough to light up. Cox wanted to be a country-western singer, had once taken first place at the Gene Hooper County Western Show Talent Contest in Caribou, Maine and had worked his way through high school playing backup at a place called Cindy's Bar. After this trip on Lapon, he recorded a ballad called "Torpedo in the Water" on his first and only collection of submarine greatest hits, Take Her Deep. The song was an ode to a close call:

From her encounter with the torpedo, Lapon carried back transcripts and photographs of the initial part of the test, as well as rolls of film filled with other Soviet activities-all of it interesting, none of it crucial, none of it enough to make Whitey a star-the star-of the Atlantic Fleet.

Instead, it was another man who was so heralded, Kinnaird R. McKee, a lithe southern gentleman with bushy eyebrows and a showman's flair. He had set the standard for surveillance operations when he was on the USS Dace (SSN-607), and even though McKee's stellar command was nearly over by the time Mack photographed the Yankee in March 1969, he stood as an icon in the sub force. In 1967, McKee had not only photographed a Soviet nuclear-powered icebreaker as it was being towed, but he grabbed radioactive air samples that proved the ship had suffered a reactor accident. The next year, in one breathtaking mission, McKee collected the first close-up photographs and sound signatures of not one but two of the second generation of Soviet nuclear-powered subs: an attack sub and a cruise missile sub that NATO had named the "Victor" and the "Charlie." He had found one of the new subs in the waters off Novaya Zemlya, a large island between the Barents and Kara Seas that was one of the Soviet's main nuclear test areas.

Like Mack, McKee had been detected. Indeed, he had snapped a photograph of a Soviet crew member standing on the deck of one of the subs and pointing right at the Dace's periscope just before the Soviets began to chase. McKee had to outrace a group of Soviet sur face patrols pinging wildly with active sonar. He finally managed his escape by driving Dace straight under the hazardous reaches of the Arctic ice. When it was safe to emerge, he continued his mission, locating the second new Soviet sub within a week.

"Gentlemen, the price of poker has just gone up in the Barents Sea," McKee announced on his return at a session with the joint Chiefs of Staff and members of the Defense Department. With typical flair, he captured his audience with a briefing no less dramatic for his exclusion of the detection and his omission of the shot of the Soviet crewman pointing at Dace. McKee's presentation and his slide show of other photographs shot through his scope went over so well that his immediate superiors never thought to criticize him for allowing his sub to be detected. Instead, for McKee, the mission was marred only by the fact that the Navy had refused to let him name the Soviet submarines he had found.

His manner, as much as anything, was what separated McKee from the likes of Whitey Mack. McKee was everybody's idea of a hero. While Mack bullied his way through the system, McKee was one of those officers pegged early on for the fast track to the top. This was a man who courted his sweetheart, Betty Ann, by spinning her through a winter's night in a Jaguar convertible with the top down and then spun her about with a marriage proposal thirteen days later. On Dace, he courted the vigilance of his junior officers by promising cases of Dewar's scotch and Jack Daniels to any who helped him spot the new Soviet subs. He won over admirals with the same flair, conjuring up such amazing tales of his exploits that the men who reigned over the U.S. submarine force never thought to question the risks he took.

Mack also had other competition in the Atlantic Fleet. There was Alfred L. Kelln, the commanding officer of the USS Ray (SSN-653), who had shot the very first pictures of a Yankee. Then there was Commander Guy I–I. B. Shaffer of the USS Greenling (SSN-614), who had slipped his sub directly beneath both a Charlie and a Yankee a few months before Mack spotted one. That gave Greenling's crew a chance to record the noise levels and the harmonics that the Soviet boats created in the water and the chance to film the hull and propeller, underwater through the periscope, with a new low-light television camera. Indeed, Greenling got so close to the underside of the Yankee that had the Soviets checked their fathometer, the ocean would have seemed very shallow, perhaps not more than 12 feet deep.

The job, known as "underhulling," was enormously dangerous. At any time, one of the Soviet submarines could have moved to submerge right on top of Greenling, but the payoff was enormous as well. The United States had the first acoustic fingerprint of a Yankee submarine, and the sounds from Greenling's tapes were quickly plugged into the SOSUS computers.

Now one question remained: Would the data collected by Greenling he enough to make the Yankees stand out as they moved into the open ocean din of fishing boats, marine life, and currents? Nobody would know that until somebody accomplished the longer trail through an actual deployment.

The race was on. Mack and the other commanders took their turns, steaming again out past 50 degrees north latitude, out of U.S. waters, and out of touch with fleet leaders back home, toward the Barents Sea and the Yankees' home ports.[9]

Mack's chance came in September 1969. As Lapon pulled out of Norfolk, she was stocked with a mountain of eggs, meat, and syrupy drink mixes known as "bug juice"-typical fare for a long mission. There was, however, one major exception: her mess held three months' worth of frozen blueberries. Mack had a voracious appetite for blueberries and blueberry muffins, and he shared his passion with his crew. On board were also ingredients enough to fuel weekly pizza nights and a one-armed bandit to stave off boredom.

There never would have been room for a slot machine on Gudgeon or any of the other diesel boats that went out on the first spec ops. That's not to say Lapon wasn't cramped, but at least each man had his own rack-no hot-bunking, no sharing. The racks were still stacked one atop another-shelves with mattresses on them-and some mattresses were still crammed in among the torpedoes, but there was some relief in having 15 square feet or so of private space that could he curtained off from the rest of the crew. The shorter guys even had room to stow a few hooks so long as they didn't mind designating the bottom square of their beds a bookshelf. And just about everyone had a single drawer, although that was all the space they had to store three months' worth of skivvies, uniforms, and anything else they believed they couldn't live without.

The diesel stench was gone with these nukes, as was the condensation that had plagued the diesel submarines. Lapon was downright comfortable, practically climate-controlled for anyone who didn't mind the constant clouds of cigarette smoke that massed despite the advanced air-filtering system. Nobody expected much more from life in their "closed sewer pipe." For most of the guys, contact with the outside would be pretty much limited to periviz and "family grams": the three- or four-line messages that wives and parents were allowed to send a few times each deployment.

Beyond that, the men's existence was charted out in a rhythm that amounted to six hours of watch, followed by twelve hours of equipment repair, endless paperwork, and qualifying exams. Nobody was handed his dolphins, the mark of an official submariner, until he had qualified on nearly every system on the boat.

Still, sanity finds a way, and on this sub Mack was determined to help it. Mack organized nightly sing-alongs, having managed to dig up about a dozen guitar players among his handpicked crew. Tommy Cox was among them, back on board, carrying his guitar and a threemonth supply of strings and picks. Cox, who had become one of the first spook to bother with all of the standard submariners' qualifying exams and earn his dolphins, now entertained his true crewmates with performances of "Torpedo in the Water" and a new song about Scorpion, as well as standard covers of Johnny Cash, Ricky Nelson, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Elvis Presley tunes.

It was no accident that Cox was back on Lapon. While most spooks were assigned to subs by the Naval Security Group and almost never rode the same boat twice, Mack had managed to handpick his spook team just like he had the rest of his crew. He fought to keep his favorites, his core team, together. Along with Cox, there was Lieutenant Donald R. Fallon, the spook team leader. Mack decided Fallon would be a permanent member of the crew about ten seconds after the spook first boarded Lapon. He had spent his first nine seconds staring Mack down. The tenth second was the kicker. That's when he came up with a description of Mack that was never topped. Borrowing from the sub force's love of acronyms, he dubbed Mack "NOM- FWIC," or, in non-naval parlance, "Number One Mother Fucker What's In Charge."

Mack liked men who were bright, inventive, just odd enough to appreciate his own eccentricities, and as willing as he was to bend the rules. One of Mack's favorite acquisitions was a chief machinist's mate with the unlikely name of Donald Duck. He was a self-proclaimed hillbilly, raised in a log house in Shelby County, Alabama. Mechanics was the family business. Duck's dad worked on buses, Duck on submarines. He never finished grade school. In fact, he had enlisted in the Navy under an illiteracy program, but he could fix anything on Lapon, and he was an even better scrounger than Mack. That, in particular, was an especially useful art now that the Vietnam War made materials scarce. Duck would find or steal whatever Lapon needed, keeping his cache of spare parts in a place only he believed to he secret.

Duck's lack of formal schooling didn't matter on Lapon, where most of the enlisted men had little more than a high school education anyway. This was a blue-collar crowd, but they were, as a whole, a bit brighter, a bit more inventive, and a lot more willing to put up with long months of confinement than just about anyone in the regular Navy. The officers mostly came out of the Naval Academy. In the end, the differences blurred. Rank, station, pedigree-on the best subs none of that mattered much. Maybe it was the confinement; maybe there was no other good way to run a submarine. After all, one of the first lessons any college-educated lieutenant learned was that he wasn't going to get very far without the help of his grizzled chiefs and a bunch of enlisted guys willing to engineer imaginative fixes to all of the unimaginable problems that were likely to crop up month after month at sea.

Now the crew that Mack built was about to be put to the test. One week into the trip, Lapon got a message, the one Mack had been hoping for: on September 16, SOSUS had detected a Yankee north of Norway. It was heading out of the Barents Sea toward the GIUK gap. A second SOSUS array then picked up the Yankee as it passed just north of Norway's Jan Mayen Island at the mouth of the Denmark Strait, which separates Greenland and Iceland. If Mack could intercept the Yankee before it made it past the gap into the open ocean, where she would he far more difficult to find, Lapon would be able to attempt a trail.

As Mack raced Lapon toward the Denmark Strait, an Allied P-3 Orion airborne submarine hunter confirmed the Yankee's heading. Lapon arrived the next day and began a patrol moving slowly back and forth at the southernmost tip of the Denmark Strait, just southwest of Iceland.

Donnie Ray Bolling, the chief of the boat, hung a map in the crew's mess. From now on, the quartermaster would go below periodically to give the crew a look at Lapan's position. If they caught up to the Yankee, he'd chart her position as well. Sharing such details with the crew was against regulation. But Mack wanted his men enthusiastic. He believed that knowing what they were attempting would make up for the lack of sleep that was about to become the rule on the boat.

Mack called for modified battle stations. Around him the control room was packed with men crammed in between charting tables, computer equipment, and weapon controls, with all their corresponding oscilloscopes, dials, gauges, and plotting gear. The pipes that hung from nearly every inch overhead and all around made the compartment seem all the more crowded. In the center of it all was the periscope stand. Two scopes sprouted out of the foot-high pedestal. Just in front of the stand, the diving officer and two planesmen sat tightly tiered in a pyramid, staring at depth gauges. From here on out, the fire control party, the sonar crews, the navigators, and the diving watch would have two imperatives: finding the Yankee and keeping the Yankee from finding the Lapon.

Only one day went by before the Yankee passed to the east of Lapon. The sound of the submarine was so faint that the sonarmen almost failed to pick it up over the clamor of nearby fishing trawlers and teeming marine life. But there it was, a slight flicker on the oscilloscope, the electronic image of the Soviet submarine. This wasn't going to he easy. In the noisy waters off of Greenland, the submarine was audible in the din only when it ventured within 1,400 yards of Lapon.

Mack ordered Lapon southeast. He was going to try a "sprint and drift." The plan was to race Lapon at 20 knots for half an hour or so to a point where the Yankee would soon pass if she maintained her track. Then Lapon would slow down to 3–5 knots, drift hack and forth, and listen.

The Yankee showed up, but then disappeared again. Mack was worried. The Soviets weren't keeping to their expected course. Each time the sounds from the Yankee came through, they were lost almost immediately, drowned out by the living Atlantic made even louder now by violent currents caused by a raging storm above. Mack paced about the control room, frustrated at having to crawl blindly around the ocean knowing that the Yankee was so close.

Lapon found and lost the Yankee several times over the next few days. 'Then, on the fourth day, the Yankee showed up again. This time Lapon followed, first for an hour, then for two, then for three. The Yankee's propellers spun a steady rhythm through the sonar team's headsets. Six hours, twelve hours, the Yankee was still on a steady course in front of Lapon. But at eighteen hours, the Yankee disappeared from the sonar screens, lost again. Mack's burgeoning underwater drama had fallen flat.

By ❑ow, most of the officers and some of the crew had gone several days with little sleep. Mack had only dozed, minutes at a time, mostly while still standing in the control room. And now, for these men, grave disappointment replaced the adrenaline rush that had already sustained itself far too long.

No one spoke the obvious. No one wanted to say that maybe it was impossible to keep track of this new, quieter generation of Soviet submarine as it rode through the cacophonous ocean. No one wanted to give up.

Sharing Mack's disappointment back in Norfolk and in Washington, D.C., were Captain Bradley; Vice Admiral Arnold Schade, who was still commander of submarines in the Atlantic; and Admiral Moorer, the CNO. They had been in constant touch as Mack flashed UHF progress messages to U.S. aircraft flying overhead. The Navy, in turn, kept aides to the president up to date. Nixon was following the trail in real time.

The admirals ordered all SOSUS installations in the area to listen for the Yankee. P-3 Orions also were on the lookout. But in both instances, the efforts were futile.

Mack decided to take a huge gamble. Calling his navigators and officers into the wardroom, he announced that they were going to give up trying to pick up the Yankee near the Denmark Strait. Instead, Mack was going to try to guess where the Yankee was headed next, and he wanted to try to beat her to her destination. Now Mack, his XO Charles H. Brickell Jr., the engineer officer Ralph L. Tindal, and others bent over charts and began an intense game of "what if," putting themselves in the place of the Yankee's commander. Desperation weighed in as much as logic when they finally decided to attempt to pick up the Yankee's track several hundred miles south, near Portugal's Azores Islands.

Lapon hurried down there and then trolled about the appointed spot for three days. Too much time, Mack fretted. He made another guess and moved the sub west. Almost as soon as Lapon settled into her new patrol, her hull began to reverberate with the grinding of metal on metal. Mack came running into the control room. The diving officer reported that Lapon was losing depth.

The 4,800-ton Lapon had been caught in the net of a deep-sea fishing trawler, tangled in the net's metal weights and thick metal cable. The Yankee could pass by at any moment, and Lapon was dangling along with Sunday brunch.

It didn't take long for the fishermen to give up, or maybe they cut their net. Either way, they left the area with the greatest one-that-gotaway story of their lives. But a piece of the trawler's cable had worked its way around a sonar device on the front of the submarine. There was no way Lapon could effect a silent trail with the dangling cable clicking across her bow.

Mack had no choice. He waited for dark, then ordered Lapon to the surface. Now praying that the Yankee would not pass, at least not now, he sent a man out onto the sail with a large pair of bolt cutters. His gamble worked-the cable was away and Lapon was ready when the Yankee showed up twelve hours later.

This time Mack was determined not to lose the Soviet submarine. This more southern portion of the Atlantic wasn't as loud as the waters off Greenland, but the Yankee was still quieter than any submarine a U.S. boat had ever tried to follow. It was time for a new tactic that Mack dubbed on the spot the "close-in trail." Lapon would tailgate the Yankee, moving no further than 3,000 yards away. More than 4,000 or 5,000 yards away, and the Yankee would be lost.

Mack's strategy was risky. Hurtling 4,800 tons that close to the massive Yankee was dangerous. Normally even surface ships try to stay about two miles apart for fear of collision. And Lapon had the added worry of detection. Mack just hoped that this new submarine didn't have better sonar than her predecessors. Lapon was so close that all someone had to do was drop a piece of equipment or slam a watertight door at the wrong time and even the Soviets' outdated equipment could register an American shadow.

Just about everyone on board realized the risk they were taking, but nobody dared question Mack. Nobody had time to. It had become crucial now to figure out what the Soviet vessel sounded like when she slowed down, or turned. Until Lapon's sonar team could figure out what combination of clicks or tones matched which maneuvers, both submarines were in grave danger of colliding.

Mack ordered Lapon to slip side to side behind the Yankee as his men set about finding answers to a matrix of questions. Once again, Mack engaged himself in a game of "what if," trying to put himself in the Soviet captain's place, wondering what he would do, and when. It was like working on a very large, very difficult crossword puzzle. One answer led to others. One blank created several avenues of confusion. All Lapon's crew could do was keep collecting information. The sonar teams began listening for any flaws in the Yankee's construction, anything that would give them clues to help them "see" the other submarine as it maneuvered.

Standard sonar would never have been enough. The Yankee was simply too quiet. But Lapon wasn't relying on just standard sonar. Mack had slipped aboard an added edge, an experimental sonar device designed to capitalize on some discoveries that Kelln's USS Ray had made in 1967 and 1968 when she trailed the November-class attack sub into the Mediterranean and then tracked a Charlie in the North Atlantic. The device worked by upgrading the way the standard system registered noise levels in the ocean. It zeroed in on certain tones, those made by the Yankee as she moved through the water, almost the way notes of music sound from a bottle when somebody blows over the top. After a fair amount of trial and error, Lapon's crew realized that one particular frequency changed each time the Yankee turned. A shift to the left, and the tone was slightly higher. When the Yankee moved away, the tone lowered. If the tone changed quickly, it meant the Yankee was making a swift course change.

The one place Lapon couldn't follow from was directly behind. Unlike other Soviet submarines that offered an easy-to-follow din from their propellers, the Yankee was quiet enough from behind that she was rendered effectively invisible. Indeed, the Yankee might have been able to slip away entirely, even with Lapon's extra sonar gadget, if not for what must have been a structural flaw. To the left, the Yankee's machinery was making more noise than any other portion of the boat.

From now on, Lapon was going to follow that machinery noise. If it got louder, Mack would know that the Yankee had made a left turn. If the Yankee seemed to vanish, she probably had turned right.

Ultimately the best vantage point turned out to be a little off to the side of the Yankee's stern, in either direction-with the left side being a little louder. From there the new sonar device picked up strong tones, and standard sonar registered steam noises coming from the Yankee's turbines and the clicks made by the Yankee's propeller each time it made a revolution. Counting those clicks and logging turn counts was how Mack and his crew determined the Yankee's speed.

All this took four or five days to figure out-longer than the entire length of most trailings attempted so far against the noisy Soviet Hotel, Echo, and November subs, the HENs. But Mack wasn't going to break off. Instead, he was going to keep following, and he would figure out the mechanics as he went along. The process of trial and error spanned several watch stations, leaving it up to Mack and his engineer officer to teach each succeeding team what had been discovered over the past twelve hours.

Mack was determined not to lose the Yankee again, especially when he realized that she was headed on a track toward the U.S. Atlantic coast. He again began to forgo sleep, although he slipped in 15-minute catnaps at the helm, a trick he picked up in college from an article in Reader's Digest.

Days later, Lapon was still tracking the Yankee. Mack began to map out the Yankee's operating area, one of the most crucial pieces of intelligence he could carry home. The Soviets had settled into a holding pattern that covered about 200,000 square miles. They moved back and forth, staying between 1,500 and 2,000 miles off the United States.

Up until now, the Navy had been convinced that the Soviet Union would send its Yankees as close as 700 miles from U.S. shores. But Mack's discovery would help Naval Intelligence determine that the Yankee's new SS-N-6 missiles actually had a range of 1,200-1,300 miles.

If Lapon had not followed the Yankee this far, it would have been difficult for the United States to keep track of the new Soviet nuclear threat, even though the Yankee plowed through what appeared to be a well-defined box. The United States would have been searching 800 miles too close to shore.

Now Mack mapped the Yankee's exact course. Choosing one area, she meandered at about 6 knots before racing to another area at 12–16 knots. Then she slowed again. Every 90 minutes, almost to the second, the Yankee changed course. Sometimes by 60 degrees, sometimes by far more.

A few times a day the Yankee went to communications depth, presumably to receive radio messages, and every night, at the stroke of midnight, she rose to periscope depth to ventilate. Between ten and sixteen times a day she turned completely around to clear her baffles, listening to see whether anyone was following. Each time the Yankee turned, Lapon turned with her, trying to stay behind, just off to one side, shielded in the backwash of the Yankee's own noise. (U.S. submariners also clear their baffles regularly when they are out on operations, only never according to schedule. The delicate question of timing those maneuvers was left to a pair of dice kept in the Lapon's control room for just that purpose.)

Once a day the Yankee kicked out with a wild, high-speed move that Lapon's crew called the "Yankee doodle" because it resembled the twisted designs on someone's desktop notepad. The Yankee would curl about, usually in a figure eight or some version of that, ending up facing 180 degrees from where she had started. Shifting to port, she would then make a 180-degree turn, then a second 180-degree turn, then a 90-degree turn, then a 270-degree turn, and end with two more 90-degree turns.

The first set of turns seemed designed to catch an intruder following close in, and the second set to catch another submarine following from farther away. All this was usually done at high speed, sometimes twice, back to back. The entire process took about an hour.

Had the Yankee's sonar been any better, the maneuver might have been effective. But the Soviets seemed to have made one key miscalculation. Lapon could hear the turns and get out of the way long before the Soviets could hear Lapon. In fact, Lapon sonar techs realized that their sonar seemed to have more than twice the range of Soviet sonar. In good conditions, Lapon could spot a surface ship from 20,000 yards away. But the Yankee would pass within 10,000 yards of the same ship before showing any reaction.

As Lapon's trail fell into a routine, Mack was finally able to give up his standing catnaps. He actually went to his stateroom to lie down and sleep, though never longer than 90 minutes. He never missed a course change or a Yankee doodle. It was during one of his naps, however, that Mack made the biggest mistake of the mission, perhaps the biggest mistake of his career. The mess cook awakened Mack on the advice of a junior officer who decided Mack would rather give up sleep than his nightly order of blueberry muffins. Startled, Mack let out a roar, the cook went running and the muffins and coffee went flying. In that one moment, Mack had destroyed possibly the best perk ever offered a submarine captain: his beloved fresh blueberry muffins, split and drenched with butter. Nobody would again dare delivery, not then, not as the third week of the trail gave way to a fourth, and then an unheard-of fifth week.

By that time, Lapon's three rotating officers of the deck realized they had each fallen into sync with their Soviet counterparts. Indeed, each American could identify his Soviet "partner" by slight stylistic differences in the Yankee doodles and other course changes. They named these Soviets-"Terrible Terence" and "Wild Willy" were the two most memorable-and they began to take bets on how well they could predict the Yankee's next move. Tindal won most often. The sonar crew also got into the act, interpreting the sounds they picked up from inside the Yankee. Sounds of drilling, pumps running, and other noise led to some crude jokes, mostly bathroom humor. A quick clank was automatically recorded as a toilet lid being slammed, and every time Lapon sonarmen heard the rushing of air over their headsets that could have been sanitary tanks being blown, they reported, quite formally, "Conn. Sonar. We just got shit on."

Every man in the crew, down to the youngest seaman and the lowliest mess cook, was getting into the act. Mack let each of them take a turn at manually plotting the unfolding course. It was heady stuff for the young crewmen. Here they were on a trail longer than any other, trailing one of the most crucial pieces of hardware the Soviets had put to sea, and they were integrally involved in the process. The excitement was extending from sub to shore. Mack had gotten to know the Yankee captain's habits well enough to be able to predict when the Soviets would go deep, and he used those moments to bring Lapon to periscope depth and flash a quick message to the P-3 Orions that were flying high over the Yankee's patrol area.

All continued to go well until one of the Orions almost ended the entire effort. The pilot must have come lower than he should have, because when the Yankee came to periscope depth, her crew spotted the plane and made an immediate dive. The Orion sped away. The men on Lapon listened to the entire drama, their sub undetected. They realized that, although the Orion had been spotted, the Soviets didn't seem to know that they were being trailed through water as well as air. That seemed true, in fact, until someone back in Washington made a big mistake.

Rumors in the sub force say it was an admiral in naval aviation who leaked information to a newspaper that could threaten the mission. The leak didn't specify that Lapon was out following a Yankee, and it didn't even say that a Soviet ballistic missile submarine was, at that very moment, wandering 1,500 to 2,000 nautical miles off the United States. But on October 9, 1969, the New York Times ran a front-page story headlined "New Soviet Subs Noisier Than Expected."

Whoever leaked the story was either unaware of Lapon's findings or distorted them, because what the Times reported was far more reassuring than the truth. As Mack had found out, the Yankees were by far the quietest subs the Soviets had put to sea-although U.S. subs were still quieter.

Word of the story must have made it back to the Soviet Navy and to the Yankee's captain. Either that, or he had become suddenly psychic. Within hours of the story's publication, moments after the Yankee made its midnight trip to communications depth, she broke all of her patterns. In fact, she went wild. The Yankee made a sudden 180degree turn and came roaring back down her former path full-out at 20 knots, heading almost straight for Lapon. This did not at all resemble the calculated set of turns that made up the Yankee doodle. Nor did it have the calm routine of the Yankee's usual slow turns, those baffle-clearing maneuvers.

This was a desperation ploy, an all-out search by the Soviets to see if they were being followed. This was the ultimate game of chicken. This was what the U.S. sub force called a "Crazy Ivan."

The Yankee came flying through the water, her image filling the screens in Lapon's control room and the noise of her flight screaming through sonarmen's headsets. It sounded like a freight train running through a tunnel: "Kerchutka, Kerchutka, Kerchutka… "

"That bastard is coming down," someone in the control room blurted out. The men tensed, although they knew Lapon was still 300 feet below the Yankee as she blindly passed to starboard. Nobody missed the irony, that the Yankee, in her noisy high-speed flight, had missed her chance to detect Lapon. The Yankee continued to search, moving in circles for hours, but Mack countered with his own evasive maneuvers enacted by a crew who had been standing at battle stations throughout the drama. Mack refused to break off the chase. Instead, he waited for the Yankee to calm down. Then he continued the mission.

On October 13, nearly a month after the trail began, Admiral Schade sent a top-secret message to the Lapon: "ADMIRAL MOORER STATES THAT SECDEF AND ALL IN WASHINGTON WATCHING OPERATION WITH SPECIAL INTEREST AND NOTES WITH GREAT PLEASURE AND PRIDE SUPERB PERFORMANCE OF ALL PARTICIPANTS. I SHARE HIS THOUGHTS."

Lapon continued on, through the rest of the Yankee's patrol and then some as the Soviets took an almost straight track back home. There were no more Yankee doodles, no more Crazy Ivans. The Yankee beat a path to the GIUK gap, where Lapon left her on November 9.

Lapon had followed the Yankee for an amazing forty-seven days.

Tommy Cox again was moved to write, this time coming up with "The Ballad of Whitey Mack":

Cox's lyrics were right on target. It really was Blind Man's Bluff, a game far more dangerous than mere hide-and-spy operations. Mack's success marked the beginning of a new mission for the submarine force. From here on out, the fleet would be focused on tailing Soviet ballistic missile submarines at sea. U.S. attack submarines were sud denly elevated to critical participants in the nation's strategic nuclear defense. And they would lead the greatest sea hunt in maritime history. For now, as he drove Lapon back to Norfolk, Mack was basking in the glory that was finally his. Messages of congratulations flooded the radio channels.

Months later, Lapon would receive the highest award ever given to submarines, the Presidential Unit Citation. Whitey Mack would win a Distinguished Service Medal, the highest personal honor the Navy awarded its officers in peacetime.

But it was one of the messages sent out when Lapon was still on her way home that pleased Mack more than any other accolade. It wasn't addressed to Mack or to his crew. Instead, this message was sent out to every other submarine out on operations in the Atlantic: "Get out of the way. Whitey's coming through." The order was clear. Everyone was to make way and give the Lapon a clear track home.

When Mack heard that, he slapped his fist in his hand, shook his head and said: "Eat your heart out, suckers. Whitey's coming through."