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

Seven — "Here She Comes…"

Whitey Mack had set the new standard, one that other commanders were itching to match-indeed, itching to beat. Trailing Soviet missile subs was fast becoming the Navy's most critical mission, though not all of the men leading these dangerous hunts were as skilled as Mack, or as lucky.

At least two subs put the United States on the verge of nuclear alert when they radioed that the Yankees they were following had opened their missile doors and seemed ready to launch. In both cases, the U.S. subs quickly radioed again to say that the Soviets were engaged in simple drills.

Within months of Lapon's feat, there were also several collisions between American subs and Soviet subs, accidents that threatened U.S.-Soviet moves toward detente. When the USS Gato (SSN-615) slammed into an old Soviet Hotel-class missile sub in November 1969, Sergei Georgievich Gorshkov, the longtime commander in chief of the Soviet Navy, sent warships into the Barents in search of the intruder. He was hoping to find proof that Gato had been sunk. Gorshkov wasn't a bloodthirsty man, but the collision came just two days before arms control talks were scheduled to begin in Helsinki, Finland. It stunned him that President Richard Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, could proffer arms negotiations as though they were simple handshakes, while letting their submarines invade Soviet waters.

Evidence of Gato's steel corpse would have given Gorshkov one knockout of a handshake to proffer back. But his forces never did find Gato, which had hightailed it out of there, weapons armed and ready. At the orders of the Atlantic Fleet commanders, Gato's captain pre pared false mission reports showing that his boat had broken off her patrol two days before the accident.

Close calls, especially those that stopped short of major incident, were almost always omitted when Navy intelligence officers went to brief Nixon and his aides. Thus, there was no pressure on the submarine force to curtail its brazen operations, even after two more minor collisions in 1970, one in the Barents and one in the Mediterranean.

There was, however, a third accident that year, one that was so violent and so severe that the Navy had no choice but to immediately tell top Pentagon officials and Nixon.

It happened in late June. The USS Tautog (SSN-639) was heading for waters filled with Soviet traffic outside of Petropavlovsk, the big missile sub base on the Kamchatka Peninsula in the northern Pacific. Little rattled Tautog's thirty-nine-year-old captain, Commander Buele G. Balderston, who had already overcome childhood rheumatic fever to grow to a 6'4" all-American in swimming and track. He had studied desert scorpions at the University of Nebraska and then enlisted in the Navy during the Korean War, where he was promptly assigned responsibility for the disposal of unexploded ordnance left over from World War II. Ultimately he switched to diesel submarines because he and his wife Irene both thought the job would be safer. He had later thought of giving up the filthy, cramped life of a diesel submariner to study medicine, but before he could apply to medical school, Rickover tapped him for the nuclear sub force. Balderston decided that maybe it was a sign, that maybe he was destined to remain on submarines. He believed that, even after all of his illusions of safety were shattered with Scorpion's loss. He had been the engineer officer during her construction, and after her disappearance, accident investigators trying to unravel the mystery frequently called him away from Tautog.

On Tautog, Balderston was known as much for his idiosyncrasies as anything else. This man who could drink any of his crew under the table during port stops was also something of a health nut. He drank Sanka in lieu of the full-powered brew that kept most of the crew fueled, and he demanded that his sub be stocked with copious supplies of chopped walnuts-he ate them after every meal, save breakfast, because they were full of lecithin. He also had a peculiar dexterity: he could raise his large, gray, bushy eyebrows one at a time. Right or left, it didn't seem to matter, both could make the singular crawl up the side of his face. It was a talent he used for emphasis. When crew members scrambled answers during qualifying exams, an eyebrow would levitate. When a mistake was especially stupid, one of those great brows would leap. One young seaman was especially unnerved by the gesture and could never deliver a message to his commander without stuttering as soon as Balderston sent a brow on its ascent.

For the crew, those brows were almost as memorable as the ingenuity Balderston displayed during their first mission together in the summer of 1969-a mission that earned their sub the nickname "The Terrible T."

They were sent to monitor a test of a new Soviet cruise missile from start to finish. Unlike the Yankees' ballistic missiles, cruise missiles posed little threat to U.S. shores. But these smaller weapons could destroy a massive U.S. aircraft carrier from as far as 250 nautical miles away, and carriers were still one of the primary platforms being used for U.S. bombing missions over Vietnam. Indeed, Echo II submarines-each toting eight cruise missiles that could hold either nuclear or conventional warheads-had been spotted trailing U.S. aircraft carriers near Southeast Asia. If the Soviets got directly involved in the war there, Naval Intelligence would need to know as much as possible about the missiles and the subs that carried them. And it was Balderston's job to learn how many missiles the Soviets could fire in rapid succession, to capture electronic pulses that might indicate trajectories, and to grab communications that might help to assess weaknesses. He would also try to snap photographs of the launches so analysts back home could measure the flames as the missile shot skyward and maybe figure out what type of propellant the Soviets were using.

Brazenly, Balderston led his sub through the Soviets' sonar net and right beneath a group of Soviet ships and a submarine, keeping Tautog hidden, hovering at just 70 feet below the surface. Most of the time, the tips of Tautog's intercept antennas and periscope barely broached the waves. The scope's small, cup-shaped eye was so low in the water that every third wave washed over. Balderston took to counting, "One, two, under; one, two, under; one, two, under….

Perhaps the most critical trick to all of this was keeping the 4,800ton Tautog level despite the fact that she was constantly taking on water and getting heavier. Subs take on water in part to cool their reactors, and pumps usually recycle it back to the ocean, but the pumps were too loud to use this mechanism close to the Soviets. Michael J. Coy, one of the diving officers on watch, somehow had to keep Tautog's scope at just the right height without the pumps.

It was nerve-racking business. Coy had been on Tautog for only three months, and he knew he was not one of Balderston's favorites. It irked the captain that Coy had enlisted in the sub force only as an honorable alternative to fighting in Vietnam, just as it irked Coy that Balderston kept talking up the advantages of military life. But now the two of them worked together as Balderston employed a solution that was ingenious and amazingly low-tech. He called upon an old submariner's trick and ordered all off-duty men out of their bunks, out of the crew's mess, and on a march: first to the forward half of the boat, next to the engine room in the stern. Back and forth they went for hours, living counterweights, keeping Tautog's nose up and the submarine buoyant. There were no breaks for Coy, not even to go to the head. Instead, when it came time to adjust Coy's buoyancy, Balderston sent for an empty coffee can.

In the end, Tautog watched the Soviets for two days-capturing the entire missile test from start to finish. Balderston brought home so much data that the Navy awarded him one of its highest personal honors, the Legion of Merit. Now, in the summer of 1970, as Balderston drove Tautog toward Petropavlovsk, captain and crew were convinced they could do just about anything. One thing high on their list was trailing an Echo II sub. This sort of trail might prove crucial to safeguarding the U.S. carriers off Vietnam, and it was one of the most important roles a sub could play in the war effort.

As luck would have it, it was an Echo II that registered on Tautog's sonar almost as soon as she reached Soviet waters. There was no mistaking it-sonar showed the Echo's trademark pair of four-bladed propellers. The sub was moving south from Petropavlovsk, and Tautog's crew had visions of following the sub through an entire patrol.

The Echo was noisy and seemed as though she would be an easy target, but no trail was ever really easy. Relying on passive sonar, Tautog's men essentially had little more to interpret than textured static (the muffled whir buried within that static was their only "view" of the Soviet sub), and the flickering oscilloscope that transformed some of that static into a light display.

It helped that the Soviet commander seemed to be taking no precautions against a hunter. Instead, as Tautog followed behind, he motored noisily, spending five hours maneuvering through an odd undersea dance that submariners call "angles and dangles." It was almost an undersea "cossack." Submariners on both sides do this awkward dance, a series of random figure eights, sharp turns, and changes in depth meant to shake things out, to see what kind of noise a submarine is making, and to find out whether anything is stowed where it shouldn't be. The dance has little of the offensive fury of a Crazy Ivan, but the steps are tempestuous. And it is impossible to outguess a commander who might order his submarine up or down, right or left, simply as the mood strikes him.

The trick to trailing a submarine tripping through angles and dangles is to back off. But aboard Tautog, the order to back off never came. In fact, as the hours passed, the Soviet sub's angles and dangles had begun to seem routine, and Balderston and others left their stations to their seconds-in-command. The captain went down to his quarters to get some sleep, a marked departure from the past year's missile-test mission when he had stood awake at the helm for nearly forty-eight hours.

On this mission, Tautog had an unusual complement of two sonar chiefs instead of one. But, as it turned out, neither of those chiefs was in the sonar shack while the captain was in his bunk. One of them had been assigned as chief of the watch and was overseeing the enlisted men in the control room. The other was off duty. That left the sonar operations supervised by a more junior man, Sonarman first-class David T. Lindsay.

Before this mission, Lindsay's biggest claim to fame was accidentally being photographed with Pat Nixon. The first lady had been visiting wounded Vietnam veterans at a Honolulu military hospital. Lindsay was there because of an accident on his motorcycle, a super-souped-up machine that he lovingly called "Betsy." When the first lady came to the submariner, no one had the courage to tell her how he had been hurt. It was a photograph of the two of them that made the local papers.

Lindsay had lost an inch off one leg in the accident, and on Tautog he was dubbed "Step-and-a-Half." Now Step-and-a-Half was listening for the Echo, relaying information to the helm, manned by Tautog's executive officer, who was holding to a track set by the captain. As Tautog cut through depths of 120–200 feet at a moderate 12–13 knots, her path was leading her dangerously close to the Echo. Finally, the XO sent for Balderston.

Balderston showed up in the control room wearing a dark blue and maroon bathrobe and slippers. He walked directly over to Scott A. Van Hoften, the officer of the deck who had won minor celebrity among the crew for being the boat's best ship handler and for winning the onboard Coca-Cola consumption record. Now Van Hoften gave the captain a tactical update.

Meanwhile, Paul S. Waters, one of the sonar chiefs, returned to the sonar shack, taking over operations there. Putting on a headset, Waters listened for the Soviet Echo.

"Son-of-a-bitch, it's close," Waters murmured lust before he got up to brief the captain.

"Captain, to the best of my knowledge, this is an Echo II. It is close aboard."

Balderston towered over the short sonar chief, staring at him from beneath those famous eyebrows. As the two men spoke, Balderston settled into a small foldout seat just behind the periscope stand. With that one move, he took over. He made no dramatic pronouncements. He didn't have to say a word.

Van Hoften remained officer of the deck and continued to yell the orders, but everyone knew they came from Balderston. He would not leave the bridge again-not to return to his hunk, not to change out of his bathrobe. At his side was Michael Coy. By now, the all-Navy captain and the decidedly nonmilitary Coy had struck an uneasy peace. Coy had learned to refrain from repeating that he had no intentions of staying in the Navy, and Balderston had stopped talking up the advantages of military life. Besides, Coy also was the boat's supply officer and kept the health-conscious commander in vitamins, Sanka, and enough walnuts to keep his body swimming in lecithin.

Balderston began to scrutinize the oscilloscope. On its nine-inchwide screen a single electronic amber arc offered a sonar-generated image of the Echo. Usually, ten or more faint arcs flickered on the sonar screen, computer depictions of the noise generated by distant boats, land masses, even whales. But the image created by the Soviet sub was large and bright, and it was jumping back and forth across the screen. There was only one interpretation possible. The Echo was very, very close.

"Here… she… comes…. There… she… goes," the captain commented, drawing out the sentence to add emphasis to anyone and no one in particular as he watched the Echo's athletics. He would repeat that comment a few minutes later, and a third time after that.

The XO stood to Balderston's left, studying the navigators' plots. About five feet away, Van Hoften bent his 6'5" frame over the fire control station, monitoring the weapons computers, which were also tracking the Echo's direction, speed, and distance from Tautog. Just outside the conn, in the sonar shack, men crowded shoulder to shoulder and continued to track the Echo.

Mentally they sifted the soft, rhythmic shw-shw-shw sounds of the Echo's propellers from the blanket of ocean noise coming through their head sets. But nothing they heard or could see on their display read the Echo's depth. For that, the men could only listen and guess. Every few minutes the distance between the subs registered zero. At one point, sonar operators guessed that the Echo had risen near the surface, which would have placed her directly above Tautog. Then it seemed that the Echo was descending again.

This all could have been much easier. Tautog had been scheduled to receive a newly engineered device designed to measure another submarine's depth by measuring the disturbances in the water it created. The device consisted of four hydrophones, which were supposed to have been mounted on Tautog's sail. But the shipyard had been behind schedule, and the submarine left port with the new technology sitting in Pearl Harbor.

One officer muttered that it was too bad about those missing hydrophones, and others began to talk about trying to open up the distance between the two subs. Just then, the image on the oscilloscope leapt again, this time violently.

"Here she comes… " the captain began. He never finished the sentence.

The image on the oscilloscope disappeared. At that instant, the sonar operators lost all track of the Echo. No one knew whether the Echo had gone to the right or to the left. She was just gone.

Then, the Echo announced herself in the worst possible way. The 6,000-ton sub slammed belly first into the top of Tautog's sail with an impact that sounded like two cars colliding at 40 miles an hour. With a horrible screech, the Echo's propellers ground through Tautog's metal with a din that forced Chief Waters to recoil from his headset.

Tautog flipped on her right side, rolling nearly 30 degrees as she was forced backward and down. Men went grabbing for a handhold on rails and tables. Coffee mugs, pencils, rulers, charts, and erasers went flying through the control room. Maraschino cherries and pickle relish splattered all over the mess area. Tools popped out of wall lockers and littered the floor of the engine room. Step-and-a-Half Lindsay was thrown down a ladder. Down in the torpedo room, three men who had been sleeping, curled up against the long, green weapons, were tossed from their "bedpans," those mattresses on top of empty torpedo racks. Around them the massive weapons strained at their canvas straps.

One man jumped up to close the watertight doors to the torpedo room. He didn't check to see whether anyone was inside, didn't realize that he had just locked in Greg Greeley-an eighteen-year-old recruit who had boarded Tautog just three weeks before the mission began. All that man knew was that the exterior compartment might be among the first to flood and as the one closest to the hatch, it was his job to seal it off. Then, as he was trained, he turned his hack, never looking in the small round window to see Greeley frightened inside. It would be several minutes before anyone could be sure the hull was intact, several minutes before anyone let Greeley out.

Meanwhile, other officers jumped out of their hunks, raced out of the wardroom and to the control room, scrambling to assume their preassigned collision stations. Coy took over the diving station and began struggling to level the sub. Van Hoften gave his last order as officer of the deck before formally turning the boat over to the captain.

"Do not sound the collision alarm."

It was awfully late to try to stay quiet and avoid detection and just as unnecessary to announce the collision. Still, according to rote, the crew quietly passed a collision alert from man to man, compartment by compartment. Compartment by compartment, the men reported back that each area of Tautog was essentially intact. The watertight doors were opened.

"They build them well at Ingalls," Waters finally said, referring to the sub's shipyard in Mississippi. His comment would he caught on an audiotape that was running in the sonar shack, recording the drama.

Step-and-a-Half hustled back, grabbed hold of a headset, and shouted, "Fuck you, God, nothing gets through HY-80." HY-80 was the steel that Tautog's hull was made of, so named because it could withstand 80,000 pounds of ocean pressure per square inch.

Then the two men sat back to listen. What they heard, and what was recorded on the running tape, seemed to confirm the worst. It sounded as if one of the Echo's propellers had been torn off and, with nothing to resist the water, its turbine was spinning wildly. If that were true, and the Echo's pressure hull was gashed through, she would likely sink into the ocean. At 2,000 feet down, she would implode. There would be no survivors.

Then the men heard noises like an engine starting up and sputtering, followed by banging, perhaps watertight doors being slammed shut on the Echo. Finally sonar picked up something that sounded like popcorn popping, what Lindsay interpreted as the sound of steel cracking apart.

After that, the ocean seemed to go silent, a blanket of uninterrupted static through the sonarmen's headsets. They listened for anything that could be the Echo racing away, or blowing ballast tanks and surfacing. But everything, the spinning, the banging, the popping, had just stopped.

Someone in the sonar shack jumped up and turned off the recorder. The tape normally ran on a continuous loop, and had the recorder been left on, the sounds of the crash would have been lost.

Stunned, the operators continued to search, looking for any sign that the Soviet sub had recovered. The silence seemed to mean only one thing: that as many as ninety submariners were helplessly sinking into the crushing depths below. It didn't seem to matter now that they were Soviet submariners.

Within minutes of the collision, Balderston gave the order that sent Tautog steaming away, fast. There was no thought of surfacing or even of going to periscope depth. This was, in fact, an undersea hit and run. Tautog's crew would not mount a search for survivors or wreckage, normal procedure for a collision at sea. Balderston's prime directive was to avoid any further encounter with the Soviets.

Tautog headed due east, moving at only about 12 knots and listing at least 10 degrees to her starboard side. Every time Balderston. tried to drive the submarine faster, she leaned over more sharply. One by one, metal plates that had been welded to Tautog's sail were torn off by the force of the water. Each slammed onto the submarine's hull with a resounding crash. The crew started a pool, betting on how much of the sail would be left when they got back to Pearl Harbor.

Water leaked into the control room from the gash left by the Echo's propeller, but it would be hours before Tautog surfaced, hours before a small team of officers could, under the cover of darkness, inspect the damage outside.

Men rushed around, trying to clean up evidence of the debacle. The sugar bowl looked like it had exploded as the captain and his officers gathered in the wardroom to make sense of what had happened. Scott Laidig, one of Tautog's spooks, greeted the senior officers as they arrived. Laidig was a U.S. Marine. He had been assigned to work with the Naval Security Group, which decided that his fluency in Russian qualified him for submarines. Still, he knew he could offer no help during a collision, so he had done the next best thing. He had gotten out of everyone else's way, slipping down to the wardroom to wait out the adventure.

"I don't know how you guys do this," he said now. "You sit out here in the middle of nowhere, and you let somebody run right through you."

"Gee, I hope we didn't ruin your cup of coffee," Balderston countered.

Laidig was a veteran of two tours in Vietnam and was well known on Tautog for his ability to spin a yarn. Now it seemed as if he and Balderston were conspiring to divert the other officers, at least for a few moments.

Balderston asked Laidig whether he'd ever been afraid, really afraid. That was Laidig's cue. He launched into a harrowing tale about the time he had led a platoon after a sniper who had been firing on Americans from across a rice paddy. When the Americans were surprised by a second gunman, Laidig sought the only shelter available, a skinny tree. As he pressed against it, a barrage of bullets sawed his pack off his back.

The officers listened, their hands still quaking from the crash. They decided that as bad as their day had been, Laidig had been through worse. He said he wasn't so sure. The men concluded that they were probably all more comfortable dealing with the devil they knew. With that, the officers turned their attention to the devil at hand.

For more than two hours, they tried to reconstruct the accident, and came to a single conclusion. Tautog should have been traveling at a different depth. No one talked about what might have happened to the Soviet sub or her crew.

For the first time, Balderston's officers saw him almost humble. At one point he just shook his head, saying, "You take care of things that need to be taken care of, the safety of the ship, the safety of the crew, and of course, nondetection……

Balderston didn't finish. He didn't have to. His men understood what he meant. Later he would say what everyone was thinking, but not for several hours. Not until Tautog had surfaced and his officers had assessed the damage. Not until he was sure his submarine could make it hack to Pearl Harbor.

"Well, there goes my career," Balderston finally said. "I can forget about stars." He had lost his chance to make admiral.

When they were 150–200 miles away from the Soviet Union, Balderston gave the order to surface. Several officers climbed out the forward hatch into the darkness. They couldn't take the usual route out to the sail and up to the bridge. The hatch leading to the bridge had been breached and the sail flooded.

When the officers climbed on deck, they saw that their sail had been dished in one-third of the way hack, maybe more. It was almost as if the massive structure had been made of cardboard. A fist-sized chunk of the Echo's propeller was lodged in the tower's upper hatch, which was bent and crammed back into its housing. One of the sub's two periscopes was hopelessly bent. Most of Tautog's antenna and electronic masts were jammed inside the damaged sail and useless. That was going to make it tough to send a message back home, but it was very definitely time to let Pacific command know what had happened.

The crew strung a makeshift antenna-little more than a wireacross the top of the submarine. Then they flashed the bad news: there had been a severe collision; a Soviet submarine was involved; and Tautog was ending her operations two months early.

Commanders onshore flashed back: Tautog was to bypass all closer ports and return directly to Pearl Harbor. Later, the instructions would become more detailed. The submarine was to remain away from port until the dead of night. Then she was to creep in, all lights out.

On the way hack, Balderston ordered the crew to gather, in shifts, on the mess deck. As if anyone really needed to be reminded, he told them that any discussion of the collision outside of an official inquiry was definitely out.

Tautog's arrival at Pearl Harbor was logged late on July 1. She was maneuvered into a shipyard dry dock where a huge shroud was draped over her sail. No one without authorization would be able to see the damage, not even her crew. The men were to be kept aboard for another twenty-four hours, until the damage was well hidden and they had signed formal secrecy oaths. One man tried to hold on to a piece of the Echo's hull as a souvenir, stashing it in a locker on board behind some cleaning fluids and alcohol. Some months later, he was discovered, and security officials insisted that he turn the piece over.

Rear Admiral Walter Small, commander of submarines in the Pacific, met Tautog at the pier and was among the first to learn the details. Also briefed was Admiral Moorer, who was just being promoted from CNO to chairman of the joint Chiefs of Staff. It was either Moorer or a top Pentagon intelligence official who carried the bad news to Melvin Laird, Nixon's secretary of Defense. These reports were made verbally. No one wanted to leave a paper trail.

Laird briefed Nixon himself, telling the president that there had been a collision and it looked like the Soviet sub had sunk. Nixon's reaction, Laird recalls, was inscrutable.

It was clear that the United States would not tell the Soviet Union about the unmarked, underwater grave officials believed existed perhaps only 50 miles off the coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula. Given the secrecy that surrounded all submarine operations, it went without saying that the White House was not going to announce that two nuclear-powered submarines, both carrying nuclear weapons, had met in one violent, possibly fatal, moment. Besides, the Soviets were suffering so many at-sea accidents at the time, Nixon and his advisers decided the Soviets would likely blame another lost submarine on their own jinxed technology.

A court of inquiry was convened, although just about everyone involved was already certain that the Soviet boat was lost. Indeed, Small, Moorer, and Laird all say they remember specifically being told that the Echo had sunk. Other former senior Navy officers, including one who heard the sonar tapes, say that conclusion was based largely on the terrifying sounds captured on the recordings. But officials say that, without more definitive evidence, a formal declaration that a Soviet sub had sunk would not have been made part of the Navy's official records.

Shortly after the accident, James Bradley rushed out to Pearl Harbor to try to determine a cause. As best as anyone could guess, the Echo's captain had just made an unlucky and sudden maneuver. That in itself raised another issue. Bradley realized that U.S. captains were going to have to alter their techniques. As things stood now, the danger was too great that two subs would meet head-on at flank speed. If that happened, both subs would be lost.

So Bradley wrote some new rules for trailing, one institutionalizing a favorite Whitey Mack technique: subs would now trail slightly to port or starboard of the enemy. That would leave the Americans more maneuvering room, while still allowing them to hide in the wash of noise coming from the hunted sub. There was another rule, however, that ran directly counter to Mack's style: subs would now try to trail from safer distances.

Bradley didn't blame Balderston for the incident, and Balderston, who had already been scheduled to leave Tautog, became commander of a division of four submarines that included her. Still, he had been right about making admiral. It would never happen. He retired seven years later and became a Baptist minister. His heart weakened by his childhood rheumatic fever, he died in 1984. He never told his wife or children about the collision.

Balderston's silence was typical. Bound to secrecy, submariners could not seek the kind of emotional solace that most men get from their wives and children when something goes wrong on the job. "It was not for him to tell," Irene L. Balderston says. "And I would never have dreamed of questioning him or of prying anything out of him."

Just about the only ongoing discourse about the incident took place among members of Tautog's crew, who passed the story on to new members as they joined the boat. They whispered to one another about what had bent their crooked sail, and crew after crew of sonarmen passed along a hidden bootleg recording-the sonar tapes made during the collision. Off the boat, the tapes were played in sonar school as an anonymous example of a Soviet sub sinking. Then two decades later the fate of the Echo 11 came surprisingly into question.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Boris Bagdasaryan, a former Soviet submarine commander, stepped forward to say that he was the captain of the Echo II that collided with Tautog and that he was very much alive. With so few people in either the Soviet Union or the United States aware that their governments had long hidden a terrible accident, his account got little attention. But Bagdasaryan tells a story that has been supported by high officials of the Russian Navy, and his tale meshes with many of the details provided by Tautog crew members, although there are a few small discrepancies.

Sitting in his Moscow apartment, cigarette in hand, Bagdasaryan's slight build and graying hair make him look more like an aging professor than a Soviet sea captain. But he had been a commander for more than a decade before he took the Echo II submarine the Soviets called the Black Lila out on a three-day training run in June 1970.

Bagdasaryan had survived early experiments on Soviet diesel subs, staying underwater on one of the boats the Americans called "Whiskey" for thirty days despite a design flaw that allowed exhaust gas to be sucked back into the sub through its snorkel. By the end of the month, the crew was so poisoned that their legs and hands were swollen to nearly twice their normal size. The Soviet Union chalked up the voyage as proof of the superiority of Soviet manhood.

No wonder Bagdasaryan had such a well-developed sense of political cynicism and was so willing to speak out. He especially despised the zampolits, the Kremlin's political officers who were assigned to every submarine. Ostensibly, they were there to ensure that crews remained Communistically correct, but Bagdasaryan thought them drunks, pests, and inept nags and let them know it. He roared at one, "You have been as useful as a suitcase on my submarine for two months," after the man accused Bagdasaryan of playing "outlaw's music" when he put on a tape of a new popular singer to inspire his men.

Nor was Bagdasaryan afraid of the Americans. As he put it, he had once "attacked" the American battleship USS New Jersey, stalking her as she headed full speed for Vietnam's Gulf of Tonkin. Had he been given the order, he could have sunk her. He also had gone inside U.S. waters to try to trail an American ballistic missile submarine as it left Guam, later falsifying his patrol reports, as some U.S. commanders did. He never did manage to keep tail on a U.S. sub longer than eighteen hours-a mere wink in comparison to the feats of Whitey Mack-but that was long enough to win him a reputation as one of the most daring commanders in the Soviet fleet.

Yet through all this, he always remained superstitious and fearful of disaster. He once delayed deployment rather than leave without his crew's lucky mascot, Mashka the rat. To buy time, he told an admiral that much of the meat in the ship's refrigerator was dated 1939. "Rat flight is a well-known sign," Bagdasaryan says. "It was necessary to delay our departure." Black Lila, however, had no such good-luck charm on that fateful day in 1970. Perhaps she should have.

Bagdasaryan says that he was moving Black Lila, formally identified as K-108, through a series of exercises, a set of planned revolutions through the water similar to angles and dangles, much as Tautog's crew had guessed. By early in the morning of June 24, his submarine was running circles at a depth of 40 meters and a constant speed of 5 knots.

She came to periscope depth to scan for messages from shore. Then she went back to 40 meters and began to turn 90 degrees to her right. The idea was to practice checking for sounds in the area that had been shielded by the din of Black Lila's own propellers-just as the Americans had thought.

As Bagdasaryan tells it, his sonar men soon heard sounds that they identified, not as an American submarine, but as a "submarine imitator," an exercise device that looks like a torpedo and creates the same kinds of noises as a trailing submarine. Four minutes later, they lost the contact. Two minutes later, there was a crash.

What happened next inside Black Lila was very much like what Tautog sailors say they heard, and very much like what they say they imagined.

Black Lila's deck began to slant forward. First by 20 degrees, then by 30 degrees. The submarine was starting to slide out of control.

"We had 2,500 meters below us," Bagdasaryan says. "I announced the emergency alarm. Ordered to blow the main ballast bow part. No change. We started to blow the entire ballast. Useless again. The sub kept sinking. Gave an order, `Lock in compartments!"' Silence in response. His crew was apparently in shock.

"Truth to tell, I began to doubt at that moment a possibility of successful surfacing," Bagdasaryan says.

He shouted at his stunned men. Finally they began to report in. "I hear air being slackened," sonar said.

By then, the commander realized that they had collided with another submarine. The noise of slackened air could have meant that the other sub was sinking along with the Soviets, or it might have been surfacing.

Bagdasaryan's chief engineer, Volodya Dybsky, crawled into the control room, literally pulling himself by his arms. His legs were paralyzed with fear and shock. The engineer continued to give orders, lying down.

Meanwhile, Black Lila continued to fall, for what seemed like several minutes. Bagdasaryan shouted what he thought would be his last order ever: "Reverse!"

It was a desperation move. If his crew could reverse the engines, their sub just might drive herself to the surface. But descending this steeply, Bagdasaryan knew the reverse clutch was likely to fail.

Black Lila began to vibrate. Inside the sub, "the depthometer's hand shook, then stopped, near 70 meters, then it moved back to 50 meters, to 25 meters. From the depth of about 25 meters, we went like a shot from the gun to the surface," he said. "Suddenly we appeared on the surface, like a cork from the champagne bottle." After that dive, he added, referring to his men, "they have a toast to the engines."

As soon as Black Lila hit the surface, her men opened a hatch. The sun was shining. They could see no other boat for miles around, and they feared the worst for the American sub. "I thought for a second, `I have sunk a brother submariner,"' Bagdasaryan says. "It was hard to have realized it."

The Soviets were reporting the incident to their shore commanders when they caught the sound of what Bagdasaryan now believes was Tautog, moving away from the scene of the accident at 15 knots.

Bagdasaryan says his submarine limped back to port with only one propeller still working. Her right propeller shaft was hopelessly bent, and there was a large hole in her outer hull. The sounds of that outer hull cracking up could have created the popcorn effect recorded in Tautog's sonar room.

But the Echo had a second reinforced inner hull. American submariners used to joke that the Soviets used a two-hull design because their metallurgy was, well, Soviet metallurgy. But it was very likely that the second layer of steel held back the crushing ocean and kept Black Lila's men alive.

The hole in the outer hull "was so big that a trolley bus with antennas up could drive into it," Bagdasaryan recalls. "Truth to tell, if the Tautog had run into our sub a few meters closer to the center, we would have been very unlucky. The American submarine's speed was fairly high. And she would undoubtedly thrash both the light hull and the pressure hull of our sub."

Crammed into the hole between the inner and outer hulls, Bagdasaryan believes, were pieces of Tautog. He says he was certain that the crash had completely sheared off Tautog's conning tower. Like the men on Tautog, who had tried to hold onto pieces of the Echo, Black Lila crew members tried to keep pieces of the American sub for themselves, but the chunks of HY-80 were confiscated by the KGB. Only Bagdasaryan, who refused to give his up, still has a souvenir.

After that, Bagdasaryan's story departs from the tale told by Tautog's crew. He insists that it was Tautog that rammed Black Lila, not the other way around. And he says that the Soviets tracked Tautog heading back to Japan. He also says Soviet intelligence sources reported that once there, Tautog remained to undergo a long overhaul. But Tautog never went to Japan-she returned directly to Pearl Harbor.

When Bagdasaryan returned to the Soviet Union, he faced a torturous hearing before a Communist Party commission. He says his squadron commander gave him advice: "Don't fly into a rage. Drop some tears on dusty boots."

A severe reprimand was registered on his service card. The transgression meant that he would no longer be allowed to teach at the naval academy. Instead, his boat was overhauled, then sent to spend two and a half months hiding outside of San Francisco. This "combat service," Bagdasaryan says, was meant to make amends for his failure, to "wash out the fault with blood."

After the crash, a new joke began to make the rounds among Soviet submariners, although the facts it was based on were altered somewhat, as no one wanted to be caught referring directly to a classified incident. With such constraints, it's little wonder that the humor is somewhat strained.

The joke went like this: "An American nuclear sub collided with an iceberg in the ocean. The iceberg's crew had no casualties."

After about six months, Bagdasaryan's superiors decided to rescind the reprimand. Somehow, it wasn't erased from party documents until many years later, and by then, Bagdasaryan wanted to hold onto his unique blemish.

His reason: "It would be hard to find a Communist whose service card would say `Severely reprimanded by the party for the collision with an American nuclear-powered submarine in underwater position.",

As Bagdasaryan spoke, he paused and wondered aloud whether he might meet Commander Balderston, perhaps to "have a drink and think together how to avoid similar collisions in the future." Told that Balderston had died, the former Soviet commander seemed crestfallen.

"It's too bad about the commander," he said. "I guess this incident did not pass easily for him."