Red Star Rogue (17 page)

By early summer, USS
Halibut,
under the operational command of Captain Clarence Edward Moore, was ready to begin the hunt for the lost Soviet submarine. As special project officer, Lieutenant Commander John H. Cook III was in charge of the operations conducted from the bat cave. The submarine had a crew and scientific/spy staff of ninety-nine.

The
Halibut
finally set out from Pearl Harbor in the second week of July 1968. By then, K-129 had been down for more than four months, and the Soviets had given up on their major search activities far to the north of the search site where Dr. Craven sent the American spy submarine. It would have made little difference if a few Soviet search ships were in the area because they could not have detected what the
Halibut
was doing, anyway.

The Soviets did not learn that the United States had any submarines with such deep-sea espionage capabilities until near the end of the Cold War, in 1990. The Navy’s spy-submarine operations, which would become extensive during the 1970s and 1980s under the clandestine Development Group One program, was one of the best-kept secrets of that era. The American public was also astonished when it first learned of the exploits of this silent service in the late 1990s. Sweeping revelations of a largely unknown branch of the U.S. Navy were made public for the first time in the book
Blind Man’s Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage,
by Sherry Sontag, Christopher Drew, and Annette Lawrence Drew.

But in 1968, the deadly serious business of deep-ocean espionage that was already taking place would have seemed like science fiction to both the Soviets and most Americans, who were not privy to such operations. Submariners serving on boats such as
Halibut
were exploring and exploiting deep oceans, just as the astronauts and NASA’s strange vehicles were exploring space. The biggest difference between the space program and the underseas program was that the space program was highly publicized, while no one would know about the exploits taking place in the oceans for another two decades.

Stealth was the most important asset of the
Halibut
as a spy sub. It could glide silently in a search area, then launch and recover its fish while still submerged. A complete operation could be performed successfully without the Soviets’ knowing the Americans were even interested in their lost craft. Another advantage of this spy boat over the surface vessels was that it operated in calm underseas water, below the heaving, storm-tossed surface. This enabled the submarine to work for weeks without interruption from the weather.

The
Halibut
arrived on the search site in mid-July 1968 and deployed its fish through the well in the bat cave at the heart of the operations center. The search device was lowered three miles down, to begin the painstaking process of examining the ocean floor in quadrants. The area to be searched was between 16,191 and 16,381 feet deep. It was part of the vast abyssal plain that stretches between the Hawaiian Ridge of the Leeward Islands and the North Hawaiian Seamounts. This underseas terrain comprises the southwest range of the Musicians Seamount that K-129 had traversed on its way to the launch area months before.

The
Halibut
’s special operations crew sat for hours that turned into days and then weeks, staring at the monitors as the probe’s images of the primordial ocean floor were revealed in rhythmic flashes of the strobe light. One crewman on the
Halibut
mission said the assignment was like looking for a baseball in a large field at night, using a penlight. The customized submarine trolled back and forth across the target area, towing its camera at the end of miles of cable. The specially trained crews had to be rotated frequently from the hypnotic monotony of peering at the monitor screens, visually searching the ocean bottom for any man-made objects in a zone nearly devoid of natural life.

On this mission the
Halibut
had no limitations or time schedules, working continuously around the clock from the beginning of the assignment. The specialists operating the equipment were not told that their target was another submarine. There was very little to see in this lightless, cold world where pressures were so great that most man-made items would be crushed, and only the rarest biota could survive. The bright flashes of the strobes mounted on the
Halibut
’s fish were the first to light up the black gloom in the eons since sediment layers on the ocean floor had formed.

The USS
Halibut
found the Soviet sub in mid-August. The naval intelligence team working in the bat cave immediately focused its highly sophisticated cameras on gathering as many precise photographs as possible to help determine what had happened to the sunken boat.

The technicians’ first views of K-129 came with an eerie discovery. Its effect on the
Halibut
crew, themselves all experienced submariners, can only be imagined. After weeks of staring at images of the empty ocean floor, the sailors were startled to see a skeletal human face. A corpse dressed in a raglan-style sheepskin coat and heavy storm boots came into focus on the monitors in the dark bat cave. His cold-weather gear indicated he had been outside when the disaster occurred. He had ridden the sinking submarine down to the bottom of the ocean, where his body was thrown clear of the wreckage.

A dramatic account of this discovery was written from an eyewitness interview in
Blind Man’s Bluff.
That narration poses the question of why the figure had been reduced to a skeleton.

“Bones, a bare skeleton—by all accounts, that should have been impossible,” the
Blind Man’s Bluff
authors wrote. The authors further note that, although experts believed there was nothing to eat the flesh from a corpse at this depth, the eyewitness claimed to have seen “carnivorous worms” around the body.

Later, a number of sources pointed out that, because of a lack of oxygen at this great depth of more than three miles, the other bodies in the submarine were in such good condition that their ages and ethnic characteristics could be determined.

The fact that there was no skin on the face and hands of the sailor discovered lying outside the submarine’s hulk became one small clue in solving the mystery of the submarine’s demise. But at the time, the men staring at the monitors knew only that they were witness to the grotesque scene of a Russian sailor’s final resting place.

Of greater significance to the
Halibut
crewmen monitoring the cameras at the wreck site was the visible damage to the aft section of the submarine’s conning tower where it joined the deck. The eyewitnesses told the authors of
Blind Man’s Bluff
what a number of other sources who later had access to photographs of the damage have confirmed: The Soviet submarine suffered a devastating wound behind the conning tower in the immediate proximity of missile tube number one.

The
Halibut
crew and intelligence team took more than twenty-two thousand photographs of the wreckage. They were able to gather such valuable intelligence because K-129 broke apart on impact, and its interior was exposed for the probe to explore. The myth later circulated by the CIA that K-129 lay intact on the ocean floor has been shattered by careful examination of bits and pieces of leaked information.

The submarine had broken into four or five large sections, most likely torn apart at the compartment joints where the hull structure was the weakest. It had hit the floor of the sea at very high speed, building forward momentum in its long descent. Since the compartments were torn open, the
Halibut
’s probe could easily be maneuvered to photograph far inside each section of the submarine. The fish was able to take close-up pictures of every operational aspect of the boat and get a firsthand look at the remains of the crew, to help analysts determine what happened in the last minutes of K-129’s mission.

After nearly a month of photographing, probing, and possibly even plundering small items from the wreckage, the USS
Halibut
sailed back to Hawaii with a trove of intelligence about the boat, its equipment, and the fate of the crew.

The
Halibut
’s mission to find and recover intelligence from the Soviet sub succeeded beyond the wildest expectations of the DIA team assigned to the project. Somewhere amid the physical evidence recovered and the thousands of clear, close-up photographs taken was proof of the mysterious Soviet sub’s clandestine, and probably rogue, mission. But everything the
Halibut
found, and the fact that it was even looking in the first place, remained among the top secrets of the Cold War.

Over the years, many facts about the
Halibut
’s mission to find K-129 have gradually been leaked to the press, but the man in charge, Dr. John Craven, still refuses to reveal exactly how the boat was found or what was discovered. The special project director for the recovery only generalized about some aspects of locating K-129 in his autobiography,
The Silent War,
published in 2001. In more recent interviews, whenever the subject of the exact location of the wreck is raised, he reminds the interviewer that he is under an official lifetime confidentiality oath regarding this operation. His silence, along with the silence of so many others who participated in locating the Soviet submarine, is evidence that the U.S. Navy, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and later the Central Intelligence Agency all had—and still have—some powerful reasons to keep the exact location and other details about the K-129 incident from ever being revealed.

Dr. Craven told a congressional hearing that the mission was completely successful, resulting in the “optimum recovery” of “significant intelligence information concerning the submarine, its mission and its equipment.” He later told author William J. Broad
(The Universe Below):
“We milked the submarine dry of really meaningful information.”

The evidence had to await analysis that would determine the true magnitude of the find. At the time, the CIA had not yet entered the picture, and the Navy’s top priority—beyond learning all that could be known about Soviet submarine communications and ballistic missiles—was to keep the world from discovering the capabilities of their deep-sea research submarine, the USS
Halibut.
The Soviet boat contained largely obsolete equipment and systems, so other motives for exploiting the wreckage were obviously factored into the mission.

The mystery of the K-129 had not yet been solved by one of the most successful clandestine spy submarine missions in the history of the Cold War. The mystery, in fact, had only begun when the
Halibut
brought its treasure trove back to Pearl Harbor in early September 1968.

T
HE
USS
H
ALIBUT
RETURNED
to Pearl Harbor on September 9, 1968, triumphant from a harrowing, months-long mission to the bottom of the sea. In keeping with the clandestine nature of its assignment, there were no admirals waiting to shower the officers with laurels, no hula girls to bedeck the sailors with leis. But the success of this mission did not go unnoticed at the top echelons of the United States government.

In little more than a week,
Halibut
’s captain, Commander Clarence Moore, was summoned to Washington to receive the highest peacetime decoration a grateful nation could bestow.

“Commander Clarence Moore has been awarded the Distinguished Service Medal today by the Department of Navy. He will be brought over to the President’s Office (the Oval Office) for a strictly off the record ceremony (no press announcement),” Walt W. Rostow, special assistant for national security affairs, told the president in a top-secret memorandum.

The boat and crew were also honored.

Rostow recommended that the USS
Halibut
and its crew be given the Presidential Unit Citation. The coveted citation and numerous other individual medals and unit commendations were all to be privately awarded; the men receiving the honors were never to show them off. The memorandum recommending the citation stated: “I have been briefed on the substance of this mission. It is being held at the highest order of security in the government.”

The Presidential Citation issued to the USS
Halibut
and signed by President Johnson contained a supplementary summary of the recommendation. This summary, which was partially declassified on April 25, 1994, with major details redacted, hinted at the significance of the mission. Portions of the citation read:

In addition to the anonymous commendation to the crew of the
Halibut,
President Johnson and the Navy Department, and later President Nixon, ordered a combined sixty-four secret commendations to Pacific units in the Integrated Underseas Surveillance System. These commendations went to units, officers, and men of the submarines
Halibut, Seawolf, Parche,
and
Russell;
the SOSUS network; the Boresight radio intercept system; and the spy satellite program. In addition, Dr. John Piña Craven was privately awarded the Navy’s Distinguished Civilian Service Award.

Rarely, if ever, have so many meritorious service awards been issued in secret. These silent honors attest to the value of the intelligence that the American defense establishment placed on the coordinated effort to locate and exploit the Soviet submarine K-129. The early fruits of that search-and-recovery effort, while still hidden in the deepest chambers of the DIA and CIA, provided the evidence from which some startling conclusions were later drawn.

The final military intelligence product of this massive effort was a document called a Defense Intelligence Estimate (DIE), which is a military version of the more familiar National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) created today by the CIA.

CIA Director George Tenet described the important role these analyses play in shaping America’s national security policy, in a statement issued to the
Washington Post
in August 2003.

“The National Intelligence Estimate remains the intelligence community’s most authoritative product. The process by which we produce NIEs…has been honed over nearly thirty years. It is a process that is designed to provide policymakers in both the executive and legislative branches with our best judgments on the most crucial national security issues. This process is designed to produce coordinated judgments—but not to the exclusion of differing views or without exposing uncertainties.”

Director Tenet pointed out that in recent years the intelligence estimates have been circulated for comment to all the agencies of the intelligence communities, including CIA, DIA, and NSA.

The original intelligence estimate prepared by the DIA on the K-129 sinking was not widely distributed. After it was shared with the White House, it was returned to the inner sanctums of naval intelligence. Subsequent distribution of any information about the K-129 incident, after the Central Intelligence Agency entered the case, was completely restricted to a very small, need-to-know list. Years later, attempts to have the files of the incident declassified were met by unusually intense efforts on the part of the government to keep everything secret. The CIA went to federal court twice to prevent acknowledging that an intelligence estimate even existed.

What was in the DIA’s intelligence estimate that made this document such a hot potato? Certainly the intelligence gathered by the
Halibut
’s clandestine dive on the wrecked boat was the primary source material. The estimate also contained the recordings and photography from America’s most sensitive spy technology. These included submarine tracking reports from the boats that first picked up K-129’s sailing from Kamchatka, satellite photography and infrared images from orbiting satellites, acoustical tracking records from the SOSUS network in the Pacific, and radio-signal intercepts monitored in the elephant cages hidden around the rim of the Pacific.

All this evidence, a large technological mosaic, still had to be woven together into some coherent pattern, a case made, and conclusions reached by human intelligence operatives in the Navy and DIA. One agent, who remains anonymous because of his security oath, and who worked on putting all these pieces together, confirmed that a comprehensive document about the K-129 operations accompanied the best of the thousands of photographic images taken by the USS
Halibut.

The source would not reveal exactly what the intelligence estimate concluded, but he confirmed some of the elements in the document and the methodology used by the DIA investigators to prepare it.

The U.S. Navy and the Defense Intelligence Agency conducted the initial inquiry into the K-129 as a military intelligence project, not realizing that their findings might have major geopolitical consequences as well. This being an older submarine and not one of the newer nuclear-powered boats, there was less technology of military value in the wreckage. Thus, the primary interest of the intelligence agents was to determine the cause of the submarine’s destruction.

Any chance that the damage had resulted from an American action—intended or accidental—was quickly eliminated. Navy investigators knew no antisubmarine warfare assets had been patrolling from Pearl Harbor on that date, in the immediate area where K-129 had disappeared. So it was clear the damage had resulted from activity on board the boat itself.

The best evidence available to help determine the cause was in the photographs taken by the
Halibut.
The few people who have publicly admitted to having seen all or some of the photos agreed that the prints were extraordinarily good, considering they were made three miles deep in the ocean where only the light from strobes was available for exposure. The pictures covered much of the doomed submarine, including all the outside surfaces and some of the inside areas. It is easy to imagine the detail of photographic coverage of a 324-foot-long ship when twenty-two thousand precisely aimed shots were taken at point-blank range by cameras mounted on the submarine’s towed fish. The
Halibut
’s advantage of being able to spend days on a site without interference by weather or snooping Soviet trawlers is clear.

Analysts focused attention on the gaping wound behind the conning tower. There was a ten-foot-wide hole apparently blasted outward from missile tube number one, just above where the sail joined the upper deck.

An eyewitness account of some of the images captured by the fish further describes the damage in the area of the missile tubes. The pipes and wiring inside the first tube were exposed, indicating the missile was completely destroyed. In the second missile tube the warhead was missing, but the missile itself was still intact. In the third tube, the missile and warhead were still in one piece. Considerable damage to the missile casings could have been expected as the submarine plunged into the extreme pressure of the deep. The thin-skinned missiles themselves would have been crushed like tin cans, forcing liquid fuel out in a volatile chemical mixture that might have blown the missile hatch covers off. But the type of damage seen in the photographs could not be explained by the crushing pressure.

If high pressure alone had caused the damage, all the missiles would have been uniformly crushed in the tubes, but the missile components would have remained intact. An explosion beginning in one of the missile tubes, before the submarine’s final dive, was the only logical explanation for the type of damage to the missiles and the conning tower described by those who studied the photographs.

The experts had examined the possibility of other accidental causes for an internal explosion, such as an accumulation of gases from recharging batteries. This potential cause was assigned a low probability. If a hydrogen gas buildup from the batteries had been sparked, the resulting damage would not have been at the base of the submarine’s conning tower in the vicinity of the launch tube.

Other photographs revealed additional damage to the center bottom of the submarine. In 1995, Admiral Viktor A. Dygalo, former commander of the division to which K-129 belonged, told American author and former U.S. Navy officer Peter Huchthausen that the Soviet investigators had seen photographs that revealed a tear in the bottom of the hull. Admiral Dygalo also served as technical consultant on a television documentary that graphically depicted an explosion in the bottom center of the hull. Photographs taken by the
Halibut
showed that this damage in the hull of the boat was also situated immediately adjacent to the bottom of missile tube one.

The only combustible material in the launch tubes was obviously contained in the missiles, where there was explosive material in the warhead and combustible fuel that propelled the rocket.

The damage seen in the area of the conning tower and hull provided enough evidence to narrow down the probable cause of the catastrophic explosion. Something had to have set off an initial explosion in the high-powered, nonnuclear material surrounding the nuclear core in the warhead. The blast in the warhead then ignited the highly volatile liquid rocket fuel. Since the door to missile tube one was clearly in an open position, an explosion originating in the fuel tanks at the bottom of the missile would have ejected the missile and the warhead out of the tube, thereby avoiding the superstructure damage seen in the photographs. Thus, the initial blast was followed by, not created by, the spontaneous ignition of the rocket fuel.

If the point of origin of the explosion was in the warhead, such an explosion had to have been electronically triggered. Years of missile testing by the Soviets and Americans had proven that most missile accidents ending in catastrophic failure or destruction occurred at or during launch.

The extensive damage in the area adjacent to the missile launch tube could only have been caused by the warhead exploding. The initial blast crushed the missile’s fuel tanks, mixing the volatile rocket fuel and creating a massive explosion that tore through the steel walls of the missile tube and the reinforced steel of the outer plates.