Red Star Rogue (19 page)

The second piece of disinformation needed for the cover story was the cause of the sinking. That was extracted from the probability analysis itself. While the intelligence team had ranked an attempted missile launch as the cause with highest probability, the second most likely cause was an internal explosion resulting from a buildup of volatile gases. The explosion might have been caused by equipment failure. After all, everyone knew that Soviet submarine technology was notoriously flawed.

If an accident could be blamed for the sinking, there would be few or no repercussions if the story leaked to the press. So the Navy brass and the political appointees in the Defense Department reached down into the probability analysis for a safer explanation: The boat sank from an accumulation of hydrogen, which built up while recharging its batteries. The hydrogen gas explosion became the U.S. Navy’s official position on the cause of the sinking of K-129.

That cover story persisted for years, despite overwhelming evidence that submarine hulls, designed to withstand tons of ocean pressure in deep dives, were too strong for an explosive gas buildup to cause enough damage to sink the boat.

The amount of hydrogen gas buildup inside the submarine required to cause an explosion forceful enough to rip the hull open would have been detected long before an explosion of that magnitude could have resulted. That kind of buildup was impossible on this type of boat. Golf submarines were equipped with sensors to monitor just such a gas buildup. The environment in the living compartments was tested every thirty minutes for excess levels of carbon dioxide and hydrogen. Compartments two and five, located above the batteries, each had a flameless heating unit installed in the ceiling, which was designed to automatically vaporize excess hydrogen.

Former Soviet submarine commander and fleet admiral Rudolf Golosov, who commanded the squadron to which K-129 belonged, specifically debunked the gas explosion theory.

“The widely touted hypothesis of battery explosion caused by stored hydrogen can be refuted by the sad experience of such explosions aboard submarines of the world’s navies,” retired admiral Golosov wrote. “No damage of such magnitude could be inflicted by exploding battery or batteries even to a sub’s hull that could operate at depths of 100 meters. The hull of K-129 was vastly stronger because it was designed to safely operate submerged at 300 meters.”

Dr. John Craven, the U.S. Navy’s former chief underseas scientist, also scoffs at this explanation in his autobiography,
The Silent War.

“When I read this [hydrogen buildup as a cause of K-129 loss] I could not restrain my sardonic chuckle,” Dr. Craven, who was also involved in the probability analysis, wrote about the incident. “I have never seen or heard of a submarine disaster that was not accompanied by the notion that the battery blew up and started it all.”

During the years that diesel-electric U-boats and submarines were in operation, there had been countless instances of fires and explosions resulting from hydrogen gas accumulating during recharging of the batteries. It is true that batteries did not behave well when they came in contact with salty ocean water and might explode under some circumstances. However, in all these countless accidents there is no record of such an explosion being powerful enough to tear open the tough skin of a submarine. Submarine hulls, whether single- or double-walled, are built to withstand enormous pressure from diving beneath the weight of the seas.

The
Halibut
’s photographs of the damage, which have been seen by a number of witnesses and reported extensively, further refute the gas explosion theory. In the photographs, the severe damage aft of K-129’s conning tower is nowhere near the compartment where the huge batteries were located. Gases leaking from the batteries beneath the decks in compartments two and five would have accumulated in those compartments. Any resulting explosion would have been in parts of the submarine much farther forward or back of the area where the real damage was located.

When the true location of the sinking is linked to the real cause of the K-129’s destruction, there can be little doubt about what happened. A rogue submarine from the Soviet Union attempted an attack against the United States on March 7, 1968. Instead of succeeding, the submarine blew up in the process.

The startling and unthinkable conclusion of Defense Intelligence Agency analysts was suppressed in 1968, and has been kept from the public ever since.

A
WAR
-
WEARY
,
LAME
-
DUCK
J
OHNSON ADMINISTRATION
had little time left in office to deal with the implications of an attempted rogue attack on a major American city. Still, the president’s war cabinet could not ignore early reports that a lone Soviet submarine had been destroyed near American territory.

The reaction in Washington was swift, decisive, and secretive. A solution to such a threat would be enormously expensive and even then, would be only a stopgap measure. Nothing yet devised by the best technical brains in the land could completely defend against a lone submarine armed with nuclear weapons. But if it ever became public that such an attempt had been made, President Johnson needed to be on record as having done everything in his power to protect the country from such an eventuality. Some type of defense against this hole in America’s shield had to be mounted quickly and without arousing congressional uproar or public panic. A ready-made set of plans for a partial missile defense system had been abandoned several years earlier and sat gathering dust on a Pentagon shelf.

The antiballistic missile defense plan, code-named Sentinel, had been developed in the Pentagon planning offices and on the drawing boards of hopeful defense contractors during the early 1960s.

The limited ABM plan had been abandoned in 1966, because it was determined to be too thin to guard American cities from a long-range Soviet ICBM or massive sea-launch nuclear attack. By the time of the K-129 incident, American intelligence had also changed its threat estimates and concluded that China would not have a sea-launch ballistic missile capability until the 1970s. So in 1968, when the Sentinel program was suddenly reactivated, the China threat was of less concern in the Defense Department. However, DIA analysts then realized that earlier planning to address the threat of an attack by a lone Chinese submarine would also apply as a countermeasure against a rogue Soviet submarine attack. As it became increasingly apparent that K-129 was such a rogue, the China model was dusted off.

Even though the Navy did not know exactly what had occurred in the Pacific northwest of Pearl Harbor on the night of March 7, there was enough early intelligence to cause serious alarm. Analysis of bits and pieces of data from sonar, satellites, and eavesdropping American spy subs suggested that a Soviet submarine had met with disaster in waters far closer to Hawaii than it should have been. Furthermore, the incident involved ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads.

The DIA could have quickly put together enough information to make a reasonable assessment that a hostile action had occurred.

First, a review of the SOSUS network printouts showed that the Navy had tracked and periodically lost contact with a Soviet ballistic missile submarine that had left Kamchatka late in February. The last SOSUS recordings placed the boat outside its normal mission box and much closer to Hawaii than the usual patrol of this type. Second, the NORAD satellites’ late-night recordings on March 7 revealed flashes of radiant light that could have been caused only by burning missile fuel. Third, around the fifteenth or sixteenth of March, the University of Hawaii research ship
Teritu
reported finding an irradiated oil slick drifting off the Hawaiian Leewards. Tests showed the oil slick was composed of diesel fuel of a type used by Chinese and Soviet submarines and fissile material of a type used in Soviet, and possibly Chinese, nuclear warheads.

Finally, on March 21, the sudden sailing of the Soviet Pacific Fleet’s search armada provided unambiguous evidence that a ship, probably a submarine, had been lost.

More startling was the fact that the search area was centered hundreds of miles from where the American intelligence placed the explosion. This suggested the Soviets had no idea where their lost submarine was or had been.

These early clues likely provided disturbing hints of an unauthorized, but nevertheless potentially deadly, attempt to launch a nuclear missile in waters near American territory. Under such circumstances the president of the United States would have been briefed immediately. No commander in chief could have failed to respond.

On March 29, 1968, President Johnson issued National Security Action Memorandum No. 369, declaring a national emergency. It read, in part: “…the President, under authority granted by the Defense Production Act of 1950, today established the Sentinel Program as being in the highest national priority category.”

Ironically, the president had no intention of seeing the deployment of the Sentinel through to completion. He announced two days later, on March 31, that he would not seek reelection. The weight of the office, with its seemingly intractable wartime problems, had finally exhausted President Johnson.

The Sentinel program, which was to replace the Nike X system, called for deployment of ABMs and radar around key coastal cities and strategic missile silos, which could defend against limited nuclear strikes. The document justifying the system specifically cited the potential danger of an attack by the Red Chinese or, more pertinent to the issue at hand, “an unauthorized” submarine attack.

The suddenness of the president’s emergency action caught senior congressmen, and even Pentagon officials, off balance. Defense experts have called the unexpected action “curious.” The timing could not have been worse for Johnson. He was hoping, for the sake of his place in history, that a strategic arms control and limitation treaty could be signed with the Soviet Union as a parting gift from his lifetime of public service. His hopes of softening his “war president” image would certainly be dashed when the Soviets learned that the United States intended to ratchet up the Cold War by deploying a major new antiballistic missile program.

Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), in which the Americans and Soviets had been engaged since December 1966, soon collapsed anyway, but not because of the Sentinel initiative. The Soviets led a Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. Secretary of State Dean Rusk had warned the Soviets as recently as July 23, 1968, that such an invasion would have a “harmful effect on U.S./Soviet relations,” and it resulted in a complete breakdown of friendly exchanges for the rest of Johnson’s term.

The declaration of a limited ABM initiative only weeks after defense intelligence detected K-129’s strange behavior was powerful evidence of how seriously top leadership took the incident. At a time when inflation was already rampant due to the spiraling costs of the Vietnam War and attempts to roll out huge new domestic programs of the Great Society, the announcement of a costly new defense program was an outrage to the growing antiwar movement. Congress was fighting the White House over every requested increase in war costs, even as the president and his advisors called for the new 960-million-dollar Sentinel program.

The expensive Sentinel ABM system included long- and short-range radar facilities with Spartan and Sprint ground-to-air, antimissile missiles. Initial deployment included installations to protect Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta, Detroit, Fairbanks, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Oahu, New York, and Washington. Other ABM facilities were to be located to protect ICBM silo complexes in Montana, North Dakota, Missouri, and Wyoming.

“The Sentinel System is designed to defend against a possible deliberate ballistic missile attack by the Chinese Peoples Republic or the accidental launch of a nuclear armed intercontinental missile by any foreign power,” explained a letter to a prominent senator from the president’s defense planning office.

This letter, which was similar to letters sent to congressional representatives from other locations where the system was to be deployed, was clearly intended to cover up the possibility that a Soviet rogue submarine had come very close to successfully launching a missile against an American city.

Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had earlier specifically insisted that the Sentinel program be immediately deployed to protect against a future
rogue
Chinese threat. This explanation had to be part of the cover-up, because by this time the U.S. government was reasonably sure that the rogue submarine attempting to launch against the United State’s Pearl Harbor naval base was a Soviet Golf II.

Mao’s China was widely held in some quarters to be the greatest threat to the United States in the Pacific. However, by 1968, the fear was not about a sneak attack on America, but that China threatened to widen the Vietnam War by land invasion, as it had done in the Korean War in 1950.

The Johnson administration’s concern over a Chinese nuclear threat had originally been caused by Red China’s test of its first nuclear device in 1964. The increasing frequency of Chinese thermonuclear and ballistic missile testing was closely observed by U.S. spy satellites, leading the Johnson administration to produce a flood of intelligence estimates during the mid-1960s, warning of the potential for a Chinese sneak attack.

Much of the fear of an emerging new nuclear superpower in the Pacific resulted from a lack of good military intelligence about China’s armaments program. This fear was exacerbated by the confusion in the streets of Chinese cities, resulting from the Cultural Revolution and the Red Guards’ murderous rampages. The Americans knew the Chinese were rapidly developing the weapons, but did not know who, if anyone, in China had control of the nuclear button.

Initial arguments supporting the Sentinel program were almost all aimed at that specific China threat. A report from the U.S. Defense Research and Engineering Department described “the threat to American and world security posed by the emerging Chinese nuclear capability” as “extremely serious.” The report revealed that the Department of Defense (DOD) had intensified efforts to counter short-range submarine-launched ballistic and air-breathing missiles that “may well be the initial Chinese nuclear strategic threat.” The report noted that the Red Chinese had fission bombs, a Chinese copy of a Soviet missile submarine, short-range cruise missiles, and an active ballistic missile development program.

During this period, the research staff warned President Johnson that current defense systems were inadequate to cope with an initial Chinese capability composed of submarine-launched ballistic and air-breathing missiles.

President Johnson, early in his presidency, took the Chinese threat so seriously that a preemptive nuclear strike against warhead and missile manufacturing facilities in China was contemplated. A DOD office developed a “worst-case scenario” that envisioned a nuclear-armed China as such a serious threat that it would “be necessary to attack Chinese nuclear weapons facilities as a counter-proliferation measure.”

The Pentagon not only feared China’s general nuclear capacity, but also specifically expressed concerns that a Golf submarine could carry out an attack. A 1965 technical defense assessment cited the specific type of weapon thusly: “a 350 n.m. [nautical mile] missile, which is the normal armament of the Soviet G-class submarine of which the Chinese have produced one copy.”

These intelligence estimates for the period 1964 to 1966 repeatedly warned of the Chinese nuclear threat, and particularly the potential for a sneak attack by a lone submarine on a U.S. city. Most of these intelligence estimates were prepared by advisory panels that included U.S. Navy technical intelligence specialists.

By late March 1967, a U.S. Navy warrant officer, John A. Walker, Jr., who later became infamously known as Johnny Walker Red, was pilfering top-secret defense files and selling them to the Soviets. Some of the plethora of classified documents warned of a sneak attack on America by a nuclear-missile-armed Chinese submarine. The gist of these documents—that the Americans had been obsessively concerned about a Chinese sneak attack—would have been a red flag to the KGB. This intelligence may very well have been the germ for a sinister plot involving the Soviet Golf submarine K-129.

Warrant officer John Walker, a submarine communications specialist working in a sensitive intelligence post at the Navy base in Norfolk, Virginia, had contacted the KGB at the Soviet embassy in Washington and offered to sell America’s greatest secrets for cash. The story of the turncoat and his KGB spy ring did not surface until 1985, when the network was exposed. But during the critical period of 1967–68, the Soviets netted some of the most damaging information that Walker was to supply to the KGB. The scope of the spy operation was breathtaking. Not the least of the sensitive information given to the Soviets during this period were the U.S. naval codes used for clandestine communications.

It has been established that Walker provided information that led to the capture of the USS
Pueblo
and the stripping of that American espionage boat of its decoding machines. At first, the U.S. Navy was not too alarmed because the sophisticated equipment was useless without the all-important encryption information needed for the machines to break Navy codes. The U.S. Navy was not aware that Walker had previously supplied these keys to the ciphers, and that the Soviets were already monitoring and decoding communications between American submarines and their headquarters in the Atlantic and Pacific.