Red Star Rogue (2 page)

I
N EARLY
1968, the world nervously watched as the armies, air forces, and navies of the United States and the Soviet Union taunted each other in dangerous face-to-face standoffs around the globe. This tension was at its highest in the oceans of the world, where submarines of both sides played deadly games of hide-and-seek. At no point during the Cold War, including the dramatic confrontation of the Cuban Missile Crisis in September and October 1962, was the stalemate as close to escalating into World War III as in the first six months of 1968. Yet only a handful of military men and espionage agents—and a few key politicians in the inner sanctums of the Kremlin and the White House—knew just how close the world came to the long-feared nuclear Armageddon.

Asia and the Far East were aflame, with the Cold War turning hot in a major conflict fueled by the United States and the Soviet Union. American boys were dying by the scores each week in the steaming jungles of Indochina. That year, 1968, was the bloodiest of the war, with 16,869 Americans killed in action.

In the People’s Republic of China, Mao’s Red Guards were well along in the murderous Great Proletarian Revolution, better known as the Cultural Revolution. Mao’s criticism of the post-Stalin Soviet leadership had resulted in a split between these two Red giants. The followers of a radical Maoist policy turned on Red China’s longtime patron, the Soviet Union, in the early 1960s, which led to open clashes at several spots along their twenty-four-hundred-mile border. Having originally supplied the Chinese with Russian nuclear missile and submarine technology, the Soviets withdrew their military assistance. Relations had deteriorated to the point that Soviet diplomats and military advisors and their families were forced to flee their posts in China, some barely getting out of the country with their lives.

On January 23, 1968, North Korean gunboats, in a brazen act of piracy on the high seas, fired on and captured the American surveillance ship USS
Pueblo.

On January 30, 1968, war-weary Americans were shocked by the news that the Vietnam War, far from nearing the end that politicians had promised, had blazed into a new inferno. The North Vietnamese regular army and battalions of Viet Cong guerrillas launched a surprise attack on thirty provincial capitals in South Vietnam. Within days of the Tet Offensive, America suffered its highest casualty counts of the war: 543 GIs killed and 2,547 wounded in a single week.

Exhausted by the war, on March 31, President Lyndon Baines Johnson announced he would not seek reelection. Just four days later, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis.

On May 24, 1968, an American attack submarine, the USS
Scorpion,
went missing off the Azores while conducting a clandestine mission to investigate an unusual assembly of Soviet warships in the eastern Atlantic. Immediately, U.S. officials suspected a possible Soviet navy connection with the disappearance. Ninety-nine American officers and sailors were lost.

After successfully winning the California presidential primary, Senator Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles on June 5. Two hundred thousand antiwar protesters marched in New York City, a major event in the long national war protest that would divide the nation for years to come.

Across the globe, Communist-inspired, Soviet-supported insurgencies raged in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. Overtly, the Soviets began supplying client states such as Syria and Egypt with the latest missile technology, while behind the scenes they were supplying arms to revolutionaries throughout the Third World.

In Moscow, resentment over the Cuban Missile Crisis still simmered in some elements of the military, the KGB, and the Kremlin, despite the replacement of the bellicose Nikita Khrushchev by Leonid Brezhnev three years earlier. Seldom during the long years of the Cold War did the Soviets more aggressively rattle their sabers. In Europe, the Cold War heated up with the Prague Spring. Western intelligence learned that the Warsaw Pact was about to put down the unrest in Czechoslovakia with a brutal invasion.

In short, America and the world were seething in violence and bitter turmoil during the first months of 1968, when the events described in this book took place.

It was into this volatile mix of intrigue and open hostilities that an obscure incident involving an older-model, diesel-electric Soviet submarine operating off the coast of Hawaii edged the world to the brink of nuclear war. The people of the United States and the Russian Federation have never been told the truth of this near-catastrophe.

The last mission of the Soviet ballistic missile submarine K-129 was to become one of the greatest enigmas of the Cold War. None of the crew members survived to offer historic testimony about that clandestine trip. The author uses physical evidence found at the wreck site, interviews with former Soviet submarine officers, post–Cold War writings of retired Soviet admirals from the Pacific Fleet, recently released Soviet naval equipment journals and procedural manuals, and his own experience as a Cold War submariner to answer many of the most important remaining questions. Based on these sources, early chapters of this book offer a vivid re-creation of living conditions and actions that likely took place aboard K-129 on its final voyage. For example, since the operating procedures and launch sequence of a Soviet ballistic missile submarine never varied, the background of what occurred on this boat can be reasonably reen-acted.

I
N THE DARK HOURS OF
M
ARCH
7, 1968, a lone submarine slowly prowled the surface in open waters of the North Pacific. The slender sub rolled easily in swells raised by a twenty-knot wind. Occasionally, the whitecaps racing ahead of wave crests broke over the low forward deck, sending foaming rivulets of seawater to hide the rust streaks weeping from the boat’s aging welds.

A coast watcher might have mistaken the submarine for some naval relic with an oddly long fin emerging from the depths to fight a sea battle of the Second World War. Such identification would have been only partly right. This sub, despite its angular U-boat appearance, carried three atomic-age ballistic missiles snugly housed in tubes in its extended sail.

On the bridge, in the brisk wind, an officer quickly scanned the horizon through powerful naval binoculars, and then raised them to search all quadrants of the night sky.

A seaman in an ill-fitting sheepskin coat focused his attention closer to home, climbing to the highest point in the aft section of the bridge. The coat was much too large for his slight frame, and he was much too young to have attained the rank entitling him to wear the storm raglan coat, quilted pants, and expensive lined boots of a fleet officer.

From his new perch he examined the long, flat area of the conning tower behind the bridge. The faintest glow of starlight provided just enough illumination for the sailor to discern the outline of the three launch-tube doors. The doors appeared to be clear of any flotsam that might have been picked up during surfacing. Beneath the steel doors, like giant elongated eggs, were forty-two-foot-long ballistic missiles. Each carried a one-megaton thermonuclear warhead.

The massive doors were tightly sealed, to keep salt water out of the missile tubes. The powerful hydraulic arms that opened them could be activated only from the missile control panel inside the submarine.

The officer gazing through his binoculars at the front of the bridge had seen no threat to their position—no running lights of surface ships, no antisubmarine warfare planes patrolling the sky. He acknowledged the other man’s report that the missile doors were clear, then ducked back down the ladder and into the submarine.

As the boat broke through the swells at an almost leisurely two knots, the crewmen below eagerly breathed the fresh air rushing in through hatches opened to the conning tower. It was the first time the boat had been on the surface long enough to flush out the foul air that had accumulated in the living chambers during two weeks of submerged sailing. The cool sea air replacing oily diesel fumes created a slight draft in the control center as it flowed from compartments fore and aft.

The usual elation of the crew at finally being back in man’s normal realm on the surface was suddenly cut short when they heard an order barked over the intercom. The order was for battle stations, missile launch. All compartments were to report ready when sealed. The order was followed by: “This is not a drill.”

That harsh command, which may have startled even the few crewmen in the operating compartments who knew what to expect next, was more shocking for five dozen officers and sailors confined against their will in the forward two compartments of the submarine.

With an efficiency born of a thousand drills, all the steps to fulfill a missile submarine’s ultimate purpose were methodically taken.

The officer who had just returned from lookout duty on the bridge entered the control room to assume the post of deputy commander. He reported that all was clear from his visual observations, and that the doors over the missile tubes were free of flotsam. Only the sailor in the bulky, foul-weather coat remained on the bridge in the open night air.

Another officer pronounced the stations manned and ready for live fire of the main missile batteries.

Before surfacing, several skilled seamen trained as missile technicians had worked feverishly for nearly an hour preparing for the next order. An inspection of the missile tubes through small hatches in compartment four revealed no fuel leaks or seepage of seawater that might hamper a launch. Now all preparations were complete. A small knot of anxious men in the control center waited for the commander to issue the final instructions to activate the emergency firing procedure for nuclear weapon release.

A missile officer standing at the launch console watched a warning light blink on. The door of number-one missile tube was open.

Atop the submarine, the sailor in the raglan coat visually confirmed that the missile door had opened properly. He closed the outer hatch in the floor of the bridge and knelt behind a steel protective shield. His job was to remain in this somewhat precarious spot—the only person outside the hull—to be available in the event of any last-minute problems.

Below the bridge in the action center, an officer peering through the periscope confirmed number-one missile hatch open and clear.

The commander provided a large cassette containing the computerized codes required to arm the missile warhead. Normally, the codes would have been locked inside the captain’s safe, to be retrieved by the captain and the submarine’s political officer only after orders were received from fleet headquarters. This time, the officer in charge simply handed the cassette to a young man, who turned and plugged the packet into the launch console.

Some of the crewmen waited to hear the procedure they had followed in dozens of simulated and live drills. The political officer should have announced that headquarters had confirmed launch authority. But this critical procedure was ignored. There had been no communication with headquarters in more than a week.

The officer in the action center directly above the control room made one last sweep of the horizon with the attack periscope. He checked again to make sure the missile door was completely deployed and shouted down to the control room that the missile was clear for launch.

At the launch control panel, an officer confirmed he had powered the number-one console.

An assistant navigation officer, a lieutenant, told the commander they were three minutes to launch position at latitude 24° north, longitude 163° west. Their course was east-southeast, at a speed of two knots.

The missile technician at the launch panel confirmed the target coordinates on a southeast heading from the boat: 21°18’ north, 157° west.

With that information, the commander, his deputy, and a third sailor stepped up to the launch panel. Each man inserted a key in the panel face. They turned the keys and stepped back to allow the missile officer to complete his task at the console.

The commander gave the order to proceed to activation of the warhead on number-one missile. He hurried up the ladder to the periscope in the action center, shouting to his deputy as he climbed to prepare for emergency dive after launch.

A small spotlight in the ceiling above the chart table in the control room threw a bright beam onto a naval chart. A penciled X, crudely drawn in the center of the chart, partially covered the name printed on the map. Just below the mark was another name: H
ONOLULU
. The target was Pearl Harbor. But the explosive power of a one-megaton yield from the thermonuclear warhead would extend far beyond the military base to the civilian metropolitan area that adjoined it.

The sailor at the launch control panel announced the system ready for firing sequence.

The commander looked toward the man standing at the navigator’s station. The man held a stopwatch in one hand and dividers in the other. “Two minutes to launch point on my mark…mark!”

Instantly, the commander activated his own stopwatch. The second hand swept one full turn around the face. He ordered missile one to be fired.

The man at the control panel complied, setting in motion the last step to launch missile one. Time to launch was sixty seconds.

Officers and seamen in the control room instinctively braced themselves for the jolt that would come when compressed air ejected the eighteen-ton missile out of the launch tube, just feet away from the command center.

At the control panel, a sailor pressed a black button, removing the last manual override of the system. It was fifteen seconds to launch.

The men locked in the forward compartments could hear each order in the launch sequence over the intercom. Any outcry they made was muffled by the watertight hatch separating them from the men giving the orders in the control center.

A young assistant missile officer, who by training would have known more than most crewmen about what was to happen next, curled up helpless in his bunk in one of the officers’ cabins in compartment two. A small journal lay by his side.

It was ten seconds to launch.

Standing in front of the control panel, the officer commanding the submarine began the staccato countdown:

“Dyesyat, dyevyat, vosyem, syem…”