Red Star Rogue (25 page)

The sunken Soviet submarine became the central focus for intrigues after Nixon assumed the presidency. Documentation of events that came to light after the end of the Cold War revealed that the Nixon administration purposefully delivered intelligence of Soviet military operations to the Communist Chinese leadership as leverage for opening dialogue. While there has been no direct mention of the K-129 incident in newly released transcripts of exchanges between the Americans and the Chinese, it is entirely plausible that Mao would have been especially grateful and interested in learning that the Soviets schemed to attack the United States and place the blame on China.

Central to Nixon’s extraordinary success in bringing down the Bamboo Curtain, which has never been fully explained by historians, was Kissinger’s ability to offer the Chinese key strategic information about their Soviet adversary. A growing body of information reveals that the path to rapprochement with the Chinese was paved with lavish gifts of American military intelligence. Kissinger was the chief bearer of these gifts to the grim Chinese leaders, and positioned himself as the indispensable conduit between China and the United States.

Kissinger clearly wanted to impress the Chinese with the high value of the military information about the Soviets that the United States would be able to provide. Information that the Soviets had schemed to implicate the Chinese in an attack against the United States would have been “golden” in the parlance of spydom.

It seems more than coincidental that, at the very time of these early meetings with the Chinese, the White House was launching a huge secret project centered on the sunken Soviet submarine. Many other sensitive topics relating to the Soviet’s military activities were discussed, and highly secret intelligence was made available by Kissinger and his deputies, according to recently released documents about the Kissinger meetings with Chinese leaders.

Declassified transcripts of a meeting in New York between Kissinger and China’s UN ambassador Huang Hua prove the Nixon administration was offering China military secrets about the Soviet Union months before any formal negotiations were launched. In one such meeting National Security Advisor Kissinger told Ambassador Huang, “We would be prepared at your request, and through whatever sources you wish, to give you whatever information we have about the disposition of Soviet forces.”

Agence France Presse revealed, in January 1999, that top-secret documents showed Kissinger had been giving the Chinese intelligence on the Soviet military from the early days of the administration, as part of Nixon’s “triangular diplomacy.”

Triangulation of foreign policy involving the United States, the Soviet Union, and the People’s Republic of China was an outgrowth of the realpolitik of the Cold War era. That policy reached its zenith in the early Nixon years under the skillful guidance of Henry Kissinger. Previous U.S. administrations had treated both the Soviets and the Red Chinese as adversaries. In the Pacific and eastern Asia, the power struggle had reached its most dangerous impasse by the end of the 1960s. International relations centered on strategic competition among these three powers, and Kissinger was able to masterfully manipulate the two Communist adversaries by pitting each against the other in a series of early behind-the-scenes meetings.

“When one of three states perceives at least one of the other two as a threat, that state tries to avoid having simultaneously poor relations with the other two and endeavors at all cost to prevent collusion between them,” concludes a major study of this triangular diplomacy and the Cold War period. “The aim of each is to avoid collusion of the two others, and to blackmail one’s main enemy by threatening collusion with the third.”

Kissinger became the master implementer of this strategy. The intelligence package on the K-129 almost certainly was one of the valuable weapons in his arsenal. It could be used effectively either to blackmail Soviet negotiators or to bribe Chinese representatives.

Although Kissinger had been contacted directly by the KGB, most likely on behalf of the Suslov-Andropov faction before Nixon’s assuming office, he wasted no time setting up similar clandestine lines directly to Brezhnev and the Politburo. The channel Kissinger opened was through the wily old Moscow intriguer Anatoly Dobrynin, who had survived in the Soviet embassy in Washington throughout the turbulent Khrushchev years. Dobrynin became ambassador to the United States in 1962, and would serve through the terms of six U.S. presidents. But his relationship with Kissinger, who went around newly appointed Secretary of State William P. Rogers to establish personal links to Moscow, was unique.

In a private, one-on-one meeting, Kissinger let Dobrynin know very early on that the only access to the new president was through him. The meeting was held in Kissinger’s White House office. Even though Kissinger was secretly offering the fullest cooperation with the Chinese in turning over U.S. intelligence on Soviet military operations in Asia, he assured Dobrynin that the Nixon administration was “not going to interfere in the present-day Soviet-Chinese conflict in any way.”

Dobrynin reported to Brezhnev that Kissinger was a “smart and erudite person” who did not hesitate to let the Soviets know he would be the contact point for future relations. The normal channels through the State Department were to be used only for the most mundane matters.

Dobrynin told his superiors in Moscow: “During our conversation he, for example, without any excessive humility, announced that in all of Washington only two people can answer precisely at any given moment about the position of the USA on this or that question: these are President Nixon and he, Kissinger.”

Thus, from the beginning of the Nixon administration, back-channel diplomacy became the principal method of handling the dangerous affairs of the Cold War—out of sight of the media, Congress, and the world. The wreck of the K-129 was likely a pawn in this grand, clandestine, geopolitical game.

S
INCE THE END OF THE
C
OLD
W
AR
, at least three former Soviet admirals who were involved with the K-129 investigation shortly after its disappearance have described details of the damage to the submarine that could only have been obtained from viewing the USS
Halibut
’s photographs.

The Soviet officers who claim to have seen the pictures have repeated the story that someone slipped an unmarked envelope of photographs and other material under the entrance to the Soviet embassy in Washington. The photos, just a few of the thousands taken by the crew of the
Halibut,
clearly depicted the damage that sank K-129.

While political expediency would not let these former Soviet naval officers admit their submarine might have destroyed itself during a launch attempt, some of these men must have suspected that possibility. Both Soviets and Americans had conducted hundreds of test firings, and there had been dozens of accidents on submarines and aircraft carrying nuclear weapons. In no case had a nuclear warhead trigger exploded prematurely in a launch tube or missile silo, destroying the thermal core. The conclusion drawn in the DIA’s probability analysis that the submarine had attempted to launch in the vicinity of the American base was probably as shocking to the Communist hierarchy as it had been to the U.S. intelligence analysts.

Since Soviet line officers from the Pacific Fleet who were involved in the investigation at the fleet command level had access to the photographs, surely leaders in the Kremlin were fully apprised of the material. There is no doubt that Soviet military intelligence had somehow received detailed information, probably film and photographs of the K-129 wreck, and parts of the U.S. Navy and Defense Intelligence Agency assessments.

At the end of the Cold War, American intelligence agents attending a meeting in Moscow were “spooked” by the intimate knowledge a former Soviet intelligence agent revealed to them about the Americans’ files on the K-129 incident.

Still, the implications for national security of the leaked material at the political level were considerably more significant than at the military intelligence level.

It matters little whether the U.S. intel packet delivered to the Soviets came from a spy or from an approved back-channel source in the Nixon administration. The dramatic impact on key figures in Moscow was the same. The origin of the photographs seen by the Soviet naval men could only have been Washington, D.C. The
Halibut
photographs and accompanying analysis were classified top-secret, and had been available to only a few key intelligence operatives in the U.S. government at that time. The Soviets could not have produced the photographs themselves for two main reasons: They did not even know the location of their lost submarine, and they did not have the technology to dive deep into the ocean and gather this type of information.

It is logical to assume that this leaked or stolen information quickly found its way to a perplexed general secretary Leonid Brezhnev.

One of Kissinger’s most audacious personal relationships was in the Soviet embassy in Washington. He frequently met Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin for private conversations and off-the-record negotiations, without the U.S. State Department being aware of the meetings. Former Soviet admirals freely acknowledge that Kissinger, through his contacts with Dobrynin, was the source of “sensational information” about the K-129. A published account of the Washington-to-Moscow conduit alleged that the information was shared in 1974 or 1975, but just how early the official exchanges began has never been established.

A likely purpose of sharing the K-129 information with the Soviets was geopolitical blackmail. Nixon and his insiders used similar tactics to achieve desired results at this critical period in the Cold War. As unorthodox as the shadowy diplomacy seems, its ultimate outcome may well have been to spare the world a devastating exchange of nuclear strikes.

In Moscow, Brezhnev was almost certainly kept in the dark about the true nature of the K-129’s final actions until he was briefed on the American intelligence finding. Kremlin reaction on learning of an attempted rogue attack on America by one of its submarines can only be imagined. The Soviet navy still did not know where its submarine had sunk. Early in the investigation, and before the U.S. intelligence package arrived in Moscow, the admiralty held firmly to the theory that K-129 had been rammed by the USS
Swordfish,
almost a thousand miles from where the sub actually went down.

At that time, the USSR was barely holding on to its vast collection of satellite states in Eastern Europe and neo-colonies in Africa and Asia. The Soviets, going broke providing costly aid to Third World Communist governments, relied heavily on propaganda to maintain the loyalty of Third World states in its sphere of influence.

The Soviets had not forgotten the damaging impact of photographic intelligence presented to the United Nations during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Now, confronted with a package of highly technical evidence of another warlike assault on the United States only a half-dozen years later, the cost would be very high.

Even if he pleaded that the K-129 was a rogue, Brezhnev could take little comfort. His leadership had been under constant internal challenge from the beginning of his rise to the top of the USSR. He could not afford for the Politburo, let alone leaders of the client states, to learn of his regime’s tenuous control over the Soviet nuclear arsenal. If Brezhnev was too weak to secure his own nuclear missiles, he was too incompetent to lead the Soviet Union against the technically superior U.S. forces led by the aggressive new administration in Washington.

Brezhnev was already embroiled in an internal fight for control within the Kremlin. This power struggle between Brezhnev and the ideologically Stalinist cabal came to a head shortly after the information about the K-129 incident became available in Moscow.

Something strange took place in the highest circles of the Kremlin in late 1969. The power struggle within the Politburo and the Secretariat of the Communist Party saw an emboldened Brezhnev openly confront his rivals. The confrontation came to be known by Sovietologists as the “Moscow Mini Crisis,” and remains an unsolved mystery to this day.

The hard-liners, led by the shadowy party ideologue Suslov and his protégé KGB Director Andropov, were challenged by Brezhnev and the top generals and admirals. A review of recent reports on the Kremlin power struggle suggests that the timing may very well have coincided with the arrival of the secret K-129 packet from Washington. Certainly, such information would have led to urgent internal investigations into who in the Soviet Union might have had the means and motive to attempt an unauthorized and potentially devastating sneak attack against an American target.

Suspicion was apparently quickly directed at Suslov and the KGB. Suslov had earlier been Brezhnev’s mentor, as he had been to other successful leaders since the Stalin era. But the two men were suddenly bitter enemies.

Suslov led a group in denouncing Brezhnev over his proposed policies to change the Soviet economy, and went so far as to file a list of charges and demands with the party secretariat. To everyone’s surprise, Brezhnev did not cower before Suslov’s challenge to his leadership. Showing amazing fortitude for a bureaucrat who had always been considered weak, Brezhnev took an unannounced trip to Belarus, to meet secretly with his generals. The Red Army was engaged in massive annual Warsaw Pact maneuvers. He met with the powerful minister of defense, Andrei. A. Grechko, and a number of other generals and admirals. Although Brezhnev had appointed General Grechko to head the military establishment in 1967, Grechko was still considered to be above politics and 100 percent committed to the Red Army.

Whatever evidence Brezhnev put before the normally apolitical Red Army marshals, it was convincing enough to push them in the unprecedented direction of involvement in Kremlin politics. The Soviet generals and admirals had a very good reason to stay out of politics. They remembered only too well the bloody purges of the military leadership by Stalin in the late 1930s, which had decimated the top ranks of the army and navy, just before the outbreak of World War II.

Brezhnev could have produced no more powerful incentive for the Soviet military leaders to break with long-standing protocol than evidence that renegade plotters in the KGB had usurped command of a Soviet nuclear submarine in an attempt to start a nuclear war. It is reasonable to surmise that Brezhnev may well have used the K-129 incident to convince the generals to back him.

General Grechko, along with other admirals, generals, and marshals, gave Brezhnev assurances that the Red Army (and Navy) would be with him in the power struggle against the hard-liners led by Suslov. A confident Brezhnev returned to Moscow in December 1969 and initiated a power play, declaring himself the “great Leninist and leading fighter for peace.”

An internal struggle ensued over the next several months, with posters of Brezhnev gradually replacing those of other contenders for supreme leadership. April 1970, which was a little more than two years after the sinking of K-129, turned out to be a particularly unhealthy month for those who had opposed Brezhnev. It ended with
Pravda’s
announcing a spate of illnesses among the top leaders. They were conspicuously missing from the reviewing stand above Lenin’s Tomb where they would be expected to line up for the big May Day parade of Soviet military might.

Pravda
reported that Suslov, suffering from recurring tubercular attacks, had retired to his
dacha
for a long rest. The newspaper noted that Nikolay Podgorny, first party secretary, was at home with a “feverish cold.” Alexsey Nikolayevich Kosygin, chairman of the council of ministers, was reported to be simply ill in the hospital. Alexsandr Shelepin, head of the council of trade unions, had an emergency gall bladder operation. These men, and lesser functionaries who had sided against Brezhnev and the army, soon retired from active roles in government. A badly chastened Andropov, who had been Suslov’s golden boy, dropped from political activities for a time, but retained his title as chairman of the KGB. He ultimately redeemed himself with the party. He went on to become general secretary of the Communist Party just days after Brezhnev’s death, and ruled the USSR for a little more than a year until his own death in 1983.

Others outside the Soviet military had joined Brezhnev in countering the Stalinists. In his play for power, Suslov had launched a campaign to rehabilitate Stalin, which created great consternation in many circles of Moscow. Central Committee members, writers, musicians, journalists, and actors also signed petitions of support for Brezhnev and against bringing back the Stalin era.

But it was the military, which came out of its cloistered nonpolitical encampment, that actually gave Brezhnev the power to face down the pro-Stalinists Suslov, Andropov, and the KGB.

As feared as it was, the KGB was no match for the mighty Red Army. Something had made the military men angry enough to insinuate themselves into a Communist Party feud for the first time. The K-129 incident is a likely candidate for the catalyst that drove the generals out of their stoic neutrality.

Drastic, and heretofore unexplained, changes in naval procedures also support the theory that Brezhnev and the Soviet military were alarmed by intelligence that K-129’s sinking might have been the result of a rogue attempt to launch a nuclear missile.

A significant new procedure was adopted early in 1970, requiring the launch codes for all ballistic missile submarines to be held by General Staff headquarters. This change in long-standing procedures thereby denied any rogue or mutinous crew the ability to arm and aim its missiles without direct orders, accompanied by arming codes, from a central command.

The submarine missile launch codes were also removed from the operational fleet and returned to supreme Soviet navy headquarters. Before this change, the captain kept most of the necessary targeting and launch codes, and awaited only a confirmation code from fleet headquarters to be delivered with the final order to attack. That additional code, when added to the captain’s code, unlocked the fail-safe system. Under the new procedures, submarine commanders were no longer entrusted with the firing codes before they sailed on missions; no codes were kept in the ships’ safe in the captain’s quarters. All instructions necessary to arm the mechanisms and set the target courses would henceforth be radioed to submarine commanders only after a red alert condition was declared.

Shortly after the launch procedures were changed, the Soviet military took another step to safeguard deployment of nuclear weapons. The KGB was stripped of its key role as custodian of nuclear warheads. Control of nuclear devices was given to the Soviet army, navy, and air force units that deployed these weapons. Up until the end of 1969, the KGB had physical possession of all nuclear warheads for land, sea, and air delivery. Military commanders had to requisition nuclear weaponry from the KGB. When the military took charge of distribution of the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons, the KGB was relegated to guard duty at the arsenals.

These sudden changes in long-standing launch procedures and the removal of KGB authority over the nuclear stockpiles did not take place in a vacuum. Something significant must have forced the action. The possibility that the world might be told the Soviet military had lost control of one of its nuclear-armed submarines could certainly have prompted such dramatic remedies.