Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew (14 page)

The way Bradley saw it, all of the Soviet missiles that other spy submarines had monitored through launch and splashdowns or crash were only words on a list unless Halibut could prove her worth and make them into something more. Otherwise, the $70 million and thousands of hours of work poured into refurbishing her might as well have been tossed into the seas.

The Soviets had been developing missiles at a phenomenal rate ever since they were forced to back down during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Test shots fired from rocket centers deep within the Soviet Union, and others fired from submarines, had splashed down out in the Pacific. U.S. subs had been focused on trying to film these tests and capture readings that could help determine the telemetry of the weapons. These subs took great risks, sneaking into waters all but cordoned off by Soviet ships conducting at-sea launches and monitoring splashdowns of land-based missiles, the remains of which were scattered in shards over a vast sea bottom, bits of black metal strewn about by the force of splashdowns, implosions, and ocean currents. What Bradley wanted most were missile nose cones that held the guidance systems and dummy warheads that could provide a good estimate of the weapons' size, power, and yield. Finding the pieces wouldn't be easyHalibut may have been able to find a test object carefully placed in the water, but how would she fare now that her destination was far less exact and her quarry was in northern Pacific waters commonly patrolled by Soviet vessels? Detection now, in the summer of 1967, would be diplomatically disastrous. Just that June, the United States and the Soviet Union had seemed close to blows when both sides sent armadas of ships and submarines to the Mediterranean Sea during the Arab-Israeli War.

Nevertheless, Bradley wanted a miracle, and not just one. He wanted Halibut to find so much Soviet treasure, ferret out so much intelligence, that the Pentagon would have no choice but to build a fleet of special projects subs. Craven wanted much the same and that bonded the two men as a team.

Like Craven, Bradley came from a seafaring family. Both men shared an awe for the unexplored and hazardous depths, as well as a sense of amazement at what Halibut was about to dare. But Craven's Brooklyn bravado was a direct contrast to Bradley's midwestern pragmatism. Bradley had no Civil War family yarns to tell. There were no skulls and crossbones in the Bradley past-only the stars tattooed with coal dust and a pocket knife on each of his father's knees and a great black and yellow tattooed tiger leaping across the old man's stomach. It was on his father's left arm that Bradley had taken his first world tour, tracing the fourteen tattooed flags that marked the ports of call of his first naval hero, his dad, who was a boatswain's mate in President Theodore Roosevelt's "Great White Fleet."

Bradley joined the Navy not to fulfill long-held family obligations, but because on the eve of World War II he believed he had to choose between images of mud-filled army trenches or valiant battles in sunsprayed seas and pretty girls featured in the 1940 movie Navy Blue and Gold. Bradley found himself in battle less than a year after graduating from the bottom half of his Naval Academy class in 1944. Despite that, he had so much fun tooling through the sea in diesel submarines that he later refused Rickover's invitation to join the nuclear Navy.

It was a move tantamount to turning down the first stock offering of IBM or AT&T. It was already clear that the high-profile nukes would soon become the best route to a set of admiral's stars for most of his peers. But Bradley was not like the other white-gloved candidates coming out of the Naval Academy. He would rather down a margarita than a martini, shaken or stirred, and if anyone had ever tried to serve him a cucumber sandwich, he probably would have doused it in Tabasco sauce. He ate Tabasco with everything except cake and ice cream.

Brawny, handsome, and stubborn, he had moved into intelligence backwards and sideways. He didn't take either of the two diesel subs he commanded out on spy missions. But he had taken a turn practicing cocktail party intelligence, mainly quizzing naval attaches and diplomats from other countries in the late 1950s when he was an assistant naval attache in Bonn. He landed that job because he had studied German at Georgetown University, adding to the already colorful vocabulary he had picked up as a twelve-year-old playing Little League for a church team in the German section of St. Louis.

When the job of director of undersea warfare opened up in the Office of Naval Intelligence in 1966, Bradley had a pal who happened to be the assistant to the director of Naval Intelligence. This was a time when Rickover was refusing to spare any of his nuclear submariners for landlocked staff jobs, so the job had to go to a diesel submariner, and it went to Bradley.

Bradley enjoyed the irony that he was now directing the spy missions for Rickover's nuclear fleet. Indeed, the captain enjoyed this almost as much as his beloved Tabasco sauce.

For his part, Rickover could never forgive Bradley his slight, his refusal to join the admiral's elite society, any more than Rickover could tolerate the ill-kempt irreverence of other diesel submariners. He thought Bradley was a "freebooter" and hated the fact that he couldn't control him. But by the late summer of 1967, Bradley was less concerned with appeasing Rickover than with proving that his spy program could come up with the goods.

Much of Bradley's beloved diesel fleet was on the sidelines now, as the Atlantic Fleet had quit sending diesels off Soviet waters. The Pacific Fleet had fewer subs and was slower to get nuclear ones, so it still made good use of its diesels, sending them both to the Soviet Union and into the shallower waters off China to monitor efforts there to develop nuclear missile subs. (The Pacific Fleet even sent diesel subs to monitor France's nuclear weapons tests in the South Pacific.) Just before Bradley got to Washington, two U.S. diesel subs had smashed into freighters while on surveillance missions off Vietnam."
But while mistakes like these were hastening the end of the diesels' reign, nuclear submarine commanders were being encouraged to take as many risks as diesels ever did-or more. Indeed, as the nukes took over, most fleet commanders were still willing to overlook incursions into Soviet waters and detections that stopped short of collisions.

The commanders knew as well as Bradley that the risks were worth it if it meant catching Soviet missile subs as they came out of port. Once they hit the open waters, they were far more difficult to track; even the expanding SOSUS listening nets covered only a small portion of the oceans. This problem was becoming more urgent because after all the years of worry in Washington, the Soviets had finally begun to send missile subs-mostly Golf-class diesels-on regular patrols off of U.S. coasts. The Air Force also was desperate for help in learning the capabilities of the newest Soviet land-based missiles test fired into the oceans.

And so began "Operation Winterwind," Bradley's plan to grab one of the most important items on the old Operation Sand Dollar wish list. At the Air Force's request, he was going to send Halibut out to find the nose cone from a Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile. It didn't matter to Bradley that Halibut still had no capacity to actually retrieve anything. He figured that if Halibut could simply track down shards of a missile and mark where they lay with signal-emitting transponders, the Navy could figure out a way to retrieve them later. The transponders should remain active for up to seven years, time enough to come up with a plan, perhaps time enough to allow Craven's team to build one of those deep search vehicles to move in for the final grab.

This time Halibut was being led by Commander C. Edward Moore, a man fresh from "charm school," the training ground for prospective commanding officers (PCOs) where they were grilled in the working of nuclear reactors. Run by Rickover's minions, the reactor courses were exercises in desperation and frustration, one where candidates were hammered mercilessly. Rickover himself took delight in warning the PCO's that at least a third would fail. He and his men relentlessly interrogated candidates about the details of circuit breaker theory, physics, anything in the thick stack of reactor manuals, testing to see which third that would be.

Now Moore had inherited a boat plagued with a temperamental reactor and Rickover's rancor. Built solid like a wrestler, Moore faced his task with quiet determination. His hair, already graying, would go just a hit lighter on this command, but he rarely complained out loud, and almost never about Rickover himself-though he would periodically aim a curse at some of the admiral's more overtly sadistic subordinates.

As Halibut moved more than 400 miles north of Midway, only Moore and a few officers knew what she was after-not even the handpicked, specially cleared denizens of the Bat Cave had been told. Their leader, Lieutenant Commander John H. Cook III, a thirty-oneyear-old electrical engineer with the dual title of operations officer and project officer, mentioned only that they were to scan the ocean hottom 17,000 feet down for any object larger than a garbage can.

Things started out well enough. The team laid a transponder grid on the ocean floor, using Halibut's torpedo tubes to launch more than a dozen of the signal devices. Each had a unique sound signature that could be triggered by remote control from the sub. As each transponder hit bottom, navigators plotted its precise location using a satellite navigation system.

Craven wasn't aboard while all this was happening, but his spirit was. Most of Halibut's crew believed the cover story he had craftedthat the 8-foot-long transponders were underwater mines. The transponders had even been marked with munitions codes and delivered to Halibut via a Navy munitions depot. To make sure the crew was convinced, Craven gravely warned the men to deny that mines were on board.

It took thirty-six hours to set the grid. After that, the men launched one of the fish. Most of the crew had been told that the mechanisms were a new type of towed sonar, but the "special projects" crew crammed inside the Bat Cave's tiny control room knew better.

The video signals still weren't coming through. Instead, the men were trying to "see" the bottom by sonar images sent up through the fish. They sat, staring into the gray shadows sent up to the screens, trying to separate one wash of shadow from another, to distinguish what might have been key objects from passing fish, from rocks. There were also panels displaying digital readouts to track the mechanical fish's altitude from the bottom as it swam along illuminating its own path, taking photographs that nobody would see until it was hauled back into the sub.

Things became even more difficult when the Univac 1124 crashed. This time, though, the Bat Cave crew was ready. Armed with a hand calculator carried on board by a Westinghouse engineer, the men did the job for which the computer had been designed. Not long after that, though, Halibut's gremlins almost got the better of the mission. This time the problem was caused in part by a weakness Craven had knowingly left alone, a calculated risk. The hydraulically powered cable spool was smaller than it should have been. To fit within the seven-foot gap between the submarine's pressure hull and the top of the deck, the spool could be only six feet wide. As a result, the seven-mile-long braided steel cable had to be wound so tight that it was stressed to its limit.

Craven had calculated that the cable should stand up nonetheless. But he forgot something. Overall, the cable itself was strong enough, but it was actually made up of a bunch of separate strands wound together. The strands themselves were built of shorter lengths welded together to stretch 7 miles, and each weld was a weak point. It was one of those welds that had snapped, leaving a loose wire jamming the device designed to hoist the cable, and leaving the fish dangling aimlessly at the end of the line. In a desperate effort to prevent the loss of the second of the $5 million devices, a crowd of men began working together to hoist the two tons of aluminum and managed to get the fish back on board and through the tube that launched it. Then Halibut sur faced. Over the next three days, her men pulled the entire 35,000-foot cable off its spool, laid the steel out in the Bat Cave in a seemingly endless figure eight, then rewound the entire expanse-only this time in reverse. The idea was to make sure the broken section remained wrapped around the spool when a fish was sent back out. The effort worked, but the men still never found a piece of missile.

When Halibut slipped back to port late that October, Craven was waiting on the dock. He had already figured out that Halibut couldn't go out again with a welded cable. He put out word through the Secretary of the Navy's research and development office. He wanted a seven-mile-long weldless cable. The Navy began contacting contractors, explaining only that it needed seven miles of continuous cable, no welds, for a classified project. From oil-drilling companies to elevator companies, vendors came to the Pentagon. One man couldn't bear the suspense. "You just have to tell me," he blurted out. "What building is this for?"

Not a single company could meet the Navy specification for 37,500 feet of weld-free cable. Finally, U.S. Steel agreed to modify its cablemaking process. Even then, it would take three months-until January 1968-to spin the seven miles of steel. When the cable was finally finished, Bradley decreed that it was time again to try to catch a missile.

Halibut's departure came roughly at the same time the North Koreans captured and boarded the USS Pueblo, an intelligence ship that spied from the surface. Pueblo was in international waters, intercepting radar signals, when the Koreans attacked. It was an audacious move. The Koreans sprayed the ship with gunfire, and Pueblo's crew, their ship only lightly armed, didn't dare fight back. When the Koreans moved to prevent the crew from destroying the ship's espionage equipment and records, one American was killed and three others were wounded. In the end, the Koreans stole some of the United States' most highly sensitive cryptographic gear, and U.S. intelligence officials were convinced that the gear would be handed over to the Soviets.