Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew (16 page)

Halibut Commanders Moore and Cook were called to Washington. Waiting for them were Rear Admiral Philip A. Beshany, deputy chief of naval operations for submarine warfare, Craven, and Albert C. Beutler, who supervised Halibut's work.

"We've got some intelligence that the Soviets may have lost a submarine in the Pacific," Beshany announced as soon as the men walked in. Then Beshany filled in the details and the punch line, that Halibut was going after the Soviet Golf.

From Beshany's office, Craven rushed Moore and Cook in to see Paul Nitze, secretary of the Navy. This time, the officers were grilled on Halibut's failure to find any missile fragments. Craven held his breath while Cook offered up a spiel that rivaled the best that Craven himself could have delivered.

Failure or not, Cook said, Halibut's crew had now had time to work out the kinks in their equipment. The men could, he insisted, find a submarine if given the chance. It wasn't a hard sell. There was no other craft in the Navy that could attempt this kind of a search as long as the Soviets were out in force. Cook's optimism was enough to send the secretary straight to the White House to seek the okay.

Craven, Moore, and Cook could do nothing now but pray for the final go-ahead. They barely had time to kneel. Within a few hours, Nitze telephoned Beshany, who called Moore, Cook, and Craven back into his office with the news.

"You have a new mission.""

Craven now began looking for any other evidence that might further pinpoint the location of the Golf. He was convinced that there had to be other audible signs of a sub going down, so he contacted Captain Joseph Kelly, the man chiefly responsible for expanding the SOSUS net of underwater listening devices that the Navy had been laying throughout the oceans.

Kelly's staff ran through a series of SOSUS records, looking for signs of death: the convulsive terror of an implosion followed by the smaller explosions that together indicate a submarine falling to the ocean bottom. But as Kelly's staff searched, they found no massive aberrations that would indicate a powerful implosion. There was, however, a tiny blip on their paper tapes, a little rise indicating a single loud pop. It was right in the area where Bradley believed the Soviet sub had gone down.

What if, Craven reasoned, the Golf had somehow flooded before hitting crush depth? She would have fallen without a searing, deafening, blinding, cataclysmic, implosive crash of steel. Her death would have been much quieter than that. Craven needed to know what a sinking submarine sounded like, one going down with hatches open, filling with ocean water, internal and external pressure equalizing long before the boat reached crush depth. There was only one way to find out.

Craven and Bradley prevailed upon the Navy to sink a submarine in sacrifice, a submarine whose death could be taped. The Navy gave him an old diesel submarine, a warhorse that had probably escaped countless Japanese torpedoes during World War II. Now she would suffer a vainglorious end.

World War II submarines had been executed before, made targets for torpedo practice. But those boats went out running, their engines on, their rudders wedged into position. There was something almost noble about that kind of death, downed with a single shot like a valiant old steed.

This submarine, on the other hand, was just given up to the waters, while SOSUS engineers recorded her descent. She died silently, which was just what Craven and Bradley had expected. Now, they reasoned, if a submarine with every hatch and watertight door carefully opened went down silently, then another boat might go down with a small pop if one of its watertight doors had remained shut. So, calling on data from other hydrophones that had also picked up the pop, Kelly and Craven triangulated what they believed was the Golf's most likely position: 40 degrees latitude and 180 degrees longitude. That put her just about 1,700 miles northwest of Hawaii, where the water was more than 3 miles deep.

Beshany still wasn't convinced. He believed there would have to have been implosions. The fact that the Soviets weren't anywhere near the area also caused him doubts. But he had nothing else to go on. So he gave the nod, and Halibut was sent to the spot Craven had pinpointed.

She set out on July 15, her orders kept secret from the men on board. Even the occupants of the Bat Cave were told little. Most assumed they were going back to look for the Soviet missile that had eluded them before.

As a fish was sent out, sonar gray again replaced images from a video camera that still didn't work. Watching the monotone miles roll by on a continuous taped-together sheet was dizzying. The men's eyes stung as they forced themselves to focus, looking for shadows that seemed foreign to the Pacific bottom. Their shifts never lasted longer than ninety minutes. After that, the sky-blues in the Bat Cave began to quiver with gray ghosts.

Day and night, Halibut trolled back and forth. The site that Craven, Bradley, and Kelly had targeted still left five miles of sea to search. The Soviet submarine could have drifted a long way before it fell the three miles to the bottom.

Every six days or so, the fish was hauled back into the submarine so that the still film could be collected and developed. This went on for weeks. Still nothing. Then the haze was interrupted.

"Captain Moore, Captain Moore." It was the ship's photographer bursting out of the Halibut's tiny darkroom, suddenly completely aware that he hadn't been looking for a missile this time. He was at once stunned and certain he had found his target.

It was a perfect picture of a submarine's sail. The photographer was shaking so hard Moore worried for a moment that he'd collapse. There it was, Halibut's first success, a view of the steel tomb of about one hundred Soviet sailors.

At Moore's orders, the fish dove again, down to the spot captured in the photograph of the sail, down to where the Soviet Golf looked as though someone had carefully driven her 16,580 feet to the ocean bottom and parked.

Sonar and camera gobbling up everything in the area, the fish collected new detail with each dive. There was a hole blown nearly 10 feet wide, just behind the Golf's conning tower. There must have been an explosion, probably on the surface, given the quiet recorded by SOSUS, and it probably came from a hydrogen buildup that could have occurred as the Soviet crew sat charging the diesel submarine's 450-ton sulfuric acid battery. Although severely damaged, the submarine looked basically intact.

The photos also showed that small hatches had been blown off, exposing two missile silos. Inside the first was twisted pipe where a nuclear warhead had once sat calmly waiting for holocaust. Inside the second silo, the warhead was completely gone. The third silo was intact.

Then the fish's camera found something else, something that shocked even Moore. It was the skeleton of a doomed sailor, probably just an enlisted man, a kid, lying alongside his submarine, alone, his crewmates probably entombed within. One of his legs was broken and bent almost at a right angle, perhaps from the shock of the explosion that destroyed the submarine. Maybe that's what had killed him. Or maybe he had drowned as he fell the three miles to the ocean floor.

The boy had to have been out on deck when the submarine was destroyed. He was dressed in foul-weather gear, a brown sheepskin coat buttoned up to his neck, thick wool pants, and heavy black military hoots. Now the clothes warmed only his stark white hones.

Bones, a bare skeleton-by all accounts, that should have been impossible. Little or nothing lived this far down in the ocean, the experts had said. But there he was, and there was something else in those photographs. Tiny, carnivorous worms wriggled around the body they had already eaten bit by horrific bit.

No one who saw the Soviet boy-submariner could forget him, not anyone who saw the 22,000 photographs Halibut brought home on September 9, 1968.

Bradley code-named the pictures "Velvet Fist" after the gentle way they were snatched from the ocean. All those millions of dollars, all those hours poured into Halibut, had finally paid off. He rushed the plunder straight to the new director of Naval Intelligence, Frederick J. "Fritz" Harlfinger II, who had taken the post while Halibut was still out to sea.

This was a man who had been the Defense Intelligence Agency's assistant director of collection, a polite word in intelligence circles for theft. Working with the Syrians and the Israelis a few years earlier, his team had managed to steal a Soviet MIG fighter jet. During the Vietnam War, they handed the Pentagon a Soviet surface-to-air missile. They also managed to pilfer a Soviet missile in Indonesia and the engine from a Soviet plane that crashed near Berlin.

But the Velvet Fist photos were unprecedented. As far as Harlfinger was concerned, presenting these to the president was the perfect way to start a new job.

Under Harlfinger's direction, Bradley created a montage of forty photographs to show to the top Navy ranks and up at the White House. First stop was Beshany at submarine command.

"American technology is pretty terrific," Beshany thought as he experienced his first brush against the Velvet Fist. He would forever compare Halibut's feat to a helicopter hovering 17,000 feet in the air with a small camera at the end of a line taking pictures in a dense fog.

Soon after, Harifinger presented the photographs to President Johnson, who was so impressed that Naval Intelligence officers would congratulate themselves for months.

In January 1969, Richard Nixon was sworn in as president. Shortly after, the phone rang in Bradley's office. It was Harlfinger.

"Get your ass over to the White House, and take Velvet Fist with you.

Alexander Haig, then deputy to Nixon's National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, wanted to see the photographs. Haig was so impressed that he demanded that he become the guardian of Velvet Fist.

Bradley called Harlfinger for help, pulling him out of a meeting. "Haig wants to keep the material," he reported.

"Fuck him," the intelligence chief answered.

But ignoring Haig was easier said than done. "He wants to show this to his boss and to his boss's boss," Bradley said.

No one needed to explain to Harlfinger that Haig's "boss's boss" just happened to he the new president of the United States. Harlfinger had played enough politics over the years to know when it was time to concede.

"Okay," he relented. The photographs could be left with Haig, but only for twenty-four hours.

That was time enough for Haig to bring the material to Kissinger. Later, it would he Kissinger who made the presentation to Nixon. Nixon was fascinated. So much so that word got back to the CIA.

While the agency's analysts had long been interested in what the regular spy subs managed to pick up, it had generally left control of the operations to the Navy. But now, the CIA and its director, Richard Helms, were suddenly and intensely interested in the ocean deep. Helms began to engineer a takeover, CIA-style. First, he created a new level of bureaucracy, a liaison agency that would supposedly pool the resources of Naval Intelligence and the CIA. It would be called the National Underwater Reconnaissance Office (NURO).

This wasn't the first time the CIA had made this kind of arrangement. In 1961 the agency decided to share control over the satellite operations with the Air Force by creating a joint venture dubbed the National Reconnaissance Office.

NURO was supposed to be divided evenly between Navy and CIA staffers. At its top ranks, it was. Its director was John Warner, Nixon's new secretary of the Navy. Bradley would be staff director. Heading up the CIA end was Carl Duckett, its deputy director for science and technology. But from the day NURO was formed, the CIA took charge. Bradley could spare only a few people for the new office. His entire staff in the undersea part of Naval Intelligence numbered only about a dozen. The CIA, however, had no such constraints. It moved in with eight permanent staffers and more consultants loyal to the agency.

Worse, it was becoming increasingly clear to Bradley and Craven that the CIA couldn't tell a submarine from an underwater mountain. By now, the two men had come up with a plan for retrieving the best of what was on board the Soviet Golf. Their idea was to eventually send mini-subs to grab a nuclear warhead, the safe containing the Soviets' "crypto-codes," and the submarine's burst transmitters and receivers so that the Navy could finally decode all of the message traffic it had been collecting.

The two men had already proven that the Golf's hull could be opened without destroying everything inside. They had borrowed Army demolition experts to test their theory. With a large steel plate shielding various fragile and flammable objects set up in a pool of water, plastic explosives were affixed to a tiny area and detonated. The blast left a small doorway, barely singeing the articles behind the steel.

That's really all anyone needed to do: open a small doorway and reach in. The rest of the Golf could be left buried at sea. The military had watched these submarines being built in overhead photography for ten years. Naval Intelligence knew the Golf II down to nearly every nut and bolt. The rockets that the Golfs used to launch their nuclear payloads were primitive, with ranges of only 750 miles. Both the United States and the Soviet Union had already engineered rockets with 1,500 mile ranges. There was little to he gained in attempting the impossible job of pulling up thousands of tons of already antiquated gear from the bottom of the ocean. Besides, it would take years to develop the equipment for such a salvage attempt.