Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew (17 page)

Carl Duckett and his CIA loyalists listened politely to the more abbreviated plan. But when they came back with their answer, Craven and Bradley were dumbstruck. The CIA recommended picking up the whole submarine and intended to build a massive crane-laden ship to reach down and grab the Golf.

Craven and Bradley couldn't believe it. The Golf may have hit bottom at 100 knots or more, accelerating 70 feet per second as it fell. It may have looked intact, but it was probably as fragile as a sand castle. Touch it hard enough, and it would disintegrate.

"You can't pick up the goddamn submarine, or it will fall apart," Bradley blurted out. "Oh, no, Jesus Christ almighty. You people are in a tank. That's a pipe dream."

Bradley may have been right, but the CIA held the power in Washington and usually got what it wanted, even when what it wanted was, in Harlfinger's opinion, crazy and impossible. (Former CIA Director Richard M. Helms says now that he never even heard of the alternative that Bradley and Craven had proposed.)

The CIA, however, wasn't alone in its enthusiasm. Chief of Naval Operations Thomas H. Moorer loved big, fascinating technological projects and was captivated by the CIA plan. Here was a chance to snatch a whole submarine and get back at the Soviets for North Korea's capture of Pueblo. Besides, he wasn't convinced that Bradley and Craven's method could recover all of the key gear on the Golf.

In the end, Defense Secretary Melvin R. Laird gave the final approval to the CIA plan, acknowledging that he did so despite the fact that "some people thought it was a nutty idea." Laird rationalized the exercise. Creating a ship to lift the Golf from the Pacific might also give the United States the ability to retrieve its own submarines if they were lost.

Laird consulted Howard Hughes, the billionaire recluse whose shipping company was hired by the CIA to build the ship that would try to hoist the Golf from the ocean floor. That ship would be called the Glomar Explorer, and the effort code-named "Project Jennifer."

Craven watched these wranglings, no longer surprised by a national intelligence program run by politics. He may have been cynical, but he was certain that the CIA was looking for a project that would funnel hundreds of millions of dollars to Hughes to pay off Nixon's heavy political debts.

Whatever the reason, Nixon quickly approved the CIA plan. And Bradley and Craven were left to whisper their dissent to themselves and to one another. No one else, it seemed, cared to listen. If anything, Craven was rewarded for his protest by being shut out of the operation. The largest deep-water undertaking ever was going to go forward without the guidance of the men who had made it possible.

It would also go forward without Halibut's Commander Moore. It was time for Rickover to make his move, to crack down on this world that had tried to exclude him. The admiral had stood by when Moore's predecessor claimed higher authority for Halibut than Rickover's Naval Reactors Branch. Rickover had observed tens of millions being poured into Halibut while he himself came under fire when NR-1's $30 million budget ballooned to $90 million. He had bided his time while Nixon awarded Halibut the Presidential Unit Citation (PUC), the highest submarine award possible. And he was unmoved when Moore won the Distinguished Service Medal for finding the Golf.

All the while, Rickover's reactor specialists at the shipyard were focused on Halibut. Her men became so agitated under the constant scrutiny that Moore suspected they were making mistakes just to give Rickover's men something to mark down, just enough so that the men would he satisfied and leave. Crew members weren't admitting as much, but Moore knew the tension was getting to them, just as he knew that it was only a matter of time until Rickover had the ammunition he was looking for. He was going to send a fleet-shaking salvo that no submarine, no matter its mission or its accomplishments, was beyond his reach or the reach of his safety inspectors.

He got his opening early one morning in 1969. Halibut had been moved to the Mare Island Naval Shipyard, just out of San Francisco. Her reactor was being refueled while her officers were distracted by yet another refit designed to enhance Halibut's deep-sea capabilities. Rickover was scheduled to come to the sub that day, only nobody on board knew when. Moore was back at his shore quarters, six blocks away from Halibut's dock, when the admiral arrived at Mare Island, dressed as usual in civilian clothes.

Rickover first encountered a pair of Marine guards who refused to let him past the gate. That wouldn't have been too much of a prob lem-these men might not have recognized Rickover in person, but they would have known his name. All he had to do was show his identification, and that, he refused to do. He was infuriated that anyone at a sub base could fail to recognize him on sight. He crashed the gate. Later, Moore would hear that the admiral raced down the causeway on foot, guards in chase. He was caught and again asked to show his identification. By the time the guards had been satisfied, Rickover stormed straight to the office of Robert Metzger, his reactor-safety chief on Mare Island. Still infuriated, Rickover decided not to go to Halibut himself. Instead, he sent a representative, one of the men who had traveled with him from D.C. In doing so, Rickover set the stage for history to repeat itself.

Just about anyone on the sub would have recognized Rickover immediately and no one would have questioned him. Nobody, however, knew his representative, so the young submariner serving topside watch did what he was supposed to do. He approached the man and asked for identification, then called down to the duty officer who ended up denying Rickover's man access.

When Moore heard about all of this, he immediately sought out Rickover. The admiral didn't give him much chance to smooth things over. Instead, he barked, "Moore, you ought to worry about your career." Then he demanded, "And what are you going to do to the duty officer who denied us access?"

Rickover never did bother to inspect Halibut, but the sub would feel his wrath. The constant review of Halibut reactor operations continued. Halibut's crew knew there was enough to find, if you noted every small move, a wrong wrench used, a failure to exactly follow procedures, and more.

Moore was removed from command of Halibut three months after his run-in with Rickover. Although the move was wrapped in the paper of a usual transfer, few people doubted that Rickover was behind it. "That to me was one of the numerous irrational personnel actions that the gentleman was capable of doing and did do," says Rear Admiral. Walter L. Small Jr., then commander of submarines in the Pacific. Rickover was going to dismiss anyone he wanted to dismiss "whether he had the authority or not."

Much of Moore's wardroom chose to resign from the Navy-some in silent protest over Rickover's treatment of their captain, others simply to avoid the endless barrage. Even Doc Wheat, the corpsman who had poured the brandy that revived Charlie Hammonds, had come under fire when Rickover's crew deemed that the records of the crew's radiation exposures were a mess.

Moore was moved to the Pentagon to work with the deep submergence group, and ironically ended up being part of the team seeking missions for Rickover's beloved NR-1. Rickover had engineered Moore's firing, but he hadn't gotten rid of him. And despite Rickover's ire, Moore made full captain along with the rest of his class. He had too many favorable fitness reports, had accomplished too much, for anyone to deny him, even Rickover.

But full captain or not, Moore had lost his boat. It was a bizarre reward. After leading the Navy's boldest undersea spy program, Moore would never command at sea again. 

    It was May 27, 1968, and the end of a long day. John Craven was driving along the Potomac, on his way home, when the news ninety-nine men were missing. L came over the radio: the USS Scorpion (SSN-589) was missing;

Barely two months had passed since U.S. intelligence had realized the Soviets had lost their Golf submarine. And Craven was still helping Bradley figure out where it had gone down when this latest news came. Craven listened hard for details about Scorpion, but there weren't any.

Nobody had any idea where Scorpion was or what had happened to her. All they knew was that the 3,500-ton nuclear attack submarine was due back in Norfolk, Virginia, and had failed to arrive. She hadn't been slinking off Soviet shores or even plumbing new depths, as the USS Thresher had been doing when she was lost five years earlier. Scorpion had simply been cruising through the Atlantic Ocean on a straight track for home. Just like the World War II submarine she was named for, Scorpion had vanished without a trace and seemingly without reason.

Craven slowed his car at the next exit and turned for the Pentagon. As Craven stepped into the controlled pandemonium of the War Room, all he knew was that, as the Navy's top deep-water scientist, he would be needed. A submarine was missing; ninety-nine men were missing.

Surveying the crowd of captains and admirals and other officers already there, Craven sensed something he had never encountered in a room full of top-ranking military men: abject fear.

The fear could be seen in the tensed faces of the men who stood scrutinizing a huge wall chart mapping Scorpion's assigned track, and it could be heard in the shaken tones of others who were intently studying navigational charts strewn all over the room. Men were laying out hypotheses and search patterns. They were plotting Scorpion's track, creating a path for search planes above and looking for the sparse undersea mountains below. Just a few months before, the USS Scamp (SSN-588) was nearly lost when she rammed into an undersea mountain in the Pacific in her race to go monitor a Soviet missile test. A similar accident, and Scorpion might be lost forever. Then again, those mountains might also be the only places along her path where she and her crew could have sunk without meeting instant, crushing death.

Other officers were studying the positions of nearby Soviet ships and submarines, wondering whether any had crossed Scorpion's path. People all over the room were trying to weigh the possibilities, wanting to believe that Scorpion was still intact, her crew stranded but alive.

"What can my organization do to help?" Craven said over the worried voices, the roar of competing conversations, and the rustle of the charts. Nobody looked up or even seemed to notice him speaking from the doorway. Most of these officers knew nothing of Halibut, of Craven's role in preparing her for deep-sea searches, or even of his success in pinpointing the atomic bomb the Air Force lost in the deep Atlantic near Palomares, Spain. To most of the rank and file here, Craven was just another skinny engineer. Those few who did know him well found him to be a man full of odd ideas and strange search methods that didn't sound like anything ever penned in a Navy manual. Few of the officers in the War Room that day would have believed that Craven might he their best and perhaps only chance of finding Scorpion.

Craven repeated his question. This time, someone answered: "We haven't been able to find Scorpion on the acoustic nets. We don't know where it is. If there's anything you can do with respect to that, do it."

With that, Craven was left on his own, left to try to figure out why and where Scorpion had vanished. Odds were worse than a million to one against anyone finding the boat. She could have been anywhere on a track that covered 3,000 miles of the Atlantic.

The families of the Scorpion crew had begun to worry as early as February 15, 1968, three months before Craven heard the news on the radio, three months before rumors began swirling through the sub force that the Soviets might have sunk her.

There, standing on the dock tossing the final mooring line to the crew as Scorpion departed, was Dan Rogers, an electrician's mate who had risked his career by demanding to he transferred off the boat, writing to his captain, Lieutenant Commander Francis A. Slattery, that everyone on board was "in danger." The Navy had always portrayed the 252-foot-long sub as a gleaming showpiece, but Rogers said Scorpion was so overdue for a thorough overhaul that the crew had taken to calling her the "USS Scrap Iron." There were oil leaks in the hydraulic systems and seawater seeping in through the propeller shaft seals. Her emergency ballast systems weren't working, and the Navy had restricted her depth to 300 feet, less than one-third of the operational depth of other boats of her class.

There had also been a frightening incident three months earlier when Scorpion had vibrated so violently during high-speed maneuvers that she seemed to corkscrew through the water, sending huge pieces of equipment swaying on their rubber mountings. The cause was never diagnosed. Rogers and other crewmen feared that the problem could reappear at any time.

Most of the submarine fleet had undergone massive safety overhauls after Thresher was lost. The bulk of the work on Scorpion, however, had been postponed due to tight budgets and the relentless pace of intelligence operations, which were growing rapidly toward a peak never before seen during the cold war. As she set out, Scorpion was one of only four of the Atlantic Fleet's submarines that was still waiting to be refitted with post-Thresher safety features.

Rogers and his mates complained to Slattery that he and his officers weren't taking their concerns seriously. Rogers wasn't even released from the boat until he agreed to Slattery's demand that he erase the Cassandra-esque warning of "danger" from his request for transfer.

One month later, Scorpion was assigned to join in NATO exercises in the Mediterranean. She was sent there only because the Navy needed a last-minute replacement for Seawolf, the same submarine that Craven had bypassed in favor of Halibut when it came time to pick a special projects boat. Seawolf had knocked herself out of the fleet rotation by ramming an undersea mountain in the Gulf of Maine, badly crushing her stern.