Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew (2 page)

In the cold and dark, submariners faced hazards worse than those that have traditionally confronted seafaring men, for the ocean pressures could easily crush steel hulls should they go too deep. Over the years, such catastrophes struck submarines from both sides. Just as threatening were the Soviets themselves, who were determined to stop these American spies and fought back as best they could, sometimes with depth charges, sometimes by enlisting American military and intelligence staffers to spy for them. The risk in all of this became increasingly obvious as Soviet and U.S. subs engaged in frantic chases, as misjudgments led to collisions, as U.S. submarines were detected in Soviet waters.

To the Soviets, American submariners were more than an enemy; they were ever-present pests. To other Americans, they were simply the anonymous men of the Silent Service. This book is their story, one that has gone unspoken and unheralded, until now. This is one of the last, great, untold stories of the cold war.

At its heart, the motivation for the submariners' hunt-to prevent an adversary from launching a wave of death from the oceans seems almost timeless. In the early sixteenth century, Leonardo da Vinci sketched out a design for a proto-submarine but wrote in his notebook that he'd never reveal how one would run underwater because he feared the evil nature of men who would use them as a means of destruction at the bottom of the sea."

Still, it was that very potential for surprise devastation that spurred on inventors who followed. During the Civil War, they tried to build bubble-shaped subs and then others that looked like short cigars, all to stick mines on the bottoms of enemy ships. The subs were powered by hand cranks and treadmills, and most of the men killed by these new weapons were members of their own tiny crews. Still, there was terror in the sheer attempt, and it was only a few years after the Civil War that Jules Verne, in his novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, depicted the submarine as a sea monster ramming ships. That his creation was powered with electricity was prophetic. The Holland-the U.S. Navy's first working submarine-ran on electric batteries when submerged, a gas engine on the surface. Purchased on April 11, 1900, she was only fifty feet long and held a crew of six.

Submarine technology progressed so rapidly that less than a generation later Germany's diesel-powered submarines were terrorizing Allied ships during World War I. It was one of these German "U - boats" that shattered U.S. neutrality by sinking the British passenger liner Lusitania, after she sailed from New York in 1915. By the time the United States entered the war two years later, German U-boats had destroyed several hundred ships.

By World War II, submarines had hecorne so powerful they were able to go after armed surface convoys, and they had become a decisive factor. Germany sent its subs out in "Wolf Packs" that could converge for a kill, a tactic so lethal that the United States seized on it to regain control of the Pacific after Pearl Harbor. The impact on Japanese troop ships, tankers, and freighters was devastating, but it came with great cost. The United States lost fifty-two subs and thirty-five hundred men.

It is these World War II images of subs shooting torpedoes, of men trapped sweating within cramped steel cylinders as Japanese sonar pings rang through their hulls and depth charges fell around them, that remain most vivid. But there was something else going on in those days as well, the beginning of a tentative courtship between submariners and spies. A few times, subs put up simple antennas to intercept Japa nese radio messages and about a dozen submarines were sent to conduct periscope beach-reconnaissance to prepare for troop landings. These experiments piqued the interest of intelligence officials and showed that submarines could have a new mission once the cold war began. Diesel subs were the first to give it a try. Then came the creation of submarines with nearly endless power and unlimited stealth-boats powered by nuclear reactors that could remain submerged for months at a time. With these, U.S. submariners would grasp the definitive edge in the cold war under the seas.

The details of all of this have been closely held by top admirals and captains within the Navy, who typically disclosed these operations only to the president, his top military and intelligence advisers, and a few congressmen who only rarely pressed for details. But ultimately, control of any mission rested in the hands of young submarine captains, who were usually about thirty-five years old and under orders to maintain complete radio silence. These men were encouraged to take risks, and some slipped right into Soviet harbors or into the middle of Soviet naval exercises to bring home the best information. Still, their prime directive remained: avoid detection and keep the Soviets unaware of just how closely they were being watched. That necessity, more than anything, was also what impelled the staunch secrecy surrounding these missions.

Still, every now and then, even a few insiders fretted. Were these missions too provocative, too dangerous? Could one failed mission or one terrible accident coax the two superpowers to the brink? Could these spy missions inadvertently spark the very war they were designed to prevent? As long as these submarine operations remained secret, the Navy was rarely faced with these questions.

It was only through several years of interviews that we were able to piece together events so long hidden, and then only with great effort and persistence. We contacted hundreds of submariners. Some responded by telephoning the Navy's investigators, and some simply declined to talk. Many others, however, agreed to meet in interviews that took place face to face throughout the United States. At times, the Naval Investigative Service visited or called these men, intoning grim reminders of secrecy oaths and legal obligations. But the details mounted nonetheless, as submarine officers, enlisted men, political figures, and intelligence officials decided the time had come to tell their stories. For the submariners especially, talking offered release. Most had never given the details of their months-long absences to their parents, wives, children, or best friends. They could never come home and just unload after hard months at work. They needed to speak to someone who understood, to find some long-overdue recognition.

And so we write about them, and for them. The people, their names, and the events in this book are real, and the tales told in each chapter are rendered as faithfully and scrupulously as possible based on extensive interviews and the few documents that have been released. Conversations are related here, as they were repeated to us by people who were involved or who were there to hear the words as they were spoken. Still, not all of the people we describe in this book talked to us. Instead, they are here because they were at the heart of some of the most critical operations of the cold war. In most cases, we had to promise our sources that they would be protected, that we would not attribute information to them or disclose even that we had met with them.

Most of the stories in Blind Man's Bluff have never been told publicly, and none have ever been told in this level of detail. So instead of repeatedly pointing out each time we offer new information, we have decided to flag, either in the text or in footnotes, only the details that were already available. The rest of this book is a first, even for many of the men who served full careers in the submarine service but were given only the information that the Navy deemed they had a need to know.

This is a book about submarines, espionage, and geopolitics, but it is also a book about people: the poetry-spouting deep-sea scientist who was asked to conjure up ways of recovering nuclear missiles from the ocean floor; the Naval Intelligence officer whose childhood memories led him to conjure up the idea of tapping Soviet underwater communications cables; a cowboy sub commander who couldn't resist sneaking up to within feet of Soviet subs; the men whose sub was held underwater with barely enough air to keep them alive as Soviet ships above rained down explosives. We also present new information that may solve the mystery of what happened to the USS Scorpion, an American spy sub that sank, all hands lost, thirty years ago.

Most books about submarines focus on one man, perhaps the single most influential officer in the modern Navy and the father of the nuclear submarine: Admiral Hyman G. Rickover. But even Rickover had to look on as other men drove his boats and led these missions. So this is not the story of one man, but the story of a force of men who served over decades. We trace their efforts through the decades in three phases: from the early fumblings, through the greatest sea hunts, to the times when technology and imagination allowed the sub force to reach straight into the Soviets' minds. And like so many great epics, this one does not end. American submariners are still being sent to keep an eye on Russia, as well as to peer at other hot spots around the globe. The stories here are not just a look in microcosm at the nation's mammoth espionage efforts. They are a lesson in how far governments will go to learn one another", secrets, no matter where they stand in time or place.