Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew (29 page)

A severe reprimand was registered on his service card. The transgression meant that he would no longer be allowed to teach at the naval academy. Instead, his boat was overhauled, then sent to spend two and a half months hiding outside of San Francisco. This "combat service," Bagdasaryan says, was meant to make amends for his failure, to "wash out the fault with blood."

After the crash, a new joke began to make the rounds among Soviet submariners, although the facts it was based on were altered somewhat, as no one wanted to be caught referring directly to a classified incident. With such constraints, it's little wonder that the humor is somewhat strained.

The joke went like this: "An American nuclear sub collided with an iceberg in the ocean. The iceberg's crew had no casualties."

After about six months, Bagdasaryan's superiors decided to rescind the reprimand. Somehow, it wasn't erased from party documents until many years later, and by then, Bagdasaryan wanted to hold onto his unique blemish.

His reason: "It would be hard to find a Communist whose service card would say `Severely reprimanded by the party for the collision with an American nuclear-powered submarine in underwater position.",

As Bagdasaryan spoke, he paused and wondered aloud whether he might meet Commander Balderston, perhaps to "have a drink and think together how to avoid similar collisions in the future." Told that Balderston had died, the former Soviet commander seemed crestfallen.

"It's too bad about the commander," he said. "I guess this incident did not pass easily for him."

   It was after 3:00 .A.M., and even the Pentagon seemed almost still. Official Washington wouldn't start to churn for hours, not until the sun began baking the asphalt-and-concrete moat that surrounded the 34 acres taken up by the building.

James Bradley sat beyond that moat, deep within the long creamcolored corridors, still on the fifth floor of the Pentagon's E Ring behind three sets of locked doors, his suite of offices empty but for him. It was late 1970, Bradley's fourth year as the director of undersea warfare at the Office of Naval Intelligence, and it was in these early morning hours that he could dream best, immersed in the quiet of his office and in the deep oceans beyond.

He was preoccupied with notions bordering on the fantastic, plans for a new mission for Halibut, one that would shake the intelligence community even more than the photographs of the Soviet Golf submarine that had so caught the imagination of President Nixon and, unfortunately for the Navy, the CIA.

Bradley wanted to send Halibut into the heart of a Soviet-claimed sea after a quarry that was living-practically breathing-and beyond almost anything U.S. intelligence had attempted to grab before. Closing his eyes for a moment, he could almost see his target. It was a telephone cable, a bundle of wires no wider than five inches.

But what a bundle of wires. Bradley imagined the cable as it ran from the Soviet Union's missile submarine base at Petropavlovsk, under the Sea of Okhotsk, and then on to join land cables going to Pacific Fleet headquarters near Vladivostok and then to Moscow. If Halibut's camera-toting fish could find that cable, if her crew could tap it, then the United States would violate the very soul of Soviet secrecy. Here could he an open ear to the plans and frustrations of Soviet leaders, intelligence unmatched by any human spy or even the newest surveillance satellites floating high over the Kremlin.

Bradley could almost hear the words flowing through the line, technical analysis clear of propaganda, measures of the abilities and problems of Soviet submarines, information that might make them easier to trail, tactical plans for patrols that would take those submarines and their missiles near U.S. shores. If he was right, maybe the Americans could even grab the Soviets' own assessments of the test flights of ICBMs and sea-based missiles that smacked down on the Kamchatka Peninsula and in the northern Pacific. That cable might provide entry inside the minds of Soviet commanders themselves.

Of course, the Soviets would probably see Halibut's intrusion into Okhotsk as an act of piracy. If she were detected, they might try to board or destroy her, forcing an international incident that might end the delicate dance toward detente.

And there was another hitch, a big one. Bradley had no proof that this cable existed at all. Even if it did, there was no way to tell where it lay beneath the 611,000-square-mile expanse of Okhotsk. Even Bradley could see the humor in his predicament. How could he present this idea to the cadre of White House, military, intelligence, and State Department officials who were supposed to have final say over an operation as dangerous as this one? How could he say that he wanted to send Halibut out on a hunch in search of an ethereal strand?

Still, as far as Bradley was concerned, it was a pretty good hunch. After all these years of watching the Soviets, American intelligence knew that Soviet defense officials insisted on constant reports from the men in the field and that the Soviets painstakingly coded most communications sent through the air to thwart interception. If Bradley's intuition was right, Soviet admirals and generals would be far too imperious and impatient to suffer an ocean of cryptographers already overwhelmed by the sheer bulk of their work. Top Soviet officers would want, would insist upon, an immediate and simple communications method, and the only simple and secure way to talk was through a hardwired telephone system.

Any telephone line the Soviets set up between the mainland and the submarine base at Petropavlovsk would have to run beneath the Sea of Okhotsk. Petropavlovsk was, after all, a tiny, desolate port across that sea, isolated on the Kamchatka Peninsula and nearly hidden among ancient volcanoes and primeval birch forests. Okhotsk itself was almost empty, save for a few fishing trawlers and occasional submarines engaged in missile tests.

The Soviets had to consider the sea secure, given that it was nestled into the crook of Kamchatka and the east coast of the Soviet Union as neatly as the Chesapeake Bay fits into the U.S. eastern seaboard. The way in for an enemy submarine or ship was through narrow, shallow channels that sliced through the Soviet-controlled Kuril Islands. Those channels could be easily blocked in an alert.

But even if the cable was out there, where was it? Where in all those miles and miles of water lay a strand that couldn't be more than five inches wide?

Bradley cleared his mind of charts and maps, freed himself from official assessments, from the meetings, memos, and briefings that swamped the business of intelligence in Washington. He let his eyes close and his thoughts wandered to simpler journeys taken in simpler times, before the cold war, before World War II, back to the waters of his childhood.

There he found an answer that was beguilingly simple and just strange enough to be true. It was buried in his memories of St. Louis in the 1930s when he was a boy and his mother packed him up to escape the summer's heat on riverboat rides along the Mississippi River. From the point where the Mississippi meets the Missouri River through Alton, Illinois, the boats steamed through water dyed with brown silt and banked by miles of flood plains painted with wild upward strokes of grasses until the green gave itself up abruptly to towering gray harrier bluffs. Eagles traced circles above, while sand cranes left leggy tracks along the shore. It was this scenery that captured most people riding the river-that and the riverboat orchestra and social scene on board.

But for a boy, there were other sights that marked the trip. The young Bradley had taken to passing time with the steamer captains in the pilothouse, and from there he could see a series of black-and-white signs placed discreetly along the shore. Most of the signs marked mileage and location. But there were a few, he remembered now, that declared: "Cable Crossing. Do Not Anchor." These signs were there to keep some idiot in a boat from snaring and snapping a phone or utility cable in the shallows.

Bradley's eyes snapped open as he realized that what was true of the Mississippi just might be true of Okhotsk. That's how they would find the cable, he thought. That's how they would engineer one of the most daring acts of tele-piracy of the cold war. Halibut would be led directly to her quarry by signs placed somewhere on a lonesome beach in the Soviet Union, declaring: "Watch Out! Cable Here."

This wasn't the way intelligence operations were normally crafted in Washington, but Bradley's imagination had always been vast, sometimes too vast for the rigidity that often ruled much of the military crowd. He had been dreaming about a possible cable tap almost from the moment he had gotten the job and control of Halibut. He and his staff had spent hours talking about the possibilities for Halibut and that mythical communications cable. They scanned maps and pored over charts of Soviet seas and bases, and they soon came to realize that there were three spots that held special promise, three places on the maps where Soviet naval bases were separated from Moscow by miles of water: the Baltic Sea, the Barents Sea, and the Sea of Okhotsk.

Of these, only Okhotsk was truly desolate. Covered with a layer of ice nine months of the year, the sea was as dreary and cold as Petropavlovsk, where nuclear submarines and missile arsenals were secreted among buildings that had been decaying for a century or more. Soviet naval officers made dingy homes in these cheap squares of concrete built among civil defense shelters and radar receivers.

The more Bradley thought about Okhotsk and the sub base on Kamchatka, the more he knew that Halibut was destined to go there. But throughout his first three, even four years directing her missions, there had been no safe way to allow men to leave a submarine, walk the sand 300 to 400 feet under the sea, and reach out and tap a cable. Bradley had to wait for the technology to catch up with his vision. And that had finally happened.

The same post-Thresher panic that had prompted the Navy to put money into underwater research, the same push that had given birth to a redesigned Halibut, had also paid for a program to create new ways for divers to survive in the deep. Bradley's old friend John Craven had overseen much of this work until he retired from the Navy. Under Craven's direction, the ability of divers to work in the depths had progressed at an incredible pace.

The problem had been daunting. What is life-giving air on the surface can kill divers down deep. By 300 feet down, air compresses so much that a single lungful contains about ten times the surface amounts of oxygen and nitrogen. At these concentrations, oxygen becomes poisonous and nitrogen has a druglike effect-nitrogen narcosis-that makes divers go squirrelly.

Specially trained Navy divers and scientists had been experimenting with recipes for a new underwater atmosphere that replaced much of the oxygen and all of the nitrogen with helium, which is nontoxic. On ascent, those gases could he remixed to fulfill the divers' increasing need for oxygen in shallower waters. Animal experiments had given way to human underwater habitats called SeaLabs. Placed 200 feet down off La Jolla, California, the living was dangerous and uncomfortable. At one point, the plumbing failed on one and the habitat tilted, but four divers inside survived on the new gas mixtures.

Everything was progressing well until one of the Sea Labs developed leaks in 1969. A diver was killed while trying to make repairs-not at all the kind of publicity the Navy was looking for just a year after Scorpion had been lost. The SeaLab program was unceremoniously canceled, and to outsiders, it seemed as though the Navy had abandoned the effort altogether. But development quietly continued, and Bradley and Craven prepared to put the new gas mixture and the new "saturation diving" techniques to use for divers on Halibut.

The sub was now at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard outside San Francisco being fitted with a portable version of SeaLah, a pressurized chamber to support the divers as they acclimated to the water pressures they would find if they walked the seafloor to tap the Soviet cable. But before Halibut could navigate the bottom of Okhotsk, Bradley had to win the funding and political support that the mission would require.

Bradley's office was still the clearinghouse for all submarine spy missions. He and his staff collected wish lists from top policy-makers within the National Security Agency, the Pentagon, and the White House. It was up to Bradley to come up with the operations that could fulfill those requests-the submarine trailings, the observations of missile tests, the gathering of electronic signals. *
After that, Bradley had to sell those missions to the fleet commanders, who still had the final word on whether any of their submarines went out and where. Bradley had already made dozens of trips to Pearl Harbor, Norfolk, and Yokosuka, 'Japan, to brief and debrief submarine captains, and he had earned their respect and trust. Besides, the daring of the cable-tap mission would make it an easy sell to these men.

Navigating through Washington required more finesse. Still, Bradley knew how to court the crowd in this town where information was currency and was jealously distributed under the amorphous guideline of "need to know." This was a place where power was measured by access, and Bradley traded access for approvals, packaging facts within a romantic haze of deep-ocean wonders. His briefings drew on the storyteller's art that he had picked up decades earlier listening to his father weave wondrous yarns of wine, women, and sea.

In fact, Bradley's idea to search for a Soviet cable was inspired almost as much by its dramatic impact as it was by its potential intelligence value. If that cable did exist, finding it and tapping it would do more to bring his office high-level exposure and funding than just about any mission he could think of. Bradley was already counting his successes in dollars and in enemies. His bounty usually came straight from the zipped pockets of other Navy departments. After he nearly decimated one project headed by a naval aviator, the man was ready to punch Bradley in the nose right there in the Pentagon. "You sonof-a-bitch," swore the burly aviator, pouncing on the captain in the corridor. Bradley didn't blame him, didn't blame him a bit. But Bradley also was unapologetic. He felt completely sincere in believing that his group was doing better work than anyone else.