Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew (34 page)

This was their celebration for finally getting out of the shipyard. This was a wake for their lost freedom. This was how the men of the Halibut launched one of the most critical submarine spy operations of the cold war.

The party wouldn't end until just a few hours before "Smiling Jack" McNish gave the final order to embark. Smiling Jack was the name the men had given their hulking commander, a testament to the tight grin that took the place of a growl or gritted teeth. It widened only with trouble. Few crew members remembered ever seeing the thirty-eight-year-old redheaded captain actually laugh-not now, and not on Halibut five years or so earlier when he had served as her executive officer.

That grin would be there, unchanging, through most of the month Halibut spent transiting to Okhotsk. Any other attack submarine would have made the distance in less than two weeks. But Halibut's 1950s vintage reactor could not kick up past 13 knots, and she was further slowed by the drag of the fake DSRV on her back. Most of the trip progressed at an infuriating crawl of 10 knots as Halibut traveled a long arc, matching the curvature of the earth. Moving north to the Aleutian Islands, then down past the icy Bering Strait, past Soviet surface ships, she reached the Sea of Okhotsk.

Getting inside the sea was tense business. The crew took several hours to maneuver through a shallow channel, probably at the northernmost part of the Kuril Islands chain just below the southern tip of Kamchatka. From here, the men had a periscope view of an active volcano, but they feared sunlight more. A single glint off the periscope and any nearby submarine-hunting plane or ship would find them.

By now, they knew where they were. McNish had told them that much, and he told them the divers were going out on this mission. But he omitted any talk about Soviet cables. The commander instead declared that Halibut was there to find pieces of the new and deadly Soviet ship-to-ship missile. Only McNish, his officers, the divers, and a few men among those knighted as the "special projects team" knew what they were really up to as he ordered Halibut to move slowly up along the Soviet coastline, periscope up.

Every three hours, Halibut moved along an "S" path, or cut a figure eight, or shifted from one side or the other, or circled around. Anything to give a peek into that blind spot in her baffles, to make sure no other sub followed from behind.

The search continued for longer than a week. The men found nothing, but continued to look, to hope. Then they saw it, sitting along the beach, far up on the northernmost half of the Sea of Okhotsk: one of Bradley's signs proclaiming a warning to the careless-"Do Not Anchor. Cable Here"-or something to that effect in Russian.

At McNish's order, a fish was sent swimming out of the Bat Cave. By now, the problems with the video feed had been fixed. The pictures that came flying up into the submarine's monitors were still grainy and tinged with gray, but they were far clearer than the sonar images the men had to rely on while searching for the Golf. Now, the men staring at the monitors could even see vague shapes of Okhotsk's giant crabs, though only photographs would show the smaller fish, the clouds of luminescent plankton, the teeny jellyfish dancing diamonds as they were lit up by the mechanical fish's incandescent mechanical lights. Anything, no matter how large, that was more than a few feet from the cameras and lights was lost in the murky water-dark greenish brown from silt runoffs, it showed up dark gray on the video monitors. Only a few men were cleared to look at any of this, but the novelty wore off quickly and their shifts seemed to take forever as they stared at the screens for hours at a time.

Then the sand seemed to rise slightly, a bump on the bottom a foot or two long. The bump disappeared, then returned, a dash in the sand, followed by other dashes in the sand. At first, the men wondered whether they were imagining a broken line within the gray. But there it was again, and again, periodic gray rises and a more occasional glimpse of black. There was something there, something almost entirely buried in the sandy silt.

Halibut began to follow the line. As the video images flickered on Halibut's monitor, the fish snapped twenty-four photographs a second. Later, the fish would he hauled up and gutted, refilled, and sent out again. The film promised images much clearer than this grainy video, but the ship's photographer wouldn't be able to develop any of the rolls until later, when Halibut could move high enough to the surface to snorkel and vent the toxic darkroom fumes.

Finally, McNish gave the order, and Halibut came up in the privacy of a black night. The photographer began unraveling the rolls of film taken from the fish, working with the officer in charge of special pro] ects. In the cramped darkroom, the two men watched the images emerge. There, in the color photographs, lay the Soviet cable.

Now Halibut's crew had to find a flat strip on the sea bottom, a place to lower the two huge mushroom-shaped anchors at her bow and stern. McNish was looking for a spot well outside the 3-mile limit. There was nothing to be gained by tempting fate now. Ultimately he settled on a place in the northern part of Okhotsk, about 40 miles off the western face of Kamchatka. His men maneuvered the boat gently down to a place just above the cable. It took almost a day to move into position and anchor.

The divers had been waiting in the fake DSRV, breathing the helium and oxygen mixture for some time, and their bodies were acclimated to the increased pressure. Now they climbed into rubber wet suits that fit loosely, leaving enough room for tubes that ran down their legs, their arms, into their hands, and around their bodies. A pump in the submarine would push hot water through the tubes as soon as they left the chamber, transforming the suits into something like rubbery, wet electric blankets. The water would come through tiny holes in the tubing, seeping warmth against the chill of Okhotsk. It was November, and the water was at near-freezing temperatures.

The divers also wrapped insulation against their gas jets; there was no point in warming their bodies if they were going to breathe cold gas. Several times they checked their umbilical cords, the two-inchthick bundle of tubes and wires that provided the mixed gases for breathing, the hot-water sluices, and the links for communication, power, and lighting.

Running through the cord was one strong wire that had nothing to do with breathing, talking, or seeing. This was the emergency line, which would be used to yank them back into Halibut should something go wrong. Their only other margin for error was latched onto their belts-small bottles containing three or four minutes of emergency air, their "come-home bottles."

Finally the men were ready to crawl out the outer hatch. In the control room, McNish could see them walking what seemed a space walk. Only barely lit by their handheld lights, they cut a ghostly path through the murky water to the communications cable. Once there, they began using pneumatic airguns to blow debris and sand away from the wire. As soon as it was clear, the men started to attach the tap, a device about three feet long that held a recorder filled with big rolls of tape. Off the main box was a cylinder that contained a lithium-powered battery. A separate connector wrapped around the cable and would draw out the words and data that ran through. The tap worked through induction. There would be no cutting into the cable, no risking an electrical short from seeping seawater.

Inside the boat, men monitored the water currents, taking readings every fifteen minutes or so. Halibut swayed against her anchors, while planesmen struggled to keep her level through the hours that the divers worked to attach the recording device to the cable. After that connection was made, the spooks collected what seemed like an adequate sample of the Soviet voice and data transmissions running through the cable.

Nothing in Halibut's history suggested that this would ever be so easy. The cable had been found without a single snag in the line towing the fish. The mission had gone so smoothly that much of the crew would remain firmly convinced that their submarine had happened upon the cable by sheer accident. They had, after all, been told that the target on this trip to Okhotsk was pieces of Soviet missiles. Now, true to his word, N[cNish turned Halibut and headed for a Soviet test range.

The water there was somewhat deeper than the waters over the cable. Still, Halibut's fish quickly found a spot where the whitish-gray grains carpeting the ocean bottom became speckled with the steel gray and black of electronics and small shards of casing. Halibut had found a place where Soviet missiles went to die.

This mission also was important, for these new Soviet cruise missiles posed a terrible threat to U.S. aircraft carriers. The weapons had a new kind of infrared guidance system that the U.S. Navy had been unable to counter. Bradley had already sent three standard U.S. attack submarines to Okhotsk with orders to try to get close enough to missile tests to record the frequencies of the infrared devices as well as the frequencies of the new kind of radar altimeters that let the missiles skim close to the water surface and out of range of conventional U.S. countermeasures. The idea had been for the standard attack subs to use bulky devices attached to their periscopes to squirt bits of heat at the missiles and see what frequencies reflected back. The task proved impossible. (At this point, the Navy was so desperate to learn whatever it could about any kind of Soviet cruise missiles that it had sent Swordfish with sonar developed for Halibut, side lit and mounted on her hull, out to scour seabeds in shallow waters. The sonar worked so well that Swordfish could skim the shallows not more than twentyfive feet off the bottom practically at flank speed.)

Only Halibut could actually send men out to retrieve anything, and now her divers were out again, this time to pick up piece after piece. The hope was to find one of the infrared devices or one of the radar altimeters. The divers stowed the pieces in a huge gondola-like basket hooked to Halibut's steel underbelly. When the gondola was filled with hundreds of missile bits, the divers climbed back into the fake DSRV to wait out the long decompression process.

They were there much of the time it took Halibut to travel back to Mare Island. She docked about a month after she left Okhotsk.

Before the crew could disembark, tapes from the cable tap were on their way to the huge National Security Agency complex at Fort George G. Meade. That complex, located halfway between Washington and Baltimore, was where the Defense Department sent most of the electronics intelligence picked up by submarines and other spy vehicles to be decoded and analyzed. Protected by three layers of barbed wire and fences, one layer electrified, were five and a half subterranean acres of computers. These were used by some of the nation's top mathematicians and scientists to break Soviet codes. There were also thousands of Russian linguists and analysts poring over decoded communications. The massive operations building was nicknamed the "Anagram Inn," and it was behind its 70,000 square feet of permanently sealed windows that the Halibut's tapes would be played, replayed, and judged for content.

Meanwhile, the missile fragments were sent to a Department of Energy lab secreted away in the Pacific Northwest, a so-called black installation with no outward signs of the work that went on inside. There, in a large, empty room, sat the basketfuls of junked missile pieces. Bit by tiny hit, engineers sorted through the baskets, laying out pieces on a long board. They were at it for months, but finally they had a board filled, 20 feet of junk transformed into a flattened, shattered version of nearly an entire missile, a 20-foot-long jigsaw puzzle with few pieces larger than 6 inches.

Still, in all those heaps and baskets, engineers never found the infrared homing device the Navy so desperately wanted to study. (It was assumed that the devices must have shattered when the missiles careened headlong into their targets at speeds of Mach 1 or Mach 1.5.) But the radar altimeter and other crucial parts of that device were found, allowing U.S. engineers to try to build a countermeasure, one that would hopefully send the Soviet cruise missiles plunging harmlessly into the ocean.

Meanwhile, word about the cable recordings came back to Bradley from the NSA. His guess had been right. Flowing through that cable was pure military gold: conversations between the submarine base and high-level Soviet Navy officials, many of them unencrypted or coded in fairly rudimentary ways.

The find separated the cable tap from most of the communications intelligence available to the United States. The growing network of spy satellites, planes, listening stations, and subs had watched and listened as the Soviets moved troops, built bases, and sent their fleets swimming through exercises. But even the most advanced eavesdropping system, the prototype of the Rhyolite satellite launched in 1970, could not penetrate a hardwired phone line. And the few eavesdropping satellites the United States had were focused on Moscow and the Soviets' northern coast. None pointed toward the Pacific bases, the bases that were linked by the cable through Okhotsk.

To be sure, Soviet agents provided occasional insights into the Soviet psyche. But for all the drama in dead drops and late-night forays through dark Moscow streets, finding a way to consistently intercept conversations among Soviet military leaders was something that the United States had been trying to do for decades with only limited success. A set of antennas placed atop the U.S. embassy in Moscow had captured Brezhnev complaining about his health and other Politburo members talking about the traffic or their sex lives, but no Soviet leader was going to make a habit of talking about state secrets over something as vulnerable as a car phone.