Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew (35 page)

Now the cable tap was providing the first inside look at the Soviet Navy's fears and frustrations, its assessments of its own successes and failures, and its intentions. And the full potential for the Okhotsk cable tap had yet to be measured. These first recordings were only samples, an ear to conversations and reports that took place over a few days on a few of the dozens of lines that ran through the cable under the sea.

Bradley saw the next step, and he saw it clearly. He wanted to tap as many of the lines as possible, and he wanted to plant a device that could record for several months or even a year, a device that would keep working in Okhotsk even when Halibut was docked at Mare Island. His staff contacted Bell Laboratories, whose engineers were familiar with commercial undersea phone cables and began designing a much larger tap pod. Just like the smaller recorder Halibut carried on her first trip, the new device worked through induction, but this tap pod was huge. Nearly 20 feet long and more than 3 feet wide, it weighed about 6 tons and utilized a form of nuclear power. It would be able to pick up electronic frequencies from dozens of lines for months at a time. Halibut could plant the tap one year, then go back and retrieve it the next.

Leaving behind proof of intrusion was risky, but Bradley's group reasoned that even if the Soviets found the tap, the United States could argue that the induction device was legal. Under U.S. law, the Constitution's prohibition against illegal search and seizure had already been ruled not to apply to currents emanating from buildings, homes, or cables.

Navy lawyers wrote up highly classified papers to that effect. These legal contortions might seem disingenuous, but they accompanied almost all covert operations. It was, after all, the United States that kept insisting that other countries operate on high moral ground and within the bounds of international law.

When the new tap was finished, it looked like a giant tube that had been squashed some from the top and welded shut at the ends. The device was crammed with miniature electronics circuits and had the capacity to record for weeks at a time.

Finally it was time for Bradley to wade through the formal approval process that he had avoided when the cable was still only a Mississippi River hunch. If Halibut was going to leave evidence of intrusion sitting in Okhotsk, the project would need more than a quiet nod from Haig and Kissinger. Despite Bradley's tensions with the CIA, it had been easy to get the agency officials he worked with to go along. They were so busy building the Gloinar Explorer they didn't mind leaving the cable tap operation to him. So Bradley presented Halibut to the 40 Committee in early 1972, while the American public was being presented with details about Nixon and Kissinger's peace initiatives with Vietnam and their historic trip to China.

Given the timing, approval for the tap mission was anything but certain. For one thing, the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) were at a make-or-break stage. For another, Kissinger and Zumwalt, the CNO, were engaged in an open feud. Kissinger had made a glaring mistake during arms negotiations that threatened to leave the Soviets with a dangerous lead in submarine-based ballistic missiles. In
secret talks away from his military advisers, he had agreed, offhandedly, not to ask for limits on the Soviets' massive effort to build the Deltas, a new class of submarines that would far surpass the Yankees and carry ballistic missiles with ranges of 4,000 miles. Zumwalt was furious, convinced that Kissinger and Nixon had given away the barn in their zeal to get SALT completed before the year's elections. Zumwalt, who passed off words of caution from State Department officials-calling them "bed-wetters"-was trying to force Kissinger to pay for his negotiating mistake by pressuring him to approve an even more powerful new class of U.S. missile subs: the Tridents. It was a battle he would win.*

Now that the CNO had thrown his considerable weight behind Halibut and her return to Okhotsk, and damn the risk, it seemed that the cable tap could easily become a pawn in the battle between the White House and the Navy. Bradley did what he could to play down the risks, making his presentation without reference to a what-ifHalibut-were-caught scenario. Beyond that, much of what he offered the 40 Committee was pure drama. The captain pulled out a map of Okhotsk. He pointed to where the signs were found on the beach and drew a path over the sea to indicate the cable. Then he boldly stated what had once been only a guess-that this was a cable that carried crucial information about the operations and development of Soviet ballistic missile submarines. His discussion of the dangers was limited to the harrowing undersea walks facing Halibut's divers.

What Bradley didn't tell the committee was just how he knew there was a cable in the first place. He left out the fact that Halibut, on Haig's nod, had already visited the wire. He only assured the committee that the Navy was certainly not going to draft the operations orders until it was convinced that it could engineer a cable tap.

By the time he was finished, Bradley had won over the room. If the arms control negotiations or political machinations gave these officials pause, they didn't show it. The cable tap mission was approved, and Halibut left for her second trip to Okhotsk on August 4, 1972. Two months after the break-in at Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate complex, Halibut was on her way to perform the ultimate wiretapping exercise for an administration that was about to be crushed under its own tapes and covert operations.

This time McNish decided to brief his men about their true mission and the risks they would encounter. He called them into the crew's mess, one-third of the men at a time. Characteristically solemn, his grin a tight wire across his face, he stood against the bulkhead and told them where they were going, told them about the cable, told them about the tap. Then McNish told his men something else: he told them about black boxes strategically placed at how, stern, and midship. They were filled with explosives, and they were wired for self-destruct. The boxes were not carried by regular attack subs, but on Halibut every torpedoman's mate had been trained to crimp the explosive caps attached to fuses to ready the demolition boxes for detonation. Should Halibut become trapped in Okhotsk, McNish told his men, she would not be hoarded, and her crew would not he taken alive.

This briefing was, presumably, at odds with general Navy security rules. Most of the crew had no "need to know" where they were going or why. But McNish was asking his crew to go out for six months and take a risk unmatched in peacetime. Need or not, his men had a right to know.

On the way to the place her men were now calling "Oshkosh," Halibut was stranded-her clutch blew, sending the shaft to her screws spinning uncontrollably. A Halibut newcomer devised a juryrig involving a series of braces and a hydraulic jack attached to the motor. The fix held.

The men were by now affectionately referring to their usually ailing, most of the time moving, underwater nuclear-powered habitat as the "Bat Boat." The moniker stuck when somebody noticed that the huge bump created by the Bat Cave hangar made the sub look like a giant rendering of Bruce Wayne's comic-book super car.

Back in Okhotsk, Halibut found the cable easily. McNish gave the order, and the two huge anchors descended from how and stern. The divers climbed out of the DSRV lockout. In a matter of hours, spooks were listening to voices coming from the cable.

"Get in here, you have to hear this," one of the spooks called to some of the chiefs.

As he listened, one chief's eyes opened wide. He understood "nyet" Russian, but that didn't seem to matter.

"Jeeesus, this is great!" the chief said, shaking his head. "Jeeesus!" Then he began to laugh, a deep-throated, gut-shaking laugh built at once of pure bravado and the realization that they could all be caught listening to a conversation they were never meant to hear. With an adolescent conspirator's sense of occasion, the chief took off his headphones and slipped them to the next man in line.

A fortunate few were these chiefs, these men on the inside track who had the good luck to be pals with the spooks. One after another, they took their turns meeting the enemy they had tracked, pointed weapons at, harangued, and forsaken their families for. They were taking part in history. They were meeting the Soviets ear to ear, with one side deaf to the transaction.

None of this, of course, concerned the two Soviets yammering happily away on the telephone in unscrambled, uncoded Russian. They had no idea that 3,850 tons of steel and more than 120 men had conspired together to listen in to their conversation, or that soon their words would be weighted with layers of classification and given points for intelligence value in Washington.

A celebration was in order, and the divers provided one. Plucking a giant spider crab from the seafloor, they sent it into the Halibut through the DSRV lockout. One of the chiefs grabbed hold of a spindly leg, then a huge body. Someone else found a platter, a big one, the biggest one on the boat. It wasn't big enough. With legs dangling, its brownish-gray body hanging off the steel plate, the crab moved slowly as it was paraded through the engine room toward a massive pot of boiling water on its way to becoming the only casualty of the mission.

McNish kept Halibut hovering over the line for at least a week. Then Halibut made her way out of Okhotsk, leaving the tap planted and the internal recorders running. The submarine would come back to pick the recordings up in about a month. For now, the men were going to Guam. They would stay there long enough to let the tapes fill some more and long enough to patch whatever had broken on their Bat Boat.

It was a routine port stop, at least until their final night. The officers, the enlisted men, the chiefs, most everybody who was not on watch went out drinking. Then talk among the chiefs in the noncommissioned officers' club turned to the cable tap.

No one remembers who was the first to blurt out what was probably on most everyone's mind, but somebody, whether moved by fear or made courageous by beer, cracked the veneer and asked the question: Had they crossed a crucial line? This wasn't like going up against another sub or a ship and watching from afar. This was eavesdropping. What the hell were they doing crawling into the Soviet Union's backyard and tapping a military cable in peacetime? Why were they risking their lives for a mission they were all sure the United States would never acknowledge? Why were they riding a boat with a captain who had made clear that his hand was on the self-destruct button? Why were they riding a boat that could disappear without a word to their families of how or why?

Once it began, there was no stopping it. Fear, anger, concern, poured across the table. This had been building from the first moment the spooks pulled the chiefs into the radio shack and handed them the headphones. Listening to those words they didn't understand coming from a tap they weren't supposed to have planted didn't seem funny anymore. What once struck them as exciting and daring now seemed just plain illegal and dangerous.

Few of the men suffered qualms of morality or politics. As far as they were concerned, detente and diplomacy were public shows put on by both sides to hide true intentions. Still, what they were doing, the men told themselves, could be construed as an act of war. Worse, what they were doing could start the war they feared most.

For perhaps the first time since they had joined the submarine service and faced the power of the oceans and the threat of Soviet depth charges and torpedoes, some of these men were suddenly, deeply certain that what they were doing could kill them.

Then one man said it, said that they ought to tell the old man to stuff it, that they ought to tell him they didn't want to go back. Then others said the same thing in different ways.

More beers were ordered and downed. Then together, they made their way to the dock. Together, they stood in front of their submarine. Then, one by one, they climbed down the hatch, realizing that they weren't going to go tell McNish to stuff it after all. They were going to their bunks or their posts, and they were going back out to the Sea of Okhotsk.

Soon everyone was on board, except Auxiliaryman's Chief John White. He stood on the pier and announced that he was not going down the hatch. As far as he was concerned, the submarine service was a volunteer service, and he was devolunteering.

Nobody expected this. White had served more than nineteen years. He was the kind of man who always worked harder than his crew, the kind who rewarded their hard work by sending them out on the town on his tab. Maybe it was the beer talking, only White didn't seem drunk enough to throw away his career when he was only one year away from a full pension.

Still, something had made White decide to do just that, something that he refused to talk about, that day on the pier or since. In the end, he would say only that he wasn't reacting to the mission or to the selfdestruct charges on hoard; that it was all "more personal than that." Whatever his reason, Halibut pulled from port without him. White was flown back from Guam to California, where he was given an honorable discharge with a normal twenty-year pension.

For the rest of the trip, it was White the chiefs talked about. Soon they were back in the spook shack listening to the Soviets. This time they even understood a little of what they heard, as one Soviet sailor used the telephone line to practice wooing his girlfriend in English. The chiefs listened and laughed, but the joy of conspiracy had left the boat with John White.