Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew (40 page)

The public had lost its first real opportunity to assess the value of the ongoing undersea grab for intelligence. The Navy's spymasters were rolling right along, just as they always had, and within the submarine ranks it was business, and silence, as usual. All operations would continue. Holystone surveillance operations would now be referred to as "Navy Specials," short for Special Navy Control Program. And Inman and Vice Admiral Robert L. J. Long, the Navy's top submariner, decided to pour even more money into cable-tapping. They decided to get Rickover's okay to finally convert a modern, frontline sub for the work. NURO-the joint CIA/Navy office-had survived the Glomar fiasco, though the CIA would never again have that kind of day-to-day control over any of the Navy spy missions. Instead, NURO had become a funding vehicle for the special projects subs, and Congress quickly approved the money for the latest refit, though it would take a couple of years to ready the new boat.

In the meantime, it was up to the poor and nearly broken Seawolf to carry on with the cable tapping operation. Although a few submariners had risked everything to talk to Pike, little had changed. Nothing was going to stop these missions, even if they were now to be conducted by a sub that was loud and had been ill-fated from the start.*

Seawolf had missed her champagne baptism when a congressman's wife missed her aim. This was the same sub that Craven had rejected in the mid-1960s for special projects. She ended up being converted anyway only because Rickover had little use for her, especially after she ran into an undersea mountain in training exercises in 1968. Even after the Navy equipped her with the high-tech deep-sea gear, Seawolf was most notable for her 1950s technology. Her barely-working reactor was so antiquated that her crew joked that if the Soviets ever captured the sub, it would set their nuclear program back 50 years. Just as memorable was the alarm system that the men were calling "the Bitch in the Box," because it rang with a woman's voice-a 1950s telephone operator actually, who was chosen because someone in the Navy decided that she sounded soothing. She announced fires, floods, and other catastrophes, and as far as the Seawolf's crew was concerned, she talked far too much.

Together, Seawolf's mishaps and her missions left her men torn between abject disillusionment and abject pride. One rare diary, kept by a young Seawolf crew member, often reads like a catalogue of complaints. He was well aware that it was patently illegal for anyone in the crew to keep an account about the Navy's most secret missions. But despite everything, Seawolf was making history, the country's history and his, and he was determined to write it.

He describes successful cable-tapping missions in both 1976 and 1977. Indeed, the diary starts off like a techno-thriller: "JUNE 20, 1976-Somewhere off San Francisco, destination: Russia. No doubt about it though we aren't supposed to know-strange things have happened and stranger things I've seen-that book next to the QM stand-Russian sea coast and charting and piloting showing their buoys ..."

In some ways Seawolf was just like any other sub. Her crewmen played the same virulent game of "pinging" that existed throughout the fleet, as they took delight in attacking one another with inelegant phrases such as "I wouldn't piss in your mouth if your teeth were on fire." And many of the diarist's entries chronicle the boredom and loneliness of life on a sub where the outside world was represented mainly by stockpiles of girlie magazines and "crotch novels" with titles like Cocksure Girls hidden on hoard. On Seawolf, there was a twist: the sub's top-secret camera-toting fish had been dubbed "Happy" and "Linda" after the Happy Hooker and Linda Lovelace, the porn queen.

Monotony was interrupted by mechanical breakdown, which was even more dangerous because many of those breakdowns were taking place in the middle of Soviet waters. There were fires and reactor scrams. Nuclear technicians were so wearied by their faulty reactor that they were popping speed to keep themselves going. Problems with Seawol f's air-conditioning systems got so had that, while she was on the tap site, the crew was forced to relive the days of the Gudgeon-lighting oxygen-generating candles and then snorkeling to ventilate while they were still in the Soviet Sea of Okhotsk.

Soon after that incident the diarist gave up his crotch novels for Alive, a true account of survivors of a plane crash who turned to cannibalism to survive the desperate month when they were lost in the frigid Andes Mountains. He mused about "rum and fresh fruit dreams" as he scribbled, hiding behind the curtain covering his rack, the only place where he had a shadow of privacy. Despite the publicity surrounding the Glomar fiasco, despite the congressional hearings, secrecy reigned within the sub force and especially on hoard Sea wolf.

So he kept his diary hidden, from his commanders, from most of his crewmates. And in the end, he showed that despite the fires and the reactor scrams, he was just as impressed by his sub's exploits as Pike had been: "Found out what we do-the mission of ship-unbelievable-we are ON THE MOOR-finally-really gotta hand it to the USA-not as dumb as let on to be-the country still has balls."

   Richard L. Haver could spin a tale and craft a briefing better than just about anyone in town. He was only thirty-three years old, one of many department heads at Naval Intelligence and a civilian at that, but he was also a prized protege i of Bobby Inman's, the man who had singlehandedly shielded the sub force from its one close encounter with congressional criticism. Haver had that same ability to mesmerize.

Admiral Stansfield Turner, the director of the CIA, knew that. So did Harold Brown, the secretary of Defense. That's why they had brought Haver with them on this spring day in 1978 to brief President Jimmy Carter in the White House Situation Room.

Turner made the introductions, while Haver looked around at the men assembled: the president, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, and White House Chief of Staff Hamilton Jordan. Vice President Walter Mondale was there as well, though he had just gotten back from a twelve-day trip to Southeast Asia and seemed to be nodding off. Haver wasn't worried.

He knew it was Carter's attention he had to hold and that Carter was a former nuclear engineer and a Rickover acolyte. He had been chosen for the nuclear submarine program in the early 1950s, but before the first nukes ever went out to sea, his father died and he was called home to run the family peanut farm. Still, Carter had never stopped viewing Rickover as a mentor. Indeed, the title of his campaign biography, Why Not the Best-, was taken from a phrase that Rickover used to grill him and other officers. As for Haver, he had been an intelligence officer, a spook who went out on Navy air reconnaissance flights during the Vietnam War. That's how he met Inman, who had overseen some of the Navy's wartime intelligence efforts. When Haver decided to resign his commission, it was Inman who had helped persuade him to become a civilian intelligence analyst rather than go to law school.

What Haver wanted to do now was bring Carter up to date on the Soviet nuclear threat and also lay the groundwork to win Carter's okay to begin planning a mission more daring than any that had been tried before. Naval Intelligence had learned that the Soviets were taking advantage of the 4,200-mile range of their new Delta ballistic missile subs, driving them out of reach of U.S. SOSUS nets below the Azores in the South Atlantic or holding the subs back in the Barents Sea. The subs in the Barents were being protected by surface ships and attack submarines-and they were just a shot across the Arctic from Washington, D.C., or any other target within an arc drawn from about South Carolina through Oklahoma to Oregon.

Haver assured Carter that intelligence networks and spy subs were working hard at collecting and analyzing the new information. Within Naval Intelligence, however, there was a raging debate about whether the Soviets' decision to hold missile subs back in the Barents marked a true change in strategy or a momentary flux. Haver was among those who believed it likely that the Soviets were positioning to take a crucial nuclear edge away from the United States.

When the Yankee subs were the best the Soviet Union had, nearly every one sent within range of the United States had been in the line of fire of U.S. subs shadowing behind. If war had broken out, those subs could have sunk the Soviet boomers before they ever fired. Then, if both sides ever launched their land-based ICBMs, only the United States would have been left with a second-strike capability tucked away in the oceans. This was the edge the Navy had been preparing for ever since Whitey Mack first rode bronc on the Lapon. But the strategy relied on three things: that Soviet subs remained relatively noisy; that they never realized how often they were being followed; and that they continued to patrol in open seas where they could be trailed in the first place.

But when the Deltas were moved into the Barents, Haver and others started to seriously question some fundamental assumptions behind U.S. strategy. After all, practically since the cold war began, American planners had believed that the Soviet Navy was bent on challenging the United States on the high seas, that in a war Soviet attack subs would mainly try to sink U.S. ships resupplying Europe, just as the Germans had done in World War II. Now it seemed the Soviets might be doing a strategic about-face and, in the process, knocking over a cornerstone of U.S. nuclear strategy.

After giving a sense of these concerns, Haver reminded the president that the Navy had one other extraordinary way to keep tabs on the Soviets-the critical cable-tapping operation in the Sea of Okhotsk that Carter himself had approved just the year before. Then Haver went on to describe what Naval Intelligence was considering as a next, bold step.

What if the United States could tap cables in the Atlantic arena? What if a submarine could be sent to put a tap right in the Barents Sea, the very location of the Soviets' missile-sub bastions?

Halibut never could have done that, and neither could Seawolf. Both subs had been castoffs when they were given to the tapping operation, too old and too loud to sneak into these active waters. (As this briefing took place, Seawolf was out in the Pacific searching for missile fragments, looking for a chance to use a special retrieving claw that had been added to one of her camera-toting fish.) But the Navy finally had a boat that could do the job, a new sub just converted to hold deep-sea divers and the gear that could let spooks listen in on a new tap. She was the USS Parche (SSN-683), the sub that Inman and Vice Admiral Bob Long had pushed for after the Pike inquiry. She was a four-year-old Sturgeon attack sub, and she was quieter, faster, and much newer than any boat that had been given over to "special projects" before.'"
Parche had new eavesdropping equipment that could support a modernized tap pod with far more recording capacity, and she was quiet enough to sneak right beneath the Soviets' powerful Northern Fleet to plant tap pods in the Barents.

As Haver talked, what had begun as a typical briefing turned into a dialogue, Navy vet to Navy vet. Carter began leaning so far forward in his chair that some of the men in the room began to wonder whether the president would wind up in Haver's lap. It was certainly clear that Carter was intrigued, and for now that was enough. Haver and his bosses weren't looking for formal approvals for the mission, not yet. They just needed to know that Carter was interested, that they could keep planning.

Getting this kind of early read was a good tactic in dealing with any president, but in Carter's case there was even more reason to move slowly, to sound him out. Despite his Navy background, Carter had been looking for ways to trim defense programs. He had spoken out against the new weapons systems being pushed by the Pentagon, and he was so forceful about the need to make peace with the Soviets that some in the military thought he was soft on communism.

Everyone in the room knew that sending Parche on such a mission, into crowded waters, carried far greater risk of detection and of antagonizing the Soviets than anything tried in the desolate Okhotsk. Parche would have to elude the dozens of Soviet warships and submarines that were constantly moving about the Barents. Not only that, but because any cable in the area probably ran alongshore, a geographical necessity, Parche would almost certainly have to plant the pod inside the Soviet's 12-mile territorial limit, and probably within the 3-mile-limit recognized internationally.

But Haver had invoked Carter's fascination more than his caution. Turner was nothing less than ecstatic when the president finally thanked them all for the briefing and asked to be kept informed. It seemed that Haver had not only sold Carter on a new mission but had probably guaranteed the success of the cable-tapping program for the next decade.

Still, as jubilant as everyone felt, there was one nagging concern that Haver hadn't mentioned to Carter. Haver couldn't help but feel that there was something eerie about the Soviets' shift in strategy and other recent moves. It was almost as if the Soviets had found their own way to read the Americans' minds. Only there wasn't enough evidence to be certain, no clear patterns, just glimmers within a series of curious changes in the way the Soviets were operating.

First, the Soviets were increasingly sending attack subs to escort the Yankees and Deltas still heading for the Atlantic. Along the way, the attack boats were circling the boomers as if looking for NATO subs that might be trying to trail. Second, Soviet subs seemed to be waiting to monitor U.S. naval exercises even before U.S. ships and subs arrived on site. A few times, Soviet subs had shown up in waters where U.S. exercises had been scheduled, then canceled. Other times, Soviet subs barreled right into the middle of exercises almost as if they were trying to see how the U.S. forces would react. Finally, the latest subs the Soviets had sent out on sea trials-Victor III attack boats-were much quieter than any of their predecessors, almost as quiet as U.S. subs. It was as if somehow the Soviets had caught on to the idea that silence could be crucial. Before, they had always seemed more focused on sheer quantity.