Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew (42 page)

As all this was going on, a steady stream of Soviet ships and submarines continued to fill Parche's sonar screens. The activity got the crew members to talking. One man whispered that Parche was "very, very near Murmansk" and "really up against the Soviet coast." One chief found a more colorful way of describing their position to a young seaman. "This is so close you could look through a periscope and see people's faces on the beach if you came to the surface."

As they sat there, some of the men began to realize that no one had ever leveled with them about the dangers of this operation. As one man put it, "Here you've got one hundred some-odd guys willing to die, and they don't even know they're truly in a situation where they might."

Finally, the job was done. All Maurer had to do now was get his men out of there and get them home. The plan was to leave the immediate area of the tap and signal "mission accomplished" to a second U.S. submarine, which had been skulking nearby throughout Parche's operation. Had there been any indication that Parche was detected, it would have been this second sub's job to make a racket, become a decoy, and draw the heat.

Parche, of course, was maintaining strict radio silence, but she had been equipped with a special horn to send her signal. U.S. subs usually were wired for 60 megahertz, but Parche would signal at 50 megahertz, the Soviet standard. To the Soviets, it was hoped, the signal would sound like one of their own. To the men on board, the blast sounded like bongo drums. One quick beat on the bongos, and the message was sent. Parche waited for a reply, then headed for home.

For her feat, Parche received the Presidential Unit Citation, the highest award possible. Each man was given a certificate, with the presidential seal at the top and Jimmy Carter's signature on the bottom. It was an award that Halibut had won twice, Seawolf never.

"By virtue of the authority vested in me as President of the United States and as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States, I have today awarded THE PRESIDENTIAL UNIT CITATION (NAVY) FOR EXTRAORDINARY HEROISM TO USS PARCHE (SSN 683) for extraordinary heroism and outstanding performance in the conduct of a mission of vital importance to the National Security of the United States as a unit of the U.S. Pacific Fleet in 1979," the award read.

Buried in the hureaucratese that followed was one telling line. It praised Parche for operating "in the hostile environment of poorly charted ocean areas."

In 1980, Parche was scheduled to go back to the Barents tap, and Seawolf was scheduled to return to Okhotsk. But in February, a fire broke out on Seawolf during sea trials. A turbine generator blew up and began tossing balls of flame into the engine room while the sub was submerged. By the time Seawol f's crew could perform an emergency blow and surface, ten men had been overcome by black thick smoke. They were carried up to the deck and fresh air, and it was there they were photographed by a passerby. Instead of having a chance to win a PUC, to show the guys on Parche that Seawolf's men were just as good, they were awarded with a page 1 photo in a local newspaper captioned, "Seawolf Sons Basking in the Sun After Rigorous Sea Trials."

Seawolf went back to dry dock for another year, and Parche again took her place on a run to Okhotsk in the summer. Parche also went back to the Barents that fall to plant a new tap and retrieve the first year's worth of recordings.

By now, Ronald Reagan was scoring big in the presidential campaign. Carter had been plagued by the hostage crisis in Iran. He also was hurt by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which killed any chance for ratification of the arms treaty he had just reached with Brezhnev. (Both of these events also led the U.S. sub force to step up surveillance of Soviet naval forces in the Indian Ocean.) Reagan was promising to get tough with the Soviets. To that end, he pledged to pour billions of dollars into rebuilding the military, and he put the Navy front and center in his plans. Painting the conventional picture of the Soviet Navy as increasingly bent on challenging the West in any sea-pretty much the opposite of what Haver believed might he happening when he briefed Carter-Reagan said he would expand the U.S. Navy to 600 ships from 450 ships to prevent the Soviets from snatching maritime superiority.

In fact, the Soviet fleet was growing. In November a U.S. satellite captured images of an enormous pile of steel and a newly enlarged dock at a Soviet shipyard. That and other evidence suggested that the Soviets might be building their first full-sized aircraft carrier. To many top Navy officials, the satellite images seemed to be proof that Rich Haver and other young analysts were wrong about the Soviet Navy pulling back, and that in fact the Soviets were still gearing up for battle in the open oceans. They might finally be ready to pour money into the kind of huge surface ships and supply vessels that they would need to create a true blue-water Navy. After all, aircraft carriers had always been used to project power outward, to sail to distant places and launch planes.

After his election, Reagan appointed John F. Lehman Jr., the campaign aide who had come up with the plan for the 600-ship fleet, as his Navy secretary. At only thirty-eight years old, Lehman was the youngest man in this century to hold the post. He was smart, quick, and outspoken about his hard-line stance.

"I believe that our former narrow margin of superiority is gone," Lehman warned Congress on February 6, 1981, just one day after he was sworn in. It didn't take long for him to earn a reputation as !'enfant terrible as he took control of the Navy in a way that no secretary had attempted in decades. Lehnian's plans included a radically new and aggressive naval strategy. He didn't talk much about what he expected the Soviets to do in a war. Instead, he wanted U.S. submarines, battleships, cruisers, and aircraft carriers to drive en masse right into the Barents and go after the Soviet surface and submarine fleets in their own waters. He was making, he declared, "a firm corn- mitment to go into the highest-threat areas and defeat the Soviet naval threat." Lehman became fond of describing Murmansk and the rest of the Kola Peninsula as "the most valuable piece of real estate on earth."

Soon, top admirals were grumbling that Lehman was a torpedo without a guidance system. Most liked his idea of a more aggressive strategy, but Lehman dismissed out of hand the protests of some admirals that it was suicide to drive aircraft carriers into the Barents where the Soviets could easily sink them with cruise missiles. He also shrugged off outside critics-academics and congressional staff members among them-who warned that threatening Soviet sea-based missiles too early in a war could backfire, prompting them to "use 'em or lose 'em."

This was the backdrop as Pentagon officials prepared to give Reagan his first briefing about submarine spy operations. It was scheduled for Friday, March 6, at 9:15 A.M., and was set to run 20 minutes. The luminaries who gathered in the wood-paneled Situation Room in the West Wing of the White House included Vice President George Bush, Chief of Staff James A. Baker III, Counselor Edwin Meese II and Richard V. Allen, the new national security adviser. Attending from the Pentagon were Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger; Admiral James D. Watkins, the vice chief of naval operations; Lehman, Haver, and Rear Admiral John L. Butts, now director of Naval Intelligence.

Weinberger and Watkins got things rolling by sketching the basics of the surveillance missions being run by regular attack subs. Then Butts stepped in to introduce Reagan to Seawolf, Parche and cabletapping. He made his presentation with a dramatic video and slide show that Lehman had told him would appeal to Reagan.

The president was, by all reports, mesmerized. Finally, he leaned over and asked his vice president, a former director of central intelligence, "Did you have something to do with this, George?"

Bush answered that some of these programs had run during his tenure at the CIA.

Then Rich Haver stepped in and, just as he had with Carter, began to describe how Naval Intelligence used the information the spy subs were collecting. Haver had slides too, but by now Reagan was itching for answers. He wanted to know if Haver thought the Soviets would be less willing to wage nuclear war now that they were facing him and his hard line in the White House. He also asked some of the same questions the analysts had been grappling with: How do the Soviets plan nuclear war? How do they train for it? How do they intend to fight it? Would a naval war go nuclear from day one, with Soviets using cruise missiles against aircraft carriers? And if it did, could it be contained at sea before anyone fired strategic ballistic missiles at the United States?

Again Haver succeeded in drawing a president into a dialogue. In a question and answer session that went on for nearly 15 minutes with Bush and Watkins fielding questions also, Haver explained the conventional view of war on the high seas and the long-held assumption that the Soviets would probably turn to tactical, short-range nukes early in those battles. He added that such a move had seemed likely to set off a broader nuclear war.

Then he offered some of the conclusions that his team of analysts had reached-that the Soviets appeared to be turning away from the conventional strategy and dedicating the bulk of their ships, attack subs and planes to protecting their missile subs in safe bastions close to home.

From here, Haver went on to plug Lehman's aggressive plan to confront those forces in Soviet waters. When Reagan seemed satisfied, Haver began to pack up the projector as Weinberger stepped in to carefully explain to the president what his role in the process would be, how he needed to sign off on all the sensitive espionage operations in advance. Weinberger took his time, talking slowly and very deliberately. He wanted to make sure that Reagan appreciated what was being asked of him.

Weinberger needn't have worried. Reagan was already hooked. Nobody had told him any of this when he was merely governor of California, home to the nation's most crucial spy subs. He had come to Washington still holding onto a view of the Navy built from equal parts of World War II fact and of World War II myth, the image of heroic men facing off against Japanese ships, their torpedoes sinking the enemy, dodging depth charges as they went along. This was an image dear to Reagan, and he loved to talk about how he played a submarine captain in the 1958 film Hellcats of the Navy."

Reagan had a favorite story about those days, and he told it nowalbeit with only the details fit for screen-in Reagan's version, he effortlessly echoed commands whispered by a Navy officer and, with cameras rolling, set one of the nation's subs steaming out of San Diego in a Pacific sunset.

As Bush and Baker began trying to hustle Reagan along, the president was still talking about his experiences on the Hellcats set and his admiration for the submariners he met there. This briefing had already gone on for 45 minutes, more than twice as long as it had been scheduled to run. Reagan, however, was in no rush. Turning to Haver, the president asked, "Where do you get guys like this?"

"Sir, they're just Americans," Haver answered in his best for-thegipper style.

On that note, Reagan finally seemed ready to leave. It was clear he wanted Haver to keep trying to puzzle out Soviet strategy and that he had given his tacit approval for the next round of submarine spying missions.

All this occurred as Seawolf was ready to go to sea again. For the first time, the Navy could send both special projects boats out at the same time, in different directions to different seas.

Before Parche could leave for her 1981 run, however, Commander Peter John Graef, her new captain, ordered what he thought would be a routine drug screening. The last thing he expected was to nail nearly 15 percent of his crew for marijuana use-twenty-two crew members, including three officers. There was no debate. They were off the boat, and replacements were rushed in.

This was definitely not what Reagan had in mind during the briefing when he had asked Rich Haver where the Navy found "these guys," these superheroes of the cold war. Although, in retrospect, Haver's answer seemed far less corny. They were "just Americans" after all.

Staffing these boats had never been easy. Navy recruiters went through bizarre contortions to keep their secret and at the same time find men who wouldn't mind trespassing in Soviet seas for the purpose of cabletapping. As one young submariner described it, the recruitment process was more like an interrogation. Men in leisure suits brought potential projects men into smoky rooms and began demanding to know: Did the recruit ever use drugs? Ever get in trouble with the law? The questions were peppered with promises that the government had ways of learning every dirty detail. "If you ever jacked off behind the barn, we will find out about it," one kid was told.

Parche wasn't unique in her personnel problems, and the drug bust had intelligence officials worried. Seawolf's crew was disintegrating under the mounting frustrations of serving on a broken-down and cursed boat. The pressure inspired some of her crew to lose themselves in a marijuana haze. Some even proclaimed their drug use openly and loudly, just to get off of the Seawolf. Then there were Seawolf's isolationists, who were readying for the day when they would take singular stands against communism in mountaintop homes transformed into forts. These men had taken to going out to the mud flats near the base to practice with their non-Navy-issue assault rifles, blasting apart cans and at least one truck. One man sent a live round into his television. 'The rest of the crew, leery, sweaty, and exhausted, just looked on at the dopers and the gun fanatics.