Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew (44 page)

In fact, the Soviets did more than find the tap. They reached down and lifted the large recording pods-both of them-out of the water. There was no hiding what they were-or for that matter, who had put them there. Inside of one was a part emblazoned with the words "Property of the United States Government."

Haver had checked and rechecked his time lines. There could he no mistake. None of this was Seawolf's fault. The Soviet survey ship had been on its way to the area before Seawolf fell on the cable. It had taken a meandering route to Okhotsk, a trek that suggested camouflage, all the way from the Baltic Sea on the Atlantic side. There was, however, almost no chance that U.S. intelligence was going to miss a ship heading toward the tap site. Both in the Barents and in Okhotsk, the U.S. maintained around-the-clock surveillance with satellites, land listening stations, in short, any means possible. That was especially easy in Okhotsk. The sea was so empty any ship that went in and loitered was hound to stand out. Now, that surveillance had paid off with one horrifying realization. The search for the taps almost had to have been deliberate. And if that were the case, Haver knew there was one glaring possibility, the worst possibility-that Seawolf hadn't shown her hand at all. The Soviets may have been tipped. There might very well he a spy.

This was not going to go down well in the Navy or the NSA. That much was clear to Haver as he listed a spy among the reasons why the tap could have been discovered in a report dated January 30, 1982, the day that just happened to be his thirty-seventh birthday. But while Haver expected distress, what he got back was outright skepticism. Top admirals decided he was seeing ghosts again, just as they had believed a few years earlier when he had raised an alert about a possible spy or communications leak in the Atlantic. Now here he was seeing spies in the Pacific.

What Haver was saying seemed unbelievable. If he was right, there was not one but two spies. One man couldn't he responsible for the problems in both oceans. Anyone with operational knowledge of Atlantic submarine trailings in the late I 970s was almost guaranteed to be out of the loop when it came to the Pacific tapping operations. Besides, the cable taps were about the best-kept secret in all of cold war intelligence. No, top admirals concluded, Haver was seeing shadows in coincidences. The Soviets, they figured, had probably just found the Okhotsk tap on a maintenance run to the cable.

Only a few in the Navy saw Haver's report, and they gave his warnings little thought. This was a time when the United States was facing a more immediate and tangible threat. The Soviets seemed to be engineering another big change in their missile-sub strategy, one more dangerous than their move back to the bastions in the Barents in the late 1970s. They were now holding some of their missile subs even closer to their coasts, in "deep bastions" such as the White Sea and the once nearly desolate Okhotsk, and they were hiding others under a nearly impenetrable shroud, the Arctic ice.

Haver and other bright young analysts still felt sure that the Soviets were chiefly trying to protect their missile subs from attack in the early stages of a war, and the early returns from the cable-tapping in the Barents seemed to back up this idea. But if they wanted to, the Soviets also could use the Arctic cover to launch a first strike, and the United States would have less warning than ever before. A missile shot from a Delta in a Soviet bastion in the Barents could take less than
thirty minutes to travel the 3,500 nautical miles to Washington, D.C. But a missile traveling from even the northern reaches of the Arctic's Baffin Bay, which sits just above Canada, could cut that time to less than twenty minutes."

Indeed, the Soviets' shift to the Arctic was a brilliant move. After all, it had never been lost on either side that the shortest distance between the United States and the Soviet Union was over the top of the world. Both nations had already aimed their huge arsenals of landbased missiles across the North Pole. But although both had been exploring the Arctic with submarines for decades, neither the United States nor the Soviet Union had been able to develop the technology to fight in the exotic Arctic environment effectively.

The Arctic is also the one area of the world where the prey has the distinct advantage over the hunter, where it would be hugely difficult for U.S. forces to root out the Soviet missile subs and destroy them. For one thing, there are thousands of miles of shallow ice-filled seas where the Soviets could scatter their subs. Even the most massive boats could disappear in these shallows, drift silently along with the ice, and allow the currents to decide direction. And by taking the shallow route through the Kara Sea, the Laptev Sea, and the Beaufort Sea around to the North American side, a Soviet sub could end up among the icebergs of Baffin Bay above Canada, the fjords along the west coast of Greenland, or even the channels that reach clear down to the Hudson Bay inside of Canada.

A submarine hiding motionless would be almost silent, while any attack submarine seeking it out would become the loudest and best target around. U.S. scientists had tried for years, with only limited success, to devise sonar that could compensate for conditions in these marginal ice areas where temperature and salinity layers, the din of near-constant storms, ice crunching upon ice, and the barks of seals and walruses combined to make tracking other subs nearly impossible.

No wonder an alert ran through the Navy, over to the Pentagon, and into the Oval Office when Soviet missile subs began slipping into the Arctic. At stake was nothing less than the ultimate nuclear advantage. And now the U.S. government needed to know: Was this simply another defensive move, a Soviet counterfeint in the game of deterrence? Or were the Soviets positioning for a possible first strike? Were Soviet leaders as insane and evil as President Ronald Reagan and his supporters were proclaiming? Or were the Soviets just afraid that Reagan was as hostile as his rhetoric?

Adding to these fears was the fact that the Soviet Union was building a new and powerful generation of missile subs: the Typhoons. The first was already in sea trials, and satellites had caught sight of at least three more of the subs under construction at Shipyard 402 in Severodvinsk. They were nuclear monsters, squat and bulbous and by far the largest undersea craft constructed by any nation-half again as large as the Trident missile subs, which the United States had put to sea in late 1981. While both classes of submarines stretched almost as long as two football fields, the Typhoon was twice as wide as the Trident.

The Soviets also were building four large underwater "tunnels" at a new submarine base at Gremikha near the tip of the Kola Peninsula, about 150 miles from Murmansk. Blasted out of the adjacent hillside, the granite tunnels were large enough to accommodate the Typhoons and seemed designed to give them protection from nuclear attack.

That the Typhoons would be ice-ready seemed obvious. They were protected by two pressure hulls within a third outer hull, and they had flat, retractable how diving planes, a shielded propeller shaft, and a reinforced steel sail. Hiding in the Arctic, it would be easy enough for a Typhoon to push its massive bulk through ice cover several feet thick for an attack on the United States. A Typhoon could carry twenty SS-N-20 nuclear missiles, each 50 feet long and able to hold ten warheads programmed to hit different targets as far as 4,500 nautical miles away. This was a boat built to survive, a boat built to ensure that, in the event of nuclear war, key U.S. military centers and cities would not.

The United States needed more than ever to divine the Soviets' intentions, to get right inside their minds. And that meant the cabletapping operation had to continue, even though the Okhotsk tap had been discovered. Seawolf was too old and too broken to ever send back to the Soviet coast. Future missions would be left up to Parche.

Meanwhile, it would be up to the rest of the sub force to keep learning about the technical capabilities of the Deltas and the Typhoons, to try to carry the crucial game of trailing to the Arctic, and to do something that had eluded the U.S. Navy for forty yearsdevelop a true Arctic capability. And so admirals turned again to one civilian scientist who had long insisted on studying those icy waters when few others in the Navy showed much interest: Waldo K. Lyon, the director of the Navy's Arctic Submarine Laboratory in San Diego.

The Navy learned early on that Lyon's impish physical stature was hugely misleading. Partially by sheer will, partially with his ability to enlist the support of at least one top admiral or CNO every year, Lyon had kept his lab alive and working to unearth the secrets of the Arctic ice since the end of World War II, when he had first become convinced that the Soviets would ultimately learn a lesson from the Nazi captains who had taken their U-boats under the ice's edge to target Allied supply ships. He had kept the lab running despite skepticism so fierce that the CNO handbook back in 1950 included the line: "It's fantasy to think about using the Arctic Ocean."

Still, Lyon had won enough backing to inspire the sub force to send at least one sub to the Arctic almost every year since Nautilus traveled beneath the North Pole in the late 1950s. Lyon had been up that way more than twenty times himself, and he or someone from his lab rode along on every one of those trips, helping to map routes tinder the ice and to experiment with different types of sonar.

But it was only now, at sixty-seven years old, that he was being called out of relative obscurity by a bunch of admirals who were suddenly terribly interested in the Arctic. Somebody suggested sending some of the older U.S. missile boats to hide under the ice, a seemingly perfect tit-fortat. Rickover, on the verge of being forced to retire by Secretary of the Navy Lehman, came up with his own proposal to build an experimental Arctic sub, one with a hardened hull and little more than a hump for a sail. He had tried his usual tactics to push the project through, bypassing the Navy and the Pentagon and sending Lyon and the proposal straight to the House Armed Services Committee. But all that ever came out of this effort was a letter to Lehman written by House staffers who were stunned that nearly a quarter-century of Arctic submarine expeditions hadn't left the United States ready to fight beneath the ice. Rick
over had to let the fight die when Lehman finally forced him to retire at age eighty-two in January 1982."

Later, one admiral confided to Lyon that the Navy would never build an experimental Arctic sub, because doing so would show the Soviets that the U.S. Navy was unable to fight under the ice. Besides, a plan to develop an Arctic sub would compete with another proposal now before Congress: the Navy wanted funds to build a new class of super-subs, one they were claiming could do just about anything. Some in the Navy were calling the boat "Fat Albert." It was, in fact, the highly controversial Seawolf class of attack submarines, the SSN-21 s, which were to follow the Los Angeles-class boats that were replacing the Sturgeon class.

Looking on, Naval Intelligence also liked the idea of a new class of submarines. Intelligence officers figured that any new technology would give the Soviets another problem to solve, another distraction. Besides, the intelligence officers believed that by announcing plans to build new and better submarines, the United States would send the message that the Soviets would never have the edge, no matter what they did.

All of this talk about new ice operations and new submarines helped distract attention from plans to send Parche back out to the Barents. This trip worried planners more than the return to Okhotsk had. The Barents cable carried the most sensitive information, and even if the Soviets had found the tap in Okhotsk by accident, reason might have led them to at least keep tighter watch on the Barents, especially if they suspected another tap but had been unable to find one. The round-the-clock surveillance of the tap site hadn't shown anything unusual, but it was hard to know for sure. Okhotsk was desolate; any activity was going to be pretty obvious. The waters of the Barents, on the other hand, were so active, that a Soviet search for a second cable tap could have been camouflaged by the usual traffic.

There was also the possibility, though most Naval Intelligence officers thought it a long shot, that Haver was right, that there was a spy. If that was the case, the Soviets might he keeping careful track of Parche herself. They might even know that Parche had invaded the Barents through the Arctic.

But what if Parche were sent by a different route, a very different route, one that could confuse any efforts at surveillance? The word was put out to the crew: Parche was leaving earlier than usual, in April instead of late summer, and she was going to go south, on an "endurance mission," south past the Equator, away from the Arctic, away from the Soviet Union. She would travel along the U.S. Pacific coast, past Central America, and down along South America to Cape Horn.

What was held back was that Parche would ultimately round the Cape and head back north through the Atlantic for the Barents. She would also have to swing wide of the Falkland Islands, where Britain and Argentina were at war. It was the most indirect route anyone could have thought of, save for a trip through Antarctica. It was a feint of masterful misdirection and it would also allow Parche to avoid the heavy ice she would have encountered, since she was leaving so early in the year. Parche would have to travel more than 15,000 nautical miles each way, a round trip that would make the mission last nearly five months. She was to go entirely underwater.

"They want to see how long we can last," the men began telling one another as they unknowingly repeated their own cover story. "We are going for a record."