Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew (45 page)

As Parche was loaded for a possible 150 days at sea, so many cans of food were hoisted aboard that the men had to cover a toilet seat with a plank in order to transform one of the heads into a pantry. After that was filled to the ceiling, the upper-level operations passageway was crammed with enough food to make it completely impassable. Anyone trying to reach the wardroom had to walk through the captain's quarters, through his bathroom to the executive officer's bathroom, and out of the XO's door, emerging to take a right at the first cleared path.

Commander Peter J. Graef was at the helm for this trip. Graef, the father of six, looked out for his crew, and they knew it. If he wasn't in the conn, Graef was probably playing cribbage in the wardroom, riding an exercise bike he had stashed in the engine room, or sitting with one of his chiefs. Rank didn't matter to him, Parche did. He believed every minute he was on board that he was at the high point of his career. What was to come after, he once told one of his men, "just doesn't matter, it's all downhill."

As he led his crew out for their "Odyssey 82," some of the men were reveling in their special celebrity. Others just reveled. "Animal" was on board, so dubbed because he delighted in breaking his own record for time lapsed between showers and because he alternately entertained and tortured his mates with his "stink-off" contests. Then there was "Bumper Car," who had acquired his name because he liked to walk through the sub bouncing off walls saying, "Look at me, I'm a bumper car." There was also a quartermaster called "Big Bird." He weighed in at more than 300 pounds, and he couldn't move through any of the hatches on board without somebody shouting, "Open, shut."

As far as the crew was concerned, the best diversion of all came from one of the youngest officers, Lieutenant Timothy R. Fain. The men saw him as a "raghat" just like them. He sported a goatee and shared their disdain for officer decorum. They targeted Fain's good nature for their most daring pranks. Their favorite was "EB-Greening" him-grabbing Fain and mummifying him with the leaf-green duct tape favored by the Electric Boat company because it could withstand sea pressures. It had been developed to seal up small cracks in equipment, but on Parche it was used primarily to bind and gag Fain. On this trip, he would be left green-wrapped for Graef on the wardroom table, and he would be similarly bandaged and left in the tunnel on the way to the reactor compartment as a surprise for the engineer officer.

The XO, Timothy W. Oliver, had less patience for the crew's antics, especially after the door to his compartment somehow ended up beneath the engines, then in the "wine cellar," a space by the bilges, and on into other hiding places around the boat. "No movies tonight!" Oliver would shout, echoing-by all accounts, unaware James Cagney's portrayal of a blowhard supply-ship captain in Mr. Roberts.

Parche might have been headed toward a mission more daring than any depicted a couple of years later in The Hunt for Red October, but she was manned by a crew taking its cues from M *A *S *H.

There was just one moment when everyone on hoard was certain of their position, and that was when they crossed the Equator. In a ceremony that had been repeated on many submarines, first-timers were initiated, and humiliated, as they paid homage to "King Neptune." They were forced to eat a bilious concoction off the King's belly, quite literally the stomach of one of their more-experienced mates.

There were no such celebrations when Parche finally entered the Barents. This time, her divers were installing a new kind of tap pod. The clamps were gone. Instead, this pod was designed to break away and remain on the sea bottom if the Soviets tried to raise the line for any reason.

Other procedures also had been changed since the Soviets found the Okhotsk tap. After Parche's divers laid the pod and her spooks had listened in for about a week, the submarine pulled out for comparatively safer waters before heading back in a week later to monitor the cable again. Graef may have been giving the recorders time to accumulate extra data for short-term review. The more likely alternative is that she came back in to add a second recorder or to lay a second tap in a new spot. That's what had been done in Okhotsk. Besides, the extra recording capacity would have been needed: Parche was scheduled for an overhaul after this mission and wouldn't come back to the Barents for two years.

Parche finally came home after being at sea for 137 days. For this "endurance op" she won another PUC, maintaining her streak of one Presidential Unit Citation for every trip to the Barents. This PUC, her fourth in four years, was signed by Reagan, who also sent Graef a box of cigars. The certificate used the standard language about "extraordinary heroism," but then it went on to say that Parche had "established new standards for endurance and excellence in underwater operations." The president had immortalized the Navy's cover story.

With Parche scheduled to be in overhaul throughout 1983, there was no other submarine that could be trusted to service the Barents cable tap. Seawolf was in the shipyard, recovering from storm damage, but her days of tapping Soviet cables were clearly over. Naval Intelligence never imagined Seawolf clunking and hanging around the Barents, and the Soviets' discovery of the Okhotsk tap had ended any tapping missions in that sea. When Seawolf finally did emerge from the yards, she would mainly be used to search for pieces of test missiles and other Soviet hardware in the open ocean.''
It also was still just drawing up plans to convert the USS Richard B. Russell (SSN- 687) into its fourth and final special projects sub.

So Naval Intelligence was without its best source of information during what would become one of the most tense years of the cold war since detente. The Navy was trying to learn how to trail the Soviets under the ice by following them there from their ports, but as the U.S. Navy sent more and more attack subs, the number of skirmishes with the Soviets in the Arctic increased. Not only that, trailing the Soviets under the ice was proving difficult. The Navy was most successful in the deep polar regions where the waters had sound properties most like those of the open ocean. That wasn't the case in the marginal ice zones.

Still, the Navy had no choice but to keep trying. There was enough Soviet activity that Admiral James Watkins, who had succeeded Hayward as CNO, finally told the American public that the latest front in the cold war had moved far up north. And, he said, "if there are forces in that area, we'd better know how to fight them." He added, "The ice is a beautiful place to hide."

It was now more critical than ever for Naval Intelligence to spread what it was learning about Soviet tactics and strategy throughout the sub force. The captains and spooks on regular surveillance subs were filing thicker patrol reports than ever, and even much of the information from the cable taps, once tightly guarded, was being distributed to submarine officers, although first sanitized to disguise the source. Naval Intelligence was so desperate to out-think the Soviets that it was even willing to rely on a little knowledgeable guesswork. A group of submariners and analysts were gathered and told to write up what they thought would be found in a Soviet submarine operating manual. When that was done, they were sent to visit and brief attack-submarine commanders on what they might expect to face at sea.

By now, it was clear that no one else was going to champion Rickover's idea for a special class of Arctic subs. Instead, the Navy had decided to try to give ice capabilities to nearly two dozen remaining Los Angeles-class subs, still scheduled for construction. Conceived as open-ocean aircraft carrier escorts, the original LA-class subs lacked some of the sophisticated electronic-surveillance equipment and icecapable sonar that had been built into Parche and other Sturgeon boats. That had left the nation's newest subs unable to handle what had become the most crucial spying operations as easily as the boats they were replacing.

Lyon had been asked to help research what changes were needed to allow the LA boats to do better under the ice, but his funding never seemed to come through. While under-ice operations were increasingly focused on attempts to develop torpedoes and sonar that could better distinguish between ice ridges and missile subs in the deep polar regions, Lyon kept arguing that the fleet commanders were ignoring the greatest problem-that no U.S. sub had the ability to hunt or maneuver well enough to fight within the marginal ice, where he was certain the Soviets were most likely to hide. Nobody of rank, it seemed, wanted to hear it.

Just as the Soviet sea threat was growing, relations between the superpowers were disintegrating. Yuri V. Andropov, a former director of the KGB who had succeeded Leonid Brezhnev as the Soviet leader in 1982, was spinning apocalyptic visions of a U.S. first strike that even many KGB experts saw as alarmist.

Then Reagan began stirring Soviet fears. On March 8, 1983, he outpreached the preachers at the convention of the National Association of Evangelicals, held that year in Orlando, Florida. He offered a laundry list of national and international evils: abortion, teen pregnancy, clinics providing teen birth control. After an impassioned plea for school prayer, he turned his attention to the Soviet Union.

"Yes, let us pray for the salvation of all of those who live in that totalitarian darkness, pray they will discover the joy of knowing God," Reagan intoned. "But until they do, let us be aware that while they preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the Earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world."

Moments later, he concluded, "So, in your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride, the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil."

Reagan had equated the fight against communism as the fight between good and evil before. But the phrase "evil empire" became one of those sound bites that gets repeated over and over. It definitely captured the fearful attention of the Soviets. Their concern that Reagan might consider a first strike was bolstered on March 23 when, less than two weeks after his "evil empire" speech, the president went on television to introduce the world to "Star Wars"-the strategic defense initiative (SDl).

At first, the Soviets saw this plan to orbit lasers designed to blast Soviet missiles out of the sky as impractical. But Reagan's rhetoric, as interpreted by the KGB, further convinced some Soviet officials that the president was capable of ordering a first strike.

The Soviets weren't calmed either when, shortly after the evil empire and Star Wars speeches, the U.S. Pacific Fleet began its largest maneuvers since World War II. Navy warplanes from the carriers Midway and Enterprise flew over Soviet military installations on the Kuril Islands that mark the entrance to the Sea of Okhotsk. The show of force was another step in Lehman's efforts to get the Soviets' attention.

Following that, crucial arms control talks stalled as the Soviets protested a U.S. plan to place low-flying cruise missiles and Pershing lI intermediate-range ballistic missiles in West Germany and Italy. Then, on August 3 1, the Soviets shot down a Korean Airlines passenger plane, KAL 007, which had veered over Soviet military bases near the Sea of Okhotsk. All 269 people on board were killed.

Reagan accused the Soviets of premeditated murder, of knowingly shooting down the civilian airliner. Rather than admit that they had made a lethal mistake, the Soviets claimed that the airliner was a CIA reconnaissance plane. Following the KAI, incident, Soviet students at U.S. universities were called home on the grounds that anti-Soviet sentiment put them in physical danger. By the time Lech Walesa won the Nobel Peace Prize on October 6, the KGB was convinced that the award was part of a Western-Zionist plot to destabilize Eastern Europe.

Tensions mounted further on October 26, when Reagan ordered the invasion of Grenada. The United States claimed it was rescuing American medical students. But in the process, it overthrew the infant Communist government.

As all this was going on, the KGB was actively looking for signs that NATO and the United States were considering a first strike. The search, now a top priority, had been started by Andropov when he was still heading the KGB. It was code-named "Operation RYAN" for the Russian term for nuclear missile attack, Raketno Yadernoye Napadenie. According to Oleg Gordievsky, a high-ranking KGB officer who later defected to England, the KGB, throughout 1983, was pressuring Soviet agents around the globe to feed RYAN, to report alarming information even if they were skeptical of it themselves.

In the wake of the KAL shoot-down, the KGB Pushed RYAN agents even harder. By now, Andropov had fallen gravely ill, and one of his kidneys had been removed. He had not been seen in public since mid-August. But he was still in charge, and he still believed the world could be heading toward nuclear Armageddon.*

With Operation RYAN running wild and nearly unchecked, Gordievsky says there was a real danger of a catastrophic mistake. That was never more true, he says, than during November NATO exercises, code-named "Able Archer." From November 2 to November 11, the NATO forces were practicing release procedures for tactical nuclear weapons, moving through all of the alert stages from readiness to general alert. Because the Soviets' own contingency plans for war called for real preparations to be shrouded under similar exercises, alarmists within the KGB came to believe that the NATO forces had been placed on an actual alert.