Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew (46 page)

RYAN teams were given orders to look for signs that NATO was about to start a countdown toward nuclear war: last-minute crisis negotiations between Britain and the United States; food-industry efforts to stockpile, such as mass butchering of cattle; or evacuations of political, financial, and military leaders and their families. The Soviet alerts eased after November 11, when Able Archer came to an end.

But there was little easing of the paranoia. That December, Marshal Nikolai V. Ogarkov, chief of staff of the Soviet armed forces, made a stunning public pronouncement. He said that the Soviets believed the United States "would still like to launch a decapitating nuclear first strike."

Reagan's secretary of State, George P. Shultz, met Ogarkov's announcement with outright disbelief. Shultz was certain that this had to be just more talk. But in January 1984, the Soviets followed through on a threat made during the dispute over the Pershing II missiles. Offering their own show of force, they sent some Delta missile submarines back out into the Atlantic to cruise off U.S. shores along with the Yankees that were still routinely patrolling there. The aim was to show that the Deltas could hit targets throughout the United States as easily as the Pershings in Germany could target the Soviet Union. Ironically, the Soviet move actually put the Deltas just where the U.S. Navy could track them most easily. But the implied threat was nonetheless clear. Both sides were stepping up the normal catand-mouse game, trailing one another more aggressively than ever.

The Reagan administration now realized that it had to try to calm things down. The incendiary rhetoric in Washington came to an abrupt halt. Shultz began talking privately with Soviet diplomats to try to dispel the tension and renew a dialogue about arms control. Reagan took the new line public in a speech on January 16, when he said, "We are determined to deal with our differences peacefully, through negotiations." He also touched again on the vision he had evoked when he made his Star Wars proposal. "As I have said before, my dream is to see the day when nuclear weapons will be banished from the face of the earth."

After a while, the Soviets began to soften as well. Andropov died that February, and his successor, Konstantin Chernenko, signaled that he might be willing to talk about arms cuts. He attached a condition, however, that Reagan wasn't willing to go for. Chernenko wanted Reagan to drop Star Wars. The Soviets feared the technology could enable the United States to launch a first strike without fear of retaliation.

Throughout, the intelligence community was struggling to keep up with these events. The CIA launched a study to try to figure out why the Soviets seemed to have gotten so edgy, and as U.S. satellites captured the first images of Soviet missile tests in the Arctic, Naval Intelligence and the NSA began anxiously planning Parche's return to the Barents.

Parche left for the Barents shortly after yet another diplomatic scuffle, in which the Soviets boycotted the Olympic Games in Los Ange les, answering the U.S. boycott of the games in Moscow four years earlier. When she returned, it was clear that she had brought home far more than even the most optimistic intelligence officials had hoped for. The taps had been recording all through the alert sparked by Able Archer and had captured a detailed look at the Soviet Navy's nuclear strategy. This was an ear to the Soviet Navy's nuclear command-andcontrol structure as it was placing some of its missile submarines on high alert, rehearsing for war. Some former intelligence officials say this information simply confirmed the picture that had been emerging from the taps about how the Soviets planned to use their missile subs. But other former CIA, NSA, and Navy officials say that Parche's take from this mission was so critical to their understanding of the Soviets that it qualified as "the big casino," or "the crown jewels."

Based on the tap data, they say, U.S. intelligence realized that some information collected by human agents had been dead wrong. The tap recordings chronicled the dispersal of key Soviet ships and submarines and offered a new picture of the state of Soviet readiness. Just as some of the younger Navy analysts had postulated years earlier, the emphasis was going to be on protecting missile subs. In the early days of a crisis, the Soviets planned to move some of their Typhoons and Deltas into safe bastions. Those bastions would be guarded by the bulk of Soviet attack subs and warships. Attack vessels would also ride shotgun as the missile subs made a dash for the safety of the Arctic ice.

This was the strategy that had so worried the Pentagon. The Soviets had engineered a way to avoid NATO forces waiting to attack at the mouth of the GIUK gap as well as any NATO sub that tried to follow Soviet boats into the Barents. Still, Parche had carried home confirmation of one more crucial fact that eased the Pentagon's worst fears: The Soviet Union was not preparing for a first strike from the sea. As one former intelligence official says of the tap data, both from this and other missions: "It conveyed a notion that, while preemptive war was an option, the Soviet forces were not designed to go for a first strike."

The bottom line was this: the balance of power was changing. Soviet technological advances-the increased missile ranges, the hardening of submarine sails and hulls to withstand the ice-had placed the Soviet Union on the verge of achieving nuclear parity with the United States in the last major area where it had lagged behind. Now that the Soviet Union could better protect its missile subs, it had in its grasp that allimportant "strategic reserve," a nearly invulnerable second-strike force. In the Soviets' view, this would make it even less likely that the United States would ever launch a first strike against them.

President Reagan was briefed on the findings, but he left it largely to the Navy and Defense Secretary Weinberger to grapple with the strategic military implications. Lehman and Watkins had been arguing for several years that if war came, the Navy would have to go up under the ice and try to root out the Soviet missile submarines, and they now decided to make this the Navy's official strategy. Their decision was based in part on extensive war games in which U.S. officials had been asked to act as they thought Soviet commanders would. And there were assumptions made, most notably that any major crises would take months to build, giving the Navy plenty of time to flood attack subs into the Barents, pick up Soviet missile subs leaving port, and "tag" them-follow them to their patrol areas.

Heady from their successes trailing submarines in the deepest waters of the Arctic, most admirals didn't want to hear Lyon's continued warnings that it was a lot easier to play tag than hide-and-seek. He was certain that the Soviets could lose a trail easily where the U.S. subs couldn't find them, in the shallow-water marginal ice zones. The admirals were even less interested these days in his critiques of the design modifications for the new LA-class submarines. In fact, after forty years as the Navy's key Arctic expert, Lyon was inexplicably under orders to stay away from the redesign of the LA-class boats.

Navy leaders acknowledge that the sub force would have taken big losses by trying to blast into the Soviet bastions or roust their missile subs from tinder the ice. But they also say they had no doubt that they could have beaten many of the Soviet subs to their war positions. To test that theory, they sent more than two dozen attack subs surging from Atlantic ports toward the Soviet Union one Sunday. Every intelligence sensor was aimed at recording the Soviets' reaction, and not a single one picked up any sign that the scramble had been noticed. Besides that, Navy leaders were counting on the fact that U.S. crews were better trained than their Soviet counterparts and had spent far more time at sea given how much of the Soviet fleet was usually broken down and out of service. And if the Soviets were willing to confine themselves to the Arctic and their home waters, the U.S. subs would know roughly where to hunt their prey. They also would have prior knowledge of favorite Soviet patrol areas from surveillance ops and from the sonobuoys now peppering the marginal ice where SOSUS didn't reach.

The limits and the advantages of the U.S. strategy were voiced most bluntly by Watkins, who was the chief of Naval Operations from mid1982 until mid-1986. He says the Soviets' strategy of pulling back their missile subs was "probably smart" and initially did make it more difficult to destroy them. But he also believed that if the Soviets started a nuclear war with land missiles, the United States could eliminate "a very large percentage" of the missile subs that they would have positioned to make a second strike from the sea.

Still, any strategy that allowed for even a few enemy missile subs to fire at U.S. targets was a far cry from the days when most of the Soviet Yankees traveled the seas with unknown and lethal shadows that could prevent them from shooting at all. And for intelligence officials, it was a huge relief to realize that the Soviets were not readying to use their improved position to start a war.

Ironically, the 1984 run-the trip that brought home the "big casino"-was the first of Parche's five missions to the Barents that would fail to win a Presidential Unit Citation. (Instead, Parche was given a Navy Unit Commendation, the next highest award.) Parche may have supplied the United States with an amazing wealth of critical information, but her own role in the ongoing cold war drama was becoming more routine.

Actually, Naval Intelligence was now hatching a plan to access the Soviet cable in real time, without having to wait for a submarine to travel there at all. The concept had been kicking around NURO since the mid-1970s, when some officials envisioned linking the Okhotsk tap by cable to Japan. John Butts, the director of Naval Intelligence, and his team were now pushing an ambitious idea to lay 1,200 miles of cable between the Barents taps and Greenland. He envisioned barges that would look so perfectly innocuous that no one would ever dream that they were involved in stretching and laying his imagined cable. And he saw a full-time staff of linguists and cryptologists dedicated to translating and decoding the material as it came in.

The plan was grand. In fact, it was grandiose. Some of Butts's colleagues began to joke that he was trying to take over the world. They watched, wondering whether Butts and his aides would realize they were getting more than a little carried away. They waited as Butts tallied up the $1 billion cost. The intelligence committees in Congress didn't wonder or wait. They simply made it clear they were going to sink Butts's plan, barges and all.

Throughout all of this, the two superpowers continued talking about shedding, or at least shrinking, their nuclear arsenals. And when Chernenko died in March 1985, the old Soviet guard all but died with him. For its new leader, the Politburo reached into a younger generation to find fifty-four-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev. He had been convinced ever since the Able Archer panic that the Soviet Union had to get back to the negotiating table. Now, as he took up his post as general secretary, he seemed more willing than any of his recent predecessors to consider major changes in U.S.-Soviet relations.

Indeed, he made his first move late on the day of Chernenko's funeral. "The USSR has never intended to fight the United States and does not have such intentions now," Gorbachev flatly declared to Bush and Shultz. "There have never been such madmen within the Soviet leadership, and there are none now."

During these first steps toward conciliation, U.S. authorities made startling discoveries that reminded the nation that the days of spies and old-style cold warriors were not over. Rich Haver, it seems, hadn't been seeing ghosts at all.

It was early in 1985 when Bill Studeman, who was about to succeed Butts as director of Naval Intelligence, walked into Haver's office with a critical piece of paper. Haver, who was now the deputy director of Naval Intelligence, took it and read through the FBI's account of an interview with a woman named Barbara Walker, who had come to report that her husband, a former Navy chief, had been spying for the Soviets. The FBI noted that Walker had been living the good life, although his only visible means of support was a failing detective business.

Haver knew instantly that he was holding the answer that he and Studeman had sought back in the late 1970s when they tried to convince admirals to investigate a possible communications break.

John A. Walker Jr. was a retired Navy submariner and communications specialist. In 1967 he had been a watch officer in Norfolk handling communications with American submarines in the Atlantic. He had access to reports on submarine operations, technical manuals, and the daily key lists that were used to unscramble all of the messages sent through the military's most widely used coding machines. If the Soviets had gotten hold of any of this, they would have known that they needed to look over their shoulders, that their missile subs were being followed by much quieter U.S. subs. They also would have known just how quiet U.S. submarines were, and just how critical submarine-quieting technology was to the balance of ocean power.

Later, Haver and Studeman learned that Walker had given all this to the Soviets, and more. In fact, when Walker retired from the Navy in 1976, he had continued his espionage by drawing others into his scheme. First he recruited another Navy communications specialist, Jerry A. Whitworth, who continued Walker's access to the crucial key lists. In the early 1980s, Walker enlisted his brother Arthur, who worked for a defense contractor. And soon after that, Walker began using his son Michael, an enlisted man on the USS Nirnitz, a nuclearpowered aircraft carrier. Walker was caught only because his ex-wife wanted to prevent him from recruiting their daughter into a spy ring that had already swallowed their son.