Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew (49 page)

The pace of operations was fueled by signs that the Soviets had finally learned to build subs as powerful and, more important, nearly as silent as American subs. There was a colossal irony to all of this: just as the Soviets had finally learned to construct first-class submarines, they were running out of money to build and operate them. But that realization had yet to filter down through the ranks on either side.

And so, out on Mare Island the pace of special projects operations didn't let up much. Seawolf had been retired in 1987, and Parche had gone into overhaul so that she could be modified to handle a wider array of potential projects. She was cut in half to fit in a 100-foot section that would hold new sophisticated equipment for cable-tapping and gear to allow her to retrieve objects from the ocean floor as Seawolf had. The overhaul was scheduled to take several years, but even so, the United States continued cable-tapping without pause, having readied Parche's replacement, the Richard B. Russell, named after the senator whose name had once been synonymous with a wink and a nod and nearly blank-check acceptance of all intelligence operations.

From 1987 through 1990, the Russell collected one award for each trip to the Barents-one Presidential Unit Citation and three Navy Unit Commendations. Her missions went on as Reagan left office in early .1989 and Bush came in, as Bush and Gorbachev picked up where Reagan and Gorbachev had left off, and even after Bush wrote privately to Gorbachev offering to help the Soviets retrieve one of their submarines that had been lost in the Norwegian Sea.*

Later that year, Trost was invited to Leningrad, the honored guest of the Soviet Navy. On this trip, a month before the Berlin Wall crum bled, he was given a firsthand look at how rapidly Soviet submarine capabilities were dwindling. The Soviets were having trouble keeping its subs at sea, paying for maintenance and running enough operations to train its crews. Trost was stunned by the changes that had taken place since he last visited the Soviet Union in 1971, a time when he knew his room had been bugged and he and his cohorts followed, so overtly in fact, that the Navy men had stopped in their tracks to offer to tell their Soviet shadow where they were headed. Now there seemed to be no spies. Instead, there were frank discussions, admiral to admiral, about the difficulties of keeping a navy running, about the futility of nuclear warfare. Indeed, Trost got his first look at Soviet submarine construction and the problems facing Soviet commanders: they saw subs on which sometimes only the officers spoke Russian and conscripts from the republics were so ill trained that only the officers could manage much of the critical maintenance necessary to keep the boats at sea. But perhaps the most telling moment occurred when Trost and the top Soviet admiral, Vladimir N. Chernavin, began joking, or half-joking, that their fates were linked. If either side failed to maintain an adequate-size navy, the other would have a terrible time justifying his defense expenditures. The world was changing from beneath them almost as fast as East and West Berliners had torn down the Wall with hammers, rocks, and their bare hands.

By now, top State Department officials had begun to worry about anything that could undermine Gorbachev as he continued to move toward closer relations with the United States. Their concern fell on the Russell cable-tapping mission that was scheduled for when Gorbachev and Bush were to meet again. In the end, the timing of Russell's trip was changed.

But one changed mission was not necessarily enough. Some diplomatic officials worried that the intelligence community was adapting too slowly from its long-held views of the Soviet Union. There was no doubt that after forty years the nation's spies were reluctant to be deprived of their enemy. What would happen to the intelligence agencies when nobody cared about the measurements of weaponry, of force? What would happen in a world when the most crucial information came not from covert efforts but from the Cable News Network and its twenty-four-hour reports about the sweeping social changes?

That the submarine force faced these questions with concern and some resentment was evident when retired and current officers met at the annual convention of the Naval Submarine League in June 1990. Around the world, shards of the Berlin Wall were being sold as souvenirs, but within the convention halls at a Radisson Hotel outside Washington, D.C., it was certain that nobody would be crying out for a "peace dividend," not a single man would eye the submarine fleet with a scowl on his face, a calculator in hand, figuring the myriad social programs that could be funded even in one boat's stead. The specter of the bean counters, however, loomed large, even in their absence.

The man who was now secretary of the Navy, H. Lawrence Garrett III, stood before the assemblage and warned that "budget-cutters are sharpening their knives, even as we speak." He failed to mention that the sharpest knife was coming from General Colin Powell, who had succeeded Crowe as chairman of the joint Chiefs of Staff and had just announced that the military budget would probably have to he cut by 25 percent over the next several years. Garrett, taking a far harder line, went on to dismiss any effect that perestroika and glasnost might have on the game of submarine spying. "The logic of nuclear deterrence has not changed just because the Soviet leader routinely presses the flesh on Pennsylvania Avenue," he thundered.

Other speakers were more moderate but still called for prudence and skepticism when it came to the Soviet Union. William H. J. Manthorpe Jr., then deputy director of Naval Intelligence, posed the question that was quickly becoming the rallying cry of the submarine force: "What will be the intentions of the Soviet leadership of the future? Can we depend on those intentions being benign? The answer, of course, is: No, I would not bet my country's security on it."

Before long, though, something happened that convinced even the most hard-line skeptics that the Soviet Union was no longer the most likely candidate to drag the United States into a war. Almost as if he realized that there was room on center stage for a new villain, Saddam Hussein stepped forward from Iraq and overnight annexed Kuwait. The United States had a new reason to fight, and this time it stood shoulder to shoulder with the Soviet Union, issuing an unprecedented joint statement denouncing the "blatant transgression of basic norms of civilized conduct" and calling for an arms embargo against Iraq. Secretary of State James A. Baker III would later proclaim that this was "The Day the Cold War Ended."

When war finally broke out in the Persian Gulf in January 1991, submarines played only a bit part. Still, the conflict dramatized the need to refocus defense efforts on regional conflicts, and with an eye to ensuring its place in future conflicts, the submarine force highlighted the role it had played against Iraq for all it was worth. The USS Louisville (SSN-724) and the USS Pittsburgh (SSN-720) together had fired a dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles against inland targets in Iraq. Other attack submarines stood guard for cargo ships in the Mediterranean, protecting vast quantities of war supplies. A string of subs from the United States and its allies-Turkey, Greece, Spain, Britain, France, and Italy-were positioned from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Suez Canal.

The war gave the sub force a chance to show its versatility, to show that it could do more than just chase Soviet subs and shadow Soviet ports. It also gave submariners themselves a sense that they could create a new mission-a comforting realization given the fact that any lingering doubts about Soviet intentions were soon to be wiped out by one dramatic event after another. Bush and Gorbachev announced a new deal to cut strategic stockpiles by one-third. Boris Yeltsin rescued Gorbachev from a reactionary coup, signaling the last failed gasp of the Communist hard-liners. And in a richly symbolic move, Bush also grounded the Strategic Air Command bombers that had been on nearconstant alert for thirty-two years.

The Pentagon began rethinking the nation's military strategy. The sub force knew it was going to have to re-create itself-just as it had been forced to do after World War II. It needed to find a new job and new enemies. There was no question that for much of the cold war submarines-missile and attack boats taken together-could stake claim to being the nation's most critical naval weapons. That made sense when the chief enemy had a fleet that was nearly as formidable. But the 1990s were bringing fundamental change, and it was already clear that the submarine was bound to fall from the pantheon. Like the clipper ships in their day, subs had been perfectly suited to their time, and they had so dominated that they defined an epoch.

For its part, the Navy started simply at first, writing new rules in mid-1991 legislating greater distances and caution for U.S. subs trailing Soviet subs. Then the Office of Naval Intelligence recommended that the number of missions off the Soviet coast be cut dramatically. No longer would the U.S. Navy try to maintain "cast-iron" coverage of the largest Soviet naval bases. No longer would one surveillance sub follow in the wake of another to Soviet waters. No longer would they keep constant watch, waiting for something-anything-interesting to happen.

Not even the vaunted special projects subs were sacred any longer. Desperate to update their fleet of spy satellites, the CIA and the Air Force began to eye the hundreds of millions of dollars still being invested in those subs. Because both Russell and Parche were in the shipyard throughout 1991, neither doing any missions, the rival agencies were able to suggest that two special projects boats might be too much of a luxury.

The process of attrition was stopped short by the surprising dissolution of the Soviet Union. On Christmas Day 1991, the Commonwealth of Independent States, a loose federation of republics, formally replaced the Soviet Union. Soon after, reports began coming out of a meeting of five thousand Russian military officers that painted a portrait of confusion, anger, and abject frustration. Members of the now-shattered Soviet Navy yanked the old hammer-and-sickle standards from their ships and began flying the flag of St. Andrew, which had marked Russian ships since the days of Peter the Great. Now U.S. Naval Intelligence desperately wanted to know who would get control of the Soviet missile subs and how they would be deployed under the new regimes.

Renewed surveillance had its price. On February 11, 1992, the USS Baton Rouge (SSN-689) collided with a Russian Sierra-class boat, among the newest and quietest to come out of the Soviet shipyards. Baton Rouge was tracking the Sierra near the 12-mile limit off Murmansk when the American commander lost his contact, which then struck Baton Rouge from below. Neither sub was damaged much, and nobody was hurt. But the incident was embarrassing.

Yeltsin quickly complained, and Baker met with him in Moscow to keep things calm. The next day, in an unprecedented move, the Pentagon publicly announced that the collision had occurred, and the Russian Navy began to complain publicly that the United States was still operating too close to its waters.

In the end, this embarrassment was what accelerated the shift in submarine surveillance away from Russia. The president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, chaired by retired Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, examined the special projects program. Shortly thereafter, Naval Intelligence was told that the board had decided that there was no longer any need for more than one special projects sub and that if the Navy was going to keep tapping underwater cables, then maybe it was time to find some cables in other parts of the world.

U.S. attack subs had already handled reconnaissance off countries like Lebanon and Libya, and in the mid-1980s two old missile subs had been converted to carry SEALs. The USS John Marshall (SSN- 611) had bobbed around in the Mediterranean for two months with fifty SEALs aboard during one crisis in Lebanon in 1989, waiting if needed to rescue hostages or mount a retaliatory strike.

Now as part of the Navy's new "From the Sea" military strategy, subs would ride shotgun for aircraft carriers and cruisers and take orders from task force commanders riding on those vessels. But the submarine force would also continue to lurk unseen near potential arenas of conflict and come up with the intelligence to "prepare the battlefield," before the task forces were ever called in. The term had been borrowed from the Army, but in this case it meant sending subs out two, three, four or more years before any anticipated conflicts to learn more about nations that loomed as potential foes, to determine their weaknesses, and to pave the way for U.S. victories in conflicts that would have fewer casualties because of these undersea efforts.

Iran, for instance, had already taken delivery of the first of three "Kilo" diesel submarines-silent and highly advanced boats built in Russia. A top Iranian admiral had boasted that he intended to use these subs to gain control of the Strait of Hormuz, the entrance to Persian Gulf ports and the starting point for about one-sixth of the world's oil. That was enough to send the USS Topeka (SSN-754) to the Persian Gulf to observe the Kilo's arrival in November 1992. It was typical of the new era of reconnaissance missions.

The new spy missions raised no agonizing debates at the National Security Council or within the White House, which was still approving all sub reconnaissance operations on a monthly basis. Still, there were accusations from Capitol Hill that the sub force was merely inventing enemies to keep itself employed. The Navy's answer was simple: some of the other targets had existed for years, and it was only the collapse of the Soviet Union that had offered the luxury of time and resources to allow subs to do a job they should have been doing all along. The enemies might he comparatively unsophisticated-an Iranian Kilo running on diesel power can't really be compared to the high-speed Akulas the Soviets sent out in the later years of the cold war. But the U.S. Navy would still need to know how the Iranians would operate the Kilos, would still need to find their blind spots. "Can you imagine the embarrassment to the U.S. Navy if the Kilos sank the USS America?" said one high-ranking Navy official. Pausing, he added, "Not on my watch."