Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew (50 page)

The shift to these new missions was well under way when President Bill Clinton took office in early 1993. But as he and his administration laid plans for his first summit with Yeltsin, scheduled for the first week of April, they got hit by what seemed to he an anachronistic and unwelcome blast from the past.

On March 20, the USS Grayling (SSN-646) collided with a Soviet missile sub in the Barents Sea. Grayling had been shadowing the Russian sub 105 miles north of Murmansk, smack in the middle of the Northern Fleet's training range. The Russians claimed that their sub had been moving for more than an hour at a steady speed, course, and depth when Grayling left a huge dent in their starboard how. Nobody was hurt.

The incident was everything the State Department had been worrying about since the final days of Reagan's tenure. Yeltsin was in the midst of a political crisis in Moscow. News that his friends within the United States were still sending submarines tooling about Russia's most sensitive ports and bases wasn't going to boost his popularity.

At first, the Pentagon said Grayling had been trailing one of Russia's newest missile boats, a Delta IV, but the Russians insisted that Grayling had been hot on the trail of a Delta III, a class of subs that dated back to the late 1970s. This provoked more than a few stinging comments from other submariners, all along the lines that the Navy already had so much information on the Delta Ills that "we could build one from the hull up."

Clinton was furious, and so were his aides. In exasperation, one senior administration official complained of the Navy's leaders: "One wonders if they've read the newspapers."

The Russian defense ministry issued an angry statement expressing "great concern." It was one thing to take such risks during the cold war, but now? As Rear Admiral Valery Aleksin, the chief navigator, put it, "We walk on the razor edge. Once, this hunt will end up in a disaster. I am sure today, too, that if such a practice doesn't stop, the disaster is inevitable."

Clinton offered Yeltsin a formal apology and smoothed things over with him at the start of the summit in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he also pledged $1.6 billion in aid to support Yeltsin's reforms. Declaring the collision "regrettable," Clinton said, "I don't want it to ever happen again." He ordered a review of both the incident and the policies "of which the incident happened to be an unintended part."

That last part of Clinton's promise worried the Navy. There needed to be damage control, and fast. Rear Admiral Edward D. Sheafer Jr., who was now the director of Naval Intelligence, along with the captain who coordinated the submarine reconnaissance program, prepared a detailed briefing for top officials, including Clinton's new national security adviser, Anthony Lake, and his deputy, Samuel Berger; Strobe Talbott, the deputy secretary of State; and nearly everybody, it seemed, within the office of Secretary of Defense Les Aspin. The Navy team stressed that submarine spying had indeed changed with the times. Now, only 25 percent of the missions were directed toward Russian waters. The remaining 75 percent had turned to Middle Eastern waters to spy on Iran and enforce the economic embargo against Iraq, to the Adriatic to help seal off Bosnia from Western arms shipments, to the waters off of Haiti to enforce an arms embargo there and to monitor potential threats in the Far East. Finally the submariners marched out their new rallying cry, the one about "preparing the battlefields" around the globe.

It was a briefing as good as any offered up during the cold war, one that showed how quickly the submarine force had reinvented itself. By the time Sheafer and his staff were done, even they were astonished. Here they had thought the Grayling collision might sink their program, and instead, the Naval Intelligence team ended up chortling that the collision "saved our bacon." In their desperation, they did such an impressive job of touting the sub force that several administration officials were practically cheering, saying things such as, "Goddamn, it's a free ocean," and, "There's no prohibition against being outside another country's territorial waters." High administration officials who might never have focused on submarines and submarine spying were impressed that the Navy had changed so much without having to be dragged away from its old foe. The Navy even got the go-ahead to keep watching the Russians, albeit at this greatly reduced pace, as long as the reconnaissance was done more cautiously and judiciously.

Since then, the submarine force has fared relatively well under Clinton. Perhaps his biggest favor has been keeping alive the Seawolf pro gram: Clinton agreed to build three of the mammoth $2.5 billion attack subs rather than halt the program at one, as Bush had tried to do. Clinton said he was doing that to prevent the industrial base that builds submarines from shriveling and dying altogether. There was opposition from normally hawkish Republicans, who described the Seawolf as a cold war relic.

Clinton also okayed a plan to build another new class of attack submarines, one smaller and cheaper than the Seawolf. Quieter and much more versatile than the Los Angeles subs, this new class, known first as "the New Attack Submarine," or NSSN, and now the Virginia class, is designed for the array of new missions in shallow, regional waters. Clinton agrees that the Navy will need new subs after the turn of the century to replace some of the aging Los Angeles vessels. His support has taken some of the sting out of a dramatic downsizing of the force. From a high of ninety-eight in the late 1980s, the number of attack subs had fallen to sixty-six by 1998 and is now expected to dwindle to fifty early in the next century and even further as the Los Angeles subs are retired. The fleet of nuclear missile subs, which are still circling quietly in the oceans, will dwindle to ten to fourteen boats from a onetime high of forty-one.

The Navy is asking Congress for the cash to build the new subs and is arguing that they will be capable of operating not only near Third World countries but also up against Russian shores. The Seawolf is said to be as much as thirty times quieter than the early Los Angelesclass subs that came out in the 1970s, and ten times quieter than even the newest LA-class subs. Both Seawolf and the Virginia class will be especially useful for the new missions closer in to shores and for assisting in conflicts on land. They will carry Tomahawk missiles, be equipped with sonar designed to be especially useful in the shallows, and they will be configured to carry detachments of Navy SEALs and other special forces. The Navy also has been pouring money into creating underwater drones-and even small pilotless aircraft-that could be controlled by these submarines and swim out ahead to look for mines or fly out to do surveillance.

The subs in use now are also being upgraded with new microprocessing technologies to enable them to better communicate a variety of intelligence to commanders of task force battle groups, including email and photographs-even video-taken through their periscopes. This same technology is also likely to help subs with some of the other new missions the Navy has taken on since the end of the cold war. Subs have occasionally tipped the Coast Guard to suspicious trawlers in the Caribbean that have turned out to he carrying shipments of illegal drugs. And subs have been alerting surface ships to freighters suspected of trying to make illicit shipments of arms and other cargo in violation of U.S. embargoes.

Still, the U.S. sub force remains most concerned with countering the threat from other submarines, including new models of both diesel and nuclear boats. Russia has been supplying advanced Kilo subs to Iran and China. Even some Western nations, such as Germany, have been exporting advanced diesel subs to Third World countries. In addition, the Russians continue to view the submarine as the most important vessel in their Navy, and they have kept improving the Akulas, their quietest and most sophisticated nuclear attack subs. (There are still significant flaws in Russian technology. According to Naval Intelligence officials, the latest Akulas are very quiet below 10 knots, but they develop audible knocks at speeds above that and become easy to detect.) The Russians also have started to build an even more advanced replacement, known as the Severodvinsk class, which some U.S. officials fear could he quieter than the improved Los Angeles subs. When and if a proposed START II treaty is finally ratified by the Russian Durna, the bulk of Russian nuclear might will shift to the sea. As long as Russia still has the world's second most powerful sub force-as long as "The Bear Still Swims," as Navy briefers like to say-it needs to be watched, though now it has little money to send its subs to sea.

Clinton has agreed to continue the limited surveillance operations off of Russia, and his approvals have resulted in a few lonely sentinels lurking off Vladivostok and Murmansk, at least at times when the Navy has reason to believe the Russians might be engaging in an exercise or testing new equipment. It also is with Clinton's nod that the special projects spy program has continued, although its focus has shifted away from Russia. Government officials say that one of the special projects subs-probably Russell in 1992-went back to the Barents to retrieve the tap pods after the Soviet Union collapsed. Russell went cable tapping in other parts of the world before she was retired in mid-1993. That's when Parche came back from her long overhaul, earning two more Presidential Unit Citations, in 1993 and 1994, and a string of Navy Unit Commendations. All told, Parche has now won at least seven PUCs, by far the most of any ship in Navy his tory. Details of exactly where Parche is going now have been tightly held, even more so than any of her cold war efforts, but those awards never would have been given had Parche not continued to pioneer new and dangerous missions. She can still tap cables, and since her refit, she can also retrieve military hardware off the ocean floor.

The Navy, it is clear, is also determined to hold on to her. When the rash of post-cold war base closings rang the end of the Mare Island Naval Shipyard in 1994, Parche was moved to Bangor, Washington, where she is the only attack sub to moor at a major Trident missilesub base. In 1995, 1996, and 1997, public records show that Parche continued to win Navy Unit Commendations. And the Navy has pushed her special technology forward and could even be using unmanned drones to swim out from Parche and handle much of the tasks of cable-tapping without risking her crew's lives.

Her targets are easy to guess at and no doubt reflect the Navy's broader intelligence concerns. Iran took possession of its third Kilo in January 1997. The cover of the 1997 issue of Worldwide Submarine Challenges, a Naval Intelligence annual, pictures a Chinese submarine and crew. Inside is a running litany of nations that present a potential threat, including two Asian nations, China and North Korea. China not only used one of its Kilos in highly threatening exercises off Taiwan in 1996 but fired land missiles as warning shots, forcing Clinton to send U.S. aircraft carriers to ensure that no attack took place. The Chinese are also using Russian technology to develop their own fleet of modern nuclear missile subs, and they have been testing land-based ballistic missiles with ranges long enough to reach U.S. shores. Chinese test missiles fired into the oceans would be invaluable to the United States if they were retrieved. Finally, concerns about North Korea have escalated greatly. The country repeatedly has used diesel subs to try to infiltrate commandos into South Korea.

Parche is still out there, as are other attack submarines bent on spying. The program that began with the first chill of the cold war continues.

   A sub commander and his wife once made a promise: when he was at sea, they would both look at the same star at the same time of night. She would never know when he could dare bring his sub to periscope depth, dare take a peek at the sky. L J So she faithfully sought out their star every night at the appointed hour, even though she realized that he was probably moving silently through the darkness of the ocean. She did that in the hope that at least once they would be gazing at their star together. She did that every night until he came home.

These two were among the lucky ones. The stress caused by long months at sea and the staunch secrecy that submariners were sworn to maintain tore many other couples apart. No final analysis of the submarine war can ignore the human costs. These men traded months, years, and more to become what was for decades the country's best defense against nuclear attack from the sea.

Submariners tracked Soviet missile submarines as well as anyone could, development by development and mile by mile. Only another sub could follow a Soviet boomer, hear just what clanked, see just how its crew operated, and learn just where it would he going should the order ever come to fire. This was all intelligence that grew over time, a few facts from each mission, some of it redundant, much of it cumulative. It was intelligence that had to he collected all over again each time the Soviets put out a new class of subs, each time they came up with a new tactic.

At their best, submarines did something more: they enabled the United States to get a glimpse inside the minds of Soviet military leaders. A U.S. captain in the midst of a trail could see himself in the decisions of a Soviet commander, just as he could see how the other man was so very different.

The special fleet of submarines equipped to tap cables made it possible to listen as Soviet naval headquarters detailed day-to-day frustrations, critiqued missions, and reacted to fears of an American nuclear strike. At a point in time when both superpowers could start nuclear war with a push of a button, this was a rare and crucial look at who the adversary really was.

Hunan agents, satellites, and spy planes, along with subs, all got very good at collecting information about Soviet hardware-what was being built, the technical specifications. It was much harder, however, to get a glimpse into the Soviet psyche. In the end, not even the cable taps could reveal much about what the top Soviet leadership thought or show the true political and economic crises building in a country so closed. Still, the taps were often the best gauges anyone had, even when what they did record was trapped underwater for months until a sub could be sent to retrieve their tapes.