Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew (51 page)

The men who serviced those cables at the bottom of the Barents and Okhotsk knew they faced immense risk. The self-destruct charges they carried onboard were a grim reminder. Even men who often stood as rivals to Naval Intelligence, top officers at the CIA, acknowledge that cable-tapping was the most dangerous of any long-standing intelligence operation of the cold war. That aura of danger awarded the missions respect, just as it made them especially rare.

While satellites replaced many of the spy planes and made intelligence-gathering safer and more antiseptic, submarines continued to confront the Soviets directly. That not only set subs apart from any other intelligence collectors, but from the rest of the military. Submariners knew they were part of the only force that practiced not simply against allies in war games, but by meeting the enemy, day in and day out.

There was always a huge risk of a destabilizing incident, even the risk that a submarine might spark real battle. Occasionally some critics worried publicly that this could have happened each time a submarine was detected in Soviet waters, each time one risked retaliation, each time there was a collision. There is no question that some skippers went too far in their quest for the big score. But when the Navy and the intelligence agencies weighed the gains against the possibility of a violent response, they relied on one simple fact: the Soviets were sending out their spies as well. As Admiral James D. Watkins, the former chief of Naval Operations and secretary of Energy, put it: "The fact that you get caught periodically is historical. So what. You know everybody's in the game." He went on to say: "As long as we're doing it, which you might say in a way that does not clearly violate agreements that we made or international laws we subscribe to, it is a fair game. We should never apologize for it. We've got to get on with it. And if we don't do it, we are not doing our job."

There's more than a bit of doublespeak in his stress on spying in ways that do "not clearly" violate laws and agreements and in his further limiting his thoughts to laws that "we subscribe to." But looking back, it's clear that even the most violent submarine encounters never sparked real crisis, just as it's clear that the Soviets were writing their rules in much the same way. Most of the time the United States was violating Soviet secrecy with the cable taps, the Soviets were getting the same kind of information-having enlisted John Walker and his spy ring to steal the codes that let them gaze right back at the U.S. Navy's soul.

The Soviet Union's efforts to keep up with the United States military, especially its efforts to create a force of missile subs that could evade U.S. attack subs during the opening salvos of a nuclear war, clearly contributed to the country's ultimate bankruptcy. The contest was costly for the United States as well, as hundreds of billions of dollars were poured into building and manning nearly two hundred nuclear subs and expanding the SOSUS net. Still, the intelligence gained also saved vast sums by helping to hone decisions about just what defense systems the United States really needed. Now that the Soviet bear is bankrupt and eviscerated and the cold war is over, the U.S. Navy's plans to build new subs have come under fire and submarine budgets have been slashed. Men will still go to sea, still brave the depths to spy on enemies of the United States, but those enemies are more likely to be found in Third World hot spots, and for now, no other country poses as big or sweeping a problem at sea as the Soviet Union did. When Congress finally gets around to cutting overall intelligence budgets, which have been only slightly reduced from cold war levels, it is likely that the sub force will be squeezed some more.

Meanwhile, both Russia and the United States are still facing other enormous costs as they decommission many of their nuclear-powered subs and are forced to find some way to dispose of the reactors that powered them. Russia has the most daunting burden-it has the enormous and perhaps impossible job of cleaning up the Barents, of undo ing the damage caused by the dumping of a dozen nuclear reactors, spent cores, and radioactive parts from old submarines into the waters near the northern island of Novaya Zemlya.

Russia and the United States share something else as well. The secrecy that has been maintained on both sides about all cold war sub operations has left lingering pain, especially for the families of men lost in this cold war under the seas. For instance, neither navy has yet offered conclusive answers about the disappearance of the subs they lost in 1 968: not the Americans about Scorpion and not the Russians about the Golf.

Soviet officials simply marked the Golf's men as missing and were so determined to bury their embarrassing secret that they refused to bestow the honors and pensions that normally went to loved ones of those who suffered a military death, a death that occurred, in Soviet parlance, "while executing the combat task." Instead, wives were given a onetime payment of 1,500 rubles and an annual pension of 58 rubles for each child and disabled relative of the dead men.

Irina Zhuravina, who lost her husband on the Golf, refused to spend those rubles because she thought that would be reconciling to her husband's death on her government's terms. After the Golf was lost, she was working at the customs office at an airport, where foreign newspapers and magazines were collected, censored, or confiscated outright, and she began reading the forbidden pages, risking imprisonment as she did so. Year after year, she kept at it, hoping that news from another country could tell her how her husband had died.

It wasn't until seven years after Halibut found the Golf that Zhu- ravina came across the account of the Glomar recovery attempt in a Western magazine. That's how she learned that her husband's submarine had gone down, that the Americans had found it, tried to raise it, and brought up at least six bodies, six men who were prevented by politics from coming home. But when she asked, her government refused to acknowledge any of this.

Andrei Kobzar, who was the captain's son, got the same kind of evasive answers when he wrote to several directorates about his father, Vladimir Ivanovich Kobzar. Finally, he went to the U.S. embassy in Moscow. Surely someone there could tell him something. But the U.S. diplomats held firm to their nondisclosure agreement with the Kremlin-held firm to their conspiracy of silence.

Then, two years after the Soviet Union disappeared, Robert M. Gates decided to make what he considered "a dramatic gesture" as he prepared to become the first CIA director to visit the Kremlin. Somebody at the CIA mentioned that the crew of the Glonzar had videotaped the burial at sea they had given the six recovered Golf submariners. Gates fought for and won permission to bring the tape with him to his first meeting with Boris Yeltsin. Two weeks later, the tape aired on Soviet national television. The Golf families got to see American sailors standing at attention as both national anthems were played and as the Americans added Russian prayers to the naval service for the dead. Kobzar, Zhuravina, and the rest were astonished and moved that Americans, their enemies for so long, would treat their nien with such respect. Still, the tape wasn't enough, any more than the declassified pictures of Scorpion's remains were enough to appease the families who lost men on that sub.

In the United States and in Russia, families of the dead-and of the living-have been calling for more. They have wanted their governments to give up their remaining secrets. Some want simply to lay their men to rest; others want the answers to all of those questions that have been so long forbidden. They want to know: was it all worth it?

Perhaps the entire nuclear arms race was insane, but once it existed, spy subs became a crucial part of dealing with that insanity. That subs were lost to technological failures and in a rush to the sea is horrible. But once nuclear missiles were put on submarines, there had to be a way to track them, to threaten them, to ensure that neither country felt safe enough to use them. For the Soviet Union, that meant trying to keep the United States from knowing just how many failures their nuclear subs were suffering. For the United States, it meant trying to keep the Soviets from knowing just how truly vulnerable their subs were.

With stakes this high, there were valid reasons for secrecy. But obsessive secrecy tends to feed on itself, obscuring critical lessons from the past-lessons that are being lost forever as generations of men who lived that past are dying. Now, with the end of the cold war and a new phase in submarine espionage beginning, it's time to look back, time to assess what has so long been hidden.

SUBMARINE COLLISIONS

Throughout the cold war, there were dozens of submarine accidents as boats that relied on sound for sight came as close as they dared to the enemy-sometimes too close. None of these accidents were as severe as Tautog's collision with Black Lila, but even a relatively minor hump by a four-thousand-ton vessel is enough to send men and their craft reeling. Here are some of the other incidents caused when submarines sent on spec ops by the United States and Great Britain slammed into or were hit by Soviet subs and ships or other vessels.

This list includes collisions that were confirmed and others considered probable. Some have never been disclosed before.

1960-1961: USS Swordfish

While Swordfish (SSN-579) was on a surveillance mission off the Soviet Pacific coast, a Soviet sub apparently attempted to surfacefrom directly below. The American boat was at periscope depth when it suddenly shook from an impact. One crew member recalls that the officer at the conn looked through the scope and saw "running lights"-lights along port and starboard that a sub might turn on as it surfaced. By the time the Swordfish itself came to the surface, the ocean was clear; the crew assumed that the Soviet sub had dived back down.

Early 1960s: Unidentified Sub, Possibly USS Skipjack

One former Navy intelligence official clearly remembers an incident in which a U.S. sub got tangled up with a Soviet destroyer in the Barents Sea. He wasn't sure, but believed that the sub was the Skipjack (SSN- 585). He was certain, however, that the American boat came home with "a propeller gouge on the sail." This may be one of the incidents that Seymour M. Hersh mentioned in the New York Times in May 1975, when he described an unnamed Holystone sub that was damaged when it surfaced underneath a Soviet ship in the midst of a Soviet fleet naval exercise. Hersh also reported that the sub suffered damage to its conning tower and escaped despite a search by Soviet vessels.

July 1965: USS Medregal

The Medregal (SS-480) smashed into, and crippled, a Greek cargo freighter that was under surveillance because it was suspected of carrying supplies to enemy forces in Vietnam. The accident happened in the Gulf of Tonkin when the diesel sub was being driven by a temporary commander. The Medregal's regular skipper had broken his neck diving into a swimming pool during a port stop in the Philippines.