Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew (56 page)

Lederer's article and book also omitted any mention of the faulty foul-weather gear and boots that dragged some of the Tusk crew members to their deaths. This problem was documented in the Tusk log for August 25, 1949. Retired Rear Admiral Eugene B. Fluckey, who was the Atlantic submarine fleet's legal officer at that time, also confirmed in an interview that the foul-weather gear given to the men on the Tusk was "an experimental suit that nobody had tested. But the only thing is when you're in the water, it turns you upside down. And they got hung with their boots up."

On the Soviet side, we drew our description of the Soviet naval bases near Murmansk from "Kola Inlet and Its Facilities," ONI Review (September 1949). And the Soviets' suspicions that the Cochino was on a spy mission were cited in Associated Press articles that appeared on September 3 and 19, 1949, in the New London Day and on September 21, 1949, in the New York Herald Tribune.

Chapter 2: Whiskey A-Go-Go

Main interviews: Former crew members of the USS Gudgeon and other diesel submarines and former top officials from the U.S. subma- rive force, the Office of Naval Intelligence, and the Naval Security Group, which employed the Russian linguists and other spooks who rode on the subs.

Government documents, articles, books, and other sources: The dates of the Gudgeon's deployment in the summer of 1957 come from its daily deck logs on file at the National Archives, Suitland Records Center. The logs show how many miles the Gudgeon steamed each day and other basic facts, but they give no hint that it was on an intelligence mission.

A listing of all of the diesel submarines that made surveillance deployments during the Korean War-and descriptions of the difficulties some encountered with icy weather and primitive reconnaissance equipment-are included in the interim evaluation reports that were prepared every six months during the Korean War by the commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. They are in the files of the Operational Archives Branch at the Naval Historical Center.

U.S. intelligence officials have long believed that a U.S. surface ship sank a Soviet sub that came close to an aircraft carrier attack force in 1951, early in the Korean War, according to two former intelligence officers. The United States was so concerned that the Soviet Navy would try to help the North Koreans that surface ships were under orders to protect U.S. warships by depth charging any possible hostile submarines, and in this case, one force depth charged a suspected Soviet sub and then saw no signs that it had survived. Asked about this, current Russian Navy officials said they knew of no sub losses around the time of the Korean War, and then said it would be too difficult to check navy archives or reach a definitive answer.

The U.S. Navy itself used one sub in a direct combat role during the Korean conflict, sending the diesel boat, USS Perch (SS-313), to the shores of North Korea in 1950. On board were U.S. troops and sixtythree British Royal marines. Although Perch was detected, commandos managed to hoard rubber rafts and make their way to shore. A bombing raid staged by the United States that night helped draw fire away, while the men landed, blew up a culvert, mined a tunnel, and destroyed a train. One British marine was killed by enemy troops. This tale is well recounted in Submarines at War: The History of the American Silent Service by Edwin P. Hoyt (New York: Stein and Day Publishers, 1983), pp. 299-303.

The monthly issues of the ON[ Review provided an excellent source for tracking the rapid growth of the Soviet submarine fleet throughout the 1950s. The information about the Soviet Whiskey crew that was ravaged by gases on a 30-day test came from retired Soviet Navy Captain First Rank Boris Bagdasaryan, who served on that sub and was interviewed by a Russian military reporter, Alexander Mozgovoy, whom we hired to do research for us. The unconfirmed intelligence reports that the Soviets were modifying some of their Zulu-class subs to carry missiles were mentioned in "Developments and Trends in the Soviet Fleet During 1956," ONI Review (secret supplement] (Spring-Summer 1957): 9-10.

The encouragement of regular Navy officers to receive intelligence training and thus engage in the world's "second-oldest profession," one with "even fewer morals than the first," appeared in the article "Postgraduate Intelligence Training: An Avenue to Rewarding Service," ONI Review (August 1957): 337.

President Eisenhower's hesitancy about approving U-2 flights in the mid-1950s is described in chapter 2 of Graham Yost's Spies in the Skies (New York: Facts on File, 1989), a book about the evolution of U.S. spy satellites.

We drew some background details about the Gudgeon's captain, Norman G. Bessac, from his official biography on file in the Operational Archives Branch at the Naval Historical Center.

The Soviet version of "Hansel and Gretel" was cited in "Trends in Communist Propaganda," ONI Review (May 1955): 226. The Soviet offers to American pen pals to swap pictures were mentioned in "Security Control of Technical Data," ONI Review (April 1951): 127.

The first nuclear-powered submarine, the USS Nautilus, was commissioned on September 30, 1954, and sent out its historic message, "Underway on nuclear power," at the start of its first training deployment on January 17, 1955. The USS Seatcol f became the second nuclear-powered sub to go into service when it was commissioned on March 30, 1957. The personal background and political savvy of Admiral Hyman Rickover is well covered in two excellent books: Rickover: Controversy and Genius, a full-scale biography by Norman Polmar and Thomas B. Allen (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), and The Rickover Effect: How One Man Made a Difference, a memoir by one of Rickover's former associates, Theodore Rockwell (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1992). The adventures of the Nautilus in becoming the first submarine to reach the North Pole are chronicled in Nautilus 90 North, a book written by its second captain, Commander William R. Anderson, with Clay Blair Jr. (New York: Harper & Row, 1959).

Middleton's The Ultimate Naval Weapon notes that the World War II fleet boat named the USS Gudgeon (SS-21 1) also had a major success: it was credited with the first American kill of a Japanese U-boat.

The Soviets' August 26, 1957, announcement of their first successful intercontinental ballistic missile test is mentioned in "Soviet Scientific and Technical Developments, 1957," ONI Review (May 1958): 214. It also is discussed in Peter Pringle and William Arkin, SLOP: The Secret U.S. Plan for Nuclear War (New York: W. W. Norton, 1983).

A series of Navy press releases about the Gudgeon's trip to circumnavigate the globe and take part in Eisenhower's "People to People" program are in the file on the Gudgeon at the USS Bowfin Submarine Museum and Park in Honolulu.

One of the young officers on the USS Wahoo when it was caught near a Soviet beach in 1958 was William J. Crowe Jr., who rose to become an admiral and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush. He described the Wahoo's perilous encounter with the Soviets in his memoir The Line of Fire: From Washington to the Gulf, the Politics and Battles of the New Military (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993).

Russian military officials now say there were several reasons they showed greater restraint in dealing with spy subs than spy planes. Soviet warships dropped low-capacity "drill bombs" instead of full depth charges, officials told our researcher Alexander Mozgovoy, in case American subs like the Gudgeon had made navigational errors and found themselves in Soviet territory accidentally. The Russian officials also said that the smaller, grenadelike charges were used in keeping with their regulations for warning foreign submarines encroaching upon their territorial waters, rules that included this method of signaling them to leave.

Some of the hysteria about the possibility that Soviet subs were coming close to American shores in the late 1950s was fueled by U.S. Representative Carl Durham, a Democrat from North Carolina who chaired a joint House-Senate committee on atomic energy. He was quoted in an Associated Press dispatch on April 14, 1958, as saying that 184 Russian submarines had been sighted off the U.S. Atlantic coast in 1957 alone. Mrs. Gilkinson's sharp eye for foreign submarines was reported in the "Monthly Box Score of Submarine Contacts," ONI Review (January 1961): 38. The man from Texas was mentioned in "Monthly Box Score of Submarine Contacts," ONI Review (January 1962): 27.

In describing the expansion of SOSUS in this and subsequent chapters, we drew on an excellent declassified history of many of the Navy's antisubmarine warfare programs, "Sea-Based Airborne Antisubmarine Warfare 1940-1977," vols. 1-3, prepared by a Navy consultant, R. E Cross Associates, Ltd., Alexandria, Virginia, in 1978. It is available at the Operational Archives Branch of the Naval Historical Center.

Admiral Jerauld Wright's proclamation, the case of whiskey he offered as a prize, and the USS Grenadier's surfacing of the Soviet Zulu are described in "The Wright Stuff," U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings (December 1984): 74-76. The article was written by retired Navy Captain Theodore E. "Ted" Davis, who was the Grenadier's captain during the chase. In an interview, Davis said he saved one bottle of Jack Daniels as a souvenir and divided the rest among his crew. He kept the sealed bottle on a shelf in his study until a housekeeper helped herself to a taste one day in the late 1970s. Not long after that, retired Navy Captain William L. "Bo" Bohannan, who had been the Grenadier's engineer, came to visit. Recalled Davis, "I said, `Well, now that it's open, we may as well drink the whole damn thing.' So we sat down and drank it all."

The July 1959 issue of the ONI Review also discussed the Grenadier's feat and its importance in confirming the intelligence reports that some Zulus had been converted to carry missiles. This article, "Soviet Submarine Surfaced by U.S. Forces Off Iceland," (292-295), was accompanied by four photographs of the Zulu taken by the Grenadier. The article also noted that as soon as the Zulu surfaced, crew members scurried up onto the deck to paint over the sub's identifying number (82) and rig a canvas over the top rear of the sail. Naval Intelligence suspected that this part of the sail housed two vertical missile-launching tubes, and the article said that an analysis of the photographs indicated that the tubes "may be larger than previously estimated," meaning that the missiles also may have been slightly larger than the United States had expected.

The diary of George B. Kistiakowsky was published as A Scientist at the White House: The Private Diary of President Eisenhower's Special Assistant for Science and Technology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976). The entry we quote (p. 153) describes a special intelligence briefing that Kistiakowsky received on November 12, 1959.

The dates of all forty-one deterrent patrols made by Regulus missile subs from September 1959 through July 1964 are listed in the July 1997 issue of the Submarine Review, an excellent quarterly published by the Naval Submarine League, a nonprofit group made up of current and former submariners and other people who support the submarine force. The four diesel subs that carried the guided missiles (the `G' in the standard submarine number designations stands for `guided') were the USS Grayback (SSG-574), the USS Tunny (SSG-282), the USS Growler (SSG-577), and the USS Barbero (SSG-317). One nuclearpowered sub, the USS Halibut (SSGN-587), made seven Regulus patrols from February 1961 through July 1964. Retired Navy Commander Herbert E. Tibbets, who served on the USS Growler, showed us the S-M-F pin designed for members of the "Northern Pacific Yacht Club."

In describing the pervasive safety problems with Soviet nuclear subs, we drew on research by Mozgovoy, our Russian stringer; Joshua Handler, a former research coordinator for Greenpeace, the international environmental group; and a large body of articles that have appeared in the Russian press since the end of the cold war. We recount the reactor accident on the Hiroshima and other similar incidents more fully in Appendix B.

The scrambling of the early Polaris subs during the Cuban Missile Crisis was described to us in interviews with retired Vice Admiral Philip A. Beshany and other former submarine officers. President Kennedy's fears about encountering Soviet subs early in the crisis were quoted by his brother, Robert F. Kennedy, in his book Thirteen Days (New York: Signet Books, 1969), p. 70. For information about the U.S. Navy's surfacing of Soviet diesel subs during the crisis, we drew on "Cordon of Steel: The U.S. Navy and the Cuban Missile Crisis" by Curtis A. Utz, a historian at the Naval Historical Center's Contemporary History Branch. His 48-page study was published by the Naval Historical Center in 1993 as the first in a series of reports on "The U.S. Navy in the Modern World."