Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew (57 page)

Chapter 3: Turn to the Deep

Main interviews: John P. Craven; former submarine, Naval Intelligence, and Naval Security Group officials; former crew members of the USS Halibut.

Government documents, articles, books, and other sources: In describing the Navy's general lack of enthusiasm for deep-sea exploration and how that attitude changed after the Thresher's sinking, we drew on several news and magazine articles. The June 1964 issue of National Geographic was particularly intriguing, with articles such as "Thresher: Lesson and Challenge" by James H. Wakelin Jr., and "Tomorrow on the Deep Frontier" by Edwin A. Link. We also relied on two books. One, Mud, Muscle, and Miracles: Marine Salvage in the United States Navy (Washington, D.C.: Naval Historical Center/Naval Sea Systems Command, 1990), was written by Captain C. A. Bartholomew, a top Navy salvage engineer. The other, The Universe Below: Discovering the Secrets of the Deep Sea (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), was written by William J. Broad, a science reporter for the New York Times.

The full sequence of events that caused the USS Thresher disaster has never been conclusively determined. Just a few minutes before Thresher sank, a Navy salvage ship monitoring the tests received a sonar-type message from Thresher saying it was experiencing minor problems and was trying to blow ballast, or release high-pressure air to force water out of its ballast tanks and propel itself to the surface. Officers on the salvage ship then heard the sounds of air under high pressure, followed only, as that maneuver failed, by sounds of the "Thresher breaking apart. A Navy court of inquiry later concluded that a piping system probably had failed in the engine room, letting loose a violent spray of water that damaged electrical circuits and caused a loss of power.

Rickover always denied that his reactor controls and procedures were to blame. But in Death of the Thresher (Philadelphia: Chilton Books, 1964), Norman Polmar has suggested that an unexpected reactor scram, or shutdown, may have been a crucial factor in the Thresher's demise. Polmar and his coauthor, Thomas B. Allen, also make this point in Rick over: Controversy and Genius, in which Rear Admiral Ralph K. James, chief of the Bureau of Ships during the Thresher's construction, is quoted as saying: "I feel from what I know of the inquiry in which I participated, what I know of the ship itself, and events that occurred up to that time, that a failure of a silver soldered pipe fitting somewhere in the boat caused a discharge of a stream of water on the nuclear control board and `scrammed' the power plant." Then, according to James, "because of inadequate design of the nuclear controls for the plant, power on the boat was lost at a time where [sicl the depth of water in which the submarine was operating forced enough water into the hull that prevented her from rising again because they couldn't get the power back on the boat" (p. 433). While Rickover never acknowledged any blame, he did shorten the time that operators had to wait to restart the reactor after a scram-from ten seconds to six.

The plans to create Deep Submergence Search Vehicles, minisubs capable of retrieving objects from the ocean floor, were detailed in Navy fact sheets in the 1960s, some of which are available in the files at the USS Bowfin Submarine Museum and Park in Honolulu. The dates of each stage in the Halibut's conversion to a special projects submarine come from official histories of the ship and articles in the Mare Island Grapevine, a newspaper that covered the Mare Island Naval Shipyard and base near San Francisco, and from the files of the Vallejo (California) Times-Herald.

Rickover's drive to create the small, nuclear-powered NR-1 submarine also is recounted in Polmar and Allen, Rickover: Controversy and Genius (pp. 435-443). Polmar and Allen devote a chapter (pp. 269-293) to Rickover's idiosyncratic techniques for interviewing applicants for his nuclear-powered submarine program and the worst horror stories that came out of it. Many of the people we interviewed told similar tales. Bartholomew, Mud, Muscle, and Miracles, and Broad, The Universe Below, also describe the efforts to recover the nuclear bomb off Palomares, Spain.

The fact that Rickover always wanted to know what was going on in the submarine intelligence programs-and was insulted at the thought that he should have to sign a secrecy oath like everyone elsecame from interviews with two former high-level Naval Intelligence officials. As one of them put it, "Rickover wanted to know everything the reconnaissance programs were producing, what they were doing, where they were operating, and he refused to ever sign a security oath. He absolutely wouldn't sign it." Referring to several men who served as directors of Naval Intelligence in the 1960s, this source added: "There were legendary stories of Rickover shouting and screaming at them, summoning them, demanding to know what was going on and refusing to sign," and they were all "reluctant to cross" him.

Chapter 4: Velvet Fist

Main interviews: Former top Pentagon, submarine, Naval Intelligence, and CIA officials; John P. Craven; and former crew members of the USS Halibut.

Government documents, articles, hooks, and other sources: The code name "Operation Winterwind" is mentioned in the Halibut's official command history for 1967. The documents do not disclose that Halibut was trying to locate parts of a Soviet ballistic missile or give any hint about the nature of her "assigned special project." They do, however, give the dates for what crew members say were two "test search operations"-practice runs off Hawaii-and the first attempt to locate the Soviet nose cone. The first test occurred from March 16 to April 4, 1967, and crew members say it was on this run that the Halibut found the boxlike object that had floated before crew members on the surface ship could weigh it down with anchor chains. Halibut made a second brief test run, July 10-20, 1967, to check the cameras on its fish. Crew members say the first attempt to find the Soviet missile parts took place on what the command history describes as "a 57-day special mission," from August 28 through October 24, 1967. Crew members say the second deployment to look for missile pieces-the one during which Charlie Hammonds fell overboard-took place from mid-January to April 11, 1968.

A series of six articles by Christopher Drew, Michael L. Millenson, and Robert Becker, published January 6-11, 1991, in the Chicago Tribune and the Newport News Daily Press, contained the first public disclosure of Halibut's role in locating the Golf submarine. Craven described her search for the Golf in very general terms in a letter to a subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee in early 1994, and William J. Broad followed with an article in the New York Times on February 7, 1994. Roger C. Dunham, who was a reactor officer on the Halibut in the late 1960s, has written a fictionalized account of the search for the Golf in Spy Sub: A Top Secret Mission to the Bottom of the Pacific (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1996). The Navy required Dunham to change the boat's name-the star of his book is a submarine called the USS Viperfish-and modify crucial technical details.

The split in opinions over the CIA's plan to build the Glomar Explorer and try to recover the Golf submarine was evident in several interviews with former high-level Navy and Pentagon officials. In an interview that took place a few months before he died in 1991, Frederick J. "Fritz" Harlfinger II, the former director of Naval Intelligence, said the CIA "did the craziest things. The CIA always got in our way."

But Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, the chief of Naval Operations in the late 1960s, said that along with the skeleton of the Soviet sailor, his most vivid memory of the Velvet Fist photos was that the Golf "was intact enough to make the judgment that we could raise it." Moorer dismissed Craven's and Bradley's idea of just blasting open parts of the Golf and sending a mini-submarine to try to retrieve the missile warheads and coded-communications gear. "Yeah, but there's no way you could be sure you got all the crypto stuff-I mean, how they thought you were going to get inside of it and make a thorough search. And so, if we were going to do anything, we might as well go all the way," Moorer said, adding with obvious irritation: "There's always some son-of-a-bitch can figure out a better way to do, but he don't have to do it."

Melvin Laird, President Nixon's secretary of Defense, acknowledged in an interview that "some people thought you didn't have to try to recover the whole thing just to get the important pieces like missiles and crypto." And in recommending construction of the Glomar Explorer just a year or so after the USS Scorpion had sunk, he added: "I felt that the technology was important because we might be able to use it with one of our submarines if we got in a problem. That really had more to do with it as far as I was concerned because I was always worried about crews getting trapped. So that had a lot to do with it. You didn't have to do that much as far as the Russians were concerned. But I was thinking about it in a different way. This idea that it was just done for that one submarine is a mistake."

Laird also added one other interesting historical note. Some critics have questioned whether Howard Hughes, the paranoid and reclusive billionaire, ever knew that his companies were involved in an effort to raise a sunken Soviet submarine. But, Laird said, "I remember talking to Howard Hughes about it too."

Chapter Five: Death of a Submarine

Main interviews: John P. Craven, former top submarine and Naval Intelligence officials, and torpedo experts who asked not to be identified.

Government documents, articles, and other sources: The safety concerns of former Scorpion crew member Dan Rogers were first disclosed, and are explored in more detail, in Stephen Johnson, "A Long and Deep Mystery: Scorpion Crewman Says Sub's '68 Sinking Was Preventable," Houston Chronicle, May 23, 1993. We also interviewed Rogers. Johnson's article includes the quote from the letter that Scorpion Machinist's Mate David Burton Stone wrote to his parents about the poor condition of the ship's equipment. Johnson was also extraordinarily generous in sharing many other aspects of his extensive research with us.

The Navy's difficulties in tracking Soviet subs in the Mediterranean Sea in the late 1960s are discussed in R. F. Cross Associates, Ltd., SeaBased Airborne Antisubmarine Warfare 1940-1977, vol. 2. More details of the collision between the USS George C. Marshall and the Soviet sub are in Appendix A. Retired Navy Commander Herbert E. Tibbets, the former skipper of the USS Cutlass, described in an interview the game of chicken involving the Scorpion and the Soviet destroyer.

The main concerns fueling the notion that Scorpion was destroyed by Soviet forces were disclosed in an article by Ed Offley: "Game of `Chicken' Led to Loss of Scorpion 25 Years Ago," that ran both in the New London Day, May 23, 1993; and as "Remembering the Scorpion-Evidence Points to an Underwater Dogfight as the Sub's Demise," in the Virginian-Pilot and Ledger-Star (Norfolk, Virginia), May 30, 1993. Offley quotes Jerry Hall, an enlisted man who worked as an aide at the Atlantic Fleet submarine command in 1968, as saying he heard talk among more senior officers that on its way home from the Med, Scorpion had been diverted to "brush off" a Soviet attack sub that was trying to trail a Polaris missile sub leaving the port at Rota, Spain. But our sources who had top Navy jobs flatly denied that in interviews. They acknowledged that Scorpion had been diverted, but they said its real mission-checking into the Soviets' baffling balloon activities-was much less provocative. And in recounting details of Scorpion's final radio communications, which indicated that it had collected a few photographs of the balloon activity and then cleared that area, these officials said there was no reason to suspect that it was engaged with any Soviet vessels when it sank.