Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew (59 page)

Part of the background sketch of the Tautog captain, the late Commander Buele G. Balderston, is taken from his official Navy biography. Other information comes from an interview with his widow, Irene Balderston. The dates of the Tautog's deployment to the western Pacific June 8 through July 1, 1970-come from the sub's official command history for that year. The history, prepared by Balderston, lists the deployment simply as a "Training Cruise." just like in the Atlantic, there also was a competition among sub captains in the Pacific. And when Balderston took Tautog out in mid-1970, the USS Flasher (SSN-613), under CO Emsley Cobb, had just won a Presidential Unit Citation for the first long trailing in the Pacific-after following a Hotel 11-class missile sub for more than twenty days.

In describing the threat posed by Soviet Echo II submarines to U.S. aircraft carriers operating off Vietnam, we drew on R. F. Cross Associates, Ltd.'s declassified study Sea-Based Airborne Antisubmarine Warfare 1940-1977, pp. 2, 68-70.

Now that the Soviets had so many nuclear subs, the Pacific Fleet followed the earlier lead of the Atlantic command and quit sending diesel boats to spy off the Soviet coast. It was the end of a swashbuckling era, and diesel vets coined a romantic phrase-"Diesel Boats Forever"-to try to keep them alive, at least in their memories. Some diesel subs still did surveillance ops in less hazardous areas, such as in the Med and off Cuba, where Spanish-speaking spooks rode diesels in 1969 and 1970 to check on Soviet efforts to build a port for Russian subs in Cuba. The Navy later transferred many of the diesel subs to various allies with small navies and retired the rest.

The Tautog's collision with the Echo II was first revealed publicly on January 6, 1991, in the submarine series by Drew, Millenson, and Becker published January 6-11, 1991, by the Chicago Tribune and the Newport News Daily Press. Based on interviews with Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, who was about to be promoted from chief of Naval Operations to chairman of the joint Chiefs of Staff at the time of the collision, Rear Admiral Walter L. Small Jr., who was commander of submarines in the Pacific in 1970, and several Tautog crew members, that series reported the conclusion of U.S. officials that the Echo II had sunk. Both Moorer and Small said in the interviews that they were told verbally that the Echo had sunk. In an interview for this book, former Defense Secretary Melvin Laird said that he had been given the same tragic news, and that he immediately passed it on to President Nixon. "I briefed the president. The president knew." Asked whether he recalled Nixon's reaction, Laird said: "No, you never knew what kind of reaction he had. He was glad to get the information."

Before the series was published, the Soviet Navy did not respond to repeated requests by the Tribune and the Daily Press for comment on the incident. But in the spring of 1992, Alexander Mozgovoy located Boris Bagdasaryan, a former Soviet submarine commander who announced that he was the captain of the Echo that had collided with Tautog. Mozgovoy published Bagdasaryan's assertions in a Russian newspaper in 1992. He since has asked Bagdasaryan numerous questions on our behalf. Though there are a few discrepancies between what Bagdasaryan and the Tautog crew members recall, there seems to be little reason to doubt that they are talking about the same collision.

Chapter 8: "Oshkosh b'Gosh"

Main interviews: Former top Navy, Naval Intelligence, CIA, and NSA officials and crew members of the USS Halibut.

Government documents, articles, books, and other sources: We based our description of Petropavlovsk and the Kamchatka Peninsula on information and photographs provided by Joshua Handler after a visit there.

The most comprehensive history of the Navy's development of saturation diving techniques is Papa Topside: The Sea Lab Chronicles of Captain George F. Bond, USN, ed. Helen A. Siiteri (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1993). Bond, who died in 1983, was a Navy medical doctor who pioneered ways for divers to live and work at much greater depths. Reporting to John Craven, he supervised the experiments with the Navy's SeaLab habitats in the I 960s. For technical information, we also relied on the NOAA Diving Manual: Diving for Science and Technology, 2d ed. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Commerce/National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, December 1979); we found it in the library at the Navy Yard in Washington, D.C. The divers involved in the cable-tapping were neither Navy SEALs nor the regular Navy divers who helped perform maintenance on ships and subs. They were instead a special group of saturation divers who worked for Submarine Development Group One, a Navy detachment that included the Halibut. SUBDEVGRU 1 was created in August 1967, according to a Navy brochure, "to operate as a permanent Naval command with deep ocean search, location, recovery and rescue capability." By the early 1970s, the detachment included Halibut; Trieste 11; Turtle and Sea Cliff, two new mini-subs that initially could go as deep as 6,500 feet to recover objects or do ocean research; surface ships equipped to assist in submarine rescue operations, and one Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicle. The development group was headquartered in San Diego and had an office at the Mare Island Navy base, where Halibut was docked.

Our discussion of the "40 Committee" draws mainly on two sources: Seymour M. Hersh, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (New York: Summit Books, 1983); and the final report of a special House intelligence committee, chaired by Rep. Otis G. Pike, as reprinted in the Village Voice, February 16, 1976.

One example of the local headlines that publicized the Navy's cover story for Halibut was "Navy Bares Secret Role of M.I. (Mare Islands Sub," Vallejo Times-Herald, September 25, 1969. The article said that the Halibut "will be the lead mother submarine for the development, installation and evaluation of a rescue system which has been determined to be necessary to cover the potential loss of submarines on the continental shelf. The system will include a completely self-contained navigation, search, location and personnel rescue capability, using a deep submergence rescue vehicle which will be carried aboard Halibut."

In describing NSA headquarters, we relied predominantly on James Bamford's groundbreaking study The Puzzle Palace: A Report on NSA, America's Most Secret Agency (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982). Former CIA officials have said the operation to tap car-phone conversations of Soviet leaders ended after the Washington columnist Jack Anderson disclosed it in a news article in the early 1970s. Anderson has said that his government sources told him the operation had ended before he wrote about it. One other deal reached with the Soviets in 1972 was the Incidents at Sea agreement, which was meant to put an end to the games of chicken and other harassment between U.S. and Soviet surface vessels. At the U.S. Navy's insistence, the agreement did not place any restrictions on submarines operating below the surface.

We drew our accounts of arms control negotiations mainly from three books: Gerard Smith, Doubletalk: The Story of SALT I (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1980); Paul H. Nitze, From Hiroshima to Glasnost: At the Center of Decision-A Memoir (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1989); and Hersh, The Price of Power. Hersh's hook and Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr., On Watch: A Memoir (New York: Quadrangle/New York Times Book Co., 1976), give detailed accounts of the tensions between Kissinger and Zumwalt.

Former Halibut Chief John White made his comments about leaving the sub's crew in an interview with us. "There's not too many people who got away with what I did and who didn't get busted for it," he said. He acknowledged that he and the chiefs were drinking beer the night he decided not to go back aboard Halibut, although he denies anyone drank too much. "I wouldn't say I was sober as a judge," he added. He insisted that his decision to leave the sub in the middle of the deployment was "totally unrelated" to the nature of its mission and was not meant to he any type of protest. But he declined to say what his motivation was.

Chapter 9: The $500 Million Sand Castle

Main interviews: Seymour M. Hersh; William E. Colby; Otis Pike; Aaron Donner, Edward Roeder III, and other former staff members of the Pike Committee; John P. Craven; former crew members of the Glomar- Explorer; and former top Navy, CIA, and Naval Intelligence officials.

Government documents, articles, books, and other sources: Some of the difficulties that Hersh faced in researching the Glomar story are described in Harrison E. Salisbury, Without Fear or Favor: The New York Times and Its Times (New York: Times Books, 1980). William Colby's memoir, Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), also provided excellent background, particularly on his fencing with Hersh over Hersh's article on the CIA's domestic spying.

We interviewed Hersh several times, and interviewed Colby once before he died in 1996. Colby said that when he heard that Hersh had gotten a tip about the Glomar operation, "it scared the living daylights out of me. I didn't ask any more. I knew we had a problem." Asked whether he was worried that the Glomar operation could have threatened detente, Colby said: "We always knew we had a hot potato on our hands." Still, he said, Kissinger was always "fully supportive. Kissinger's idea was that it was my business ... it was my problem, it was my money." And Colby remained adamant that the gamble to recover the Golf was worth taking: "The answer I give to that is: What would the Russians have given to have a full American submarine in their hands? The nuclear weapons. The command and control system. The communications system. The war planning. All of it." He also dismissed Craven and Bradley's idea of making a more limited recovery attempt with a deep-diving mini-sub by saying: "On any engineering job, you have different ways of proceeding."

We drew our description of the location of the patrol areas of the Soviet Yankees and the continued expansion of SOSUS from R. E Cross Associates, Ltd., Sea-Based Airborne Antisubmarine Warfare 1940-1977, volume 2. Several submarine force officials described in interviews how they kept track of Soviet submarines during the Yom Kippur War.

In the interview with us, Colby said he thought the "real genius" in the planning of the Glomar operation was in the choice to use the secretive Howard Hughes and the manganese cover story. Colby also was blunt in saying that no matter what legal justifications the CIA lawyers might have drafted, "obviously we were secretly trying to steal this submarine. If they had known we were after that, it would have been legitimate for them to be able to try to stop us." Colby also said it was obvious that the CIA was sending Glomar into a potential Pueblo-like situation. Asked what Glomar's crew would have done if the Soviets had tried to board her, he said: "Probably dodge and weave." He added: "We had some protection.... We had a deal with the Navy. They were just down at Pearl Harbor," where Naval Intelligence was assiduously monitoring every Soviet communications frequency possible while the Glomar was at sea.

We drew most of our technical description of the Glomar and how it used Clementine, its steel arm and claw, in trying to lift up the Golf from Roy Varner and Wayne Collier, A Matter of Risk: The Incredible Inside Story of the CIA's Hughes Glomar Explorer Mission to Raise a Russian Submarine (New York: Random House, 1978). Collier helped recruit many of the oil-field roughnecks who operated the Glomar's huge machinery, and he and Varner later interviewed them and some government officials to piece together a detailed account of what happened on the ship. Another book, Clyde Burleson's The Jennifer Project (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1977), also provided helpful background information, particularly about the Glomar's design and technical capabilities. Because almost everything written about the heavily shrouded Glomar operation contains some mistakes, we went through both of these books carefully with our intelligence sources to avoid picking up any errors.