Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew (60 page)

Hersh's story on the CIA's domestic spying led the New York Times on December 22, 1974, with a headline spread over three columns at the top of page 1: "Huge CIA Operation Reported in U.S. Against Anti-War Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years." Charging the CIA with "directly violating its charter," Hersh wrote that the agency had "conducted a massive illegal domestic intelligence operation" and compiled dossiers on ten thousand or more American citizens. CIA operatives, the story said, had been shadowing war protesters and infiltrating antiwar organizations. Colby always insisted-and repeated again in our interview-that Hersh "blew it all out of proportion" by using the word massive. Colby added in the interview: "We were engaged in a few things we shouldn't have done." But, he said, "if he had left the word massive out, it would have been very hard to contest." Colby also said he attacked the Hersh story publicly at that time because "there was a good chance the agency was going to he destroyed. I was fighting for its survival."

Colby's campaign to try to keep news organizations from breaking the Glomar story was described in Salisbury, Without Fear or Favor, and in two news articles that drew on declassified CIA documents: George Lardner Jr. and William Claiborne, "CIA's Glomar `Game Plan,"' Washington Post, October 23, 1977; and William Claiborne and George Lardner Jr., "Colby Called Glomar Case `Weirdest Conspiracy,"' Washington Post, November 5, 1977. The quote from Jack Anderson about why he went ahead and broke the Glomar story on his radio show comes from Martin Arnold, "CIA Tried to Get Press to Hold up Salvage Story," the New York Times, March 20, 1975.

The hest analysis of the lack of success of the Glomar operation remains the first detailed one-Hersh's first article, "CIA Salvage Ship Brought up Part of Soviet Sub Lost in 1968, Failed to Raise Atom Missiles," on the front page of the New York Times, March 19, 1975. Hersh also interviewed Wayne Collier extensively for a follow-up article: "Human Error Is Cited in '74 Glomar Failure," the New York Times, December 9, 1976. Hersh made some errors, such as initially overstating the number of bodies recovered with part of the Golf. But in describing how little of value was gained through the Glomar operation, he was right on the mark, while the Washington Post consistently wrote that the operation was relatively successful, and Time magazine published an article stating that it was a total success and the entire Golf submarine had been recovered. In our interview, Colby, who had previously declined to say much about the Glomar operation, finally confirmed that only part of the Golf was recovered. And while he said that some of the information gleaned from it was "useful," the sub "was not raised."

Hersh's story on the Holystone operations-"Submarines of U.S. Stage Spy Missions Inside Soviet Waters"-appeared on the front page of the New York Times, May 25, 1975. His follow-up on the Gato collision appeared in the Times on July 6, 1975.

Our description of the Pike Committee's conclusions comes from its final report, as reprinted in the Village Voice on February 16, 1976. After the full House voted not to release the report, it was leaked to the Voice by the veteran CBS newsman Daniel Schorr, who describes what happened in his book Clearing the Air (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, '1977).

Chapter 10: Triumph and Crisis

Main interviews: Former top Navy, intelligence, and White House officials and crew members of the USS Seawol f and USS Parche.

Government documents, articles, books, and other sources: For President Jimmy Carter's background as a submarine officer and his general defense policies as president, we reviewed two of his hooks, Why Not the Best? (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1975); and Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President (New York: Bantam Books, 1982). Our description of the briefing for him on the activities of the special projects subs is based on interviews with former high-level officials who were familiar with it. Because of the sensitivity of the decision to tap Soviet cables in a second location, we should note that Richard Haver did not discuss the Barents taps with us in any fashion. In fact, we deliberately avoided describing as characters in this chapter or the next anyone who did talk to us about the operation.

The pulling back of Soviet missile subs to the bastions was discussed in general terms in a number of articles in trade journals such as the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings and the Submarine Review during the I 980s. An excellent discussion of the initial differences in opinion among Navy leaders and analysts about what this Soviet move meant appeared in Gregory L. Vistica, Fall from Glory: The Men Who Sank the U.S. Navy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995). Vistica, a former reporter for the San Diego Union-Tribune who now works for Newsweek, set out to chronicle the Tailhook sex scandal and some of the problems with the Navy's leadership that seemed inevitably to lead to it. But he also delved into how Naval Intelligence formed its views of the Soviet threat, including the discussion about what to make of the satellite evidence in November 1980 that the Soviets might be building an aircraft carrier. Vistica's book also gave the first public description of the briefing on submarine spying that was given to President Ronald Reagan on Friday, March 6, 198 1. We also interviewed officials who attended that briefing, as well as crew members of the USS Besugo (SS-321)-the diesel submarine used in filming Hellcats of the Navy-who watched Reagan closely as he practiced barking out his orders and who saw the pier break.

Information about drug use among Seawolf and Parche crew members came from crewmen on those boats. Frederick H. Hartmann's book Naval Renaissance: The U.S. Navy in the 1980s (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1990), provides good background on how pervasive this problem once was in the Navy as a whole. He cited a Department of Defense drug-use survey in 1980 in which 47 percent of the respondents in the Navy and the Marines acknowledged using marijuana, compared to 40 percent in the Army and 20 percent in the Air Force. Only 2 percent of the Air Force respondents reported using cocaine, compared to 6 percent for the Army and i i percent for the Navy. Alarmed by these and other similar findings, Admiral Thomas B. Hayward, the chief of Naval Operations, released a videotape in December 1981 to be shown to every man and woman in the Navy. Hartmann recounts how in this message Hayward announced a new "pride and professionalism" program and delivered a stern warning to the people who were using drugs: "Not here, not on my watch, not in my division, not on my ship or in my squadron, not in my Navy." This program, enforced with huge numbers of random drug tests, sharply reduced the amount of illicit drug use in the Navy.

The dates of the missions by the Seawolf and the Parche are derived from official command and other histories for the ships found in Navy archives. Also helpful was the "cruise book"-an album of photographs, inside jokes, and crew rosters put together by Seawolf crew members and given to everyone who was on the 1981 mission. For information about the massive storm system that assaulted the Sea of Okhotsk and imperiled the Seawolf, see the Mariners Weather Log (published by the U.S. Department of Commerce/National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) 26, no. 2 (Spring 1982): 89; this volume gives the weather reports for October, November, and December 1981.

Chapter 11: The Crown Jewels

Main interviews: Former officials of U.S. intelligence agencies and former members of the crew of the USS Parche.

Government documents, articles, books, and other sources: After the cold war ended, the KGB placed a photograph of one of the two cabletap pods that it had recovered-along with some of the data-recording equipment that had been inside-on display in the Russian Ministry of Security's museum at the notorious Lubyanka Prison. On a visit there, our Russian researcher Alexander Mozgovoy was shown a small plate on the data-recording equipment that identified it as belonging to the U.S. government. Russian officials told Mozgovoy that the tap pods had been recovered about 60 kilometers, or roughly 38 miles, off of Kamchatka in the Sea of Okhotsk. They also said that one of the pods was clearly newer than the other and had more sophisticated recording equipment that made extensive use of microprocessing technology. The Russians confirmed that the devices were nuclear-powered and could work for about 125 days. Mozgovoy also obtained the picture of the tap pod that we have included with the photographs in this book.

Waldo K. Lyon helped us in interviews with the portion of this chapter that fell within his amazing area of expertise: the scientific properties of Arctic sea ice and their troubling implications for submarine warfare. Lyon fought tirelessly throughout the 1980s to try to persuade Navy officials to take more account of his views. Born in 1914, he had long operated with the energy and vigor of two men. He continued to work at the Arctic lab-and also was a national senior badminton champion-in his seventies. In his eighties, he was still fighting a 1997 order to raze the building that houses one of the few giant pools in the world where scientists can "grow" Arctic sea ice and conduct experiments. Lyon, who died in May 1998, wanted the lab mothballed intact so that study could he revived quickly should there be a war, and he found it hard to believe that the submarine force had not recognized the importance of saving the facility. He believed that the lesson from German tactics in World War II and the Soviets' shift to the ice proved that potential enemies will again use the almost impenetrable cover to attack U.S. targets on shore or at sea. He noted that even a simple diesel sub could easily hide in the ice and that, without further study, the United States would remain vulnerable.

Another good source on Lyon's early work (the first two or three decades of it) is The Reminiscences of Dr. Waldo K. Lvon, a 297-page oral history in the collection at the U.S. Naval Institute, Annapolis, Maryland.

The stunning scene when Admiral Rickover appealed to President Reagan to block Lehman's efforts to retire him is recounted in full detail in the introduction to John F. Lehman Jr., Command of the Seas: Building the 600-Ship Navy (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1988). Rickover's retaliation-putting up the picture of Benedict Arnold near John Lehman's-was recounted in Rockwell, The Rickover Effect, (p. 364).

Rickover was still an icon, but even some veteran submariners thought it was time for him to go-and that the demands of his reactor safety bureaucracy had gotten out of hand. In 1981, one sub captain, Commander Ed Linz, resigned his command of the USS Kamehameha (SSBN-642) to protest the management of the sub program. He said some officers had so little time to focus on seamanship skills that he feared a nuclear sub might run aground "due to total incompetence in basic navigation and ship handling, but the reactor-control division records would be perfect as it hit." Rickover died in July 1986.

Odyssey 82 was the name of a cruise hook put together by crew members on the Parche that year.

Admiral Watkins's quote on the Arctic ice as "a beautiful place to hide" for Soviet submarines was cited by Compton-Hall, Sub Versus Sub, p. 97. In a lengthy interview, Admiral Watkins also explained to us why he thought the U.S. sub force still could have countered the Soviets under the ice, as well as some of the moves he and others made to intimidate the Soviets psychologically. One of the most fascinating involved Watkins's decision to allow the U.S. Naval Institute-a private, nonprofit organization that works closely with the Navy-to publish the first edition of Tom Clancy's submarine novel The Hunt for Red October in 1984 even though some admirals believed it would enable the Soviets to learn more about U.S. submarine capabilities.

Watkins told us that about two-thirds of the technical information in Clancy's novel is on target and the rest is wrong, and that it typically overstates U.S. abilities. Rather than blocking publication of the book, or attempting to correct the misperceptions, when Clancy submitted his manuscript to the Navy for clearance, Watkins said he decided to let the book go forward as it was. "The Hunt for Red October did us a service," he said. "The Soviets kind of believed it, and we won the battle, and therefore it was a significant part of the noncostly deterrence of submarines."