Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew (61 page)

Along the same lines, Watkins said that he was "sending a signal" to the Soviets by allowing detailed papers on the new forward U.S. maritime strategy to be published in the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings in 1986. While some in Congress questioned his move, he testified that the public declarations told the Soviets: "Don't risk either conflict or serious conventional war with the United States, because you are going to run into a hornets' nest and one of those is going to be at sea and you're not going to win that one." Publication of both the novel and the strategy, he added, demonstrated that "we had the resolve, we had the plan."

Another former official said the Navy also funded undersea expert Robert D. Ballard's search for the wreckage of the Titanic as part of this game of psychological warfare against the Soviets. Ballard found the Titanic in 1 985 and explored its wreckage with the mini-sub Alvin in 1986. This official said the Navy's aim in supporting Ballard's highly publicized missions was to show the Soviets that "we could find things underwater and look inside" so that they would think "we were not merely 10 feet tall but 20 feet tall." He said all these efforts to intimidate the Soviets-and make them think they could not compete with the United States-were encouraged by the late CIA Director William Casey.

Much of the information about the tumultuous year in U.S.-Soviet relations in 1983 comes from George Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State: The Memoirs of George P. Shultz (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1993). The sense of paranoia among Andropov and other KGB officials is vividly described in chapter 13 of Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story (New York: HarperCollins, 1990).

In explaining the importance of hiding a second-strike capability on submarines, Admiral Watkins also said: "The mission of the strategic deterrent at sea is not first strike. It is called war termination strategy. That's where it fits. So the first strike was the intercontinental ballistic missiles, obviously. The land-based missiles were the potential first strike and probably the most destabilizing of the elements of the deterrent.

"The maritime forces, while they were large in numbers of warheads, were there for the war termination strategy, which said: How do you win such a thing? Who wins? Well, we both know that nobody really wins. But who wins the battle is going to be largely a function of how much you have left after the first exchange. And while this is an insidious game, and I'm not trying to say I love the game, that's the reality of when you get into offensive weaponry on both sides as a strategic deterrent, as opposed to strategic defense."

Watkins also said he believed very strongly that the Soviets weren't going to launch a first strike. "We briefed the joint Chiefs, we briefed the president on what we thought we could do, why we thought we could do it, and I think we felt very comfortable, and I believe that that self-confidence was transmitted to the Russians in a variety of ways-by the strength of our resolve at our incidents-at-sea agreements, our discussions, by the maritime strategy publication itself, by their intelligence-gathering network on the sophistication and ability and capability of our submarine force, by a variety of publications and unclassified speculation and so forth, over a long time.

"Their intelligence sources were good, and we wanted them to know how self-confident we were. That's the role it plays. It's not a matter of charging up there and shooting up a lot of ballistic missile submarines as being the goal to prevent them from even launching first strike. No. That's not the way they would deploy their submarine force, and not the way that we would deploy ours.

"It was far deeper than that. These were the backup forces necessary to-you might say-undergird a nuclear exchange, and our job, of course, was to set up a deterrent that would make it unwise to do that, and we did it. And I believe it was one of the reasons that we were able to bring the Russians to their knees in the cold war. Because they could not win that battle, and therefore, why continue?"

Bob Woodward first described Admiral Butts's proposal to lay cables in the Barents and relay information from taps on Soviet lines in real time in Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981-1987 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987). Veil also gives the best previously published description of how the Soviets found the taps in the Sea of Okhotsk and how the White House and the intelligence community sought to keep the Washington Post from publishing what it knew about the tap operations in 1986. But even though Veil outlines Butts's costly proposal, neither Woodward's stories in the Post nor his book say that the Navy already was tapping Soviet cables in the Barents.

The only public indications that the Navy was involved in tapping cables in the Barents have come in brief statements in three other books that also mention Butts's proposal: Angelo Codevilla, a former Senate staff member who reviewed intelligence budgets from 1977 to 1985, notes in Informing Statecraft: Intelligence for a New Century (New York: Free Press, 1992) that the Sea of Okhotsk taps had been so valuable that "by the early 1980s the U.S. government had begun a multibillion-dollar project to make the flow simple and instantaneous. It involved tapping a Soviet undersea cable near the northwestern city of Murmansk with an American cable, buried under the sands of the Arctic Ocean's floor, and reaching all the way to Greenland. This intrusion into Soviet communications would have provided foolproof, timely warning of any Soviet decision to go to war." Still, Codevilla added that this idea eventually fell victim to "a classic bureaucratic coup de grace. Powerful factions within both CIA and NSA had opposed the directcable tap because it would have been expensive and would have taken money from current programs" (pp. 163-164). In Fall from Glory, Greg Vistica cites an unnamed defense source who said that the Navy had experimented with, and then abandoned, plans for an undersea plow that could "lay a cable from Greenland directly to the pods on the north coast of the Soviet Union, thus eliminating the submarine's work" (p. 72). And in The Universe Below, Bill Broad states that in addition to the Sea of Okhotsk, the cable tapping "feats were repeated" in the Barents. He cites an interview with Codevilla where he added that the cables to Greenland would have been made of fiber optics and would have been so long that they would have needed special devices to boost the signals. He also stated that the project-"a massive industrial undertaking on the seafloor, the likes of which had never before been attempted"-became the most expensive item in the intelligence budget before "the plug was pulled" (pp. 82-83). Before Blind Man's Bluff, nobody has ever written any more about how the Navy was tapping cables in the Barents, and nobody has identified Parche as the sub that laid the taps, or described how extensive and hazardous these operations were.

Two books give the full history of John Walker and his spy ring: John Barron, Breaking the Ring: The Bizarre Case of the Walker Family Spy Ring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987); and Pete Earley, Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring (New York: Bantam Books, 1988). John Lehman offers his ghoulish advice on what kind of punishment Walker should have received in Command of the Seas (pp. 133-34). Studeman's assessment of the damage that Walker did was included in an affidavit he wrote as part of the criminal case against Jerry Whitworth. It is on file in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, and a copy is included in Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, "Meeting the Espionage Challenge: A Review of United States Counterintelligence and Security Programs," September 23, 1986. The tale of Toshiba's treachery in selling the advanced propeller-milling equipment to the Soviets is well summarized in Ralph Kinney Bennett, "The Toshiba Scandal: Anatomy of a Betrayal," Reader's Digest (December 1987). In the case of Ronald Pelton, we drew mainly on the coverage of his trial by Woodward, Patrick Tyler, Susan Schmidt, and Paul W. Valentine in the Washington Post and Stephen Engelberg and Philip Shenon in the New York Times. Rich Haver's appearance before the Senate Intelligence Committee and a summary of the contents of his report about the Soviets' discovery of the taps in Okhotsk were described to us by former government officials familiar with them.

Our quotations from what Reagan and Gorbachev said to each other in Reykjavik all come from Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, ch. 36 ("What Really Happened at Reykjavik"). Shultz notes in that book that he usually kept careful notes of his meetings with key leaders and/or contemporaneous notes taken by others.

Interestingly enough, Shultz told us in an interview that while he supported risky, "military-oriented" intelligence missions like the cable tapping, he also thought much clandestine intelligence was overrated. "The most important information-people have to keep reminding themselves-is what you get by just common observation," he said. "I always felt-I don't want to distinguish among newspapers-but I always felt that the dispatches of Bill Keller, who wrote for the Neu.' York Times, were about as rewarding reading about anything that was going on as anything I read. And he didn't have any clandestine sources or what not. He was just a smart guy who got around.

"And I think that as a general proposition, the basic State Department reporting, using open sources, and observation, and talking to people, give you the basic picture. Sometimes you can be even misled by what you pick up in some clandestine way. Because there is a feeling that if you got it by some secret means, it must be very important." Laughing, he added: "And it may he that it's not anywhere near as important as things that are just obviously there."

Chapter 12: Trust but Verify

Main interviews: Admiral Carl Trost and other current and former top Navy officials.

Government documents, books, articles, and other sources: Admiral Crowe describes Marshal Akhromeyev's visits in detail in chapter 16 of The Line of Fire. Admiral Trost, in an interview, described the meeting with Akhromeyev in the Joint Chiefs' "Tank" as well as his own travels to Russia and conclusions about the Soviet Navy. Akhromeyev committed suicide after the failed coup against Gorbachev in 1991.

The activity of the submarines in Squadron 1 I was included in its official command history for 1988.

Bush wrote to Gorbachev to offer the Soviets help after their prototype for an advanced "Mike"-class nuclear attack submarine sank in 8,400 feet of water 270 miles north of Norway. It sank after a fire broke out on board, and 42 crew members were killed.

Transcripts of speeches from the Naval Submarine League's convention in 1990 were reprinted in the organization's quarterly magazine, the Submarine Review, later that year. The role of U.S. attack submarines in the Persian Gulf War and details of the Navy's new "From the Sea" maritime strategy have been described in numerous news articles and in brochures prepared by the Navy. The Navy publicly released a report of an investigation into the collision involving the USS Baton Rouge, and we also drew from news articles about both that and the Grayling collision in the New York Times and the Washington Post, which published the quote from the unnamed senior administration official wondering whether top Navy officials "read the newspapers" before undertaking such missions.

There also have been numerous articles in the major daily newspapers, the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, and the Submarine Review on the plans for, and capabilities of, both the new Seawolf and the proposed NSSN attack submarines, as well as extensive coverage on how much the submarine force is being cut back from cold war levels. The Submarine Review's practice of reprinting Sub League convention speeches from top Navy officials has made it easy to keep track of all the changes in the sub force, from new technology to the new roles and missions. One recent article in the general pressRichard J. Newman, "Breaking the Surface," U.S. News & World Report, April 6, 1998, pp. 28-42-also provides a comprehensive look at what the sub force is focusing on now.

Two articles noted the USS Parche's move from Mare Island to a new port in Washington State: Ed Offley, "Secret Nuclear Navy Submarine Finds New Home," Seattle Post-Intelligencer [the article title as it appeared in the Times-Picayune (New Orleans), November 24, 1994]; and Lloyd Pritchett, "Will Top-Secret Sub Be Able to Slip into Area Quietly?" Bremerton Sun, August 8, 1994.

Both Offley's and Newman's stories suggest that Iran and China would be good targets for cable-tapping by the Parche.

Epilogue