by James Jinks
In November 1985, HMS Conqueror spent eighteen days on a covert intelligence-gathering and ASW-training war patrol, codenamed Operation ‘Sheikh’, in a 160,000-square-mile area in the Norwegian, Greenland and Barents Seas. Conqueror quickly detected a ‘Delta’ class SSBN deploying to the Greenland Sea and moved in to conduct two simulated Tigerfish firings, which were later judged to have been successful.87 Conqueror then broke away and began to track yet another ‘Delta’ class SSBN, which appeared to be fixing position using bottom-mapping topography. Conqueror closed to investigate, but by the time it arrived the Delta had moved off to the west, outside Conqueror’s operational area. Instead of pursuing the Delta, Conqueror moved southwest of Bear Island and after four days in the area detected a homebound ‘Yankee’ class SSBN. Once again, Conqueror moved into firing range off the Yankee’s starboard quarter, but was forced to break away when a small merchant vessel bound for Spitsbergen crossed Conqueror’s bows and disrupted the narrowband sonar picture. By the time Conqueror regained contact with the Yankee, it had increased speed and it took Conqueror over seven hours to regain a fire control solution. ‘This is a nerve wracking game,’ wrote Conqueror’s CO, ‘trailing a 12kt target is known to be quite difficult but trying to get to a firing position from astern is murder. There is no doubt that there is a chance of counter detections (in wartime being sunk) particularly when one has no idea when he will slow down to CSA [clear stern arcs].’ As Conqueror closed the range, the Yankee suddenly slowed and began to clear stern arcs. Conqueror quickly simulated firing two torpedoes, but due to the close range and the possibility of the Yankee deploying decoys and other countermeasures in a wartime scenario, the attack was only judged to have had a fair chance of success.88
Like the Delta, the Yankee remained unaware that it had just been under simulated attack. It continued to the southeast, while Conqueror altered course to the west and moved into a new search area southwest of Bear Island. There Conqueror briefly made a long-range detection of another nuclear submarine patrolling to the northwest, but lost contact after a short time. Conqueror’s CO was forced to surface his submarine and shut down the reactor in order to carry out repairs to a steam leak. As engineers repaired the problem Conqueror, which was snorting, detected the Type III nuclear submarine again.89 After pressing on with the repair Conqueror dived again and vigorously pursued the Soviet submarine, closing in and acquiring a fire control solution and firing two simulated Tigerfish torpedoes, which were later judged to have been successful. Conqueror then withdrew to the southeast and detected another homeward bound ‘Yankee’ SSBN travelling at unusually high speed, possibly due to a mechanical defect or a casualty on board. As with the previous submarine contacts, Conqueror closed the range to a firing position and simulated firing two Tigerfish torpedoes at the fast-moving Yankee. In just eighteen days at sea, Conqueror had conducted four simulated firings at four Soviet submarines.90
Despite these successes, starting in the late 1970s Western Intelligence had been puzzled by the appearance of a number of different Soviet submarine designs. Instead of quantity the Soviets started placing an increased emphasis on quality in ship construction and weapon systems. The most worrying was the culmination of the ‘Victor’ design, Project 671RTM, ‘Victor III’, of which fourteen were built between 1977 and 1993. The ‘Victor III’ was 4.8 metres longer than the ‘Victor II’, quieter and fitted with tandem propeller and improved sensors and weapons. High-frequency, narrowband noises, such as those generated from machinery inside the submarine, were significantly reduced. One of the most distinctive deviations from the previous ‘Victor’ variants was the inclusion of a pod, about the size of a small minibus, mounted atop the upper tail rudder. When the first ‘Victor III’ appeared in late 1977, Western Intelligence suspected that the pod housed a towed communication cable, a torpedo decoy system or an auxiliary propulsion system for extremely quiet underwater speeds.91 The US eventually confirmed that the pod contained a towed array, and in November 1983 a Victor III, K-324, operating off the east coast of the United States, snagged the towed-array cable of a US frigate, the USS McCloy, 282 miles west of Bermuda and was forced to surface, allowing US photography of the inside of the pod.
The ‘Victor III’ signalled the beginning of the end of the acoustic advantage enjoyed by both the Royal Navy and the US Navy. ‘The Victor Is, Victor IIs, the early Deltas, Hotel, Echo, Novembers, all those were easy,’ recalls James Perowne, ‘and then suddenly, they turned out the Victor III … Life got much harder.’92 Soviet submariners also appeared to be getting better, finding new ways to counter SOSUS. The 1980s saw older, noisier first-generation Soviet submarines sent to waters surrounding the Iceland–Faroes Gap to act as noisy, confusing contacts, to decoy Royal Navy and US Navy SOSUS and Maritime Patrol Aircraft, while newer, quieter Soviet submarines passed in and out of the Atlantic. It was almost as if the Soviets started to realize just how susceptible their SSNs and particularly their SSBNs were to detection and trailing by Royal Navy and US Navy submarines. All of this was deeply puzzling until May 1985 when the FBI uncovered the biggest espionage leak in US naval history, with the arrest of the former senior US Navy warrant officer John A. Walker.
John Walker’s espionage started in October 1967. He was deeply dissatisfied with aspects of his naval career, the American political system and, as he later wrote, ‘The farce of the Cold War and the absurd war machine it spawned.’ He was also in financial difficulties after entering into a number of failed business ventures.93 In exchange for money, he decided to spy for the Soviet Union. When he first walked into the Soviet Embassy with a batch of photocopied documents and asked to see security personnel the KGB immediately recognized the importance of the information Walker was offering. His documents contained highly classified details about US Navy submarines, as well as cryptographic information, including the month’s settings for the American KL-47 encryption machine. For the next eighteen years Walker provided cryptographic information, operational orders, war plans, technical manuals and intelligence digests to the Soviets, by selectively photographing small numbers of the thousands of documents that he had access to and depositing them in carefully prearranged spots known as ‘dead drops’, where he would collect cash and further instructions.94
To ensure his espionage activities continued when he retired from the Navy in 1975, Walker recruited an old Navy friend, Senior Chief Petty Officer Jerry Whitworth, who re-enlisted in the Navy in 1974 and continued to deliver information to the Soviets until he also retired in 1983. Whitworth left his last posting, on the US aircraft carrier USS Enterprise, with a foot-high stack of documents, including cable traffic and photographs of various US cryptographic systems. With Whitworth retired, in 1983 Walker also recruited his son, Michael Whitworth, a yeoman in the Navy, who copied over 1500 documents for the KGB while serving on board the carrier USS Nimitz. Walker’s older brother, Arthur L. Walker, a retired Navy Lieutenant Commander working as a defence contractor, was also enlisted, after he owed money to John.95
In 1984 the seeds of the ring’s destruction were sown, first by Jerry Whitworth, afflicted with guilt, who opened an anonymous correspondence with the FBI. However, he failed to follow through and the FBI was unable to identify him. It was Walker’s wife, Barbara, who eventually revealed to the FBI that her husband had been spying for the Soviet Union. The ring was finally broken on 20 May 1985, when the FBI arrested John Walker. In exchange for a reduced sentence, Walker made a deal to reveal all and plead guilty. He was sentenced to life in prison. Arthur Walker received three life sentences and a $250,000 fine. Michael Walker received a 25-year sentence, while Jerry Whitworth was fined $410,000 and given a 365-year prison sentence. John Lehman, the US Navy Secretary, was deeply angered by what in his view were lenient sentences and by the Navy’s not being able to court-martial Walker for espionage, which would have entailed the death penalty. Michael Walker was released in February 2000 for good behaviour.96 John and Arthur Walker were eligible for parol
e in 2015, but they both died in prison in 2014.
At first, the Americans attempted to play down the impact of the spy ring. The US Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral James D. Watkins, declared that the US Navy had the problem ‘bounded and can leave it in the dust behind us’.97 However, over time the US was forced to admit that Walker–Whitworth had caused a great deal of damage. In July 1985, a high-ranking Soviet KGB defector, Vitaly Yurchenko, told the FBI that ‘the information delivered by Walker enabled the KGB to decipher over a million messages’. The man responsible for first handling Walker, the former KGB station chief in Washington, Boris Solomatin, also admitted that ‘Walker’s information not only provided us with ongoing intelligence, but helped us over time to understand and study how your military actually thinks.’98 In April 1987, the US Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger admitted that ‘We now have clear signals of dramatic Soviet gains in all areas of naval warfare, which must now be interpreted in the light of the Walker conspiracy.’99 The Director of US Naval Intelligence, William O. Studeman, later said that ‘the Walker–Whitworth espionage activity was of the highest value to the intelligence services of the Soviet Union, with the potential – had conflict erupted between the two superpowers – to have powerful war-winning implications for the Soviet side’.100
Walker provided a vast amount of secret US Navy documentation to the Soviets, including operational orders, war plans, technical manuals, intelligence digests, sonar systems, operating procedures, operating areas, signals intelligence, electronic intelligence, and communication intelligence. Suddenly, the new Soviet behaviour, the change in tactics and overall naval strategy, made sense. Through information furnished by the Walker Ring, the Soviet Navy began to understand its doctrinal inferiority, how vulnerable its submarines were to acoustic detection and just how effective the US Navy and the Royal Navy were at trailing Soviet submarines. ‘The real thing they told them was that they weren’t as good as they thought they were,’ recalls Martin Macpherson.101 Armed with this information they had embarked on a series of programmes designed to close the technological gap between themselves and the West.102
Acoustic-quieting technology had already been introduced into the ‘Victor II’ design, significantly reducing machinery-produced noise and US intelligence indicated that the ‘Victor II’ already had the same noise levels as a US ‘Sturgeon’ class completed five years earlier, in 1967.103 But only seven Victor IIs were constructed between 1972 and 1978 and the programme was interrupted in the mid-1970s when the Soviets embarked on the ‘Victor III’. In the late 1970s, the Soviets had sought out Western technology to make their submarines quieter. The Toshiba Machine Company, a subsidiary of Japan’s giant electronic company Toshiba, and the Kongsberg Våpenfabrikk, a company wholly owned by the Norwegian Government, sold highly advanced propeller-milling equipment to the Soviet Union in direct violation of Export Control rules that ‘led to more efficient production of Soviet-designed submarine propellers’ and the fabrication of smoother thus quieter submarine propellers.104 A skewed propeller, very similar to that used in HMS Swiftsure in the mid-1970s, was fitted to the first Soviet third-generation nuclear submarine, the Project 945 ‘Sierra’. Like the ‘Alfa’, the ‘Sierra’ was constructed out of titanium. Double-hulled, its single reactor employed natural convection at slow speeds, alleviating the use of pumps, which contributed to its quietness at slow speeds. The ‘Sierra’ was equipped with a towed array and was capable of carrying up to forty torpedoes. Advances in automation also allowed for significant reduction in crew size; 31 officers and warrant officers and 28 enlisted men compared to the 75 men on the ‘Victor’ class.
The first ‘Sierra’ commissioned into the Soviet Navy in September 1984, but progress on subsequent submarines, including a modified design incorporating additional quieting features, Project 945A ‘Sierra II’, was slow. The Soviets intended to build a fleet of forty Sierras, but production difficulties associated with welding titanium led to significant production delays and by 1993 only four of the class had been built. Due to the delays the Soviets pursued a steel hull version of the design, which eventually evolved into an entirely new design known as the Project 971, ‘Akula’. Slightly larger than the ‘Sierra’, the ‘Akula’ used the same propulsion plant, but contained a number of major innovations intended to reduce both weight and more importantly noise, including modular isolated decks and a revolutionary active noise cancellation system. The first ‘Akula’ was commissioned into the Soviet Navy in December 1984 and series production continued well into the 1990s. The ‘Akula’ was so quiet that when the first of class began its sea trials in 1986, the US Navy was ‘aghast to learn that its “quiet level” approached that of the 688 [class] submarines we were building just a few years before’.105 Through much of the later years in the Cold War the US Navy described the ‘Akula’ as the ‘Walker’ class.
The information furnished by the Walker Spy Ring also finally explained the fundamental shift in the strategic and operational policy of the Soviet Navy. The Soviets recognized that they would have to bring about a substantial weakening of NATO’s potential to protect its sea lines of communication before they could expect much success in a large-scale, conventional campaign against the reinforcement and resupply of Europe. They concluded that the only way to do this was by gaining control of the Norwegian Sea, by neutralizing NATO’s anti-air and ASW capabilities based in northern Norway, significantly reducing NATO’s air and ASW defences in the GIUK Gap, while at the same time degrading NATO’s wide-area ASW surveillance capability in the North Atlantic either by attacking or sabotaging SOSUS terminals. The Soviets calculated that if they could achieve all of this then they could dictate the time and place of any campaign and disrupt the reinforcement and resupply of Europe. They knew that if they failed, they would have to fight a campaign on NATO’s terms, with minimal capabilities.106 Aware of these vulnerabilities, the Soviets realized that what they lacked materially and personally they could make up for tactically through the adoption of a series of techniques designed to frustrate the West’s superiority over the Soviet Navy.
The Soviets improved their knowledge of the underwater environment and began to exploit the different thermal/temperature fronts in the seas in which they operated. Different sea conditions could wreak havoc with trails. The contrast between long-range detections in the Atlantic and short-range detections across a front was stark. Ocean fronts – the boundary between two distinct masses of water, where properties can change markedly over a short distance – such as the southeast Iceland, Norwegian and Jan Mayen fronts could disrupt trailing operations and severely reduce detection ranges against submarines. The Soviets also started to deploy older noisier submarines near SOSUS arrays, as decoys, while modern, quieter Soviet submarines passed in and out of the Atlantic undetected. Soviet SSBNs deploying from the Northern Fleet also started to behave as if they knew they were being trailed. They began to visit a strong frontal area as part of their deployment process in order to shake off and possibly counter-detect any trailing SSNs.
The Soviet Navy also developed countermeasures to disrupt US Navy and Royal Navy trailing activities. One such approach was the Shkval rocket-powered underwater-unguided torpedo with a nuclear warhead, designed on the assumption that the first warning a Soviet submarine would have of an impending attack at the hands of a Royal Navy or US Navy submarine would be the sound of an incoming torpedo. The Shkval was fired back down the bearing of the attacking torpedo’s transient noise with the aim of destroying both the attacking submarine and the incoming torpedo with a nuclear explosion.107 Shkval was later described as ‘the physical embodiment of the Soviet high command’s realization’ that the Royal Navy and the US Navy could ‘sink Soviet ballistic missile submarines at will’ in the ‘northern Atlantic and Pacific seas’.108
This awareness of increased vulnerability also finally explained the earlier intelligence that indicated that the Soviets had abandoned the wartime strategy to intercept and disr
upt the NATO sea lines of communication in the Atlantic. Instead, the Soviet Navy now intended to withdraw its vulnerable SSBNs, armed with long-range missiles with sufficient range to reach the United States, to waters such as the White Sea, the Sea of Okhotsk and shallow territorial waters around the Kamchatka Peninsula and Novaya Zemlya. Once stationed in these areas Soviet SSBNs no longer needed to transit through the chokepoints and acoustic barriers of the GIUK Gap to attack targets in the United States and Europe. This new approach, sometimes termed the ‘bastion strategy’, allowed Soviet SSBNs to conduct patrols in friendly home waters, close to the Soviet Union, where it was difficult for Royal Navy and US Navy submarines to remain undetected. It also allowed the Soviet submarine fleet to exploit the protection of the Arctic ice cap and by the early 1980s there was increasing evidence that more and more Soviet submarines were operating under it.