War of the Whales: A True Story

by Joshua Horwitz

  Natter’s planning goal was to avoid the sort of “single-point failure” of the Vieques debacle that threw the entire Atlantic Fleet training schedule into disarray. He envisioned the exercises in Great Bahama Canyon as a test run. If things went smoothly, the Navy could move most of its Vieques-based exercises up to the Bahamas on an ongoing basis.

  Things hadn’t gone smoothly.

  Natter and Fallon confirmed that the Second Fleet had been operating with sonar in the canyon the night before the strandings. But no one on the ships had been alerted to the presence of whales, and none had been sighted during the exercises, either in the canyon or stranding on the beach. Of course, they were nighttime exercises, so visual sightings would have been difficult, if not impossible. Regardless of the coincidence in timing, Natter and Fallon were not willing to concede that the exercises had caused the strandings.

  As soon as Pirie got back from Norfolk, he briefed the Secretary’s general counsel, Stephen Preston, on what he’ d learned from the fleet admirals. After spending most of the 1990s trying to keep Preston’s predecessor, Steven Honigman, from “giving away the store to the environmentalists,” as he saw it, Pirie was reassured by Preston’s more pugnacious style. In light of the briefing he was about to give the Secretary, Pirie hoped that Preston could present a legal rationale for allowing sonar training exercises to proceed on schedule.

  MARCH 22, 2000

  Office of Naval Research, Arlington, Virginia

  Admiral Paul Gaffney was due to depart as chief of ONR in three months to become president of the National Defense University in Washington, DC. Gaffney didn’t want to exit ONR under a cloud. Nor did he want ONR to become the fall guy for the fleet exercises in the Bahamas. Unusual among flag officers, Gaffney was a trained oceanographer who’ d devoted the shank of his career to directing the Naval Research Lab and the Office of Naval Research. As a man of science, he wanted to present the Navy Secretary with a science-based defense of ONR’s sea tests in the Bahamas.

  With more than 500 scientists and other staff working under him at ONR, Gaffney couldn’t keep abreast of every field program in every ocean. But he quickly located the acoustics expert in charge of ONR’s Littoral Warfare tests in the Bahamas, and called him into his office.2 Gaffney and the acoustician agreed that ONR’s sonobuoy testing on the northeast side of the islands couldn’t have caused the stranding on the western coastlines. They both assumed that some sort of acoustic event was to blame. Maybe it was military, or maybe it was something seismic, like an earthquake or commercial explosives. Meanwhile, the Secretary was rattling the cage for hard data, not just theories.

  Gaffney directed the acoustician to produce a real-time acoustic model of whatever had happened in the canyon on the night of March 15. The admiral would get him the logs of ship movements and sonar transmissions from the fleet. Gaffney wanted the modeling and analysis to be conducted by a team of expert acousticians from outside the Navy—either arm’s-length academics or private contractors. If this all ended up in the press or in the courts, the Secretary would need to have an impartial, non-Navy assessment.

  The acoustician pointed out that there weren’t any marine acoustic experts that the Navy hadn’t hired or funded at some point. At least not in the United States. And he couldn’t imagine the fleet sharing classified ship logs with foreign nationals. Gaffney considered this problem for a minute. “Okay, then just get the best people you can find on it,” he said. “I want unassailable experts.”

  After lengthy discussion, they decided to hire two different research groups to work up independent models, using different algorithms: one at the Naval Research Lab, which had the best Navy acousticians; and another at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a longtime Navy contractor that boasted the best computers and software.

  Just three days after the stranding, Secretary Danzig had called Gaffney with direct questions about what ONR was doing in the Bahamas and if it could have caused the whales to beach. Gaffney had referred the Secretary to Bob Gisiner as ONR’s resident expert in bioacoustics.

  Gisiner had been working late at his office on Saturday and was taken aback by the unexpected call from the Secretary. As he reviewed the basics of beaked whale sensitivity to sonar and recounted the details on the Greek stranding in 1996, Gisiner could hear Danzig taking notes on the other end. He was impressed by the Secretary’s questions about the underwater topography of the Great Bahama Canyon compared to the Ionian Sea. Danzig told Gisiner to make sure that Darlene Ketten joined the conference call he was setting up with the fleet. In the meantime, he told Gisiner to call him on his cell phone day or night with any important developments from the Bahamas investigation.

  SATURDAY, MARCH 27, 2000, MORNING

  Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

  The Navy Secretary’s conference call wasn’t due to begin until 0900 hours, but retired Rear Admiral Dick Pittenger had been pacing his office since dawn. After a decade of civilian life, Pittenger still hadn’t adjusted to a nine-to-five regimen.

  It had taken time to get used to the casual work style at Woods Hole, where the marine biologists wore shorts and flip-flops and everyone addressed him by his first name. When he’ d earned his first star, Pittenger was assigned a personal adjutant to carry his briefcase and open the back door to his car, which came with a driver and a Navy flag on the hood. But it wasn’t the trappings of power that Pittenger missed from his days in the admiralty. It was the actual power to make decisions about the future of the Navy and national defense.

  For a man who would rise through the ranks of the US Navy to become its Director of Antisubmarine Warfare at the peak of the Cold War, Dick Pittenger had an unlikely and unpromising childhood. He grew up “sickly and dust poor,” as he described himself, in Lexington, Nebraska, during the worst of the 1930s Dust Bowl drought. Before his first birthday, he almost died of pneumonia, as his older brother had. After his family lost its farm to the bank and moved to Tacoma, Washington, Dick joined the Sea Scouts—a sailing program of the Boy Scouts—and fell in love with all things marine. At 14, he was a malnourished 80-pound boy who’ d never seen a doctor or a dentist. A few years later he enjoyed a growth spurt that raised his weight to a normal range and lowered his voice in the barbershop quartet he sang with from soprano to bass.

  Dick joined the Navy Reserves at age 17 during the Korean War and managed to pass the Naval Academy entrance exam by going back to high school for an extra year of study. He scored so high on the Navy IQ test that the Academy was willing to overlook his lung problems, which would persist throughout his life. After squeaking through the Academy physical, and after his first-ever dentist visit, he headed east to Annapolis.

  The Academy was like Oz for Dick, who was the first in his family to graduate high school. He couldn’t help feeling like a rube alongside his fellow midshipmen, many of whom—such as his classmate John McCain—were born into Navy royalty. But he worked hard at his studies and graduated in 1958 in the top third of his class.

  His first assignment out of the Academy was to the same Fleet Sonar School in Key West that Ken Balcomb would later attend. After earning a master’s degree in the physics of underwater acoustics at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, he skippered a minesweeper off the coast of Vietnam. Then he attended the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, where he wrote his thesis on the history of surface sonar. During his Cold War tour in Europe, Pittenger commanded a fast frigate and led an antisubmarine warfare squadron of destroyers that tracked Soviet subs throughout the Mediterranean. By the end of the 1970s, he had risen to the admiralty and become the Navy’s chief sponsor of midfrequency active sonar.

  In the mid-1980s, when the Soviet subs became too quiet to track with the passive SOSUS system, the Navy brought Pittenger to the Pentagon as a two-star admiral to direct and revamp its antisubmarine warfare strategy. Faced with a Soviet submarine fleet he described as “virtually silent and underfoot,” he devised an intri
cate system for “acoustic cueing” across wide ocean areas. His master plan for expanding active sonar systems included low and mid-frequency platforms on surface ships, sonobuoys, towed arrays, and aircraft. When he became Oceanographer of the Navy in 1988, he continued to promote his antisubmarine warfare plans in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill.

  Then, in 1989, the Soviet empire began to wobble, and soon after, to tear apart. After feverishly “hunting Ivan” in every ocean of the world for four decades, the US Navy was suddenly a fighting force without a mission. Pittenger had spent his entire 35-year Navy career as a Cold Warrior, and now the war was over.

  Unless they are tracking toward the very top of the four-star command chain, most two-star admirals, such as Pittenger, retire from the Navy in their fifties, at the peak of their careers. Some move on to academia. Others, who need to better support their families after decades on a military salary, take jobs in defense contracting. An admiral whom Pittenger worked with closely at the Pentagon had retired to become director of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Soon afterward, he recruited Pittenger to join him at Woods Hole to coordinate its arctic research program and upgrade its fleet of research vessels. So in 1990, Pittenger quietly retired from active duty and settled down in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

  Pittenger had served with total devotion to his Navy. But his shoulders sagged when he thought about how he’ d shortchanged his family. They’ d had to move 22 times over the course of his career, and he’ d been at sea much more often than not, missing most of his four kids’ birthdays. His wife named their first two daughters, Beth and Meg, after the sisters in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, whose father, Mr. March, was away constantly during the Civil War.

  His worst memory was during the Vietnam War. The minesweeper he commanded was stuck in port at Subic Bay riding out a typhoon, while his wife was in labor with their third child back in Huntington Beach, California. Pittenger received a ship-to-shore radio message from the Red Cross reporting that his son had been born. There was no phone on board the ship, but he was able to see a phone booth a hundred yards away on the other side of the storm-driven harbor. He made a run for it, reached the booth, dropped a coin in the phone box, and convinced the operator to put a call through to his wife in California. During the call with his wife, he learned that his daughter Beth was at the same hospital in a full body cast, having suffered a spiral leg fracture in a bike accident. The storm raging outside the phone booth seemed to mirror his swirling emotions of joy, anxiety, and frustration at being 7,000 miles from his family and powerless to help them. When the call was over, he had to get back onboard his ship to ride out the second half of the typhoon with his crew.

  Retired admirals such as Pittenger play an important, though largely unseen, role in Navy policy making. On a logistical level, the fleet relies on its retired admirals to officiate at war games and to review after-action reports, which is why Pittenger had been invited to participate in the conference call from Woods Hole, along with Darlene Ketten, who worked across campus. On a more informal basis, retired admirals network with their far-flung “flag buddies” to exert influence on a range of policy issues—such as keeping Navy leadership from compromising national security in the name of political expediency.

  Pittenger had been anxiously awaiting the Secretary’s conference call all week. But then, he had spent his entire naval career in a state of chronic, even obsessive anxiety. For decades he had worried about the next generation of Soviet subs growing too quiet for SOSUS sensors to detect. He worried about spies and about any subs that might leak through the global acoustic net the Navy had woven across the oceans. As a ship commander, he worried about the safety of the men under his command. During his time at the Pentagon, he worried about the politicians on Capitol Hill who cut defense funding every time peace broke out, as if national security were a onetime battle that you could win and then forget about. When the Cold War ended and the Soviet navy retreated to dry dock, he worried about where the next submarine threat might emerge—from China or from North Korea, or from any rogue nation with a submarine that might be lurking, unseen and unheard, anywhere in the world’s dark oceans.

  Long before the Bahamas stranding—and particularly since the Greek stranding four years earlier—Pittenger had been ringing the bell about the need to bring sonar exercises inside the permitting and regulation process. He realized that with its new generations of high-powered active sonars, the Navy was engaged in “acoustic warfare.” The sooner it started getting permission through proper channels, he reasoned, the better. His message to his fellow admirals, active and retired, had been dire and direct: “The end of active sonar is in sight unless we do something to change the way we operate.” Now he wished he’ d rung that bell even louder.

  He worried that the active sonar program he’ d nurtured, and which he still viewed as crucial to national defense, was imperiled not only by environmental activists, but by the cavalier attitude of many in the Navy leadership. One three-star admiral he’ d tried to persuade on the topic had said, “Tell me again, why are we having all this discussion about some fish?” To which Pittenger replied, “Because if we don’t it could shut down our Navy.” He’ d been down this road before. For years the Navy brass had insisted—in defiance of an unstoppable social and legal tide to the contrary—that women couldn’t be integrated into the fighting fleet. Now he was girding for what he feared would be another bungled engagement with the media and the forces of social change.

  In the days leading up to the conference call, Pittenger had tried to convince both the active-duty and retired admirals he knew that the Navy needed to get out in front of this stranding mess. As soon as the commanders realized that fleet exercises were likely involved, he argued, they should have said straight out and in public, “We’ve got a problem, and we’re going to fix it.” Instead, the fleet had placed its battle readiness in the hands of lawyers, none of whom had ever commanded sailors or ships in combat.

  • • •

  The Secretary ran the conference call, though he did very little of the talking. The review was conducted with precision and civility. No one spoke out of turn, as Danzig methodically polled the participants on whether or not he should curtail sonar exercises, and why.

  The Secretary wanted to hear first from Ketten, who had recently returned from the Bahamas. Speaking from Pittenger’s office, she reported her suspicions of acoustic trauma, based on her beachside necropsy. It was impossible to identify the source of that trauma, and the heads weren’t due up at Harvard for another few days. So she didn’t want to speculate on what she’ d find. Since the underwater topography and acoustics of the Bahamas were unlikely to exist anywhere else, she cautioned against generalizing a sonar threat to marine mammals from this one stranding event, even if it turned out to be sonar related.

  Next up was Gaffney. After he ruled out any connection between ONR’s sea tests north of the islands and the strandings, he reported that so far his acoustic teams hadn’t been able to identify any nonmilitary acoustic sound sources in the canyon on March 15. No industrial explosives. No earthquakes or sea storms. He noted that ONR had circulated its cautionary report from the Greek stranding to all the commanding officers in the fleet four years earlier. And since that 1996 incident, ONR had undertaken a more formal permitting process. In this case, it had conducted its Environmental Assessments in collaboration with the Southeast Regional Office of Fisheries, which had issued ONR a permit to conduct tests of its Littoral Warfare weapons.

  Admirals Fallon and Natter knew they were in the hot seat. They felt that Danzig was trying to get them to acknowledge that the fleet’s antisubmarine exercises caused the strandings. But neither of them was willing to concede the point. Fallon adamantly resisted any curtailment of sonar exercises. Expressing the strongest emotion of anyone during the call, he asserted, “It would be easy to shut down sonar exercises—but doing the easy thing isn’t our job.” Natter stated his oppositio
n to a shutdown in more muted language. The investigation had just begun, he pointed out, and they’ d only been able to eliminate a few of the possible causes of the strandings. Then he punted to Pittenger, in the hopes that the Secretary might defer to the most experienced admiral on the call.

  An obsessive student of naval history, Pittenger felt compelled to share his historical perspective on the high cost of nonpreparedness. It had happened time and again: as soon as the US Navy decisively defeated an enemy, the politicians slashed its funding, and the Navy fell behind in the never-ending chase after more rigorous antisubmarine warfare training. At the end of World War II, a war-weary nation cut back on defense spending, while the Soviet submarine fleet swelled in numbers. After the Vietnam War, Nixon sought détente with the Soviets, just as Russia was rolling out its quietest, most deadly class of submarines. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, the politicians in search of savings were delighted to turn a blind eye to the non-Soviet threats in oceans.

  By the late 1990s, the navies of virtually every aspiring power in the developing world boasted quiet attack submarines, among them Libya, North Korea, Pakistan, India, and Iran. Forty-three navies worldwide operated submarines—even nations as militarily insignificant as Thailand, Algeria, and Colombia.3 At any given time, submarines from a dozen different navies might be patrolling the waterways of the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf, including Turkey, Greece, Egypt, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. And in the Pacific, China was quickly building up a naval force, while the North Koreans had dozens of submarines and Chinese-made midget subs circulating in the waters off the East Asian coastline.

  For all their armaments and high-tech sensors, the Navy’s warships remained vulnerable to the most destabilizing, asymmetrical force in the ocean: a rogue submarine lying in wait along the side of an underwater canyon. A single torpedo could sink a modern battleship up to frigate size. Cruisers and destroyers could probably withstand one hit, but two well-placed torpedo strikes could split them in half. Even a massive aircraft carrier was at risk. Ships could be replaced, but the real hostages to unpreparedness were the hundreds of crew members serving on each battleship—or the thousands aboard an aircraft supercarrier.