The Fisheries contingent was smaller than the Navy’s: the leadership from headquarters in Silver Spring and the Southeast Office in Florida, plus the few individuals from the Office of Protected Resources, including Gentry, whose security clearance allowed them to sit in on a classified briefing.
An admiral from the Atlantic Fleet led off by explaining how the political upheaval in Vieques, Puerto Rico, had forced the battle group to conduct its first-ever antisubmarine exercise in Providence Channel. Then Admiral Paul Gaffney, the head of ONR, introduced the acoustic modeling of the sonar exercises in the canyon that he’ d commissioned. Someone dimmed the lights and lowered a screen from the ceiling. An acoustician stepped forward to narrate a PowerPoint deck illustrating the progress of the battle group as it transited the 150-mile length of the canyon from midnight on March 15 until four o’clock that afternoon.
As the icons representing the ships moved through the canyon, bands of yellow, red, and green—symbolizing sound waves of varying decibels and frequencies—spread out in front of their bows. Two of the ships proceeded in a zigzagging pattern, while three others followed down the middle of the channel. By the 6:00 a.m. interval in the slide show, the cross-section view of the canyon was flooded with color. The peak-intensity sound, in red, was concentrated in a surface layer, with yellow-to-green-to-blue layers of decreasing sound spreading out at lower depths.
Shifting to an aerial view, the acoustician showed how the advance of the battleships through the canyon coincided with the presumed times and reported locations of the whale strandings, which were represented by white X marks along the shore of Abaco and nearby islands. The acoustician used his laser pointer to indicate how the surface layer of warm water had amplified the sound to levels in excess of 180 decibels within a radius of 30 miles of the ships. By the time he reached the 4:00 p.m. coordinates in the slide show, the sonar exercises were complete, and each of the stranded whale locations had been traversed.
“That’s all of them,” he said, pointing to whale number 17, which had stranded at Gold Rock Creek in Grand Bahama. He added, incidentally, that no whales or other marine mammals had been sighted by the battle group in the course of the exercise.
The simulation of the 16-hour war game and 17 whale strandings had taken less than ten minutes to reenact.
When the lights came up, there was much throat clearing and fiddling with paper and pencils.
Sam Ridgway pushed his chair away from the table and pulled himself slowly to his feet. “Well, gentlemen,” he said with what seemed like an exaggerated South Texas drawl, “that was a very informative presentation. I guess we can all go home now.” Nervous laughter rippled through the room. Ridgway looked around the conference table, feigning dismay that there might be anything further to discuss or conclude.
Nonetheless, scientific experts from the Navy and Fisheries presented acoustic and biological analysis throughout the morning. But the decision makers had seen what they needed to see, and soon they were slipping away from the table to conduct sidebar conversations in the hallways. During coffee breaks, the Fisheries leadership and its lawyers swirled around one another like a school of bait fish. Navy JAGs and general counsels spoke quietly into the ears of admirals. By late morning, the Navy lawyers were conferring with the Fisheries lawyers, and the Navy Secretary with the NOAA and Fisheries administrators.
When it was time to break for lunch, Gaffney thanked the scientists for their presentations. The Navy brass and their counterparts at Fisheries, along with their respective attorneys, convened to a smaller conference room with better chairs.
Gentry hoped that Fisheries would hold the Navy’s feet to the fire. But once he saw the admirals filing into the closed-door conference—“Where the elephants go to play,” as Gisiner remarked to him with a smirk—he realized that the idea of Fisheries dictating terms to the Navy was laughable. The Navy had all the acousticians, most of the marine mammal experts, and all the other resources that counted, including money and computers. It also owned virtually all the acoustic and operational data related to the event, and Fisheries had neither the political clout nor the clear legal mandate to compel the US Navy to make it public.
The fleet commanders, for their part, opposed the notion of sharing their closely guarded trade secrets with Fisheries. The details of naval training exercises were classified, including the specific frequencies, source levels, and ranges of its sonar. Any evidence submitted to an investigation or published in a public report would have to be cleared in advance by the Navy. It defied the admirals’ comprehension that they had to kowtow to a roomful of lawyers and regulators. They had built and trained the most powerful Navy in the history of maritime warfare, had outlasted the fearsome Soviet armada during a four-decade Cold War, and now they were being called to account because a dozen whales had stranded during a training exercise?
But the civilians in the room—the Secretary of the Navy and the administrators of NOAA and Fisheries—understood the need for accommodation. An unfortunate sequence of events had forced the Bahamas incident into public view and was now forcing them into bed together. For a peacetime Navy intent on promoting itself as a good steward of the environment, pictures of dead whales on a beach with Navy warships offshore demanded a thorough and transparent investigation. So did a relentless environmental lawyer in Los Angeles—who was no doubt preparing at that very moment to sue both the Navy and Fisheries—and a former naval officer turned rogue whale researcher who wouldn’t stop talking to the press. By the end of a long afternoon of negotiation, the lawyers had agreed on the rules of engagement for the first-ever joint investigation conducted by the Navy and Fisheries.
When the Navy’s “letter of cooperation” with Fisheries was released to the press a week later, Gentry knew he was in for a long ordeal. The lawyers, predictably, had weasel-worded it so badly that you couldn’t tell who was admitting to what. The Navy acknowledged that the stranding was “an unusual and significant event,” and pledged that if the investigation ultimately determined that sonar could cause trauma to whales, “the Navy will reassess its use of sonars in the course of peacetime training and implement measures to ensure the least practicable adverse effect on beaked whales.”
What came through loud and clear to Gentry was that by announcing a joint investigation, the Navy had wrapped its arms around its supposed regulator, and it now had a stranglehold on him as well. Gentry had been named as Fisheries’ point person and as liaison with the Navy acousticians. Teri Rowles of Protected Resources was assigned to work with Darlene Ketten on the biological investigation.
The day they announced their partnership, Navy and Fisheries offered Ketten to the press to discuss her findings to date. She characterized the Bahamas strandings as “a red flag” and “a reason for concern,” then speculated that the animals that died would have experienced the equivalent of a “really bad headache.”2 She cautioned, however, that there wasn’t enough evidence yet to link the strandings to Navy sonar, and the biological investigation would take months to complete.
The week after the joint investigation was announced, Admiral Gaffney left the Office of Naval Research to become president of the National Defense University. Before leaving, he authorized Gisiner to earmark $3 million for the purchase of a Siemens CT scanner for Ketten’s Woods Hole lab. Ketten heard the news in Adelaide, Australia, where she and Teri Rowles were briefing the International Whaling Commission on their investigation of the Bahamas stranding.
Balcomb, whose contributions to recovering and preserving the evidence trail of the stranding were relegated to a footnote in Ketten’s and Rowles’ presentation, was back on San Juan Island considering how he might keep the pressure on the Navy and Fisheries to make good on their promise of a thorough and transparent inquiry.
Reading the “letter of cooperation” in his Los Angeles office, Joel Reynolds was deeply skeptical about the outcome of this “cooperative” investigation, which he doubted would shed any light on the N
avy’s midnight exercises in Providence Channel.
23
In the Valley of the Whales
Ken Balcomb spent the summer back on San Juan Island writing letters to members of Congress, speaking to the handful of powerful businesspeople he’ d come to know over the years in the Pacific Northwest, talking to any journalist who would listen—doing whatever he could to keep the pressure on the Navy to fully investigate the Bahamas stranding and change the way it used sonar in training exercises. Balcomb worked on his own, rather than allying himself with NRDC, the Humane Society, or any of the conservation groups that were starting to engage on the issue. He was past caring whether he was perceived as an environmentalist, an activist, or a whistle-blower. But he’ d always been a lone wolf, and he felt too old to start running with a pack.
By mid-September, all the summer interns had left Smugglers Cove, and by early October, the orcas had begun their migration south toward the Oregon and California coasts. Ordinarily, October was when he and Diane would be folding up camp and heading back to Abaco to start up the winter beaked whale survey. That fall, for the first time in memory, Balcomb had nowhere he was supposed to be.
When the 60 Minutes segment finally aired in early October, Balcomb hoped it would generate a chain reaction of public outrage. But to his dismay, millions of Americans watched his videotape of the mass stranding and listened to David Martin of CBS News indict the US Navy as the likeliest culprit—and then went back to speculating on whether or not the New York Mets and the New York Yankees would face off in the first Subway Series since 1956. Except for a few calls from journalists, the 60 Minutes broadcast didn’t seem to move the meter.
Ken heard from Dave Ellifrit that Diane was back in Abaco after spending most of the summer in Los Angeles. Dave had joined her in mid-September to help get the boats back in the water and restart the survey. Ken and Diane had communicated only a few times over the summer, in awkward phone conversations that were mostly about Ken’s shipping her some personal effects from Smugglers Cove. He’ d left behind gear in Abaco, including a couple of precious beaked whale heads he’ d salvaged from around the Caribbean over the years. But he was afraid that asking Diane to ship them back to him would slam shut a door he still hoped to keep ajar.
The only follow-up contact he had with Diane was to co-author an article for the Bahamas Journal of Science titled “A Mass Stranding of Cetaceans Caused by Naval Sonar in the Bahamas.”1 Their meticulously detailed account documented the time, location, and condition of each stranded animal, provided preliminary analysis of the specimens they collected, discussed the acoustic threat that military sonar posed to whales, and offered suggestions for reducing the risks to marine mammals. It was a bittersweet collaboration, executed through dispassionate emails and a few stilted phone conversations over the course of several months.
For years after its publication, their article would remain the most cited primary reference for the Bahamas stranding. It also served as a somber epitaph for their research subjects.
“None of the Cuvier’s beaked whales that we had documented in our nine-year study have returned since the March 15 naval exercise, and none of the ‘rescued’ whales has been seen again, either . . . Mitigation of naval activities during peacetime exercise appears to be the only reasonable solution to this problem.”
OCTOBER 12, 2000
Port of Aden, Yemen
Six months after its ill-fated antisubmarine training exercise in the Bahamas, the USS George Washington battle group had deployed to the Persian Gulf. After transiting the Atlantic and Mediterranean, the USS Cole led the battle group through the Suez Canal and into the Red Sea. On October 12, while the Cole was refueling at the Yemeni port of Aden, a small motorboat packed with 500 pounds of explosives pulled up, unchallenged, along the port side of the destroyer. Two suicide bombers aboard the boat detonated their payload, blowing a 40-by-40-foot hole in the ship’s hull and flooding the ship’s galley and engineering spaces. The USS Hawes and the USS Donald Cook arrived soon to assist in the rescue and evacuation of the injured. Seventeen sailors were killed and 39 were injured. The Cole narrowly escaped sinking and had to be towed all the way back to the United States for repair.
The Cole bombing dashed any illusions the US Navy may have held about its invincibility in the post–Cold War era. It was painful proof of just how vulnerable its warships were to a low-tech suicide attack, despite highly sophisticated sensors and unparalleled firepower. Arleigh Burke–class guided-missile destroyers were designed for deployment in the open ocean against Soviet planes, ships, and submarines. But operating inside narrow gulfs in other countries’ territorial waters, where they were hamstrung by politically driven rules of engagement, battleships were almost impossible to defend.
For the Navy, the Cole bombing marked a clear escalation in America’s tit-for-tat war with Islamic terrorists. Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for the Cole attack as revenge for ship-based cruise missiles launched two years earlier against Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan—which President Bill Clinton had ordered in retribution for the deadly Al Qaeda attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Al Qaeda’s founder, Osama bin Laden, had planned for two years to retaliate against an American cruise missile destroyer, before the USS Cole arrived in the Gulf. US Navy and intelligence services girded for the next attack on a soft target, military or civilian.
SEPTEMBER 11, 2001
Smugglers Cove, San Juan Island, Washington
A year after the Cole attack—and another year into the snail-paced Navy and Fisheries investigation of the Bahamas stranding—Balcomb heard the news of the four hijacked commercial airliners crashing into the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania. He understood immediately that America was at war—a hot war unlike the tense cat-and-mouse drama of tracking Soviet subs he knew firsthand. Like so many Americans, particularly veterans, Balcomb had a powerful urge to jump to the defense of his country. It was instinctive.
He had spent the past year bird-dogging the Navy and Fisheries’ joint investigation. A few weeks after 9/11, he went back to writing letters to politicians and lobbying journalists to keep the forgotten joint inquiry in the news. Despite his horror at the terrorist attacks, he resolved not to let the Navy off the hook for the acoustic storm its sonar training exercises continued to unleash inside whale habitats. Balcomb felt no contradiction between his patriotism and his conviction that the Navy needed to walk the walk when it came to its proclaimed commitment to being responsible stewards of the ocean environment.
DECEMBER 21, 2001
Washington, DC
Eighteen months after announcing their joint investigation, the Navy and Fisheries released what they titled an “interim report” on their long-delayed investigation of the Bahamas stranding. Following the time-honored dictum of Washington politics that the best way to bury a story is to release it after 5:00 on a Friday afternoon, the Navy and Fisheries waited until 5:30 on December 21, 2001—the last day of the federal work year and the beginning of the Christmas weekend, when virtually the entire news media was heading out of town on vacation.
Rick Weiss, a science reporter at the Washington Post who was working the Death Valley shift between Christmas and New Year’s, found his lead on page one of the report’s executive summary:
“The investigation team concludes that tactical midrange frequency sonars aboard US Navy ships that were in use during the sonar exercises in question were the most plausible source of the acoustic or impulse trauma suffered by the whales.”2
Weiss didn’t have any trouble tracking down Balcomb, who was spending the holiday alone on San Juan Island. For 15 years, he had celebrated Christmas with Diane’s family in Eleuthera. But he hadn’t been back to the Bahamas since the stranding, and now he was marking his second solo Christmas in Smugglers Cove, the loneliest week of the most solitary stretch of his life.
He spent Christmas Day reading a copy of the Navy and Fisheries’ report that Ri
ck Weiss had emailed to him on Christmas Eve. His only Christmas present, Balcomb mused to himself. He accepted the fact that this carefully worded interim report, released in the midst of the Christmas holiday, was the closest to a mea culpa the Navy was likely to offer. It might seem slender satisfaction to a man who had lost so many pieces of his heart to the Bahamas stranding. But Balcomb knew that when you’re trying to turn a wheel as big as the US Navy, you should expect to get only a small turn out of it. The Navy’s grudging admission of responsibility for the Bahamas stranding may have been a small turn, but it was a turn in the right direction.
Balcomb called Roger Gentry at home and asked him when a final report was likely to be released. Gentry told him, in friendship, not to hold his breath. In all likelihood, there would never be a final report. Gentry made a point of telling Balcomb that if he hadn’t stuck it to the Navy, there never would have been even an interim report. He said as much to the Washington Post reporter when he called him for comment on the report he’ d helped shepherd past legions of Navy and Fisheries lawyers over the past year and a half.
Gentry had agonized while watching the Navy and Fisheries navigate sideways for 18 months to arrive at essentially the same conclusions it had reached three months after the stranding. He had felt for a long time that Balcomb got a bum rap from the Navy, from Fisheries, and from his peers in the research community—including Gentry himself—all of whom had their own reasons for fearing or resenting a whistle-blower in their midst. It relieved Gentry’s guilt a bit to tell Rick Weiss that he credited Balcomb for sticking his neck out for the whales.
Balcomb didn’t so much mind the personal smears he’ d had to endure; he’ d fully expected to be attacked from the moment he stepped up to the lectern at the DC press conference. What made him angry, and a bit sad, was the realization that in all likelihood Fisheries would never return the beaked whale heads to him, despite Ketten’s promise to him back at Nancy’s Restaurant.
War of the Whales: A True Story Page 31