by Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story Of American Submarine Espionage
Now there was just the inner ejector door, one piece of steel, holding the ocean back. Even at a depth of just 200 feet, enough water could be forced by sea pressure through a one-inch hole to overwhelm pumping systems and sink a sub. If the inner plate covering the trash ejector gave way now, with Gudgeon as deep as she was, she could be lost.
One of the sub's senior enlisted men, a chief petty officer, had carried a had feeling about that ejector all day, long before the Soviets came. He had suggested sending someone swimming outside the sub to clear it. But Bessac decided they couldn't risk that kind of maneuver. It wouldn't have been an issue if Gudgeon weren't now in a position where a little more depth might save her. But there could be no going deeper.
Bessac began trying other evasive maneuvers. He called for the "noisemakers," devices that could be shot out the signal gun in the stern room. They came in cans, each about a yard long. When launched, they responded by sending a wash of sonar-befuddling bubbles into the water-an effect sort of like a giant Alka-Seltzer.
The Soviets weren't fooled. They answered Gudgeon's noisemakers with another round of grenadelike charges tossed into the water. Punishment for daring an evasive attempt? A taunt to show how badly it had failed? It didn't matter. Gudgeon was still under assault.
Next, Bessac looked at his helmsmen, and with a "Let's try it," began directing them to drive the sub right toward the enemy, hoping that was the one move the Soviets would never expect. It didn't work. Nor did it work when he sent his boat left, then right, then straight ahead again. Each evasive maneuver was answered with a storm of explosives.
There could have been as many as eight ships above now. One ship would pass over Gudgeon, then the next would come in for a run. Throughout, sonarmen kept track of the Soviets, and fire control men kept her torpedoes aimed. But there was a general "no shoot" policy for spy subs: don't shoot unless shot at. So far, the small charges had not been replaced by heavier explosives.
The siege continued, twelve hours, twenty-four hours. Nobody remembers Bessac-or, for that matter, Coppedge-leaving the control room. If they were getting any sleep at all, it was in quick catnaps. Most if not all of the crew were forgoing sleep as well, even the men confined to their bunks who lay tensely listening to the siege.
It was chokingly painful just to move about, to breathe. The short trek from the chiefs' quarters to the control room left a man panting, eyes watering, as if he'd just run four miles. There was, of course, no cooking on board. Instead, the mess crew handed out cold sandwiches. Smoking was banned. It was nearly impossible to light a cigarette in the oxygen-depleted atmosphere anyway. Still, a few men found air pockets where they could light up and sneak a puff or two.
The men bled oxygen into the sub from the large canisters affixed outside the hull, two aft and two forward. But adding oxygen could do nothing to reduce the carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide that were building to dangerous levels. Nearly everyone had a pounding headache. Some men were close to passing out.
Canisters of lithium hydroxide crystals were placed around the sub to absorb some of the excess carbon dioxide. Some of the crystals were spread out on mattresses to help the process along. But the carbon dioxide levels remained way too high. The crystals could not absorb the carbon monoxide, the colorless, odorless gas that could eventually lull everyone on hoard into a permanent sleep. The Soviets kept Gudgeon cornered as they moved back and forth, sideways, diagonally, drawing spokes in a wheel, a wheel defined by enemy boats. With each pass came pings, then grenades.
Wednesday, August 21, early morning: no change. Wednesday afternoon: no change. Wednesday, early evening: Gudgeon had been under siege for nearly forty-eight hours and underwater without snorkeling for nearly sixty-four hours. Bessac had dutifully noted the distance traveled in his logs over these two days as zero. Something had to be done, something drastic.
Coppedge began walking through the boat, telling the men they were going to have to try to snorkel, try to "stick our nose up." For most of the siege, the men had been at relaxed battle stations. Now they were called to full battle stations. They had to get fresh air. They had to send a message for help. They had to alter the status quo or die.
"We're going to come up," Bessac announced in the control room. "As soon as we hit, start to snorkel."
As Gudgeon came up, some of the men tried to run the hydraulics that would raise the radio antenna. The antenna wouldn't budge. It should have shot up with a bang. But all they could hear was one bump, then another. As soon as Gudgeon's snorkel broached the surface, the men started the engines. The sub took one gulp, then another.
Then one of the ships made its move, came roaring right at Gudgeon as if to ram her, or at least to force her down. The Soviets weren't finished with the sub. They weren't going to let her men get air, and they certainly weren't going to let them yell for help.
Someone hit the collision alarm, and Bessac gave the order to dive. The engines were shut down, and Gudgeon was back under. The crew hadn't been able to send an SOS. The air was just as bad as before.
Bessac ordered Gudgeon down to about 400 feet while he pondered his next move. He consulted with Coppedge, who talked to the engineering officer about the state of the batteries and with Doc Huntley, the corpsman, about the status of the air and crew. Bessac had few choices. It was obvious that his men couldn't survive much longer. The batteries might last another eight hours or so if the sub didn't move much, but that wasn't going to accomplish anything. The old man knew he didn't have the power to outrun his tormentors.
Within moments, the decision was made. Gudgeon was going to try to snorkel again, and she would probably have to surface. But one thing would not happen. She would not be boarded; she would not be taken. The captain and the crew would die first. Not a single man on board objected.
Bessac ordered all the torpedo doors opened. He knew the Soviets would be able to hear them, and he wanted to show that the Americans meant business. Then, some of the officers were handed pistols, including Doc Huntley, who went around the boat waving his .45, saying it was his job to shoot the spooks if the Soviets tried to board. "You could take a green pill, or I could shoot you," he told one spook. Doc had always been a little different.
Doc probably wasn't authorized to go around touting his death's head mask. Maybe, the crew mused, he never should have been issued a gun. But he had the .45, and for the moment the spooks were more afraid of Doc than they were of the Soviets.
Meanwhile, the spooks and the men in the radio shack across the control room, anyone who handled any codes or other sensitive papers, began loading them into leather bags that were speckled with holes and weighted down with lead. Some documents were destroyed outright. If the Soviets tried to board, those bags would go out the upper hatch and down to the bottom of the Sea of Japan.
This was the moment that no submariner wants to experience, and it was one of the worst moments any captain could face. It was also a moment that was unavoidable. Maybe Gudgeon would have gotten away if she had been able to go deeper, if that garbage ejector door hadn't jammed. Whatever the reasons, Bessac had been beaten.
Dejected, he gave the order to rise.
Bessac wanted to get a message out to the U.S. base in Japan. But on the way up, the radio mast jammed again. As soon as the snorkel hit the surface, Bessac gave the order and all three of Gudgeon's engines came on line, shooting exhaust fumes into the sub's fouled atmosphere as well as outside. Nobody cared about the exhaust now, not as long as the snorkel kept sucking in fresh air and venting out the worst of the poisons the men had been breathing.
The sub was at periscope depth now, and it was clear that the Soviet ships were hanging back. But for how long?
A minute passed, then two. Then five. The men still hadn't been able to send the message. But Gudgeon was taking in air, shooting out exhaust. The men wondered whether their CO would go through with this, and surface.
Bessac was calculating, figuring his options even at the last minute.
Gudgeon would need at least twenty minutes of snorkel time to clear the air minimally, and that wouldn't even begin to charge her batteries. If she had to dive again, she could, at best, crawl through the water on battery power. If she stayed at snorkel depth, she could transfer one engine to charging the batteries and still move a little faster. But it was only on the surface that Gudgeon could make a run for Japan at her top speed of about 20 knots. There was no telling whether the Soviet ships would try to charge again, but at that speed, and with a head start, maybe, just maybe, she could outrun them.
He made the only decision he could. Bessac told his crew to surface.
No one had been wounded, no swords had been broken, and no territory had been given up. But the United States had just lost a crucial battle. For the first time in this cold war under the sea, a U.S. sub had been forced to give up, to come out from hiding and sit vulnerable on top of the waves.
After that, Bessac told his men to send out an all-too-late cry for help.
"Send the damn thing in English," he shouted, answering a question from the radioman the crew called "Bad Ass."
There was no use trying to hide who they were anymore. The message went out unencoded. Meanwhile, the captain began climbing the long ladder that led from the hatch in the control room to the sail and up to the bridge. After him climbed one of the officers, a signalman, and a crew member to man the voice-powered phones that would send Bessac's orders ringing through the ship if the Soviets moved in for a fight. If there was a destroyer out there, Gudgeon didn't stand a chance.
It was still daylight outside. And the men on the bridge could see the Soviets. Two ships, maybe three, were left on the surface. All of them were smallish sub-hunters. The Soviets had pulled the rest of the ships back. It didn't take a crowd to herd a sub on dying batteries.
The Soviets signaled "Able. Able."-international Morse code for Who are you? Identify yourself."
Gudgeon sent back, "Able. Able."
The Soviets answered, "CCCP," Russian for USSR.
Gudgeon sent back, again in international Morse code, "USN. We are going to Japan."
The response came back, a directive for Gudgeon to get under way and away from Soviet seas. The signalman blithely interpreted for the crew: "They said, `Thanks for the ASW exercise."' Thanks for helping us practice antisubmarine warfare. He unsuccessfully suppressed a grin. The rest of the crew was grinning as well. In fact, the men were elated. They were getting the hell out of there.
The celebration had already begun when, it seemed like hours later, U.S. planes flew over to see whether Gudgeon was okay as she raced on the surface, putting as much distance as possible between herself and the Soviet Union.
For the first time in days, the cooks heated up the ovens. There was steak for dinner that night and two cans of beer per man. The men were amazed. It had never occurred to them that there would he beer on hoard, certainly not cases of it. But there it was, and these men would much rather drink than quote regulations to the old man. They were moving, they were breathing, the batteries were charging. They were embarassed, even bloodied. But at that moment, they didn't care. They were safely away, and for the first time the men admitted to one another that they had never been certain they would escape. The Soviets had obviously been capable of sinking the sub. They just didn't want to. Or maybe, the crew mused, they did want to but weren't allowed.
There was no official celebration for Gudgeon's return back at Yokosuka when she pulled in that Monday, August 26, eight years to the day since Cochino had sunk. The mood at the base was grim: the Soviets announced that day that they had conducted their first successful flight test of a land-based intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). In such a tense climate, the Navy wanted the Gudgeon incident squashed and squashed fast.
"Bad Ass," the radio tech who had sent the message in English, was promoted to chief and transferred off the boat instantly. Word was, the sub force made him send messages from then on with his left hand, lest his style, his signature of sorts, tell anyone intercepting communications that a U.S. sub was around.
Bessac was off the boat as well. Slated for transfer before the holddown, from diesel boats to a billet in Admiral Rickover's nuclear Navy, his orders didn't change. What did change, however, was Gudgeon's operating schedule. The Navy hastily announced that she was going to become the first submarine of any nation to circumnavigate the globe. It was the best way to get her out of the Pacific, where she was now well known to the Soviets, and it was the best way to try to keep the story from spreading throughout the sub force.
Of course, the Navy offered other explanations for the trip. Deeming it designed to implement a "People to People" program, President Eisenhower personally designated each man on the boat "an Ambassador of good will to the world." Each of these ambassadors was ordered never to talk about the incident.
Meanwhile, energized by its victory, the Soviet Navy began roughing up other U.S. spy subs. Among them was the USS Wahoo (SS-565), which was caught near a Soviet beach early in 1958 but managed to escape even though one of her engines blew out. Perhaps because subs went about their work quietly, the Soviets showed more restraint than they did with spy planes, some of which deliberately lit up defense radars in order to measure those systems. As nasty as the underwater battles got, no subs were sunk, and the "depth charges" were usually no more powerful than the small explosives dropped on Gudgeon.
But submarine battles in Soviet territory were now firmly entrenched as part of the cold war, and tensions only intensified as both sides prepared to deploy their first missile subs. After the Soviets launched Sput nik in the fall of 1957, President Eisenhower quickly accelerated plans to build nuclear-powered subs that could fire Polaris ballistic missiles while hiding underwater. In the meantime, the Navy was refitting some diesel subs to carry Regulus guided missiles, descendants of the German buzz bombs with ranges of between 300 and 400 nautical miles. The Regulus subs would have to surface to launch, and the missiles would have to be guided by radar from launch to landing by both the sub and a second boat positioned closer to the Soviet coast, but they would still he a potent new threat to the Soviets.
The fear that the Soviets would answer by sending their own spy subs and missile boats close to U.S. waters prodded top officials in Washington to extend their grasp over this business of underwater spying. Suddenly, operations that Navy fleet commanders had become used to controlling were being reviewed by the White House and the Pentagon. The CIA and the National Security Agency-the codebreaking agency that was so super-secretive that even people who worked there joked that NSA stood for "No Such Agency" or "Never Say Anything"-also began to play a larger role in setting the priorities for what intelligence would be collected.
Hardly any of the Soviet diesel subs had made the long transit to U.S. shores yet, but that didn't stop an outbreak of "Red hysteria." One member of the House of Representatives proclaimed that nearly two hundred Soviet subs had been sighted off the Atlantic coast. Ordinary citizens began manning "submarine watchtowers," and over the next several years submarine "sightings" became more frequent. One woman identified in Navy documents only as Mrs. Gilkinson would report seeing three subs near a Florida beach, including one that she said came within ten feet of her while she was skin-diving. A man in Texas reported spotting a periscope in what turned out to he five feet of water.
The Navy was watching for Soviet subs as well, but much of the surveillance was taking place just outside the natural bottleneck created by Greenland, Iceland, and the United Kingdom. It was an enormous advantage for the United States. Soviet ships and subs had to pass through this chokepoint, the "GIUK" gap, to take the Atlantic route to the United States. A string of U.S. diesel subs were often stationed on "barrier ops" outside the gap, and British naval forces also kept watch for Soviet subs. In addition, the U.S. Navy had begun seeding both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts with underwater listening devices-creating an underwater eavesdropping net known as SOSUS, for sound surveil lan
ce system-to detect ships and subs. Still, analysts trying to decipher the SOSUS recordings needed more data to be able to pick out the sounds of Soviet warships from all the background noise made by fishing trawlers and merchant ships. They needed a library of sound signatures, and that could best be created by sending spy subs to listen and record.
There was one other thing the Navy was looking for: a chance for retribution. It wanted to get the Soviets back for Gudgeon and other acts of harassment against U.S. subs. Admiral jerauld Wright, commander in chief of the Atlantic Fleet, posted a framed proclamation outside his office:
Whereas, the presence of unidentified submarines in the approaches to the United States has been frequently reported, and
Whereas, the submarines have been uncooperative in declaring either their identity or their intent as is required by the customs and usages of honorable seamen, and
Whereas, tangible evidence that these surreptitious operations are being conducted would result in appropriate embarrassment to those involved.
Therefore, I do hereby pledge to donate one case of Jack Daniels Old No. 7 Brand of Quality Tennessee Sour Mash Corn Whiskey, made as our fathers made it for seven generations at the oldest registered whiskey distillery in the United States, established 1866, to the first Scene of Action Commander in the Atlantic who produces evidence that a "non U.S. or known friendly" submarine has been worn out.
/s/ Jerauld Wright
Admiral, U.S. Navy
In May 1959, Wright declared a winner. The USS Grenadier (SS-525) chased a Soviet submarine near Iceland for nine hours before forcing it to surface, completely "worn out." Grenadier's skipper, Lieutenant Commander Theodore F. Davis, got the whiskey, and the Navy had surfaced its first Soviet sub.
More important, the Navy also had its first good look at a Soviet missile boat. Davis had trapped one of the Zulus that had been converted to carry missiles. He also brought home photographs and sound tapes, and the Navy quietly broadcast his success all over Washington. In fact, later that year President Eisenhower's special assistant for science and technology, George B. Kistiakowsky, noted in his diary that he had received "a very interesting account of the ways in which our Navy gets intimate information on the Soviet naval activities," a briefing that was so "hush-hush" he couldn't put it on paper. "Someday," he mused, "it will make a very exciting news story."