by Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story Of American Submarine Espionage
Something else came out of these dogfights as well. There was a growing realization on both sides that as much as the snorkel had revolutionized submarine warfare, it had massive limitations. As long as submarines could be held down and their crews choked, they were still too vulnerable. For the U.S. sub force, it was clear that Rickover's nuclear navy could no longer remain a curiosity. It was time for his submarines to move to center stage.
Rickover's revolutionary boats had a seemingly endless source of power. Reactors split atoms and turned water into steam, steam enough to power a propeller shaft and run a submarine longer and faster than any diesel boat ever could. They also could generate their own oxygen and scrub excess carbon dioxide from their air. Hold downs would no longer be a threat. These boats would he able to stay underwater indefinitely.
Nuclear attack subs began to take on missions that closely mirrored those pioneered by diesel subs, invading Soviet waters with impunity. The orders remained similar. Drive close to Soviet craft, even closer to Soviet shores. Take any risks. Don't get caught.
For instance, in late 1960, Commander William "Bill" Behrens drove the USS Skipjack (SSN-585) into the mouth of the long ship channel that led to Murmansk. He got so close to another Soviet port that his officers could look through a periscope and see the pier only 30 or 40 yards away. That may have been closer than even the Navy would have liked-at least closer than the Navy ever wanted to admit. Indeed, just before Behrens snuck into the channel, crewmen saw one of his officers disable a mechanical tracing device that plotted the sub's movements so there would never be any written record of the incursion. Later on that same mission, Behrens also monitored the sea trials of one of the first Golf-class subs, a diesel-powered boat that was the first Soviet submarine designed from the start to carry ballistic missiles. Behrens, who initially struck some of his crew as stuffy and dull, had proven that he could play as dangerously as other cap twins, that he could he one man on shore and quite another at sea, especially at sea in Soviet waters.
In this sense, Behrens was not alone. This was an era of daredevil nuclear-sub captains who seemed rooted in the no-holds-barred diesel heritage. Over in the Pacific, a couple of captains briefly turned off their reactors to cut down on the background noise when they tried to get sound signatures-and suddenly found their own boats drifting way too deep. Another sub lurking at periscope depth got humped by a Soviet sub that started to surface from below.
One of the most urgent goals was to find out where the Soviets stood in their quest to develop nuclear-powered subs. Though some top U.S. officials were reluctant to believe it, it gradually became clear that the Soviets were starting to turn out three types: "Hotels," each armed with three ballistic missiles; "Echos" carrying cruise missiles meant for use against other ships; and "November" attack subs. Still, early surveillance showed that these subs were so crude and noisy that the U.S. Navy had taken to using a shorthand built on a convenient acronym, nicknaming them the "HENs." And neither the Golfs nor the Hotels were anywhere near ready to head out on patrol.
It was clear that the United States had won the race to position missile subs within range of enemy shores. Four diesel boats with the primitive Regulus missiles had led the way in the Pacific in 1959 and 1960, and the first Polaris sub, the USS George Washington (SSBN- 598), ventured out into the Atlantic in November 1960. In no time, the Regulus subs were spending so much time lurking in terrible weather off the Soviet coast that their crews took to jokingly calling themselves the "Northern Pacific Yacht Club." One, the USS Growler (SSG-577), was heavily damaged when it ran into an ice floe near the Kamchatka Peninsula, just off the Soviet base at Petropavlovsk. Before long, the men designed lapel pins showing an anchor crossed by three semaphore flags, labeled "S," "M," and "F." The initials stood for the typical cry during a storm: "Shit! Man! Fuck!"
Throughout these deployments, the Polaris program was pushing on. President Eisenhower had given William F. "Red" Raborn, the garrulous rear admiral in charge of Polaris, unprecedented authority, allowing him to bypass the usual red tape and to hire anyone he decided could do the work of designing and building Polaris subs well, and fast. There were predictable snags with new technology. (Raborn's aides showed enough humor to compile a classified film of Polaris bloopers test missiles that barely rose at all and others that just cartwheeled.) But Polaris succeeded, and timetables were met, largely because the program was given top priority. Everyone was working such ungodly hours that the submariners came to believe that the new boats were designated SSBNs not because "SS" stood for submersible ship, "N" for nuclear power, and "B" for ballistic missiles, but because the initials stood for "Saturday, Sunday, and a Bunch of Nights."
While Raborn and his team labored to ensure that the subs were built, it was up to Rickover to oversee the installation of the nuclear reactors and the crews that would run them. Rickover was looking for men who would be unflinching in a crisis, men willing to pay attention to exact detail, men who were as meticulous as he was. He was convinced that was the only way to ensure reactor safety, and he knew that reactor safety was the only way to maintain public support for his nuclear-powered submarines. With all of this, he was helping to create a submarine force that would be unparalleled. Now Rickover's men were about to drive the most lethal subs ever built, subs that would prove crucial to the balance of power in the cold war.
The first Polaris subs were 382 feet long, about 60 feet longer than nuclear attack subs, and they carried sixteen nuclear-tipped missiles that could be aimed at targets more than 1,000 nautical miles away. They also were given two crews, blue and gold, who went out on alternating 60-day cruises-keeping the subs at sea as much as possible. The duty was tough. The 1,000-mile missile range forced these boats to ride the rough waters off the northern coast of Europe to stay near targeting distance of Moscow. Their job was to "hide with pride," to be an intercontinental missile force lurking and ready to fire a second strike if the nation were attacked and land missiles destroyed."
For their part, the Soviets had only a few nuclear-powered subs, and those so ill designed that men were dying. One submarine suffered such a horrible reactor accident that it was redubbed the Hiroshima by survivors. By the time the Soviets tried to locate missile launchers in Cuba in 1962, the United States had moved so far ahead that it was able to quickly scramble several Polaris submarines, ultimately nine in all, to points within shooting distance of the Soviet Union."
The United States had the clear advantage, but for how long? The crisis might have taught Soviet leaders that it would be impossible to build a nuclear missile force on land near U.S. shores. But by scrambling the Polaris subs into firing position, the United States had also shown the Soviets a better way to accomplish the same thing.
Three - Turn To The Deep
Flying on the wild success of his Polaris program, Admiral Red Raborn began looking ahead, thinking about new, imaginative ways of furthering nuclear deterrence. He quickly turned to the dreamer within his ranks, a young civilian whom the admiral had plucked from obscurity a few years earlier and anointed the chief scientist for Polaris.
John P. Craven was only in his midthirties when Raborn found him, but it was his job to look over the shoulder of everyone involved in the development of the missile subs, to find the problems, to come up with the answers. He was, as he put it, "chief kibitzer."
The moniker fit. Talking a torrent, his ideas usually overflowing, Craven was the kind of man who could dissect a blueprint and still have time to spout a few lines of poetry, biblical verse, or one of his endless series of self-scripted maxims of the sea. Sometimes he'd mix verse with maxim and sing the result aloud. He preached fantasy amid military discipline; he carried romance to the mechanics of nuclear war.
It was a role Craven had been bred to. He was the product of a family that reached back to Moorish pirates on his mother's side and was divided on his father's between Presbyterian ministers and Navy officers yawning in the family pew.
Th
e Navy brass was the part of the lineage that most of the Cravens liked to boast about, the part that went back to Tunis Agustas MacDonough Craven, who skippered the Civil War Union ship Tecumseh when it was rammed by a Confederate mine during the Battle of Mobile Bay and inspired Admiral David Farragut's memorable cry to the remaining fleet: "Damn the torpedoes. Full speed ahead."
In noble tradition, Tunis drowned at the helm. Most of the Craven clan would stop the story there. John Craven, however, delighted in presenting a footnote: that Tunis died while fighting to get off the sinking ship ahead of the harbor pilot. And only John Craven boasted of what the rest of his family dared not even whisper: the pirate blood he inherited from his mother's side.
That John Craven was going to he different was evident from the moment he made his first appearance on the planet, landing in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. It was a Halloween night, a fact that his paternal relatives chose to ignore as they instantly christened him Navy, fully intending that he would live a life of rigid military discipline. That their plan was doomed to fail became clear some fifteen years later when Craven was rejected by the Naval Academy. It wasn't for lack of intelligence. He'd skipped through to high school by the time he was eleven years old. But once there, he took the rogue's route to popularity. He convinced his much older classmates that he was merely small for his age and then proceeded to win their respect by becoming the class wise guy, the kid who was too tough to do homework.
Ultimately, he fulfilled at least part of his family's expectations. He never earned a Naval Academy degree, but he did get his commission in the reserves and he became an ocean engineer. From then on, he took to sermonizing about the deep, about underwater maneuvers that most of the Navy passed off as impossible, or at least hugely improbable. He expected no easy converts. But like any minister preaching the coming of a miracle, Craven was drenched in the faith that he would ultimately be proven right.
Now Rahorn was handing Craven a nearly blank check to do what he did best-come up with ideas, as many as he could. By 1963 Craven was working hard on Rahorn's vision of an Advanced Seabased Deterrent Program. As his first step, he set aside $1 million a year, thinking that would he just enough to create a small political science program to dissect the strategy of deterrence. In the process, he discovered he had hired just about every political scientist specializing in strategic defense.
With the rest of his budget and his new platform, he began to peer into an untouched realm of the deep, working with his group to scribble out ideas: missiles that could he placed miles below the surface on the ocean floor; submarines that could reach down and see through the murky depths, carry cameras into untraveled and alien waters.
Most of the Navy greeted Craven's visions with hardly a yawn. What little study of the deep there had been before had long ago been shoved into a corner, the purview of a small group of oceanographers. Admirals saw operating in deep water as more difficult than the manned outer-space launches that, at that moment, held the nation's attention hostage. The Navy's best submarines could reach down just 1,000 to 1,500 feet or so. Go deeper, and there was certain death by implosion from punishing sea pressures great enough to quickly crush even the mighty Polaris subs.
The miles below the Navy's operational slice garnered about as much respect as the average landfill. The Navy's main design branch, the Bureau of Ships, listed deep submergence as tenth on its list of top ten priorities-giving the deep number ten only because the list wasn't any longer. Even Admiral Rickover, wrapped as he was in the public mantle of Navy innovator, was uninterested in plumbing the depths.
Craven's deep-submergence group was on the fringe, but eager to work. A team of his scientists was asked to help test the USS Thresher (SSN-593), the first of a powerful new class of nuclear attack submarines designed to go somewhat deeper than the other subs of the day. On April 10, 1963, Thresher failed during a test dive to 1,300 feet. As best as anyone could tell, a piping failure and a subsequent loss of propulsion set off a series of events that caused the submarine to sink, killing all 129 men aboard, including four men from Craven's team. Craven got the news as he was sitting with Harry Jackson, an engineering officer who had helped test the sub shortly before her last dive, and who had been present for every other deep dive.
Jackson sat, repeating over and over, "I should have been there." But Craven was relieved that Jackson had missed this, the nation's first loss of a nuclear submarine, along with three of Craven's own men who had been scratched from the test for lack of space.
It was only later that Craven realized that the disaster was about to mark him among the most important players in a new and dramatic chapter in this saga of undersea spying. Craven's opportunity would spring from the almost impossible promises the Navy made in its efforts at damage control.
In the wake of Thresher, the Navy promised a massive effort to learn about the unforgiving ocean depths. There would be a "Sub Safe" program. There would be "Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicles."
This was the Navy's chance to calm the public, a chance to erase tragedy with visions of ocean wonder, a chance to obscure submarine dangers beneath visions of safety innovations. Almost everyone involved recognized that some of the proposals were more science fiction than science, especially the prospect of deep-submergence rescue vehicles (DSRVs) for sunken subs. Anyone who was to be rescued would have to have the good fortune to go down over a continental shelf or atop an undersea mountain, in waters far more shallow than the two, three, or four miles of depth that made up much of the world's oceans. Most submariners knew that a severe casualty at sea almost always meant that they would disappear-no survivors, no rescue, nothing more to say.
Still, Congress okayed these popular proposals and offered up funding that caught the attention of the Office of Naval Intelligence. The Navy might have been promising an era that mirrored Jules Verne, but a few submarine espionage specialists now saw the means to launch a new age of spying that would he much closer to James Bond.
These intelligence officers were already crafting their plans when Craven began directing a massive post-Thresher study. He had also taken charge of the Deep Submergence Systems Project, a program created to design the Navy's promised deep-submergence rescue vehicles and to build an underwater laboratory, a habitat known as "SeaLab," where the Navy could study the physiological effects of deep-sea pressures on divers.
Craven saw opportunity, especially in the DSRV program. Like nearly everyone else with knowledge of the oceans, he knew that the DSRVs were largely fantasy. But he reasoned that maybe the push to build them might give him an edge in pursuing another of his dreams-a fleet of mini-submarines made of glass. Chemically, glass is a liquid, so Craven reasoned that glass submarines would be at their strongest under the most powerful deep-ocean pressures.
He wasn't the only one trying to sell the Navy on the idea of some kind of mini-submarine. Reynolds Aluminum Company was building its own boat, hoping to gain a lucrative contract. The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, with the Office of Naval Research, was designing the Alvin, a three-man submersible that could go down 6,000 feet. At this point, the only deep-submersible the Navy had inhouse was the Trieste If, a mini-dirigible that had to be carried or towed to dive sites. It had only limited maneuverability, but it could bring a crew of three down to 20,000 feet. The first Trieste had been lowered nearly 7 miles in 1960 to the deepest spot in the world-the Challenger Deep in the Marianas Trench, about 200 miles from Guam. Both Trieste I and II explored Thresher's wreckage.
It was just as Craven began to work out the mechanics of self-propelled, independent, deep-sea mini-subs that he was approached by a Naval Intelligence officer, one of the men who helped coordinate the submarine surveillance operations off the Soviet coasts. By now, those operations had been expanded to provide a year-round presence. Operating under the code name "Binnacle"-later "Ilolystone"-the Navy's growing fleet of nuclear subs and diesels were keeping constant watch on the Soviets as they aimed test launche
s of missiles from land silos and ships into the oceans. U.S. subs were also tracking the rapidly expanding fleet of Soviet nuclear subs as they finally began to venture out into the Atlantic and the Pacific. The Soviet Navy was beginning to enact its long-threatened plan to become a blue-water force.
With all this going on, the U.S. Navy nearly always had at least one surveillance sub in the Barents and two off the Soviets' Pacific ports, where they still had to dodge occasional Soviet depth charges. Even some of the early nuclear subs, like the USS Scamp (SSN-588), got chased with small depth charges, and more diesel subs, such as the USS Ronquil (SS-396) and the USS Trumpetfish (SS-425), got held down Gudgeon-style in the early 1960s. In addition to these operations off the Soviet coast, some diesel subs carried Russian emigres back to the Soviet Union to spy for the United States, and other diesel subs were landing commandos in places like Borneo, Indonesia, and the Middle East to track the expanding Soviet influence.'` Submarine spying had become so important that the chief of Naval Operations in Washington had taken charge of coordinating all operations, and a special undersea warfare office had been set up within the Office of Naval Intelligence to plan them.
Intelligence officials were so anxious to learn the latest about new Soviet subs and missiles that submarine spooks were under orders to flash off messages with mission highlights on the transit home. The Russian-language experts among them began transcribing tapes of stolen communications as soon as they left Soviet waters. Couriers met returning submarines at the dock, ready to whisk the intelligence directly to NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. The spooks themselves were so valuable that the Navy ordered them to travel to and from ports by train rather than on commercial plane. The Navy wasn't willing to risk even a slim chance that they might be hijacked to Cuba.