Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew

by Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story Of American Submarine Espionage

  Now the Naval Intelligence officer had come to Craven, asking him to help with a grander effort than any that had been tried before. The officer handed Craven a top-secret document, actually a very long wish list that Naval Intelligence had been amassing for several years, a document that had been touched by barely a dozen people before him.

  Stamped across the front page were the words "Operation Sand Dollar." From there the list went on for pages. These were the splashdown points for Soviet ballistic missiles painstakingly monitored and noted by Navy surface ships and Air Force radar and underwater hydrophones, as well as the locations of planes and other Soviet military hardware glimpsed or heard plunging through the waves. Only a few miles away, three at most, lay the Soviets' most sensitive defense secrets: the best in Soviet missile guidance systems, metallurgy, and electronics-all of it tantalizing trash and all of it out of reach. No wonder the Soviet Union didn't even try to guard the cache. Nobody could have imagined an undersea raid through stars of luminescent plankton to the utter blackness of the deep.

  But why not, intelligence officers reasoned, use the comforting notion of deep-submergence rescue vehicles to mask an effort to reach the items cataloged in Sand Dollar? Why not use the budgets of rescue gadgets that would hardly ever be used to create some tools that might just give the United States the definitive edge?

  The Thresher tragedy would be the excuse, the new safety programs the stuff of a complicated cover story. And all of it was dependent on Craven's answer to one question. Could he manage a deep-water treasure hunt?

  It was a matter of top national security, Craven was told. Left unsaid was that it was also a matter of pride, political standing, and turf. The intelligence arm of the Navy was in a desperate game of catch-up with that of the Air Force, which had just launched a new generation of spy satellites. With their growing coverage of the Soviet Union, these new "eyes in the sky" were sending back images of sites where the Soviets were digging silos for powerful landbased missiles and dry docks where the Soviets were preparing to create their own generation of Polaris-like submarines. The Polaris program had managed to prevent Air Force bombers and rockets from monopolizing the business of nuclear deterrence. Now maybe Navy spies could compete with the satellites, diving not for mere pictures but for actual Soviet arms and craft.

  This was the opportunity Craven had been looking for, a chance to tap into his most fantastic plans. There was only one thing stopping him. He had no idea how to accomplish what the intelligence officer was asking for. Even Trieste II couldn't manage much of a secret undersea raid-it was too small, and the surface ship needed to carry the submersible out to mid-ocean would be a dead giveaway.

  "Basically, we are developing the technology, but not the assets," Craven said, calling upon his best Navy-speak. Silence. Two beats, maybe three. No matter how officiously he said it, he was still admitting he had no way to do what he was being asked.

  Then, Craven had a flash of inspiration. "Hey, look, we don't have anything that could do your operation because that requires things be clandestine." One more quick inhale and he came out with the kicker. "So it's really not worth doing Sand Dollar unless you do it from a submarine."

  There it was, blurted out in desperation, the idea for what would become the Navy's most daring venture yet. A full-sized submarine, big enough to navigate the high seas, would be outfitted to hover in place in the upper reaches of the ocean and dangle cameras miles down, deep enough to scout the ocean bottom for Soviet treasures. It was inspired. Make the effort from below the surface, find a way to be nearly undetectable. Never let the Soviets know the Americans were anywhere near.

  Actually all Craven was doing was rehashing his long-held belief that operating from the ocean surface was its own kind of hell. He had already included the concept in his self-scripted "Ten Commandments of Deep-Ocean Engineering." The way he said it was: "Remember that the free surface is neither ocean nor air and that man cannot walk upon it nor will equipments remain stable in its presence. So design your equipments that they tarry not long and that they need neither servicing nor repair at this unseemly interface."

  Now, suddenly, he had not only the means to put that commandment to the test, he also had his chance to fulfill his favorite part of his lineage and plunder buried treasure. His pulpit secure, his corsair's blood aboil, all Craven needed was a submarine.

  There were twenty nuclear attack subs in the fleet now, and more being built. But Navy admirals weren't about to give up a first-rate boat so that it could sit out in mid-ocean trolling with cameras. If Craven wanted a sub, he would have to take one of the Navy's two nuclear clunkers, the two failed experiments whose designs were never replicated. There was the USS Seawolf, a confused boat with the v-shaped bow of a destroyer and the top of a sub built to house a touchy reactor run with liquid sodium-a reactor that had been replaced early on. Then there was the USS Halibut, a boat with a grander, but short-lived, past. Halibut (SSGN-587) had been the only nuclear sub to carry the Regulus guided missiles, making seven missions off the Soviet coast. But that program had ended in mid-1964 when the Navy began basing Polaris subs in the Pacific. With the Regulus era over, no one knew quite what to do with Halibut.

  She was a marine oddball, one of the least hydrodynamic of the nuclear fleet and one of the most ridiculous-looking creations ever born in a dry dock. Unlike the flat fish she was named for, Halibut wore a huge hump that might have been appropriate on a gargantuan desert creature except for the fact that it opened up into a large shark's-mouth hatch, part of the original missile hangar. Perhaps in another time, Halibut would have been quietly scrapped. After all, this boat was not only odd, she suffered from what was a near-fatal malady for a submarine: hydromechanical cacophony. Halibut was loud. Submariners heard the din, saw only potential flooding when they gazed upon that hatch, and shuddered when they examined her cumbersome ballast tanks, gaping caverns originally designed to allow her to surface fast, shoot a missile, and submerge even faster.

  Craven took one look at the submarine it seemed nobody could love and was transfixed. All he saw were the possibilities, the strange and wonderful things that could be done with all of that excess space. And when he caught a glimpse of that gorgeous gaping mouth, it was enough to send him, like any self-respecting mad scientist, reeling with joy. No other submarine in the fleet boasted a hatch larger than 26 inches. Halibut's hatch was 22 feet.

  It was settled: Halibut would be Craven's submarine, his laboratory, his ministry, his pirate ship. He would have $70 million to outfit her with electronic, sonic, photographic, and video gadgets. The Navy put out the word, and in February 1965 Halibut went into Pearl Harbor to be refitted as an oceanographic research vessel.

  Less a lie than a huge omission, that was only one of several cover stories Craven would employ. The DSRV program and his other deepsea projects would add more layers, all hiding what Craven had proclaimed to be his "Skunk Works"-a term he borrowed for its drama from Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, the spy-plane manufacturer Craven would soon have working on the design of the DSRVs and also on a Deep Submergence Search Vehicle. The plan was that the DSSV would be able to sit on the ocean floor 20,000 feet deep and pick up objects with a mechanical arm. It was to travel to any recovery area mounted on the top of a submarine.

  It would take two years to rebuild and test Halibut, but Craven would have little time to be impatient. From almost the moment the refit began, Craven's mass of cover stories began earning him notice outside the insular realm of Naval Intelligence. Suddenly he was being pulled into other high-profile projects.

  Rickover, who had once done everything he could to limit Craven's interest in deep-diving mini-subs, now came to Craven asking him to help build the first nuclear-powered one, though one of steel, not glass. (The admiral would forever remain scathing about glass, to the point of insult.) But Craven was now working with Rickover, and the liaison would prove to be a crucial step in the scientist's education: crucial because it was through
Rickover that Craven would learn how to mine the Navy's budget, deal with Congress, and handle the cadre of admirals who ran the submarine program.

  It was a Faustian pact. Rickover may have been sixty-four years old, an age at which even less controversial officers have long been retired, but Craven, like just about everyone else in the Navy, could never quite learn to handle him. Rickover liked to begin their conversations in a way that showed just who was in charge: "Craven, my people are more competent than your people, but your shop is bigger, so I'm going to have to work with you." Rickover liked to try to throw men off balance just to see how they would handle themselves.

  Rickover personally christened the mini-sub "NR-1." It might as well have been called the USS Rickover, for "NR" was the designation for the Naval Reactors Branch-Rickover's realm. If the president could have Air Force One, Rickover would have his NR-l.

  Unlike Woods Hole's Alvin, which was completed in 1965 and was only 22 feet long, NR-1 was to be 137 feet, nearly half the size of an attack sub. NR-1 would be able to go down to 3,000 feet. Equipped with underwater lights, cameras, and a grappling arm to retrieve small objects, it also would have the potential to do some spying. One of the chief design problems was finding some way to shield the nuclear reactor in the NR-1. Standard sub reactors were shielded with a foot of lead on either end. But that would have made the NR-1 too heavy. Instead, Rickover, Craven, and the other designers decided it would have the standard lead shielding only in front where it faced crew compartments. The entire thirteen-foot area of the sub behind the reactor would be closed off permanently and flooded. The idea was to allow the wall of water to absorb any escaping radiation and work as a substitute for lead shielding. Craven had no doubt that environmentalists would cringe at the plan, but both he and Rickover believed it was entirely workable. Thirteen feet of water has the same molecular weight as one foot of lead. But when NR-1 was submerged, the water would add no weight at all-when water displaces an equal amount of water, the effective weight is zero.

  But before NR-1 could be built, it had to be paid for, and right now there was little room in the budget for a mini-submarine among the plans for DSRVs and Sea Labs. The problem didn't faze Rickover, and he solved it at a meeting with Craven; Rear Admiral Levering Smith, Raborn's top deputy on Polaris; and Robert Morse, the assistant secretary of the Navy for research and development.

  "You have any money we can get started with right now?" Rickover asked. Craven answered that his deep-submergence group could spare $10 million of its research and development money. Smith noted that the Polaris program had about $10 million of unused ship construction funds.

  "How much is this submarine going to cost?" Morse asked.

  Without hesitation, Rickover answered: $20 million. Morse went on to outline the tortuous process by which ships are normally built: contract definition, bidding, congressional approvals. Rickover cut him off before he could finish. "Just leave all that to me." Then Rickover turned to Craven and directed, "You call up Electric Boat tomorrow and tell them to get started."

  Craven, Smith, and Morse exchanged looks of disbelief. Nobody believed this could be done for $20 million-the budget soon grew to $30 million. They also saw no way that Congress was going to stand for this. Less than a week later, Rickover called Craven and told him that the president was going to announce that afternoon that NR-1 was going to be built.

  Upon hearing the news, Morse moved quickly from a state of shock into a state of panic. Up until that moment, NR-1 had been little more than an admiral's fantasy; indeed, Rickover had given only sketchy accounts of his plan to Paul H. Nitze, the secretary of the Navy, and Robert S. McNamara, the secretary of Defense. Though both had approved it, Morse knew Congress was not going to like hearing about a major project this way. As soon as the president announced the NR-1, the House Committee on Appropriations hastily called a hearing.

  Craven, on Rickover's orders, had just a few days to come up with an official mission statement, a full-bore cost-benefit analysis, and a detailed study as to why the Navy needed the mini-sub.

  "Well, you know, Admiral, that study really doesn't exist," Craven answered.

  "It will exist by the time the hearing takes place," Rickover barked back.

  Now the existence of NR-1, and perhaps his own career, rested on Craven's ability to spin visions from a black hole. He needed to prove that NR-1 was a crucial investment, one worth $30 million.

  The appropriations committee wasn't fooled, but in the end it had no choice but to give in. NR-1 was now a presidential directive. No other submarine or ship had ever been authorized faster, or ever would he again. Later, the General Accounting Office, Congress's investigative arm, scrutinized the project and concluded that it was one of the worst managed programs its investigators had ever seen.

  Rickover answered in typical form, firing off a letter to his critics that so amazed Craven that he committed it to memory. "I read the GAO report, and it reminds me of a review I read of Lady Chatterley's Lover in the magazine Field and Stream. The reviewer of that book knew as much about the real purpose of Lady Chatterley's Lover as the GAO knows about the design and development of submarines."

  Rickover was no gentler on Craven. The admiral was infuriated that he had to share Craven with the Halibut refit, the DSRV program, and the other deep-ocean projects. As far as Rickover was concerned, none of those was more important than his NR-1.

  Making the admiral even angrier was the fact that he was not cleared for the details about Halibut's new mission. Little went on within the submarine force that he didn't know something about, but the intelligence programs were one of the few areas in which he had no official "in," no real say. He took out his frustrations on Craven, who began to imagine that the admiral was waiting up nights before calling, waiting until Craven fell into a deep slumber or thought about romancing his wife. He was almost convinced that his time submerged conducting tests on Halibut was being monitored by Rickover, who seemed to time his calls for moments when it was impossible for Craven to answer. Craven always paid dearly for being unavailable.

  One Friday, Rickover was giving a speech in New York City and he sent word to Halibut, which was out near Hawaii, demanding that Craven meet him in New York first thing Monday morning.

  Craven hopped a plane, suffered a moment of panic when the flight got socked in by fog during a layover in Los Angeles, and finally landed in New York and raced breathless to Rickover's hotel suite, where the admiral was waiting. "You were out there playing golf with the beach boys," he said, mocking the cover story Craven had crafted for his trip to Hawaii.

  He then turned to the house phone. "Bring this man the biggest lunch in the hotel." Craven waited for the punch line: he knew the admiral wasn't worried that he might he hungry after the long trip.

  Sure enough: "For the next hour, you are going to sit and eat lunch," Rickover announced. "And I am going to bawl you out."

  Appearances to the contrary, Rickover liked Craven almost as much as he liked making him miserable. Rickover was impressed that Craven had moxie enough to withstand his worst tantrums. The admiral also loved that Craven had never attended the Naval Academy. Rickover had been a loner as a midshipman, and now he made great sport of adding a little torture to the mix when he interviewed Naval Academy graduates for his nuclear program. Those entrance interviews had become more like initiation rites, in which the admiral took young men to the psychological brink in his quest for perfection. Trying to rattle his applicants, Rickover would spout obscenities, seat them in chairs with one leg cut short, or send them off to "Siberia," a storage closet where they would be left for hours.

  Perhaps the all-time Rickover classic occurred when he squared off against a candidate and said, "Piss me off, if you can." The young man answered without hesitation and without a word. He lifted his arm and with one motion swept Rickover's desk clean of books, papers, pens, everything. The candidate was accepted.

  For Rickover, torturing Craven was a mere sideli
ne.

  Craven, meanwhile, was increasingly on call as the Navy's resident deep-ocean expert. But there was one call that stood out from all the rest. It came on a Saturday morning in January 1966.

  "This is Jack Howard," said an assistant secretary of Defense in charge of nuclear matters. "I've lost an H-bomb."

  "Why are you calling me?" Craven asked.

  "This one I've lost in the water, and I want you to find it." Craven was being assigned to work with a team hastily assembled by an admiral in the Pentagon. Another group was going to the site.

  A B-52 bomber had collided with an air tanker during a refueling operation 30,000 feet in the air off the coast of Palomares, Spain, losing its atomic payload. Three of four bombs were recovered almost immediately. But a fourth was lost and had presumably fallen to the bottom of the Mediterranean. President Lyndon Johnson knew the Soviets were looking for the bomb, and he refused to believe the Navy's assurances that there was a good probability that it would never be recovered by either side. Indeed, that was the belief of most of the people assigned to find the bomb-but not Craven.

  Craven called in a group of mathematicians and set them to work constructing a map of the sea bottom outside Palomares. That sounded reasonable enough, but Craven intended to use that map for an analysis that seemed more reminiscent of racetrack betting than of anything ever put down in a Navy search and salvage manual.

  Once the map was completed, Craven asked a group of submarine and salvage experts to place Las Vegas-style bets on the probability of each of the different scenarios that might describe the bomb's loss being considered by the search team in Spain. Each scenario left the weapon in a different location.