Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew

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

  It was a move tantamount to turning down the first stock offering of IBM or AT&T. It was already clear that the high-profile nukes would soon become the best route to a set of admiral's stars for most of his peers. But Bradley was not like the other white-gloved candidates coming out of the Naval Academy. He would rather down a margarita than a martini, shaken or stirred, and if anyone had ever tried to serve him a cucumber sandwich, he probably would have doused it in Tabasco sauce. He ate Tabasco with everything except cake and ice cream.

  Brawny, handsome, and stubborn, he had moved into intelligence backwards and sideways. He didn't take either of the two diesel subs he commanded out on spy missions. But he had taken a turn practicing cocktail party intelligence, mainly quizzing naval attaches and diplomats from other countries in the late 1950s when he was an assistant naval attache in Bonn. He landed that job because he had studied German at Georgetown University, adding to the already colorful vocabulary he had picked up as a twelve-year-old playing Little League for a church team in the German section of St. Louis.

  When the job of director of undersea warfare opened up in the Office of Naval Intelligence in 1966, Bradley had a pal who happened to be the assistant to the director of Naval Intelligence. This was a time when Rickover was refusing to spare any of his nuclear submariners for landlocked staff jobs, so the job had to go to a diesel submariner, and it went to Bradley.

  Bradley enjoyed the irony that he was now directing the spy missions for Rickover's nuclear fleet. Indeed, the captain enjoyed this almost as much as his beloved Tabasco sauce.

  For his part, Rickover could never forgive Bradley his slight, his refusal to join the admiral's elite society, any more than Rickover could tolerate the ill-kempt irreverence of other diesel submariners. He thought Bradley was a "freebooter" and hated the fact that he couldn't control him. But by the late summer of 1967, Bradley was less concerned with appeasing Rickover than with proving that his spy program could come up with the goods.

  Much of Bradley's beloved diesel fleet was on the sidelines now, as the Atlantic Fleet had quit sending diesels off Soviet waters. The Pacific Fleet had fewer subs and was slower to get nuclear ones, so it still made good use of its diesels, sending them both to the Soviet Union and into the shallower waters off China to monitor efforts there to develop nuclear missile subs. (The Pacific Fleet even sent diesel subs to monitor France's nuclear weapons tests in the South Pacific.) Just before Bradley got to Washington, two U.S. diesel subs had smashed into freighters while on surveillance missions off Vietnam." But while mistakes like these were hastening the end of the diesels' reign, nuclear submarine commanders were being encouraged to take as many risks as diesels ever did-or more. Indeed, as the nukes took over, most fleet commanders were still willing to overlook incursions into Soviet waters and detections that stopped short of collisions.

  The commanders knew as well as Bradley that the risks were worth it if it meant catching Soviet missile subs as they came out of port. Once they hit the open waters, they were far more difficult to track; even the expanding SOSUS listening nets covered only a small portion of the oceans. This problem was becoming more urgent because after all the years of worry in Washington, the Soviets had finally begun to send missile subs-mostly Golf-class diesels-on regular patrols off of U.S. coasts. The Air Force also was desperate for help in learning the capabilities of the newest Soviet land-based missiles test fired into the oceans.

  And so began "Operation Winterwind," Bradley's plan to grab one of the most important items on the old Operation Sand Dollar wish list. At the Air Force's request, he was going to send Halibut out to find the nose cone from a Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile. It didn't matter to Bradley that Halibut still had no capacity to actually retrieve anything. He figured that if Halibut could simply track down shards of a missile and mark where they lay with signal-emitting transponders, the Navy could figure out a way to retrieve them later. The transponders should remain active for up to seven years, time enough to come up with a plan, perhaps time enough to allow Craven's team to build one of those deep search vehicles to move in for the final grab.

  This time Halibut was being led by Commander C. Edward Moore, a man fresh from "charm school," the training ground for prospective commanding officers (PCOs) where they were grilled in the working of nuclear reactors. Run by Rickover's minions, the reactor courses were exercises in desperation and frustration, one where candidates were hammered mercilessly. Rickover himself took delight in warning the PCO's that at least a third would fail. He and his men relentlessly interrogated candidates about the details of circuit breaker theory, physics, anything in the thick stack of reactor manuals, testing to see which third that would be.

  Now Moore had inherited a boat plagued with a temperamental reactor and Rickover's rancor. Built solid like a wrestler, Moore faced his task with quiet determination. His hair, already graying, would go just a hit lighter on this command, but he rarely complained out loud, and almost never about Rickover himself-though he would periodically aim a curse at some of the admiral's more overtly sadistic subordinates.

  As Halibut moved more than 400 miles north of Midway, only Moore and a few officers knew what she was after-not even the handpicked, specially cleared denizens of the Bat Cave had been told. Their leader, Lieutenant Commander John H. Cook III, a thirty-oneyear-old electrical engineer with the dual title of operations officer and project officer, mentioned only that they were to scan the ocean hottom 17,000 feet down for any object larger than a garbage can.

  Things started out well enough. The team laid a transponder grid on the ocean floor, using Halibut's torpedo tubes to launch more than a dozen of the signal devices. Each had a unique sound signature that could be triggered by remote control from the sub. As each transponder hit bottom, navigators plotted its precise location using a satellite navigation system.

  Craven wasn't aboard while all this was happening, but his spirit was. Most of Halibut's crew believed the cover story he had craftedthat the 8-foot-long transponders were underwater mines. The transponders had even been marked with munitions codes and delivered to Halibut via a Navy munitions depot. To make sure the crew was convinced, Craven gravely warned the men to deny that mines were on board.

  It took thirty-six hours to set the grid. After that, the men launched one of the fish. Most of the crew had been told that the mechanisms were a new type of towed sonar, but the "special projects" crew crammed inside the Bat Cave's tiny control room knew better.

  The video signals still weren't coming through. Instead, the men were trying to "see" the bottom by sonar images sent up through the fish. They sat, staring into the gray shadows sent up to the screens, trying to separate one wash of shadow from another, to distinguish what might have been key objects from passing fish, from rocks. There were also panels displaying digital readouts to track the mechanical fish's altitude from the bottom as it swam along illuminating its own path, taking photographs that nobody would see until it was hauled back into the sub.

  Things became even more difficult when the Univac 1124 crashed. This time, though, the Bat Cave crew was ready. Armed with a hand calculator carried on board by a Westinghouse engineer, the men did the job for which the computer had been designed. Not long after that, though, Halibut's gremlins almost got the better of the mission. This time the problem was caused in part by a weakness Craven had knowingly left alone, a calculated risk. The hydraulically powered cable spool was smaller than it should have been. To fit within the seven-foot gap between the submarine's pressure hull and the top of the deck, the spool could be only six feet wide. As a result, the seven-mile-long braided steel cable had to be wound so tight that it was stressed to its limit.

  Craven had calculated that the cable should stand up nonetheless. But he forgot something. Overall, the cable itself was strong enough, but it was actually made up of a bunch of separate strands wound together. The strands themselves were built of shorter lengths welded together to stretch 7 miles, and each
weld was a weak point. It was one of those welds that had snapped, leaving a loose wire jamming the device designed to hoist the cable, and leaving the fish dangling aimlessly at the end of the line. In a desperate effort to prevent the loss of the second of the $5 million devices, a crowd of men began working together to hoist the two tons of aluminum and managed to get the fish back on board and through the tube that launched it. Then Halibut sur faced. Over the next three days, her men pulled the entire 35,000-foot cable off its spool, laid the steel out in the Bat Cave in a seemingly endless figure eight, then rewound the entire expanse-only this time in reverse. The idea was to make sure the broken section remained wrapped around the spool when a fish was sent back out. The effort worked, but the men still never found a piece of missile.

  When Halibut slipped back to port late that October, Craven was waiting on the dock. He had already figured out that Halibut couldn't go out again with a welded cable. He put out word through the Secretary of the Navy's research and development office. He wanted a seven-mile-long weldless cable. The Navy began contacting contractors, explaining only that it needed seven miles of continuous cable, no welds, for a classified project. From oil-drilling companies to elevator companies, vendors came to the Pentagon. One man couldn't bear the suspense. "You just have to tell me," he blurted out. "What building is this for?"

  Not a single company could meet the Navy specification for 37,500 feet of weld-free cable. Finally, U.S. Steel agreed to modify its cablemaking process. Even then, it would take three months-until January 1968-to spin the seven miles of steel. When the cable was finally finished, Bradley decreed that it was time again to try to catch a missile.

  Halibut's departure came roughly at the same time the North Koreans captured and boarded the USS Pueblo, an intelligence ship that spied from the surface. Pueblo was in international waters, intercepting radar signals, when the Koreans attacked. It was an audacious move. The Koreans sprayed the ship with gunfire, and Pueblo's crew, their ship only lightly armed, didn't dare fight back. When the Koreans moved to prevent the crew from destroying the ship's espionage equipment and records, one American was killed and three others were wounded. In the end, the Koreans stole some of the United States' most highly sensitive cryptographic gear, and U.S. intelligence officials were convinced that the gear would be handed over to the Soviets.

  Back on Halibut, all started out well. She made it back to the transponder grid without incident. This time the fish swam without a snag. Grainy sonar images played continuously on the screens of the Bat Cave, a fuzzy reproduction of a far-off planet 17,000 feet below.

  The submarine and her crew searched for nearly two months, but there was still no sight of a Soviet missile. Then the cable system broke down again, and the electronics that communicated with the fish shorted out. All this was nothing new. The crew had long ago figured out how to jury-rig a quick fix at sea. The entire operation should have taken less than an hour. The problem was that it had to be engineered on the surface. The men would have to brave Halibut's deck, in the 3:00 A.M. dark.

  Up until now, day had blurred into night for these men 300 feet below sunlight. Drifting deep in the quiet of their underwater universe, they had felt little of the big ocean swells above. But now, Commander Moore had no choice. His men would have to face the rough waters of the surface.

  As he gave the order to blow ballast, a three-man repair crew began to squeeze into their uncomfortable wet suits. Among them was machinist's mate chief Charlie Hammonds. He waited until Moore gave the order. The captain had been watching the swells, waiting for a time when the deck wasn't taking on water. After a while he gave the nod.

  "Flip on your light," said senior chief Skeaton Norton as Hammonds readied to climb out the hatch onto Halibut's hull. Over their wet suits, the repair crew wore life jackets decorated with small, canister-shaped, battery-powered strobe lights. They had been designed for the Air Force, part of jet-fighter pilots' rescue packs.

  "I'll turn it on in time," Hammonds answered in his typical hardnosed fashion. The mechanic was gruff, 5'8" tall, balding, and muscular. He was a loner but had been dubbed "Uncle Charlie" on hoard.

  "You'll turn it on before you step out that door," Norton answered in his toughest chief-of-the-boat voice.

  Hammonds knew an order when he heard one. He answered with a simple flip of a switch.

  In the night black and fog, the tiny jet-fighter light barely illuminated Hammond's face as he stepped out and hooked a safety line through an open notch on the safety track that ran almost flush with the deck the length of the sub. He made his way down the wet, narrow black deck, then over to the front of the sail where he grabbed hold of a rail. He was in as good a position as any submariner could be, considering that he was standing outside at night, on a submarine, in the middle of the rolling ocean.

  Then the ocean reached out, as if it were trying to pull the entire submarine back down into the depths where she belonged. A rogue wave rose higher than sixty feet, reaching over the conning tower, crashing gallons through the open control room hatch, washing over the deck and grabbing Hammonds along with it. He was pulled toward the front of the submarine, his safety line running the length of the track. The line should have been enough to hold him on board, and it would have been enough had the wave been less powerful, had he been pulled less far. Only Hammonds was pulled all the way forward, near the torpedo room hatch, to another notch in the safety track, there by design to allow men to hook their lines on and secure themselves. Only now, as Hammonds zipped past, that tiny notch became his exit from the track. Suddenly unlatched, he was washed into the rough waters.

  Inside the conning tower, that same wave caught a young lieutenant who sprained both arms as he desperately held on. By the time he emerged sputtering, he could see Charlie Hammonds was gone. Men on deck began shouting: "Man overboard!"

  Now a lot of people were shouting that. They began to search according to drill, what would have been normal routine on a surface ship. But this was a nuclear submarine. And submarine crews had come to spend most of their time below decks and underwater. Back in the diesel clays, the days of Cochino and Tusk, this kind of casualty was a constant threat. But now, few if any men serving in the nuclear Navy had ever experienced this, and the recovery drill for a man overboard was seldom practiced.

  "Who's lost?"

  "What happened?"

  "It's Charlie. We lost Charlie."

  The chorus went on as men raced to their battle stations. One of the officers jumped up to the periscope. Halibut continued to rock back and forth, creating a dizzying view of the waters outside.

  "I see a light out there," the officer shouted.

  "Stay on it," someone, probably the captain, shouted back.

  Hammonds was seventy-five yards away, off the starboard beam. Halibut had been moving slowly forward and away from him.

  "Back emergency, back emergency," Moore shouted to the engine room, fully aware that if they lost sight of Hammond's light, he might never be found.

  The engine room poured on power, kicking Halibut into reverse. The sub vibrated, then bucked, as her screws churned against her forward momentum. Someone shouted into the loudspeaker from the engine room that the sub's engines were overheating.

  "Keep your bell on!" Moore yelled back. He knew backing at too high a speed for too long could overheat the turbines, but he was convinced Halibut could take it. She had been designed for emergency maneuvers. Besides, there was no choice but to take the risk. They had to get to Hammonds.

  By now there were men on both periscopes, probably the executive officer and the lead quartermaster. They stared out into the black desperately trying to hang on to the distant glow of Hammonds's tiny light as other men set up a far more powerful search light.

  Four divers scrambled into their wet suits and raced to the control room. Two went out on deck and into the water. Another man stood beneath the bridge hatch, sweltering in his wet suit, ready to jump into the ocean if the other divers
got into trouble.

  Cook scrambled toward the Bat Cave shouting that he was going to reel in the fish.

  "Fuck the fish," Moore shouted after him.

  Cook went on anyway.

  Captain Moore climbed out and onto the sail with a pair of binoculars, and began tracking Hammonds's light himself.

  Storm and ocean in his eyes and ears, Hammonds couldn't see Halibut bearing down on him. He was swimming frantically without any direction. Then he heard a voice in the distance, a voice saying, "Hold on chief, we're going to get you." Hammonds relaxed. It was the most important thing he could have done. In his wet suit, hypothermia wasn't going to be the problem, but panic kills. He held onto that voice, the voice of his captain, even as his tiny light blinked out. Moments later Halibut was alongside him. Divers leapt into the water, and tied a line under his arms. Then he was pulled aboard. He had been in the icy water fifteen minutes, and Moore knew it was only luck that the chief hadn't been lost for good. The moment he was lowered through the hatch, Hugh "Doc" Wheat, the crew's corpsman, began treating him with brandy, the most effective medicine on board.

  Hammonds just kept repeating, "I couldn't see anything, I couldn't see anything." He was shivering violently. Doc Wheat prescribed more brandy. Chief Gary L. Patterson asked for brandy as well, but Doc wasn't going for it. He was brought to the showers to be warmed, then put to bed. Still, it would take hours for the shock to wear off, hours the crew spent decorating Halibut with signs declaring, "Welcome back, Charlie. How was liberty?"

  The humor may have been lost on Hammonds. His crewmates would tell and re-tell the tale of his harrowing swim at every Halibut reunion for years, but Hammonds would never show up to listen. Still, while they were at sea, Hammonds amazed everyone by going back out onto the deck, almost daring the ocean to try again. Nobody expected it of him. Just about any other man might have stayed below, might have been too terrified to face the rolling waves. But as long as Hammonds was on the boat-and he would be for another monthhe would refuse to give in to fear.