Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew

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

  In early April, Moore turned his boat for home. He was coming back empty-handed. He and his men never did find a missile. But he was also coming home with every single one of his men, and he didn't mind the trade-off, not one bit. Besides, he was about to get the chance of a lifetime to redeem himself and his submarine.

  Halibut pulled into Pearl Harbor on April 11, 1968, the sixtyeighth anniversary of the day the Navy purchased its first submarine. The enlisted men attended the "Submarine Birthday Ball," and the officers gathered at what the locals called the "Pink Lady," the Royal Hawaiian Hotel on Waikiki Beach. There, they made their way through three or four cases of champagne that one of them had stacked under their table, as well as a case of liquor that had been swiped from an admiral's suite.

  As they celebrated, an amazing detective story was unfolding. A dozen Soviet ships had poured out into the Pacific, moving slowly, hanging away at the ocean with active sonar. They were obviously looking for something. Soon it became clear that the Soviets were looking for one of their own. They had lost a submarine.

  The USS Barb (SSN-596) had been sitting off the Soviet port at Vladivostok when the frantic search began. Barb's CO Bernard M. "Bud" Kauderer had never seen anything like it. Four or five Soviet submarines rushed out to sea and began beating the ocean with active sonar. The submarines would dive, come back to periscope depth, then dive again.

  The Soviets made no effort to avoid detection, no effort to hide. Their cries filled airwaves, shattering the air around Vladivostok with unencoded desperation.

  "Charlie, Victor, Red Star, come in."

  "Red Star, come in."

  "Red Star, come in, come in, come in."

  Back on shore, U.S. intelligence agents gathered around electronic intercept monitors and listened in. Barb watched, keeping radio silence. A message flashed in from shore command: "Stay on station." Kauderer felt a flash of frustration. He had planned on turning for home, planned on arriving in time to attend his only son's bar mitzvah. But now his boy would become a man without him. Kauderer was legally forbidden from telling his son why.

  As Barb and other U.S. surveillance craft listened, it was clear that the Soviets had no idea where to find their submarine. Back in Washington, Bradley thought that he might know better.

  For some time, Bradley's Office of Undersea Warfare had been keeping a long and frustrating vigil over an obscure set of Soviet submarine communications that U.S. intelligence had never figured out how to decode. The Soviets were using sophisticated transmitters that compressed the communications into microsecond bursts. Bradley thought the key to finding the missing sub lay in these indecipherable bursts of static.

  Intelligence officers had figured out that the transmissions were coming from Soviet missile submarines on their way to and from patrols within firing range of U.S. shores. The United States had been monitoring and recording them using a series of reception stations that were built upon German technology-dozens of antennas were strategically placed along the Pacific Coast and in Alaska.

  After a while, it didn't matter much that the bursts couldn't be decoded. There was a wealth of information to be found just within the pops and hisses. Slight variations in frequency distinguished one Soviet submarine from another, and the Soviets were so regimented that their submarines created a running itinerary for U.S. intelligence to follow as they ran, tag-team style, through the 4,000 miles from Kamchatka to one of their main patrol stations 750 to 1,000 miles northwest of Hawaii. A burst typically was sent when the submarines hit the deepsea marker just outside Kamchatka. Another was sent as they crossed the international dateline, about 2,000 miles away from the Soviet Union at 180 degrees longitude. A third marked their arrival on station.

  It was as if they were saying "We are leaving.... We have hit 180 degrees longitude.... We are on station." The progress reports continued as the subs headed back to Kamchatka, and Bradley's men believed they could almost hear within the static the Soviet requests for fresh milk, fresh vegetables, vodka, women.

  Now Bradley's team searched the communications records and found what they were looking for almost immediately. A Golf II submarine-one of a class of diesel subs that filled in between the first Zulu subs converted to carry missiles and the coming of the first Soviet nuclear-powered missile subs-had left port on February 24, 1968. The sub had been transmitting as usual until it hit midcourse. Then the transmissions stopped. There was no message when it crossed 180 degrees longitude; none saying it had left deep water; nothing that could be construed as a request for milk or fruit or anything else that would mark a safe return.

  Bradley rushed the news to the Navy's top admirals: the Soviets had indeed lost a submarine, one that carried three ballistic missiles. He believed that the sub had to have gone down between the last burst transmission and the next expected one that never came, but the Soviets weren't looking anywhere near the area Bradley had pinpointed.

  What if the United States could find the sub first? There in one place would be Soviet missiles, codehooks, a wealth of technological information-and Bradley thought he had the means to find it. Halibut might not have been able to find a relatively small missile fragment, but a submarine was a much bigger and better target.

  Halibut Commanders Moore and Cook were called to Washington. Waiting for them were Rear Admiral Philip A. Beshany, deputy chief of naval operations for submarine warfare, Craven, and Albert C. Beutler, who supervised Halibut's work.

  "We've got some intelligence that the Soviets may have lost a submarine in the Pacific," Beshany announced as soon as the men walked in. Then Beshany filled in the details and the punch line, that Halibut was going after the Soviet Golf.

  From Beshany's office, Craven rushed Moore and Cook in to see Paul Nitze, secretary of the Navy. This time, the officers were grilled on Halibut's failure to find any missile fragments. Craven held his breath while Cook offered up a spiel that rivaled the best that Craven himself could have delivered.

  Failure or not, Cook said, Halibut's crew had now had time to work out the kinks in their equipment. The men could, he insisted, find a submarine if given the chance. It wasn't a hard sell. There was no other craft in the Navy that could attempt this kind of a search as long as the Soviets were out in force. Cook's optimism was enough to send the secretary straight to the White House to seek the okay.

  Craven, Moore, and Cook could do nothing now but pray for the final go-ahead. They barely had time to kneel. Within a few hours, Nitze telephoned Beshany, who called Moore, Cook, and Craven back into his office with the news.

  "You have a new mission.""

  Craven now began looking for any other evidence that might further pinpoint the location of the Golf. He was convinced that there had to be other audible signs of a sub going down, so he contacted Captain Joseph Kelly, the man chiefly responsible for expanding the SOSUS net of underwater listening devices that the Navy had been laying throughout the oceans.

  Kelly's staff ran through a series of SOSUS records, looking for signs of death: the convulsive terror of an implosion followed by the smaller explosions that together indicate a submarine falling to the ocean bottom. But as Kelly's staff searched, they found no massive aberrations that would indicate a powerful implosion. There was, however, a tiny blip on their paper tapes, a little rise indicating a single loud pop. It was right in the area where Bradley believed the Soviet sub had gone down.

  What if, Craven reasoned, the Golf had somehow flooded before hitting crush depth? She would have fallen without a searing, deafening, blinding, cataclysmic, implosive crash of steel. Her death would have been much quieter than that. Craven needed to know what a sinking submarine sounded like, one going down with hatches open, filling with ocean water, internal and external pressure equalizing long before the boat reached crush depth. There was only one way to find out.

  Craven and Bradley prevailed upon the Navy to sink a submarine in sacrifice, a submarine whose death could be taped. The Navy gave him an old diesel submarine, a w
arhorse that had probably escaped countless Japanese torpedoes during World War II. Now she would suffer a vainglorious end.

  World War II submarines had been executed before, made targets for torpedo practice. But those boats went out running, their engines on, their rudders wedged into position. There was something almost noble about that kind of death, downed with a single shot like a valiant old steed.

  This submarine, on the other hand, was just given up to the waters, while SOSUS engineers recorded her descent. She died silently, which was just what Craven and Bradley had expected. Now, they reasoned, if a submarine with every hatch and watertight door carefully opened went down silently, then another boat might go down with a small pop if one of its watertight doors had remained shut. So, calling on data from other hydrophones that had also picked up the pop, Kelly and Craven triangulated what they believed was the Golf's most likely position: 40 degrees latitude and 180 degrees longitude. That put her just about 1,700 miles northwest of Hawaii, where the water was more than 3 miles deep.

  Beshany still wasn't convinced. He believed there would have to have been implosions. The fact that the Soviets weren't anywhere near the area also caused him doubts. But he had nothing else to go on. So he gave the nod, and Halibut was sent to the spot Craven had pinpointed.

  She set out on July 15, her orders kept secret from the men on board. Even the occupants of the Bat Cave were told little. Most assumed they were going back to look for the Soviet missile that had eluded them before.

  As a fish was sent out, sonar gray again replaced images from a video camera that still didn't work. Watching the monotone miles roll by on a continuous taped-together sheet was dizzying. The men's eyes stung as they forced themselves to focus, looking for shadows that seemed foreign to the Pacific bottom. Their shifts never lasted longer than ninety minutes. After that, the sky-blues in the Bat Cave began to quiver with gray ghosts.

  Day and night, Halibut trolled back and forth. The site that Craven, Bradley, and Kelly had targeted still left five miles of sea to search. The Soviet submarine could have drifted a long way before it fell the three miles to the bottom.

  Every six days or so, the fish was hauled back into the submarine so that the still film could be collected and developed. This went on for weeks. Still nothing. Then the haze was interrupted.

  "Captain Moore, Captain Moore." It was the ship's photographer bursting out of the Halibut's tiny darkroom, suddenly completely aware that he hadn't been looking for a missile this time. He was at once stunned and certain he had found his target.

  It was a perfect picture of a submarine's sail. The photographer was shaking so hard Moore worried for a moment that he'd collapse. There it was, Halibut's first success, a view of the steel tomb of about one hundred Soviet sailors.

  At Moore's orders, the fish dove again, down to the spot captured in the photograph of the sail, down to where the Soviet Golf looked as though someone had carefully driven her 16,580 feet to the ocean bottom and parked.

  Sonar and camera gobbling up everything in the area, the fish collected new detail with each dive. There was a hole blown nearly 10 feet wide, just behind the Golf's conning tower. There must have been an explosion, probably on the surface, given the quiet recorded by SOSUS, and it probably came from a hydrogen buildup that could have occurred as the Soviet crew sat charging the diesel submarine's 450-ton sulfuric acid battery. Although severely damaged, the submarine looked basically intact.

  The photos also showed that small hatches had been blown off, exposing two missile silos. Inside the first was twisted pipe where a nuclear warhead had once sat calmly waiting for holocaust. Inside the second silo, the warhead was completely gone. The third silo was intact.

  Then the fish's camera found something else, something that shocked even Moore. It was the skeleton of a doomed sailor, probably just an enlisted man, a kid, lying alongside his submarine, alone, his crewmates probably entombed within. One of his legs was broken and bent almost at a right angle, perhaps from the shock of the explosion that destroyed the submarine. Maybe that's what had killed him. Or maybe he had drowned as he fell the three miles to the ocean floor.

  The boy had to have been out on deck when the submarine was destroyed. He was dressed in foul-weather gear, a brown sheepskin coat buttoned up to his neck, thick wool pants, and heavy black military hoots. Now the clothes warmed only his stark white hones.

  Bones, a bare skeleton-by all accounts, that should have been impossible. Little or nothing lived this far down in the ocean, the experts had said. But there he was, and there was something else in those photographs. Tiny, carnivorous worms wriggled around the body they had already eaten bit by horrific bit.

  No one who saw the Soviet boy-submariner could forget him, not anyone who saw the 22,000 photographs Halibut brought home on September 9, 1968.

  Bradley code-named the pictures "Velvet Fist" after the gentle way they were snatched from the ocean. All those millions of dollars, all those hours poured into Halibut, had finally paid off. He rushed the plunder straight to the new director of Naval Intelligence, Frederick J. "Fritz" Harlfinger II, who had taken the post while Halibut was still out to sea.

  This was a man who had been the Defense Intelligence Agency's assistant director of collection, a polite word in intelligence circles for theft. Working with the Syrians and the Israelis a few years earlier, his team had managed to steal a Soviet MIG fighter jet. During the Vietnam War, they handed the Pentagon a Soviet surface-to-air missile. They also managed to pilfer a Soviet missile in Indonesia and the engine from a Soviet plane that crashed near Berlin.

  But the Velvet Fist photos were unprecedented. As far as Harlfinger was concerned, presenting these to the president was the perfect way to start a new job.

  Under Harlfinger's direction, Bradley created a montage of forty photographs to show to the top Navy ranks and up at the White House. First stop was Beshany at submarine command.

  "American technology is pretty terrific," Beshany thought as he experienced his first brush against the Velvet Fist. He would forever compare Halibut's feat to a helicopter hovering 17,000 feet in the air with a small camera at the end of a line taking pictures in a dense fog.

  Soon after, Harifinger presented the photographs to President Johnson, who was so impressed that Naval Intelligence officers would congratulate themselves for months.

  In January 1969, Richard Nixon was sworn in as president. Shortly after, the phone rang in Bradley's office. It was Harlfinger.

  "Get your ass over to the White House, and take Velvet Fist with you.

  Alexander Haig, then deputy to Nixon's National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, wanted to see the photographs. Haig was so impressed that he demanded that he become the guardian of Velvet Fist.

  Bradley called Harlfinger for help, pulling him out of a meeting. "Haig wants to keep the material," he reported.

  "Fuck him," the intelligence chief answered.

  But ignoring Haig was easier said than done. "He wants to show this to his boss and to his boss's boss," Bradley said.

  No one needed to explain to Harlfinger that Haig's "boss's boss" just happened to he the new president of the United States. Harlfinger had played enough politics over the years to know when it was time to concede.

  "Okay," he relented. The photographs could be left with Haig, but only for twenty-four hours.

  That was time enough for Haig to bring the material to Kissinger. Later, it would he Kissinger who made the presentation to Nixon. Nixon was fascinated. So much so that word got back to the CIA.

  While the agency's analysts had long been interested in what the regular spy subs managed to pick up, it had generally left control of the operations to the Navy. But now, the CIA and its director, Richard Helms, were suddenly and intensely interested in the ocean deep. Helms began to engineer a takeover, CIA-style. First, he created a new level of bureaucracy, a liaison agency that would supposedly pool the resources of Naval Intelligence and the CIA. It would be called th
e National Underwater Reconnaissance Office (NURO).

  This wasn't the first time the CIA had made this kind of arrangement. In 1961 the agency decided to share control over the satellite operations with the Air Force by creating a joint venture dubbed the National Reconnaissance Office.

  NURO was supposed to be divided evenly between Navy and CIA staffers. At its top ranks, it was. Its director was John Warner, Nixon's new secretary of the Navy. Bradley would be staff director. Heading up the CIA end was Carl Duckett, its deputy director for science and technology. But from the day NURO was formed, the CIA took charge. Bradley could spare only a few people for the new office. His entire staff in the undersea part of Naval Intelligence numbered only about a dozen. The CIA, however, had no such constraints. It moved in with eight permanent staffers and more consultants loyal to the agency.

  Worse, it was becoming increasingly clear to Bradley and Craven that the CIA couldn't tell a submarine from an underwater mountain. By now, the two men had come up with a plan for retrieving the best of what was on board the Soviet Golf. Their idea was to eventually send mini-subs to grab a nuclear warhead, the safe containing the Soviets' "crypto-codes," and the submarine's burst transmitters and receivers so that the Navy could finally decode all of the message traffic it had been collecting.

  The two men had already proven that the Golf's hull could be opened without destroying everything inside. They had borrowed Army demolition experts to test their theory. With a large steel plate shielding various fragile and flammable objects set up in a pool of water, plastic explosives were affixed to a tiny area and detonated. The blast left a small doorway, barely singeing the articles behind the steel.

  That's really all anyone needed to do: open a small doorway and reach in. The rest of the Golf could be left buried at sea. The military had watched these submarines being built in overhead photography for ten years. Naval Intelligence knew the Golf II down to nearly every nut and bolt. The rockets that the Golfs used to launch their nuclear payloads were primitive, with ranges of only 750 miles. Both the United States and the Soviet Union had already engineered rockets with 1,500 mile ranges. There was little to he gained in attempting the impossible job of pulling up thousands of tons of already antiquated gear from the bottom of the ocean. Besides, it would take years to develop the equipment for such a salvage attempt.