Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew
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It is not entirely clear where this group of ships was working, but declassified Navy documents cite one possibility. Air-reconnaissance planes had spotted two Soviet hydrographic survey ships-a submarine rescue ship and an Echo 11-class nuclear attack submarine - conducting an unspecified "hydro-acoustic operation" southwest of the Canary Islands, which lie about 300 miles off northwest Africa. Air reconnaissance was cut off on May 19 and resumed on May 21, just about the time Scorpion would have left the area.
"There were no observed changes in the pattern of operations of the Soviet ships, either before or after Scorpion's loss, that were evaluated as indicating involvement or interest in any way," the Navy would later report in a document prepared in 1969 by a court of inquiry into the Scorpion disaster and kept classified for years.
On the evening of May 21, the Scorpion's crew radioed in their location and reported that they had embarked upon their assigned route home, the "Great Circle Track" through the North Atlantic. Ordered to transit at 18 knots, they said they expected to arrive in Norfolk at 1:00 P.M., Eastern Standard Time, on May 27.
Admiral Thomas Moorer, the CNO, and Vice Admiral Arnold E Schade, commander of submarines in the Atlantic, began to worry when Scorpion failed to answer messages on May 23 as well as repeat messages over the next two days. They quietly asked a few Navy ships and planes to scan for signs of the submarine. No general alarm was raised. After all, Slattery and his men could be racing home underwater and out of radio contact.
Concern turned to fear on May 27, at 12:20 P.M. It was twenty minutes before Scorpion was supposed to arrive at Norfolk. By now, she should have been on the surface, her crew talking with the base. Schade initiated an intensive communications check. Ships and planes flooded the air with Scorpion's call name.
"Brandywine.... "
"Brandywine.... "
"Brandywine!"
There was no answer.
At 3:15 P.M., Scorpion was declared missing.
Back at the dock, the crewmen's families waited, waited for their husbands, sons, and fathers to come back from sea, waited in a spring rain that washed the dock clean. They knew nothing about the frantic radio messages tearing through the air around them. Then the Navy told them to go home, told them that Scorpion had been delayed. It was only when news reporters started calling that the families learned that their sons, husbands, and fathers were missing.
By the time Craven turned for the Pentagon, intelligence officers had already been frantically scrambling for acoustic evidence or other signs of an accident, a collision, or a battle. Reconnaissance pilots placed all known Soviet and Eastern Bloc surface warships, merchant ships, and submarines at least 50 miles away from any point Scorpion was expected to pass. The Navy would later report that there was "no evidence of any Soviet preparations for hostilities or a crisis situation such as would he expected in the event of a premeditated attack on Scorpion." Indeed, by the time Craven walked into the War Room, the Navy basically had ruled out Soviet involvement in Scorpion's loss.
Vice Admiral Schade set out himself to join the search on the USS Pargo (SSN-650). Rogers, the former crewman, went out looking as well, aboard his new submarine, the USS Lapon (SSN-661).
There was a moment when everyone on Lapon believed that Scorpion had been found. Lapon's radiomen picked up an SOS from "Brandywine." But soon it became sickeningly apparent that the message was a fake, a sadistic joke from merchant seamen or pleasure boaters.
Meanwhile, Craven launched a search that would take so many twists, and leave him so at odds with the rest of the Navy, that he himself would begin to wonder whether he had indeed gone mad. He began routinely enough, thinking of ways to acoustically delve the ocean depths. It was clear that the SOSUS listening nets were going to be useless. While the listening system in the Pacific had picked up that one pop, the only sign of the Soviet Golf's loss, the extensive SOSUS arrays in the Atlantic could not do the same thing. The Atlantic SOSUS system was designed to filter incoming noise, allowing the sonar nets to record the consistent clatter of machinery, the whir of submarine screws, and all the other music made by submarines as they move underwater, while muffling the blasts of oil exploration, undersea earthquakes, and the calls of whales. That sane filtering system would have eliminated any evidence if Scorpion had fallen to the ocean bottom, would have broken apart the terrible cries of a submarine imploding, rendering them nearly indistinct from the normal ocean din.
"How the hell are we going to find these poor bastards?" Craven muttered to himself. Within days, he would be named chairman of a technical advisory group convened to help find Scorpion by Robert A. Frosch, the assistant secretary of the Navy for research and development. Craven and the other group members were to report directly to the CNO and the commander of the Atlantic Fleet.
He began calling upon the small oceanographic research stations that dotted the Atlantic. Top on his list was Gordon Hamilton, a friend who ran an oceanographic laboratory in Bermuda that was funded by the Office of Naval Research.
"Hey, Gordon, do you have any hydrophones in the water that could have heard the Scorpion?" Craven asked without bothering to offer a greeting.
"Well, I don't, but part of my laboratory in the Canary Islands has a hydrophone in the water all the time," Hamilton answered.
The hydrophones generated mounds of scrawled paper, those peaks and blips that accumulated as pens moved over continuously rotating drums. There was a problem, though. Six days had passed since Scorpion's last message to shore, and laboratory workers were supposed to clean up and toss the records after two or three days. Any scrawls that could have registered a final tragedy aboard Scorpion should have gone out with the trash.
Still, Craven firmly believed that people rarely do what they are supposed to do. Housekeeping, he reasoned, is usually the first thing to go. Within a couple of hours, Hamilton called back. Craven was right. There were piles of paper all over the lab, and buried within those piles were two weeks of acoustic records-including eight separate ocean explosions or severe disturbances during the six days Scorpion had been out of contact. But the disturbances could have been caused by almost anything, including blasts from illegal oil explorations, a fairly routine sound ringing through the North Atlantic. And they could have come from almost anywhere, and from any direction.
With only one set of records, Craven had no way to come up with a geographic fix on any of the blasts. To do that, he would need to triangulate three separate recordings from three different hydrophones set up in three different points. Since he didn't have the data to come up with a precise fix, Craven worked backward, charting the times of the explosions against Scorpion's known path and speed. He came up with eight mid-ocean locations where he assumed the sub would have been at the time of any of the disturbances. Bathymetric charts showed all eight sites to be in waters deeper than 2,000 feet, deeper than the crush depth of a submarine.
Acting on Craven's data, the Navy sent planes to all eight spots. The pilots were looking for floating wreckage and oil slicks. They found none. The lack of debris was far from conclusive, given that the water was so deep. But Craven needed more to go on. The hunt for sonic evidence continued.
Independent of Craven's efforts, Wilton Hardy, the chief scientist of an elite acoustic team at the Naval Research Laboratory, the Navy's primary underwater testing facility in Washington, D.C., came up with the next clue. He knew that the Air Force kept two hydrophones near Newfoundland to track underwater shocks from Soviet nuclear tests. One was right off the peninsula of Argentia. The other was about 200 miles from there.
Hardy sent for the records, knowing he was playing a long shot. Both Air Force hydrophones were about as far from the Azores, and Scorpion's last-known position, as any listening devices could be and still be in the North Atlantic. And sitting right between the hydrophones and Scorpion's track was the largest chain of mountains on earth, the undersea Mid-Atlantic Ridge. The mountains were enough to block most sounds from the Azores.
There they were, almost entirely buried in local noise, slight blips that seemed to match the more dramatic peaks picked up by Hamilton's lab. Hardy called Craven, who was by now coordinating the Navy's entire acoustic search effort. Craven decided to convince himself that the Argentia recordings were neither coincidence nor phantoms.
If the Argentia blips were worthless noise, then the plots would probably fall hundreds of miles or thousands of miles from the relatively tiny line of ocean that made up Scorpion's track. But if the new data pinpointed any one of the eight events picked up in the Canary Islands on that tiny line, the acoustic matches would almost certainly have to be valid.
Hardy found it first. There, right on Scorpion's track, was an explosion strong enough to tear through a steel hull and send a submarine, flooded, toward the ocean bottom.
There was no telling what caused the explosion. But 91 seconds later, there were a series of much louder blasts and there was no mistaking what caused those. Craven and Hardy were convinced that they had to be implosions, the agonized shouts of a submarine collapsing in on itself, compartment by compartment breaking down with the force of nearly 500 pounds of TNT.
The men on the submarine could have survived the initial explosion, if that sound was indeed from Scorpion. They might have lived long enough to see her walls begin to quaver inward, but that would have been all. Nobody could have lived through the first implosion. That shock would have sent the tail section and the bow section plowing into the center of the submarine, like a papier-mache model crushed in front and in back with a single, violent clap. The cataclysmic heat and the shock of that would have killed everyone on board in less than onehundredth of a second. The men would all be dead even as the ocean pressures continued to pummel Scorpion: a second implosion four seconds after the first, then another five seconds later, then two seconds, then three seconds, then seven seconds, then another and another and another. Three minutes and ten seconds after the first explosion, it would have been all over. Three minutes and ten seconds of destruction before the ocean went suddenly quiet.
Recorded only eighteen hours after Scorpion's crew had sent word they were heading home, the blasts meant that the sub had managed to travel less than 400 miles toward Norfolk.
It was now four days after Scorpion had been declared missing. Craven called the chief of Naval Operations to tell him that Scorpion was probably lost forever. Moorer wasn't ready to hear that. He wasn't about to tell the crewmen's families and the nation that there was no hope based on a bunch of tiny, almost indiscernible blips on paper. The fact that they occurred at a point right on Scorpion's track, at a moment when she was expected to be there, was enough to convince him only to declare the spot "an area of special interest." Then he waited to see whether any of the planes, ships, and submarines turned up anything else.
Rear Admiral Beshany, commander of the submarine force, began funneling all press inquiries to Craven. But the scientist remained under strict orders to avoid the word lost and even the suggestion of death. It wasn't until another six days had passed with no sign of Scorpion that Beshany and Moorer were forced to accept that Craven and Hardy were right. On June 5, Moorer announced that the Scorpion was "presumed lost." Hours later, the secretary of the Navy formally declared Captain Slattery and his ninety-eight other officers and crewmen legally dead.
But Scorpion was still missing. Without examining the remains of the sub, the Navy would never know what had gone wrong. Without that understanding, the nuclear submarine fleet would forever operate with the fear that a fatal flaw, somehow overlooked, could cause another catastrophe. Absent proof the crewmen were dead, their families might never be able to shake the thought, against all logic and against all available information, that the men might have been captured and were alive somewhere, perhaps in a Soviet prison.
And so began the second phase of the search. Now it was up to Craven and his team to find Scorpion and to find out what killed her. He turned his attention back to the acoustic echoes.
The site of the first explosion-now being called "Point Oscar" marked where his search would begin. But that still left him far from finding the sub. Thermal layers in the water could have distorted the sounds of Scorpion's loss as they traveled to the Canary Islands and the Argentia hydrophones. Craven calculated that there could be ten miles of error for any of the spots mapped by the triangulated data.
Also, the water at Point Oscar was 2 miles deep. The Scorpion would have stopped imploding about 7,000 feet before she hit bottom, cutting off the acoustic trail. Depending on how fast she had been traveling, and in what direction, and depending on the force of implosion and the position of her stern planes as she fell, she could have been thrown miles further.
All that meant that the submarine could be anywhere within a 20mile-wide circle, leaving a vast, unknown universe to search. And the art of deep-sea search was still in its infancy.
In starting the Scorpion search, Craven had far less data than he had when searching for the Soviet Golf in the Pacific. The Navy decided to send a surface ship to comb the area surrounding Point Oscar. There was no thought of sending Halibut on this search; Halibut was a boat designed for secrecy, and there was little need to shroud the fact that the search was going on since the Soviets could easily read about the missing submarine in American newspapers.
Instead, the ship the Navy employed was the USNS Mizar, an oceanographic survey vessel. She was a 266-foot-long former polar supply ship that had been converted to research at the start of the Navy's post-Thresher scramble to the deep. For this mission, she would be under the direction of Hardy's team at the Naval Research Laboratory, where she was based.
Mizar carried towed cameras, less-advanced versions of Halibut's fish, and with those she would start the slow, painstaking survey of the ocean bottom. The search would be led by Chester "Buck" Buchanan, a civilian oceanographer and senior NRL scientist.
As Buchanan set out, he knew he was in for a long haul. Crawling at two knots, it would take Mizar months to cover the area. But the captain was a tracker by nature, short, stocky, and good-naturedly pugnacious. He began to grow a heard the day Mizar left port, a Vandyke, declaring that he would shave only when he found his quarry.
Staying in constant contact with Hardy and Craven as they sorted through the acoustic crumbs, Buchanan began moving Mizar in circles over Point Oscar, finding little more than what seemed to be iron-rich meteorites. Following the Navy's lead, Mizar then began scouring the area west of Point Oscar. The Navy reasoned that since Scorpions had been heading west toward Norfolk, that was the best direction to search.
Meanwhile, Craven began digging for more evidence, anything that could help direct Mizar from shore. He set about trying to map each implosion in the hope that he could figure out how far Scorpion had traveled before the final sounds of her loss subsided.
He found much more.
Craven's map showed that Scorpion had not been traveling west toward Norfolk during her final moments. Instead, Craven's calculations surprisingly showed that the submarine had been moving east, back toward the Mediterranean. Perhaps a submarine could turn if it were fleeing from another boat, but intelligence officials had already told Craven that they were all but certain that the Soviets were not involved. It had to be something else.
The scientist went straight to Beshany's submarine command. He had one question. "What could make a submarine go in the wrong direction?"
Craven asked the same question of several captains and admirals. Each time he got the same answer.
A submarine turns around 180 degrees when a torpedo activates while it is still on board, an event submariners call a "hot run.
" The boat turns because that triggers fail-safe devices on a torpedo, shutting it down. The same safety devices keep the weapons from turning and blowing up the submarines they are fired from.
Scorpion carried a load of torpedoes, armed and ready for the worst, as did all cold war attack submarines. There were fourteen Mark 37 torpedoes, seven Mark 14s, and two nuclear-tipped Mark 45 Astor torpedoes. Hot runs were particularly common with the Mark 37s, and if there had been a hot run, Slattery would have called "right full rudder," ordering a 180-degree turn the moment the torpedo room reported the problem. Any captain would have-the maneuver is one of those things that are drilled into submariners until the reaction becomes simple reflex. In fact, Scorpion had recovered from a hot run in December 1967, six months before she was lost, precisely because Slattery had followed the standard procedure.
That had to be it, Craven reasoned. Scorpion was traveling west, and that had to mean that something had gone wrong with one of the sub's torpedoes. Somehow it had activated. And somehow it had exploded.
Craven began to dig around. He learned that there was a flaw in the onboard testing equipment that could easily have triggered a hot run. And he learned that torpedoes, along with almost every other piece of equipment on board, are routinely tested as submarines make way for home.
One of Craven's favorite maxims was, "If something can be installed backward, it will be." And in this case, it was true. Several submarines had reported hot runs as a result of electric leads on the test equipment being installed backward. The problem had become common enough that the commander of the Atlantic Fleet issued warnings.
With that known flaw and the acoustic data, it seemed to Craven that Scorpion's fate had been determined. Scorpion had been battling a hot-running torpedo, probably created when somebody mistakenly reversed the leads during a test. Only her turn to the east had been too late. The logic, the evidence-it all fit. Craven was convinced.