Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew

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

  The group's report also makes no attempt at all to explain why Scorpion was found just where Craven said she would be if her captain had turned to battle what he believed was a hot running torpedo. Instead the Navy had gone back to debating the meaning of the acoustic trail Craven and his team followed to Scorpion's grave. Although the details of the Scorpion search and the crucial role Craven played were retold in a second report the Navy declassified at the same time, the 1970 analysis instead relies heavily on Naval Ordnance assurances that Scorpion could not have suffered a torpedo accident. The group, in short, based its conclusions on statements made by the same Navy department that was withholding critical information that had been kept from the court of inquiry and the search teams.

  By the time the second report was written, Naval Ordnance's argument had changed. Instead of insisting that a torpedo could never explode on board a sub, Naval Ordnance had focused on the visual evidence collected by Trieste: from the outside, the hull of the torpedo room looked basically intact, while the ship's battery well was largely destroyed. The Trieste pictures did show that all three hatches leading from the torpedo room through the pressure hull-the forward escape trunk access, the escape trunk hatch, and torpedo loading hatch-were all dislodged. (Trieste could not get cameras inside the torpedo room to check for internal damage.t)

  As the report states:

  The most logical location for an internal explosion that would cause the loss of the submarine would he the Torpedo Room. However, the evidence indicates that the Torpedo Room is essentially intact ... It is possible that the explosion of a single weapon could rupture the pressure hull in the keel area, and cause the loss of the submarine-thus, this possibility must be considered. However, experts from NAVORD have stated that the explosion of one weapon would cause sympathetic explosion of others. If more than one weapon exploded there would be extensive damage to the how section, which would have the appearance of outward deformation. There is no deformation of the nature in any of the visible structure, nor is there deformation to indicate an explosion in a torpedo tube. Internal explosion in the Forward Room is considered unlikely.

  Because of that argument, the technical advisory group also discounted the simulated reenactment of Scorpion's loss staged by Craven and Fountain.

  Still, Craven and several munitions experts say that the ordnance command's argument is deeply flawed and that if the command had told investigators about the failures of the batteries on the Mark 37 torpedos, the analysis would have been changed considerably.

  The kind of external hull damage the ordnance command insisted would have followed a torpedo explosion, weapons experts say, may not have followed a torpedo explosion caused by a fire. Rather, the damage the command was describing would likely occur during, a fulltriggered explosion, an explosion in which a torpedo is set off just the way it is designed to be set off, with the power of 330 pounds of HBX explosives unleashed all at once in a massive and directed forward thrust. That kind of detonation would, the experts agree, likely detonate other torpedoes. And a multiple detonation would, as naval ordnance said, probably crack or at least buckle the submarine's hull in a way that would be visible from the outside.

  But the fact that there was a possibility of a torpedo detonation caused by fire in the torpedo battery profoundly changes the equation. A weapons explosion caused by fire will almost certainly not be the same power or predictable shape of a neatly triggered explosion. In fact, there is no way to predict the size, the shape, the properties of a blast caused by fire. Such blasts just don't follow the usual rules. It is, weapons experts say, entirely possible, even probable, that a torpedo warhead set off by a fire, could go up in what is known as a low-order detonation.

  A low-order detonation could be strong enough to kill anyone nearby and could be strong enough to blow the hatches in a torpedo room without setting off other torpedos, especially if those other torpedos were not laying directly against the torpedo that exploded. Submarines often went out without their torpedo racks full. (That's why men often bunked in the torpedo rooms. Any torpedo rack without a torpedo laying on top of it made a reasonable place for a mattress.) One low-order detonation, without subsequent detonations of other torpedoes nearby, could easily occur without the kind of external hull damage the men diving on Trieste had been told to look for. The Navy itself acknowledged that to be entirely possible in the 1969 court of inquiry report into Scorpion's loss. The report cites a 1960 incident on the USS Sargo (SSN-583) in which an oxygen fire in the after-torpedo room spread and caused two Mark 37 torpedo warheads to detonate "low-order." The report states: "The pressure hull of the Sargo was not ruptured." Sargo was pier-side and on the surface at Pearl Harbor at the time.

  Indeed, the fact that Scorpion's torpedo room is intact raises the probability that she was lost to a torpedo casualty, say sub commanders and Craven. Scorpion's torpedo room did not implode, which makes it very likely that it was flooded before she fell to crush depth. Since a flooded room is exposed to equal ocean pressures both inside and out, it does not collapse at crush depth and it does not implode. It is left intact.

  The technical advisory group does say that the torpedo room hatches "probably failed" when "pressure inside the torpedo room increased," or when the bulkhead leading to the operations compartment gave way. The idea seems to be that the hatches were forced open by the violent implosions going on right outside the torpedo room. The advisory group offers no theory about why the torpedo room would have lost only its hatches, when the group's own experts say compartments just outside were completely destroyed in the same violent instant. Trieste's pictures show that Scorpion's operations compartment, which is right next to the torpedo room, is squashed flat and that just beyond operations, Scorpion's tail has telescoped completely into her auxilliary machine space.

  The Trieste photos also show that the massive battery that powered Scorpion was torn apart. The advisory group theorizes that this is what destroyed Scorpion-echoing the theory about what destroyed the Soviet Golf. The sub's battery could have exploded as it was being charged if ventilators failed and the concentration of highly combustible hydrogen gas was allowed to build up. The battery, however, could also have been torn apart by the same forces that destroyed the rest of the submarine.

  Admiral Schade, Fountain, and others have guessed that perhaps Scorpion's trash disposal unit failed, allowing tons of seawater to pour into the sub and into the battery well. Seawater can cause a battery to emit a number of gases, including hydrogen gas. The trash disposal theory, however, is based both on the lack of any other apparent reason and the fact that a trash disposal unit failed on the USS Shark (SSN--591), Scorpion's sister ship. (Shark survived.) Again, many of these observers had discounted that the first flooding could have been caused by a torpedo, because they were told that there was no way for a torpedo to explode on board Scorpion, certainly not without blowing up the rest of the weapons as well.

  "I think we are all guessing," says Ross E. Saxon, who went down on Trieste and took some of the photographs studied by the technical advisory group. "We who were out there, who dove down on the thing, are guessing.'",

  Offered the new information about the flawed torpedo batteries, some people close to the investigation who had discounted a torpedo explosion after the 1970 report now say that a torpedo explosion has to be put back on the list of possible causes of Scorpion's loss.

  "If a room blows up and there was a hand grenade there, but then I call up and say I took the hand grenade out of the room, you would discount the hand grenade," says an active-duty Navy official familiar with the case through its latest developments. "If I didn't tell you there were two hand grenades though, if someone was being less than fully truthful, providing less than all of the information, maybe there would be cause to go back and look at it again. Based on the information on file now, the two most likely causes are a ship's battery explosion and a weapons cook-off. Based on the information we had, I'd say battery explosion. Now there
is a good way for a weapon to cook-off. Any information about specific engineering problems in a weapon ought to be tossed into the fore, ought to be discussed."

  The officer, as well as Craven and many others agree that there needs to be more investigation, perhaps another effort to take a look inside Scorpion's torpedo room. For now, Craven remains convinced that a torpedo was the most likely cause of the sub's loss. He is not alone. In June 1998, Craven stood before a throng of Navy officers when he became the first man to be given the distinguished civilian service award by the Naval Submarine League for his work on Scorpion, Polaris, and other projects. When the ceremony was over, an officer approached him. His voice lowered so it wouldn't carry through the crowded room, the officer began talking about Scorpion and told Craven that he had been convinced for years that she was lost after a torpedo accident.

  Without knowing about the alert sent from Keyport, without knowing that there were known problems with the batteries powering the Mark 37 torpedos, the officer told Craven: "I know it was a torpedo because I had a torpedo battery cook-off on me."

  Six - "The Ballad Of Whitey Mack"

  Commander Chester M. Mack, a 6'6" maverick known as "Whitey," after his pure blond pate, looked through his periscope out onto the Barents Sea. He was here in search of a new and lethal Soviet ballistic missile submarine that NATO had dubbed, without mirth, the "Yankee."

  It was March 1969, and in one terrifying technological leap, the Soviets had finally come out with a nuclear-powered missile sub with a design that seemed borrowed from Polaris and that might be capable of striking the White House or the Pentagon from more than 1,000 miles offshore. It was Mack's job to learn more about it.

  Mack had driven his sub straight through the Barents, the zealously guarded training area for the Northern Fleet, the Soviet Navy's most advanced and powerful. He was traveling with the arrogance of somebody who knew he was at the helm of one of the Navy's newest subs, a Sturgeon-class attack boat armed with the latest sonar and eavesdropping equipment. He was also traveling with a lot more luck than most, because in this game of hit and miss, he had just found what he was looking for.

  There in front of his scope was a Yankee, 429 feet long, .39 feet across, weighing in at 9,600 tons. Mack sidled Lapon up to within 300 yards and stared.

  "Holy Christ, that son-of-a-hitch looks like a Mattel model," he blurted out. The submarine was indeed a Polaris look-alike, from the shape of its hull down to its sail-mounted diving planes. The image was broadcast down in the crew's mess on a television wired to the periscope-what submariners called "periviz." Later, Mack would even air reruns, the sight was that striking.

  Mack hooked a Hasselblad single-lens reflex camera onto the periscope and held down the shutter. The film advanced on a motorized drive as Lapon moved slowly forward, Mack lifting her scope out of the water for only seven seconds at a time in an effort to avoid detection. With each peek of the periscope, he grabbed a few photos, each time capturing another small portion of the massive boat. It would take seven of the photos pasted together to show the entire Yankee.

  During the years the first Yankees were under construction, U.S. intelligence had collected little more than fuzzy images captured by spy satellites showing the Soviets were preparing to mass-produce the new weapon. But over the last year, as the Yankees ventured out on sea trials, U.S. surveillance subs had been moving in for a closer look at this nuclear monster decorated with sixteen doors hiding sixteen portable missile silos. The Yankee seemed a huge advance over the other ballistic missile subs the Soviets had put to sea, the diesel-powered Zulus and Golfs and the first nuclear-powered missile boats, the Hotels. None of those boats had inspired the same fear the Yankee inspired now. The earlier subs were loud and easy for SOSUS and sonar to spot. Now the U.S. sub force was faced with a crucial question: Did the Yankee mimic more than Polaris's shape? Was it possible that, just six years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviets were positioned to launch a first strike with little or no warning? If the subs were as silent and deadly as they seemed, then, at the very least, the Soviets would have matched the United States in creating a second-strike capability, a way to punch back if all their land missiles and bombers were destroyed.

  Captain James Bradley knew his spy program had already produced a lot of critical information about the development of Soviet subs and missiles. Photographing the sunken Golf had been a technological coup. But the Golfs posed little threat compared to the Yankees, and nothing was more important now than learning how to find these new subs, how to destroy them.

  Photos of a Yankee did only so much good. The U.S. Navy and its NATO allies needed to see these boats in action, see just where they carried their missiles, needed to collect sound signatures to ensure that the subs could never pass SOSUS listening nets unheard, and so that surveillance subs and sonar buoys dropped by P-3 Orion sub-hunter planes could recognize the threat as it passed.

  Someone had to get close to a Yankee in action, and he would have to stay close enough for long enough to give the United States ammu nition to counter the new threat. For this, almost any risks were warranted.

  As pumped up as Mack was from his photographic feat, he knew that the real star of the sub force would he the man who accomplished a long trail. Other commanders knew it too, and even the loss of Scorpion was not enough to kill the fighter-jock bravado that the new mission was sparking within the ranks. But Mack was feeling quite proprietary about the Yankees now, and he was certain he could be the guy to get in close and stay there. He was sure of that even though nobody else had been able to. Mack had that kind of an ego.

  In fact, everything about this thirty-seven-year-old commander was big. His towering, 240-pound frame didn't quite fit through Lapon's low hatches and narrow passageways, and he was almost always bent over in the control room, littered overhead with a maze of piping and wire. Submarines were just too small to contain Whitey Mack. He was a larger-than-life renegade, much like the heroes in the novels he devoured by the basketful. He saw himself as the hero in a story he was writing as he went along, a story ruled by his own tactics and sometimes by his own rules.

  He had never attended the Naval Academy. Instead, he was recruited into Officer's Candidate School by a brash ROTC XO at Pennsylvania State University who bragged that he won his wife in a poker game. Mack himself was the son of a Pennsylvania coal miner, and he held up this lack of official polish as a badge of honor. Mack labeled himself a "smart-ass kind of guy," and he faced down his superiors with piercing blue eyes and a brand of brass that had nothing to do with epaulet stars. With wry irony, he sported a homemade pair of Russian dolphins alongside his standard American dolphinsthe emblem of the U.S. submarine fleet-and he liked nothing better than to rush about his submarine shouting obscenities in Russian.

  "A faint heart never fucked a pig." That was Lapon's motto and it had been ever since Mack's first voyage on the sub when he used the phrase to announce his decision to follow a new Soviet sub close to her territorial waters. (The line was recorded on a continuous tape running in Lapon's control room.) Although, when the subject carne up once in front of an admiral, Mack delicately altered the phrase to "A faint heart never won a fair maiden."

  Mack had plunged into command of Lapon in late 1967, first by horse-trading with other commanders for the men he believed would create an all-star crew, then by installing all manner of experimental, and often unauthorized, equipment on his submarine. He alternately inspired and mercilessly drove his men. He alternately impressed and badgered senior admirals, until he was allowed to skip the usual months of U.S.-based shakedown training and head straight into the action.

  To a large degree, Mack was emblematic of his era. Throughout the sub force, captains who avoided risks were branded with nicknames such as "Charlie Tuna" or "Chicken of the Sea." Still, Mack left his superiors-not to mention other commanders who prided themselves on their own daring-debating whether he was dangerously blurring the line between valor and recklessness
. To be sure, those close-up photos of the Yankee were as valuable as any intelligence anyone had gotten lately, but Mack had also taken other immense risks for limited intelligence return.

  Lapon had already been detected in the Barents once under Mack's watch. It may have been a glint of sunlight off her periscope, no one was sure, but suddenly the men in Lapan's radio shack heard a Soviet pilot sending out an alert in Russian: "I see a submarine."

  When Lapon's officer of the deck pointed his periscope toward the sky, he saw a helicopter pilot who seemed to be looking right at him. "He's got the biggest fucking red mustache I ever saw!" the officer exclaimed.

  "That's close enough," Mack said, breathless, as he raced from his personal quarters into the control room, still in his skivvies. "We better get the hell out of here." With that, he got his boat out of Dodge before the Soviets had a chance to mount a full search.

  Mack also had driven so close to two Soviet subs conducting approach and attack runs that Lapon ended up in the path of one of their torpedoes. Mack knew that, for an exercise like this, the Soviets were shooting duds. But he had no intention of proving his point by letting the torpedo hit. Instead, he sent the order to the engine room that kicked Lapon into high speed. Flying "balls to the wall," as submariners say, Mack outraced the weapon. (The incident occurred just after he had taken Lapon out searching for Scorpion, though well before anyone realized that a torpedo might have killed that boat.)

  Two spooks on board, George T. "Tommy" Cox and Joseph "Jesse" James, were so shaken by the incident that when they later tried to grab a smoke in the radio room, neither man could steady himself long enough to light up. Cox wanted to be a country-western singer, had once taken first place at the Gene Hooper County Western Show Talent Contest in Caribou, Maine and had worked his way through high school playing backup at a place called Cindy's Bar. After this trip on Lapon, he recorded a ballad called "Torpedo in the Water" on his first and only collection of submarine greatest hits, Take Her Deep. The song was an ode to a close call: