Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew

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

  Standard sonar would never have been enough. The Yankee was simply too quiet. But Lapon wasn't relying on just standard sonar. Mack had slipped aboard an added edge, an experimental sonar device designed to capitalize on some discoveries that Kelln's USS Ray had made in 1967 and 1968 when she trailed the November-class attack sub into the Mediterranean and then tracked a Charlie in the North Atlantic. The device worked by upgrading the way the standard system registered noise levels in the ocean. It zeroed in on certain tones, those made by the Yankee as she moved through the water, almost the way notes of music sound from a bottle when somebody blows over the top. After a fair amount of trial and error, Lapon's crew realized that one particular frequency changed each time the Yankee turned. A shift to the left, and the tone was slightly higher. When the Yankee moved away, the tone lowered. If the tone changed quickly, it meant the Yankee was making a swift course change.

  The one place Lapon couldn't follow from was directly behind. Unlike other Soviet submarines that offered an easy-to-follow din from their propellers, the Yankee was quiet enough from behind that she was rendered effectively invisible. Indeed, the Yankee might have been able to slip away entirely, even with Lapon's extra sonar gadget, if not for what must have been a structural flaw. To the left, the Yankee's machinery was making more noise than any other portion of the boat.

  From now on, Lapon was going to follow that machinery noise. If it got louder, Mack would know that the Yankee had made a left turn. If the Yankee seemed to vanish, she probably had turned right.

  Ultimately the best vantage point turned out to be a little off to the side of the Yankee's stern, in either direction-with the left side being a little louder. From there the new sonar device picked up strong tones, and standard sonar registered steam noises coming from the Yankee's turbines and the clicks made by the Yankee's propeller each time it made a revolution. Counting those clicks and logging turn counts was how Mack and his crew determined the Yankee's speed.

  All this took four or five days to figure out-longer than the entire length of most trailings attempted so far against the noisy Soviet Hotel, Echo, and November subs, the HENs. But Mack wasn't going to break off. Instead, he was going to keep following, and he would figure out the mechanics as he went along. The process of trial and error spanned several watch stations, leaving it up to Mack and his engineer officer to teach each succeeding team what had been discovered over the past twelve hours.

  Mack was determined not to lose the Yankee again, especially when he realized that she was headed on a track toward the U.S. Atlantic coast. He again began to forgo sleep, although he slipped in 15-minute catnaps at the helm, a trick he picked up in college from an article in Reader's Digest.

  Days later, Lapon was still tracking the Yankee. Mack began to map out the Yankee's operating area, one of the most crucial pieces of intelligence he could carry home. The Soviets had settled into a holding pattern that covered about 200,000 square miles. They moved back and forth, staying between 1,500 and 2,000 miles off the United States.

  Up until now, the Navy had been convinced that the Soviet Union would send its Yankees as close as 700 miles from U.S. shores. But Mack's discovery would help Naval Intelligence determine that the Yankee's new SS-N-6 missiles actually had a range of 1,200-1,300 miles.

  If Lapon had not followed the Yankee this far, it would have been difficult for the United States to keep track of the new Soviet nuclear threat, even though the Yankee plowed through what appeared to be a well-defined box. The United States would have been searching 800 miles too close to shore.

  Now Mack mapped the Yankee's exact course. Choosing one area, she meandered at about 6 knots before racing to another area at 12-16 knots. Then she slowed again. Every 90 minutes, almost to the second, the Yankee changed course. Sometimes by 60 degrees, sometimes by far more.

  A few times a day the Yankee went to communications depth, presumably to receive radio messages, and every night, at the stroke of midnight, she rose to periscope depth to ventilate. Between ten and sixteen times a day she turned completely around to clear her baffles, listening to see whether anyone was following. Each time the Yankee turned, Lapon turned with her, trying to stay behind, just off to one side, shielded in the backwash of the Yankee's own noise. (U.S. submariners also clear their baffles regularly when they are out on operations, only never according to schedule. The delicate question of timing those maneuvers was left to a pair of dice kept in the Lapon's control room for just that purpose.)

  Once a day the Yankee kicked out with a wild, high-speed move that Lapon's crew called the "Yankee doodle" because it resembled the twisted designs on someone's desktop notepad. The Yankee would curl about, usually in a figure eight or some version of that, ending up facing 180 degrees from where she had started. Shifting to port, she would then make a 180-degree turn, then a second 180-degree turn, then a 90-degree turn, then a 270-degree turn, and end with two more 90-degree turns.

  The first set of turns seemed designed to catch an intruder following close in, and the second set to catch another submarine following from farther away. All this was usually done at high speed, sometimes twice, back to back. The entire process took about an hour.

  Had the Yankee's sonar been any better, the maneuver might have been effective. But the Soviets seemed to have made one key miscalculation. Lapon could hear the turns and get out of the way long before the Soviets could hear Lapon. In fact, Lapon sonar techs realized that their sonar seemed to have more than twice the range of Soviet sonar. In good conditions, Lapon could spot a surface ship from 20,000 yards away. But the Yankee would pass within 1.0,000 yards of the same ship before showing any reaction.

  As Lapon's trail fell into a routine, Mack was finally able to give up his standing catnaps. He actually went to his stateroom to lie down and sleep, though never longer than 90 minutes. He never missed a course change or a Yankee doodle. It was during one of his naps, however, that Mack made the biggest mistake of the mission, perhaps the biggest mistake of his career. The mess cook awakened Mack on the advice of a junior officer who decided Mack would rather give up sleep than his nightly order of blueberry muffins. Startled, Mack let out a roar, the cook went running and the muffins and coffee went flying. In that one moment, Mack had destroyed possibly the best perk ever offered a submarine captain: his beloved fresh blueberry muffins, split and drenched with butter. Nobody would again dare delivery, not then, not as the third week of the trail gave way to a fourth, and then an unheard-of fifth week.

  By that time, Lapon's three rotating officers of the deck realized they had each fallen into sync with their Soviet counterparts. Indeed, each American could identify his Soviet "partner" by slight stylistic differences in the Yankee doodles and other course changes. They named these Soviets-"Terrible Terence" and "Wild Willy" were the two most memorable-and they began to take bets on how well they could predict the Yankee's next move. Tindal won most often. The sonar crew also got into the act, interpreting the sounds they picked up from inside the Yankee. Sounds of drilling, pumps running, and other noise led to some crude jokes, mostly bathroom humor. A quick clank was automatically recorded as a toilet lid being slammed, and every time Lapon sonarmen heard the rushing of air over their headsets that could have been sanitary tanks being blown, they reported, quite formally, "Conn. Sonar. We just got shit on."

  Every man in the crew, down to the youngest seaman and the lowliest mess cook, was getting into the act. Mack let each of them take a turn at manually plotting the unfolding course. It was heady stuff for the young crewmen. Here they were on a trail longer than any other, trailing one of the most crucial pieces of hardware the Soviets had put to sea, and they were integrally involved in the process. The excitement was extending from sub to shore. Mack had gotten to know the Yankee captain's habits well enough to be able to predict when the Soviets would go deep, and he used those moments to bring Lapon to periscope depth and flash a quick message to the P-3 Orions that were flying high over the Yankee's patrol ar
ea.

  All continued to go well until one of the Orions almost ended the entire effort. The pilot must have come lower than he should have, because when the Yankee came to periscope depth, her crew spotted the plane and made an immediate dive. The Orion sped away. The men on Lapon listened to the entire drama, their sub undetected. They realized that, although the Orion had been spotted, the Soviets didn't seem to know that they were being trailed through water as well as air. That seemed true, in fact, until someone back in Washington made a big mistake.

  Rumors in the sub force say it was an admiral in naval aviation who leaked information to a newspaper that could threaten the mission. The leak didn't specify that Lapon was out following a Yankee, and it didn't even say that a Soviet ballistic missile submarine was, at that very moment, wandering 1,500 to 2,000 nautical miles off the United States. But on October 9, 1969, the New York Times ran a front-page story headlined "New Soviet Subs Noisier Than Expected."

  Whoever leaked the story was either unaware of Lapon's findings or distorted them, because what the Times reported was far more reassuring than the truth. As Mack had found out, the Yankees were by far the quietest subs the Soviets had put to sea-although U.S. subs were still quieter.

  Word of the story must have made it back to the Soviet Navy and to the Yankee's captain. Either that, or he had become suddenly psychic. Within hours of the story's publication, moments after the Yankee made its midnight trip to communications depth, she broke all of her patterns. In fact, she went wild. The Yankee made a sudden 180degree turn and came roaring back down her former path full-out at 20 knots, heading almost straight for Lapon. This did not at all resemble the calculated set of turns that made up the Yankee doodle. Nor did it have the calm routine of the Yankee's usual slow turns, those baffle-clearing maneuvers.

  This was a desperation ploy, an all-out search by the Soviets to see if they were being followed. This was the ultimate game of chicken. This was what the U.S. sub force called a "Crazy Ivan."

  The Yankee came flying through the water, her image filling the screens in Lapon's control room and the noise of her flight screaming through sonarmen's headsets. It sounded like a freight train running through a tunnel: "Kerchutka, Kerchutka, Kerchutka ... "

  "That bastard is coming down," someone in the control room blurted out. The men tensed, although they knew Lapon was still 300 feet below the Yankee as she blindly passed to starboard. Nobody missed the irony, that the Yankee, in her noisy high-speed flight, had missed her chance to detect Lapon. The Yankee continued to search, moving in circles for hours, but Mack countered with his own evasive maneuvers enacted by a crew who had been standing at battle stations throughout the drama. Mack refused to break off the chase. Instead, he waited for the Yankee to calm down. Then he continued the mission.

  On October 13, nearly a month after the trail began, Admiral Schade sent a top-secret message to the Lapon: "ADMIRAL MOORER STATES THAT SECDEF AND ALL IN WASHINGTON WATCHING OPERATION WITH SPECIAL INTEREST AND NOTES WITH GREAT PLEASURE AND PRIDE SUPERB PERFORMANCE OF ALL PARTICIPANTS. I SHARE HIS THOUGHTS."

  Lapon continued on, through the rest of the Yankee's patrol and then some as the Soviets took an almost straight track back home. There were no more Yankee doodles, no more Crazy Ivans. The Yankee beat a path to the GIUK gap, where Lapon left her on November 9.

  Lapon had followed the Yankee for an amazing forty-seven days.

  Tommy Cox again was moved to write, this time coming up with "The Ballad of Whitey Mack":

  Cox's lyrics were right on target. It really was Blind Man's Bluff, a game far more dangerous than mere hide-and-spy operations. Mack's success marked the beginning of a new mission for the submarine force. From here on out, the fleet would be focused on tailing Soviet ballistic missile submarines at sea. U.S. attack submarines were sud denly elevated to critical participants in the nation's strategic nuclear defense. And they would lead the greatest sea hunt in maritime history. For now, as he drove Lapon back to Norfolk, Mack was basking in the glory that was finally his. Messages of congratulations flooded the radio channels.

  Months later, Lapon would receive the highest award ever given to submarines, the Presidential Unit Citation. Whitey Mack would win a Distinguished Service Medal, the highest personal honor the Navy awarded its officers in peacetime.

  But it was one of the messages sent out when Lapon was still on her way home that pleased Mack more than any other accolade. It wasn't addressed to Mack or to his crew. Instead, this message was sent out to every other submarine out on operations in the Atlantic: "Get out of the way. Whitey's coming through." The order was clear. Everyone was to make way and give the Lapon a clear track home.

  When Mack heard that, he slapped his fist in his hand, shook his head and said: "Eat your heart out, suckers. Whitey's coming through."

  Seven - "Here She Comes..."

  Whitey Mack had set the new standard, one that other commanders were itching to match-indeed, itching to beat. Trailing Soviet missile subs was fast becoming the Navy's most critical mission, though not all of the men leading these dangerous hunts were as skilled as Mack, or as lucky.

  At least two subs put the United States on the verge of nuclear alert when they radioed that the Yankees they were following had opened their missile doors and seemed ready to launch. In both cases, the U.S. subs quickly radioed again to say that the Soviets were engaged in simple drills.

  Within months of Lapon's feat, there were also several collisions between American subs and Soviet subs, accidents that threatened U.S.-Soviet moves toward detente. When the USS Gato (SSN-615) slammed into an old Soviet Hotel-class missile sub in November 1969, Sergei Georgievich Gorshkov, the longtime commander in chief of the Soviet Navy, sent warships into the Barents in search of the intruder. He was hoping to find proof that Gato had been sunk. Gorshkov wasn't a bloodthirsty man, but the collision came just two days before arms control talks were scheduled to begin in Helsinki, Finland. It stunned him that President Richard Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, could proffer arms negotiations as though they were simple handshakes, while letting their submarines invade Soviet waters.

  Evidence of Gato's steel corpse would have given Gorshkov one knockout of a handshake to proffer back. But his forces never did find Gato, which had hightailed it out of there, weapons armed and ready. At the orders of the Atlantic Fleet commanders, Gato's captain prepared false mission reports showing that his boat had broken off her patrol two days before the accident.

  Close calls, especially those that stopped short of major incident, were almost always omitted when Navy intelligence officers went to brief Nixon and his aides. Thus, there was no pressure on the submarine force to curtail its brazen operations, even after two more minor collisions in 1970, one in the Barents and one in the Mediterranean.

  There was, however, a third accident that year, one that was so violent and so severe that the Navy had no choice but to immediately tell top Pentagon officials and Nixon.

  It happened in late June. The USS Tautog (SSN-639) was heading for waters filled with Soviet traffic outside of Petropavlovsk, the big missile sub base on the Kamchatka Peninsula in the northern Pacific. Little rattled Tautog's thirty-nine-year-old captain, Commander Buele G. Balderston, who had already overcome childhood rheumatic fever to grow to a 6'4" all-American in swimming and track. He had studied desert scorpions at the University of Nebraska and then enlisted in the Navy during the Korean War, where he was promptly assigned responsibility for the disposal of unexploded ordnance left over from World War II. Ultimately he switched to diesel submarines because he and his wife Irene both thought the job would be safer. He had later thought of giving up the filthy, cramped life of a diesel submariner to study medicine, but before he could apply to medical school, Rickover tapped him for the nuclear sub force. Balderston decided that maybe it was a sign, that maybe he was destined to remain on submarines. He believed that, even after all of his illusions of safety were shattered with Scorpion's l
oss. He had been the engineer officer during her construction, and after her disappearance, accident investigators trying to unravel the mystery frequently called him away from Tautog.

  On Tautog, Balderston was known as much for his idiosyncrasies as anything else. This man who could drink any of his crew under the table during port stops was also something of a health nut. He drank Sanka in lieu of the full-powered brew that kept most of the crew fueled, and he demanded that his sub be stocked with copious supplies of chopped walnuts-he ate them after every meal, save breakfast, because they were full of lecithin. He also had a peculiar dexterity: he could raise his large, gray, bushy eyebrows one at a time. Right or left, it didn't seem to matter, both could make the singular crawl up the side of his face. It was a talent he used for emphasis. When crew members scrambled answers during qualifying exams, an eyebrow would levitate. When a mistake was especially stupid, one of those great brows would leap. One young seaman was especially unnerved by the gesture and could never deliver a message to his commander without stuttering as soon as Balderston sent a brow on its ascent.

  For the crew, those brows were almost as memorable as the ingenuity Balderston displayed during their first mission together in the summer of 1969-a mission that earned their sub the nickname "The Terrible T."

  They were sent to monitor a test of a new Soviet cruise missile from start to finish. Unlike the Yankees' ballistic missiles, cruise missiles posed little threat to U.S. shores. But these smaller weapons could destroy a massive U.S. aircraft carrier from as far as 250 nautical miles away, and carriers were still one of the primary platforms being used for U.S. bombing missions over Vietnam. Indeed, Echo II submarines-each toting eight cruise missiles that could hold either nuclear or conventional warheads-had been spotted trailing U.S. aircraft carriers near Southeast Asia. If the Soviets got directly involved in the war there, Naval Intelligence would need to know as much as possible about the missiles and the subs that carried them. And it was Balderston's job to learn how many missiles the Soviets could fire in rapid succession, to capture electronic pulses that might indicate trajectories, and to grab communications that might help to assess weaknesses. He would also try to snap photographs of the launches so analysts back home could measure the flames as the missile shot skyward and maybe figure out what type of propellant the Soviets were using.