Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew

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

  The crew strung a makeshift antenna-little more than a wireacross the top of the submarine. Then they flashed the bad news: there had been a severe collision; a Soviet submarine was involved; and Tautog was ending her operations two months early.

  Commanders onshore flashed back: Tautog was to bypass all closer ports and return directly to Pearl Harbor. Later, the instructions would become more detailed. The submarine was to remain away from port until the dead of night. Then she was to creep in, all lights out.

  On the way back, Balderston ordered the crew to gather, in shifts, on the mess deck. As if anyone really needed to be reminded, he told them that any discussion of the collision outside of an official inquiry was definitely out.

  Tautog's arrival at Pearl Harbor was logged late on July 1. She was maneuvered into a shipyard dry dock where a huge shroud was draped over her sail. No one without authorization would be able to see the damage, not even her crew. The men were to be kept aboard for another twenty-four hours, until the damage was well hidden and they had signed formal secrecy oaths. One man tried to hold on to a piece of the Echo's hull as a souvenir, stashing it in a locker on board behind some cleaning fluids and alcohol. Some months later, he was discovered, and security officials insisted that he turn the piece over.

  Rear Admiral Walter Small, commander of submarines in the Pacific, met Tautog at the pier and was among the first to learn the details. Also briefed was Admiral Moorer, who was just being promoted from CNO to chairman of the joint Chiefs of Staff. It was either Moorer or a top Pentagon intelligence official who carried the bad news to Melvin Laird, Nixon's secretary of Defense. These reports were made verbally. No one wanted to leave a paper trail.

  Laird briefed Nixon himself, telling the president that there had been a collision and it looked like the Soviet sub had sunk. Nixon's reaction, Laird recalls, was inscrutable.

  It was clear that the United States would not tell the Soviet Union about the unmarked, underwater grave officials believed existed perhaps only 50 miles off the coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula. Given the secrecy that surrounded all submarine operations, it went without saying that the White House was not going to announce that two nuclear-powered submarines, both carrying nuclear weapons, had met in one violent, possibly fatal, moment. Besides, the Soviets were suffering so many at-sea accidents at the time, Nixon and his advisers decided the Soviets would likely blame another lost submarine on their own jinxed technology.

  A court of inquiry was convened, although just about everyone involved was already certain that the Soviet boat was lost. Indeed, Small, Moorer, and Laird all say they remember specifically being told that the Echo had sunk. Other former senior Navy officers, including one who heard the sonar tapes, say that conclusion was based largely on the terrifying sounds captured on the recordings. But officials say that, without more definitive evidence, a formal declaration that a Soviet sub had sunk would not have been made part of the Navy's official records.

  Shortly after the accident, James Bradley rushed out to Pearl Harbor to try to determine a cause. As best as anyone could guess, the Echo's captain had just made an unlucky and sudden maneuver. That in itself raised another issue. Bradley realized that U.S. captains were going to have to alter their techniques. As things stood now, the danger was too great that two subs would meet head-on at flank speed. If that happened, both subs would be lost.

  So Bradley wrote some new rules for trailing, one institutionalizing a favorite Whitey Mack technique: subs would now trail slightly to port or starboard of the enemy. That would leave the Americans more maneuvering room, while still allowing them to hide in the wash of noise coming from the hunted sub. There was another rule, however, that ran directly counter to Mack's style: subs would now try to trail from safer distances.

  Bradley didn't blame Balderston for the incident, and Balderston, who had already been scheduled to leave Tautog, became commander of a division of four submarines that included her. Still, he had been right about making admiral. It would never happen. He retired seven years later and became a Baptist minister. His heart weakened by his childhood rheumatic fever, he died in 1984. He never told his wife or children about the collision.

  Balderston's silence was typical. Bound to secrecy, submariners could not seek the kind of emotional solace that most men get from their wives and children when something goes wrong on the job. "It was not for him to tell," Irene L. Balderston says. "And I would never have dreamed of questioning him or of prying anything out of him."

  Just about the only ongoing discourse about the incident took place among members of Tautog's crew, who passed the story on to new members as they joined the boat. They whispered to one another about what had bent their crooked sail, and crew after crew of sonarmen passed along a hidden bootleg recording-the sonar tapes made during the collision. Off the boat, the tapes were played in sonar school as an anonymous example of a Soviet sub sinking. Then two decades later the fate of the Echo 11 came surprisingly into question.

  After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Boris Bagdasaryan, a former Soviet submarine commander, stepped forward to say that he was the captain of the Echo II that collided with Tautog and that he was very much alive. With so few people in either the Soviet Union or the United States aware that their governments had long hidden a terrible accident, his account got little attention. But Bagdasaryan tells a story that has been supported by high officials of the Russian Navy, and his tale meshes with many of the details provided by Tautog crew members, although there are a few small discrepancies.

  Sitting in his Moscow apartment, cigarette in hand, Bagdasaryan's slight build and graying hair make him look more like an aging professor than a Soviet sea captain. But he had been a commander for more than a decade before he took the Echo II submarine the Soviets called the Black Lila out on a three-day training run in June 1970.

  Bagdasaryan had survived early experiments on Soviet diesel subs, staying underwater on one of the boats the Americans called "Whiskey" for thirty days despite a design flaw that allowed exhaust gas to be sucked back into the sub through its snorkel. By the end of the month, the crew was so poisoned that their legs and hands were swollen to nearly twice their normal size. The Soviet Union chalked up the voyage as proof of the superiority of Soviet manhood.

  No wonder Bagdasaryan had such a well-developed sense of political cynicism and was so willing to speak out. He especially despised the zampolits, the Kremlin's political officers who were assigned to every submarine. Ostensibly, they were there to ensure that crews remained Communistically correct, but Bagdasaryan thought them drunks, pests, and inept nags and let them know it. He roared at one, "You have been as useful as a suitcase on my submarine for two months," after the man accused Bagdasaryan of playing "outlaw's music" when he put on a tape of a new popular singer to inspire his men.

  Nor was Bagdasaryan afraid of the Americans. As he put it, he had once "attacked" the American battleship USS New Jersey, stalking her as she headed full speed for Vietnam's Gulf of Tonkin. Had he been given the order, he could have sunk her. He also had gone inside U.S. waters to try to trail an American ballistic missile submarine as it left Guam, later falsifying his patrol reports, as some U.S. commanders did. He never did manage to keep tail on a U.S. sub longer than eighteen hours-a mere wink in comparison to the feats of Whitey Mack-but that was long enough to win him a reputation as one of the most daring commanders in the Soviet fleet.

  Yet through all this, he always remained superstitious and fearful of disaster. He once delayed deployment rather than leave without his crew's lucky mascot, Mashka the rat. To buy time, he told an admiral that much of the meat in the ship's refrigerator was dated 1939. "Rat flight is a well-known sign," Bagdasaryan says. "It was necessary to delay our departure." Black Lila, however, had no such good-luck charm on that fateful day in 1970. Perhaps she should have.

  Bagdasaryan says that he was moving Black Lila, formally identified as K-108, through a series of exercises, a set of planned revolut
ions through the water similar to angles and dangles, much as Tautog's crew had guessed. By early in the morning of June 24, his submarine was running circles at a depth of 40 meters and a constant speed of 5 knots.

  She came to periscope depth to scan for messages from shore. Then she went back to 40 meters and began to turn 90 degrees to her right. The idea was to practice checking for sounds in the area that had been shielded by the din of Black Lila's own propellers-just as the Americans had thought.

  As Bagdasaryan tells it, his sonar men soon heard sounds that they identified, not as an American submarine, but as a "submarine imitator," an exercise device that looks like a torpedo and creates the same kinds of noises as a trailing submarine. Four minutes later, they lost the contact. Two minutes later, there was a crash.

  What happened next inside Black Lila was very much like what Tautog sailors say they heard, and very much like what they say they imagined.

  Black Lila's deck began to slant forward. First by 20 degrees, then by 30 degrees. The submarine was starting to slide out of control.

  "We had 2,500 meters below us," Bagdasaryan says. "I announced the emergency alarm. Ordered to blow the main ballast bow part. No change. We started to blow the entire ballast. Useless again. The sub kept sinking. Gave an order, `Lock in compartments!"' Silence in response. His crew was apparently in shock.

  "Truth to tell, I began to doubt at that moment a possibility of successful surfacing," Bagdasaryan says.

  He shouted at his stunned men. Finally they began to report in. "I hear air being slackened," sonar said.

  By then, the commander realized that they had collided with another submarine. The noise of slackened air could have meant that the other sub was sinking along with the Soviets, or it might have been surfacing.

  Bagdasaryan's chief engineer, Volodya Dybsky, crawled into the control room, literally pulling himself by his arms. His legs were paralyzed with fear and shock. The engineer continued to give orders, lying down.

  Meanwhile, Black Lila continued to fall, for what seemed like several minutes. Bagdasaryan shouted what he thought would be his last order ever: "Reverse!"

  It was a desperation move. If his crew could reverse the engines, their sub just might drive herself to the surface. But descending this steeply, Bagdasaryan knew the reverse clutch was likely to fail.

  Black Lila began to vibrate. Inside the sub, "the depthometer's hand shook, then stopped, near 70 meters, then it moved back to 50 meters, to 25 meters. From the depth of about 25 meters, we went like a shot from the gun to the surface," he said. "Suddenly we appeared on the surface, like a cork from the champagne bottle." After that dive, he added, referring to his men, "they have a toast to the engines."

  As soon as Black Lila hit the surface, her men opened a hatch. The sun was shining. They could see no other boat for miles around, and they feared the worst for the American sub. "I thought for a second, `I have sunk a brother submariner,"' Bagdasaryan says. "It was hard to have realized it."

  The Soviets were reporting the incident to their shore commanders when they caught the sound of what Bagdasaryan now believes was Tautog, moving away from the scene of the accident at 15 knots.

  Bagdasaryan says his submarine limped back to port with only one propeller still working. Her right propeller shaft was hopelessly bent, and there was a large hole in her outer hull. The sounds of that outer hull cracking up could have created the popcorn effect recorded in Tautog's sonar room.

  But the Echo had a second reinforced inner hull. American submariners used to joke that the Soviets used a two-hull design because their metallurgy was, well, Soviet metallurgy. But it was very likely that the second layer of steel held back the crushing ocean and kept Black Lila's men alive.

  The hole in the outer hull "was so big that a trolley bus with antennas up could drive into it," Bagdasaryan recalls. "Truth to tell, if the Tautog had run into our sub a few meters closer to the center, we would have been very unlucky. The American submarine's speed was fairly high. And she would undoubtedly thrash both the light hull and the pressure hull of our sub."

  Crammed into the hole between the inner and outer hulls, Bagdasaryan believes, were pieces of Tautog. He says he was certain that the crash had completely sheared off Tautog's conning tower. Like the men on Tautog, who had tried to hold onto pieces of the Echo, Black Lila crew members tried to keep pieces of the American sub for themselves, but the chunks of HY-80 were confiscated by the KGB. Only Bagdasaryan, who refused to give his up, still has a souvenir.

  After that, Bagdasaryan's story departs from the tale told by Tautog's crew. He insists that it was Tautog that rammed Black Lila, not the other way around. And he says that the Soviets tracked Tautog heading back to Japan. He also says Soviet intelligence sources reported that once there, Tautog remained to undergo a long overhaul. But Tautog never went to Japan-she returned directly to Pearl Harbor.

  When Bagdasaryan returned to the Soviet Union, he faced a torturous hearing before a Communist Party commission. He says his squadron commander gave him advice: "Don't fly into a rage. Drop some tears on dusty boots."

  A severe reprimand was registered on his service card. The transgression meant that he would no longer be allowed to teach at the naval academy. Instead, his boat was overhauled, then sent to spend two and a half months hiding outside of San Francisco. This "combat service," Bagdasaryan says, was meant to make amends for his failure, to "wash out the fault with blood."

  After the crash, a new joke began to make the rounds among Soviet submariners, although the facts it was based on were altered somewhat, as no one wanted to be caught referring directly to a classified incident. With such constraints, it's little wonder that the humor is somewhat strained.

  The joke went like this: "An American nuclear sub collided with an iceberg in the ocean. The iceberg's crew had no casualties."

  After about six months, Bagdasaryan's superiors decided to rescind the reprimand. Somehow, it wasn't erased from party documents until many years later, and by then, Bagdasaryan wanted to hold onto his unique blemish.

  His reason: "It would be hard to find a Communist whose service card would say `Severely reprimanded by the party for the collision with an American nuclear-powered submarine in underwater position.",

  As Bagdasaryan spoke, he paused and wondered aloud whether he might meet Commander Balderston, perhaps to "have a drink and think together how to avoid similar collisions in the future." Told that Balderston had died, the former Soviet commander seemed crestfallen.

  "It's too bad about the commander," he said. "I guess this incident did not pass easily for him."

  Eight - "Oshkosh B'Gosh"

  It was after 3:00 .A.M., and even the Pentagon seemed almost still. Official Washington wouldn't start to churn for hours, not until the sun began baking the asphalt-and-concrete moat that surrounded the 34 acres taken up by the building.

  James Bradley sat beyond that moat, deep within the long creamcolored corridors, still on the fifth floor of the Pentagon's E Ring behind three sets of locked doors, his suite of offices empty but for him. It was late 1970, Bradley's fourth year as the director of undersea warfare at the Office of Naval Intelligence, and it was in these early morning hours that he could dream best, immersed in the quiet of his office and in the deep oceans beyond.

  He was preoccupied with notions bordering on the fantastic, plans for a new mission for Halibut, one that would shake the intelligence community even more than the photographs of the Soviet Golf submarine that had so caught the imagination of President Nixon and, unfortunately for the Navy, the CIA.

  Bradley wanted to send Halibut into the heart of a Soviet-claimed sea after a quarry that was living-practically breathing-and beyond almost anything U.S. intelligence had attempted to grab before. Closing his eyes for a moment, he could almost see his target. It was a telephone cable, a bundle of wires no wider than five inches.

  But what a bundle of wires. Bradley imagined the cable as it ran from the Soviet Union's
missile submarine base at Petropavlovsk, under the Sea of Okhotsk, and then on to join land cables going to Pacific Fleet headquarters near Vladivostok and then to Moscow. If Halibut's camera-toting fish could find that cable, if her crew could tap it, then the United States would violate the very soul of Soviet secrecy. Here could he an open ear to the plans and frustrations of Soviet leaders, intelligence unmatched by any human spy or even the newest surveillance satellites floating high over the Kremlin.

  Bradley could almost hear the words flowing through the line, technical analysis clear of propaganda, measures of the abilities and problems of Soviet submarines, information that might make them easier to trail, tactical plans for patrols that would take those submarines and their missiles near U.S. shores. If he was right, maybe the Americans could even grab the Soviets' own assessments of the test flights of ICBMs and sea-based missiles that smacked down on the Kamchatka Peninsula and in the northern Pacific. That cable might provide entry inside the minds of Soviet commanders themselves.

  Of course, the Soviets would probably see Halibut's intrusion into Okhotsk as an act of piracy. If she were detected, they might try to board or destroy her, forcing an international incident that might end the delicate dance toward detente.

  And there was another hitch, a big one. Bradley had no proof that this cable existed at all. Even if it did, there was no way to tell where it lay beneath the 611,000-square-mile expanse of Okhotsk. Even Bradley could see the humor in his predicament. How could he present this idea to the cadre of White House, military, intelligence, and State Department officials who were supposed to have final say over an operation as dangerous as this one? How could he say that he wanted to send Halibut out on a hunch in search of an ethereal strand?