by Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story Of American Submarine Espionage
Still, as far as Bradley was concerned, it was a pretty good hunch. After all these years of watching the Soviets, American intelligence knew that Soviet defense officials insisted on constant reports from the men in the field and that the Soviets painstakingly coded most communications sent through the air to thwart interception. If Bradley's intuition was right, Soviet admirals and generals would be far too imperious and impatient to suffer an ocean of cryptographers already overwhelmed by the sheer bulk of their work. Top Soviet officers would want, would insist upon, an immediate and simple communications method, and the only simple and secure way to talk was through a hardwired telephone system.
Any telephone line the Soviets set up between the mainland and the submarine base at Petropavlovsk would have to run beneath the Sea of Okhotsk. Petropavlovsk was, after all, a tiny, desolate port across that sea, isolated on the Kamchatka Peninsula and nearly hidden among ancient volcanoes and primeval birch forests. Okhotsk itself was almost empty, save for a few fishing trawlers and occasional submarines engaged in missile tests.
The Soviets had to consider the sea secure, given that it was nestled into the crook of Kamchatka and the east coast of the Soviet Union as neatly as the Chesapeake Bay fits into the U.S. eastern seaboard. The way in for an enemy submarine or ship was through narrow, shallow channels that sliced through the Soviet-controlled Kuril Islands. Those channels could be easily blocked in an alert.
But even if the cable was out there, where was it? Where in all those miles and miles of water lay a strand that couldn't be more than five inches wide?
Bradley cleared his mind of charts and maps, freed himself from official assessments, from the meetings, memos, and briefings that swamped the business of intelligence in Washington. He let his eyes close and his thoughts wandered to simpler journeys taken in simpler times, before the cold war, before World War II, back to the waters of his childhood.
There he found an answer that was beguilingly simple and just strange enough to be true. It was buried in his memories of St. Louis in the 1930s when he was a boy and his mother packed him up to escape the summer's heat on riverboat rides along the Mississippi River. From the point where the Mississippi meets the Missouri River through Alton, Illinois, the boats steamed through water dyed with brown silt and banked by miles of flood plains painted with wild upward strokes of grasses until the green gave itself up abruptly to towering gray harrier bluffs. Eagles traced circles above, while sand cranes left leggy tracks along the shore. It was this scenery that captured most people riding the river-that and the riverboat orchestra and social scene on board.
But for a boy, there were other sights that marked the trip. The young Bradley had taken to passing time with the steamer captains in the pilothouse, and from there he could see a series of black-and-white signs placed discreetly along the shore. Most of the signs marked mileage and location. But there were a few, he remembered now, that declared: "Cable Crossing. Do Not Anchor." These signs were there to keep some idiot in a boat from snaring and snapping a phone or utility cable in the shallows.
Bradley's eyes snapped open as he realized that what was true of the Mississippi just might be true of Okhotsk. That's how they would find the cable, he thought. That's how they would engineer one of the most daring acts of tele-piracy of the cold war. Halibut would be led directly to her quarry by signs placed somewhere on a lonesome beach in the Soviet Union, declaring: "Watch Out! Cable Here."
This wasn't the way intelligence operations were normally crafted in Washington, but Bradley's imagination had always been vast, sometimes too vast for the rigidity that often ruled much of the military crowd. He had been dreaming about a possible cable tap almost from the moment he had gotten the job and control of Halibut. He and his staff had spent hours talking about the possibilities for Halibut and that mythical communications cable. They scanned maps and pored over charts of Soviet seas and bases, and they soon came to realize that there were three spots that held special promise, three places on the maps where Soviet naval bases were separated from Moscow by miles of water: the Baltic Sea, the Barents Sea, and the Sea of Okhotsk.
Of these, only Okhotsk was truly desolate. Covered with a layer of ice nine months of the year, the sea was as dreary and cold as Petropavlovsk, where nuclear submarines and missile arsenals were secreted among buildings that had been decaying for a century or more. Soviet naval officers made dingy homes in these cheap squares of concrete built among civil defense shelters and radar receivers.
The more Bradley thought about Okhotsk and the sub base on Kamchatka, the more he knew that Halibut was destined to go there. But throughout his first three, even four years directing her missions, there had been no safe way to allow men to leave a submarine, walk the sand 300 to 400 feet under the sea, and reach out and tap a cable. Bradley had to wait for the technology to catch up with his vision. And that had finally happened.
The same post-Thresher panic that had prompted the Navy to put money into underwater research, the same push that had given birth to a redesigned Halibut, had also paid for a program to create new ways for divers to survive in the deep. Bradley's old friend John Craven had overseen much of this work until he retired from the Navy. Under Craven's direction, the ability of divers to work in the depths had progressed at an incredible pace.
The problem had been daunting. What is life-giving air on the surface can kill divers down deep. By 300 feet down, air compresses so much that a single lungful contains about ten times the surface amounts of oxygen and nitrogen. At these concentrations, oxygen becomes poisonous and nitrogen has a druglike effect-nitrogen narcosis-that makes divers go squirrelly.
Specially trained Navy divers and scientists had been experimenting with recipes for a new underwater atmosphere that replaced much of the oxygen and all of the nitrogen with helium, which is nontoxic. On ascent, those gases could he remixed to fulfill the divers' increasing need for oxygen in shallower waters. Animal experiments had given way to human underwater habitats called SeaLabs. Placed 200 feet down off La Jolla, California, the living was dangerous and uncomfortable. At one point, the plumbing failed on one and the habitat tilted, but four divers inside survived on the new gas mixtures.
Everything was progressing well until one of the Sea Labs developed leaks in 1969. A diver was killed while trying to make repairs-not at all the kind of publicity the Navy was looking for just a year after Scorpion had been lost. The SeaLab program was unceremoniously canceled, and to outsiders, it seemed as though the Navy had abandoned the effort altogether. But development quietly continued, and Bradley and Craven prepared to put the new gas mixture and the new "saturation diving" techniques to use for divers on Halibut.
The sub was now at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard outside San Francisco being fitted with a portable version of SeaLah, a pressurized chamber to support the divers as they acclimated to the water pressures they would find if they walked the seafloor to tap the Soviet cable. But before Halibut could navigate the bottom of Okhotsk, Bradley had to win the funding and political support that the mission would require.
Bradley's office was still the clearinghouse for all submarine spy missions. He and his staff collected wish lists from top policy-makers within the National Security Agency, the Pentagon, and the White House. It was up to Bradley to come up with the operations that could fulfill those requests-the submarine trailings, the observations of missile tests, the gathering of electronic signals. * After that, Bradley had to sell those missions to the fleet commanders, who still had the final word on whether any of their submarines went out and where. Bradley had already made dozens of trips to Pearl Harbor, Norfolk, and Yokosuka, 'Japan, to brief and debrief submarine captains, and he had earned their respect and trust. Besides, the daring of the cable-tap mission would make it an easy sell to these men.
Navigating through Washington required more finesse. Still, Bradley knew how to court the crowd in this town where information was currency and was jealously distributed under the amorphous gu
ideline of "need to know." This was a place where power was measured by access, and Bradley traded access for approvals, packaging facts within a romantic haze of deep-ocean wonders. His briefings drew on the storyteller's art that he had picked up decades earlier listening to his father weave wondrous yarns of wine, women, and sea.
In fact, Bradley's idea to search for a Soviet cable was inspired almost as much by its dramatic impact as it was by its potential intelligence value. If that cable did exist, finding it and tapping it would do more to bring his office high-level exposure and funding than just about any mission he could think of. Bradley was already counting his successes in dollars and in enemies. His bounty usually came straight from the zipped pockets of other Navy departments. After he nearly decimated one project headed by a naval aviator, the man was ready to punch Bradley in the nose right there in the Pentagon. "You sonof-a-bitch," swore the burly aviator, pouncing on the captain in the corridor. Bradley didn't blame him, didn't blame him a bit. But Bradley also was unapologetic. He felt completely sincere in believing that his group was doing better work than anyone else.
As long as his program had money, Bradley had power, and more of it than any four-stripe Navy captain had a right to expect. He still reported to Rear Admiral Fritz Harlfinger, the director of Naval Intelligence, and through him to Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr., who was now the chief of Naval Operations. But power or not, Bradley was still a captain in a town full of admirals, and a mere Naval Intelligence officer in a town where the top spooks reported to the president. There also were more than a few admirals who resented his refusal to take them into his confidence. One man, especially powerful within the Pentagon, insisted that he had to approve every operation before Bradley could send a spy submarine out. It was a directive Bradley found impossible to comply with. "You gave me an order that was not legal," Bradley answered when the irate admiral confronted him. Then he added, "By the way, I don't work for you."
The admiral stared Bradley down for what seemed like a long time. Finally he intoned, "All right. You can get away with this, this time. But I'll tell you one thing, Bradley. You're never going to make admiral."
"So be it," Bradley stood his ground. "So he it." Then with a soldier's flourish, he did an about-face and walked away, the drama of his departure filling him with satisfaction. There would be time enough later to realize that the admiral might just make good on his threat.
At the moment, Bradley was more concerned with his battle with the CIA over control of Halibut. The agency had already snatched command of all salvage operations surrounding the sunken Golf and was still waiting for Howard Hughes to finish building the monolithic salvage craft that would attempt to tear the entire sub from its ocean grave. Most of that was being engineered through the National Underwater Reconnaissance Office, the top-secret Navy-CIA office that was still being run mainly by the CIA. Worse, the CIA seemed hell-bent on broadcasting news of all of the Navy's best submarine missions and taking credit for them.
When those missions were still entirely under Bradley's watch, fewer than a dozen top officials in Washington knew of the Soviets' lost submarine and Halibut's find. Now Bradley saw CIA officers assigned to NURO handing out clearances like candy corn on Halloween. The Velvet Fist photographs, Halibut's abilities, and even other submarine spying missions were fast becoming the main attraction in a circus where having a ticket to the show was more important than the performance, where the labels "top-secret" and "need to know" made the spectacle irresistible.
Bradley saw every briefing as a potential leak. He wanted to be the one to go to Kissinger or his top deputy, General Alexander Haig (Kissinger's chief liaison to the military), and then only when the time was right. Bradley had worked hard to earn his access to the two powerful men. The captain played on his realization that Kissinger was the ultimate bureaucratic infighter, someone who wanted to control everything about foreign policy and covert actions affecting foreign policy. Bradley knew that, more than anything else, Kissinger wanted to choose what would be presented to Nixon and wanted to make those presentations personally. As long as Bradley's missions reaped key intelligence, he knew the door would be open to Kissinger and to Haig. That had been clear the last time Bradley went to see Kissinger about Halibut's exploits.
In 1900, the Navy purchased its first submarine, the USS Holland. She could carry six men.
Almost one hundred years later, the Navy floated a monolith, the USS Seawolf (SSN-21), the largest attack sub ever built.
The last picture of Cochino was taken as she was leaving England in 1949 for the first U.S. submarine spy mission in the Barents Sea. Cochino's commander Rafael Benitez had to speak the worst words any captain could utter: "Abandoning ship."
Tusk traveled with Cochino and saved most of her men. Seven men were washed off Tusk and were lost during the rescue operation.
Cochino's men survived explosions, poisonous gas and stormy seas. Refugees from submariners' hell, they gathered in Norway before leaving for home on board Tusk.
Red Austin may have avoided the group photo, but he penned Cochino's epitaph on the back. He joined the Navy at nineteen looking for action and became a spy on Cochino because he had to have something "spooky" to do.
Gudgeon and diesel boats like her drove the spy program until the Soviets proved beyond any doubt that diesel boats could be too vulnerable.
With the undying belief that nuclear power should and could move submarines, Admiral Hyman Rickover changed the sub force, the Navy, and the course of the cold war.
Nautilus was the first U.S. nuclear powered submarine and the first sub ever to travel submerged to the North Pole.
If the president could have Air Force One, then Rickover would have NR-11, the only mini-submarine powered by a nuclear reactor.
John Craven dreamed fantastic dreams of deep ocean exploration and a new kind of warfare. Here he stands with his wife, Dorothy, his son David, and Secretary of the Navy John H. Chafee (far right).
Even before the Navy sent a submersible to photograph the undersea wreckage of Thresher, her loss inspired the Navy to declare a new era of sub safe programs. What emerged, however, was modeled more after James Bond than Jacques Cousteau.
Halibut had a mammoth shark's mouth hatch that screamed flood to most submariners. It screamed potential to Craven.
As he pushed Westinghouse engineers to build camera-toting "fish" that could withstand punishing ocean pressures and find sunken Soviet hardware, Craven loved to announce a daily wire-brushing. One day the engineers answered in kind.
Commander C. Edward Moore brought Halibut out to sea, found a Soviet submarine buried in the deep, and returned to stand before Admiral John Hyland (left) to receive the highest award possible for any sub: the Presidential Unit Citation.
Scorpion was outside of Naples when a photographer shot what might be the last picture ever taken of her. She was lost only a few weeks later.
Craven (left), Harry Jackson and project coordinator Robert H. Gautier stood on a floating drydock, while deep below, three men on the Trieste II examined and photographed Scorpion's wreckage.
Scorpion's shattered hull offered no conclusive answers-only a lingering mystery. Now, evidence has emerged that Scorpion may have been primed for disaster before she ever left port.
Commander Whitey Mack was just arrogant enough to believe that he could drive Lapon on a mission unmatched by any other sub. He believed he could trail a Soviet Yankee missile boat throughout a patrol.
When Lapon rode home after her feat, her men pulled down their standard and rose their own flag: Snoopy had given his doghouse up for a submarine and had beaten a new red baron.
Lapon and Mack were immortalized by Tommy Cox, the spook who really wanted to be a country and western star, in his album of submarine greatest hits.
After Tautog crashed with a Soviet Echo II sub, Tautog fled from the scene, leaving her men and the U.S. government convinced that as many as ninety Soviet submariners were dead.
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p; Commander Buele Balderston had been a rising star, but he knew the underwater crash would also crash his career.
Boris Bagdasaryan was commander of the Echo II that met Tautog. He called his sub the Black Lila.
Captain James Bradley reached back to boyhood trips down the Mississippi to find a telephone cable deep beneath the Soviet Sea of Okhotsk. He is congratulated by Secretary of the Navy John Warner (right).
The Navy announced that Halibut was carrying the first deep submergence rescue vehicle. But that DSRV was a welded-down fake, a disguised decompression chamber for deep sea divers who would tap Bradley's cable.
Fritz Harlfinger, director of Naval Intelligence, knew if Bradley could convince Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig to okay Halibut's search for the cable, no other approvals would be necessary.
Crammed full of stolen sub banners and parts-enough contraband to drive naval investigators mad-the Horse and Cow was where men readied to launch some of the most daring operations of the cold war.
The CIA commissioned the mammoth Glomar Explorer to do what key Navy officials believed too difficult and absolutely unnecessary: to reach down and steal an entire Soviet submarine off the ocean floor.
One of the oldest and most broken subs in the fleet, Seawolf took over cable tapping operations in Okhotsk. She was nearly moored there forever.