Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew

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

  So Seawolf's crew watched with envy in 1979 as Parche prepared to shove off a second time toward a mission shrouded in mystery, the mission that had so fascinated President Carter. This time she was headed for the Barents.

  She'd travel a route that had probably never been taken before, the one path that would bypass all of the Soviet choke points, just about the most difficult and dangerous way possible. Parche was going to travel north, due north from San Francisco, past Alaska, and through the narrow and shallow Bering Strait, where the U.S. and Soviet borders almost touch and where the ice could sink a sub faster than an enemy. From there, she would travel past the North Pole and back south into the Barents Sea. All told, Parche would have to transit farther than 5,500 nautical miles, much of it treacherous. There was good reason the Soviets would never expect Parche to slip into the Barents from this route.

  There was one more precaution. Parche would not leave for the Barents until late summer, well after Carter's summit with Brezhnev. The two leaders met on June 18 and signed the SALT II Treaty, in which both sides agreed to limit the number of their nuclear-missile launchers.

  Two weeks after the superpower summit, Parche's CO, John H. Maurer Jr., held a summit of his own-with the wives of his crew. The captain provided baby-sitters, light refreshments, and a description of the men's "extended deployment" that pretty much began and ended with dates of departure and return. He gave the women "FamilyGram" forms, so that they could wire quick messages to their hushands a few times over the three months Parche would be gone, and a two-page list of emergency numbers, starting with that of his wife Carol and going down through a litany of Mare Island doctors, dentists, firemen, and police. He also gave the women a checklist of all the tasks the Navy imagined would fall to them. Know when to tune up the car. Find the telephone numbers of the plumber and the electrician. Make sure your husband leaves a will. In return, the women were asked to give up their husbands for the duration.

  There were the usual tears dockside as Parche shoved off that August. The magnetic white hull numbers denoting her as submarine number 683 had been taken down, leaving her anonymous as she passed beneath the Golden Gate Bridge and dove.

  The crew was now in the hands of the man they called "Captain Jack." He was built thick and strong, and his crew thought him a bulldog, at once determined and playful. There was something about this captain who could walk into the torpedo room and wrestle with his men. There were some, among the torpedo crew especially, who were just crazy enough to beat the captain regularly. The wrestling matches fast became ritual-"the Tag Team Follies."

  Maurer was to the Navy horn, his father an admiral. In fact, John H. Maurer Sr. had been commander of submarines in the Pacific in the late 1960s when Halibut was sent looking for missile pieces and before she set out after fantasy cables. Now his son was leading a crew top-heavy with senior chiefs, senior enlisted, and spooks on the most dangerous special projects mission yet.

  Secrecy had been tight on Seawolf, far tighter than it had ever been on Halibut. But on Parche, the secrecy was nearly paranoiac. The crew itself had little idea of where they were going. The men were told only that they were being sent to see whether Parche could find her way beneath the frozen expanse and back, perhaps detecting a few Soviet subs along the way.

  As Parche neared Alaska, Maurer began preparing to move through the narrow Bering Strait submerged. Here, the waters were only 150 feet deep and the going was hazardous. Indeed, in a few months the passage would be impossible without the help of an icebreaker. Navigators and the captain were shrouded by curtains as they tensely plotted Parche's 2-3-knot crawl.

  Once through the strait, Parche had to navigate farther north through the Chukchi Sea. Here the water was just as shallow, and the ice didn't melt even in summer. From outer space, this and other seas surrounding the pole look like a kaleidoscope as temperature and salinity patterns alter the very color of the water mile by mile. Parche's sonar bounced off the layers much as it bounced off solid objects, leaving Maurer and his crew nearly blind, much like a plane flying through thick cloud cover.

  The crew maneuvered Parche forward slowly, cursing as they tried to decipher sonar echoes, never entirely certain whether something that sounded as if it were directly ahead was at their depth or some feet above. There was no way to really tell, not until they passed closer, close enough to risk collision. But Parche wasn't totally helpless. The Navy had been sending at least one submarine a year up under the ice since the 1950s. A special lab had been created to study sea ice to try to make it easier to operate in the strange and difficult environment. And the entire Sturgeon class of subs had been made "ice-capable": given upward- and forward-looking sonar that could help avoid ramming into the ice, special buoyancy controls, and hull modifications that allowed the subs to break through thin ice for emergency surfacings.

  During these early Arctic operations, the Navy discovered that sonar pings sounded an awful lot like the mating call of the area's ring-necked seals. When the seals heard the submarine ping-a sweet tone that sounded like a singer moving across octaves-they answered: one seal calling back to the submarine, the next seal answering that seal, and another seal answering the one before. Blasting the sea, the seals inspired walruses to join in with their bell-like barks. On the early transits, the din went on for hours, seals answering subs and other seals, walruses answering seals, and walruses answering one another. Now Parche was using sonar designed to avoid courtship with the local mammals.

  The passage was noisy, nonetheless. Around the sub were chunks of ice that had broken off from large bergs farther north. Those chunks had a disturbing tendency to pack themselves against one another or against land, creating heavy pressure ridges that reached down deep into the sea. Parche could easily encounter an area with less than five feet of clearance from bottom. It was almost impossible to move through without scraping some ice, sending a screech through the hull, nails across the chalkboard amplified. The ice chunks were heavy enough to snap a submarine's screws and leave a boat helpless.

  The crew also had to be on the lookout for larger bergs that often floated south, creating huge obstacles between Greenland and Canada as well as on the other side of the pole, between Greenland and Iceland. It was an iceberg that had stopped USS Nautilus on an attempt to cross under the North Pole in June 1958. (Nautilus made the Pole, and history, a few months later.)

  When Parche finally hit deep water, she could move ahead without obstacles. This 1,500-mile swim beneath the North Pole itself would be easy-depths of 1,000 to 12,000 feet left plenty of room to maneuver beneath the most massive icebergs. After that, Parche again had to maneuver through a tapestry of marginal ice before finally breaking through to the Barents.

  Now it was time for the crew to begin readying the fish to drag along the sea bottom in search of communications cables. Given the surrounding terrain and the location of Soviet bases, it made sense that any underwater telephone cable would run from Murmansk and along the coast of the Kola Peninsula, which pointed down from the Arctic, form ing the thumb of the glove-shaped piece of land that marked Sweden and Finland as its fingers. The cable would probably stretch about 250 miles east to the tip, before it took a 40-mile hop across what the Soviets called the throat of the White Sea and looped into the Severodvinsk shipyard.

  It made little sense to lay a tap in that bit of the White Sea where boats moved continuously from the shipyard out to the Barents. Instead, Parche would look for the cable in an area where it might be a little easier for her to hover for a while and not be discovered, such as along the granite cliffs on the northernmost coast of the Kola in that 250-mile run after Murmansk. The search inevitably would bring Parche within the Soviets' 12-mile territorial limit, and probably even inside the 3-mile limit recognized by the United States.

  As Parche searched, men monitored the video images captured by the fish, looking for that vague line in the sand that could be a communications cable. They found it just about where operation pl
anners had suspected it would be, farther out than 12 miles at some points, but a lot closer in at others. It was clear that this cable had to run from Severodvinsk to the major bases of the Northern Fleet, and on into fleet headquarters near Murmansk.

  Finally, Maurer picked a spot for the tap. In Okhotsk, the cable stretched across an entire sea, and Halibut had been able to plant that tap about 40 miles offshore. It is not clear exactly how far from the coast this tap site was, but it clearly was a lot closer in than the Okhotsk tap had been.

  Nobody had to be told that the closer Parche moved in, the more she risked discovery. Sonar crews monitored the constant traffic above as Parche's divers began their work. Nothing but luck could keep the crew safe from a direct hit by a Soviet sonar ping. If that happened, there were 150 pounds of HBX explosives on hoard, just as there had been on Halibut and on Seawolf.

  The spooks were crammed into Parche's now-locked torpedo room, their eavesdropping equipment sitting on racks designed to hold weapons. While Halibut had the Bat Cave, Parche had no more space than any other late-generation Sturgeon sub. In fact, to make room for the spooks, most of Parche's torpedoes had been ditched. Now she carried just four live warshots, the minimum number any attack sub was allowed to carry on a mission.

  It would take the spooks at least two weeks to sift electronically through the hundreds of lines running through the cable and choose which lines to record-and at what times-over the next year. The process relied on educated guesses and luck. Certain channels would probably he best in the summer months when the ice cleared from the Barents and the Soviets conducted naval exercises. Missile tests tended to be seasonal as well. But lines connected directly to headquarters could be active and profitably tapped year-round.

  Some of the lines were unencoded, but many of them were encrypted to some degree. The spooks hoped to choose lines that the NSA would have a decent chance of decoding later. It also helped that the tap had evolved over the years. It weighed several tons, but miniaturization of the electronics and advances in recording technology now provided a greater recording capacity and some room for error.''`

  As all this was going on, a steady stream of Soviet ships and submarines continued to fill Parche's sonar screens. The activity got the crew members to talking. One man whispered that Parche was "very, very near Murmansk" and "really up against the Soviet coast." One chief found a more colorful way of describing their position to a young seaman. "This is so close you could look through a periscope and see people's faces on the beach if you came to the surface."

  As they sat there, some of the men began to realize that no one had ever leveled with them about the dangers of this operation. As one man put it, "Here you've got one hundred some-odd guys willing to die, and they don't even know they're truly in a situation where they might."

  Finally, the job was done. All Maurer had to do now was get his men out of there and get them home. The plan was to leave the immediate area of the tap and signal "mission accomplished" to a second U.S. submarine, which had been skulking nearby throughout Parche's operation. Had there been any indication that Parche was detected, it would have been this second sub's job to make a racket, become a decoy, and draw the heat.

  Parche, of course, was maintaining strict radio silence, but she had been equipped with a special horn to send her signal. U.S. subs usually were wired for 60 megahertz, but Parche would signal at 50 megahertz, the Soviet standard. To the Soviets, it was hoped, the signal would sound like one of their own. To the men on board, the blast sounded like bongo drums. One quick beat on the bongos, and the message was sent. Parche waited for a reply, then headed for home.

  For her feat, Parche received the Presidential Unit Citation, the highest award possible. Each man was given a certificate, with the presidential seal at the top and Jimmy Carter's signature on the bottom. It was an award that Halibut had won twice, Seawolf never.

  "By virtue of the authority vested in me as President of the United States and as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States, I have today awarded THE PRESIDENTIAL UNIT CITATION (NAVY) FOR EXTRAORDINARY HEROISM TO USS PARCHE (SSN 683) for extraordinary heroism and outstanding performance in the conduct of a mission of vital importance to the National Security of the United States as a unit of the U.S. Pacific Fleet in 1979," the award read.

  Buried in the hureaucratese that followed was one telling line. It praised Parche for operating "in the hostile environment of poorly charted ocean areas."

  In 1980, Parche was scheduled to go back to the Barents tap, and Seawolf was scheduled to return to Okhotsk. But in February, a fire broke out on Seawolf during sea trials. A turbine generator blew up and began tossing balls of flame into the engine room while the sub was submerged. By the time Seawol f's crew could perform an emergency blow and surface, ten men had been overcome by black thick smoke. They were carried up to the deck and fresh air, and it was there they were photographed by a passerby. Instead of having a chance to win a PUC, to show the guys on Parche that Seawolf's men were just as good, they were awarded with a page 1 photo in a local newspaper captioned, "Seawolf Sons Basking in the Sun After Rigorous Sea Trials."

  Seawolf went back to dry dock for another year, and Parche again took her place on a run to Okhotsk in the summer. Parche also went back to the Barents that fall to plant a new tap and retrieve the first year's worth of recordings.

  By now, Ronald Reagan was scoring big in the presidential campaign. Carter had been plagued by the hostage crisis in Iran. He also was hurt by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which killed any chance for ratification of the arms treaty he had just reached with Brezhnev. (Both of these events also led the U.S. sub force to step up surveillance of Soviet naval forces in the Indian Ocean.) Reagan was promising to get tough with the Soviets. To that end, he pledged to pour billions of dollars into rebuilding the military, and he put the Navy front and center in his plans. Painting the conventional picture of the Soviet Navy as increasingly bent on challenging the West in any sea-pretty much the opposite of what Haver believed might he happening when he briefed Carter-Reagan said he would expand the U.S. Navy to 600 ships from 450 ships to prevent the Soviets from snatching maritime superiority.

  In fact, the Soviet fleet was growing. In November a U.S. satellite captured images of an enormous pile of steel and a newly enlarged dock at a Soviet shipyard. That and other evidence suggested that the Soviets might be building their first full-sized aircraft carrier. To many top Navy officials, the satellite images seemed to be proof that Rich Haver and other young analysts were wrong about the Soviet Navy pulling back, and that in fact the Soviets were still gearing up for battle in the open oceans. They might finally be ready to pour money into the kind of huge surface ships and supply vessels that they would need to create a true blue-water Navy. After all, aircraft carriers had always been used to project power outward, to sail to distant places and launch planes.

  After his election, Reagan appointed John F. Lehman Jr., the campaign aide who had come up with the plan for the 600-ship fleet, as his Navy secretary. At only thirty-eight years old, Lehman was the youngest man in this century to hold the post. He was smart, quick, and outspoken about his hard-line stance.

  "I believe that our former narrow margin of superiority is gone," Lehman warned Congress on February 6, 1981, just one day after he was sworn in. It didn't take long for him to earn a reputation as !'enfant terrible as he took control of the Navy in a way that no secretary had attempted in decades. Lehnian's plans included a radically new and aggressive naval strategy. He didn't talk much about what he expected the Soviets to do in a war. Instead, he wanted U.S. submarines, battleships, cruisers, and aircraft carriers to drive en masse right into the Barents and go after the Soviet surface and submarine fleets in their own waters. He was making, he declared, "a firm corn- mitment to go into the highest-threat areas and defeat the Soviet naval threat." Lehman became fond of describing Murmansk and the rest of the Kola Peninsula as "the most valuable piece of real es
tate on earth."

  Soon, top admirals were grumbling that Lehman was a torpedo without a guidance system. Most liked his idea of a more aggressive strategy, but Lehman dismissed out of hand the protests of some admirals that it was suicide to drive aircraft carriers into the Barents where the Soviets could easily sink them with cruise missiles. He also shrugged off outside critics-academics and congressional staff members among them-who warned that threatening Soviet sea-based missiles too early in a war could backfire, prompting them to "use 'em or lose 'em."

  This was the backdrop as Pentagon officials prepared to give Reagan his first briefing about submarine spy operations. It was scheduled for Friday, March 6, at 9:15 A.M., and was set to run 20 minutes. The luminaries who gathered in the wood-paneled Situation Room in the West Wing of the White House included Vice President George Bush, Chief of Staff James A. Baker III, Counselor Edwin Meese II and Richard V. Allen, the new national security adviser. Attending from the Pentagon were Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger; Admiral James D. Watkins, the vice chief of naval operations; Lehman, Haver, and Rear Admiral John L. Butts, now director of Naval Intelligence.

  Weinberger and Watkins got things rolling by sketching the basics of the surveillance missions being run by regular attack subs. Then Butts stepped in to introduce Reagan to Seawolf, Parche and cabletapping. He made his presentation with a dramatic video and slide show that Lehman had told him would appeal to Reagan.

  The president was, by all reports, mesmerized. Finally, he leaned over and asked his vice president, a former director of central intelligence, "Did you have something to do with this, George?"