Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew

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

  Bush answered that some of these programs had run during his tenure at the CIA.

  Then Rich Haver stepped in and, just as he had with Carter, began to describe how Naval Intelligence used the information the spy subs were collecting. Haver had slides too, but by now Reagan was itching for answers. He wanted to know if Haver thought the Soviets would be less willing to wage nuclear war now that they were facing him and his hard line in the White House. He also asked some of the same questions the analysts had been grappling with: How do the Soviets plan nuclear war? How do they train for it? How do they intend to fight it? Would a naval war go nuclear from day one, with Soviets using cruise missiles against aircraft carriers? And if it did, could it be contained at sea before anyone fired strategic ballistic missiles at the United States?

  Again Haver succeeded in drawing a president into a dialogue. In a question and answer session that went on for nearly 15 minutes with Bush and Watkins fielding questions also, Haver explained the conventional view of war on the high seas and the long-held assumption that the Soviets would probably turn to tactical, short-range nukes early in those battles. He added that such a move had seemed likely to set off a broader nuclear war.

  Then he offered some of the conclusions that his team of analysts had reached-that the Soviets appeared to be turning away from the conventional strategy and dedicating the bulk of their ships, attack subs and planes to protecting their missile subs in safe bastions close to home.

  From here, Haver went on to plug Lehman's aggressive plan to confront those forces in Soviet waters. When Reagan seemed satisfied, Haver began to pack up the projector as Weinberger stepped in to carefully explain to the president what his role in the process would be, how he needed to sign off on all the sensitive espionage operations in advance. Weinberger took his time, talking slowly and very deliberately. He wanted to make sure that Reagan appreciated what was being asked of him.

  Weinberger needn't have worried. Reagan was already hooked. Nobody had told him any of this when he was merely governor of California, home to the nation's most crucial spy subs. He had come to Washington still holding onto a view of the Navy built from equal parts of World War II fact and of World War II myth, the image of heroic men facing off against Japanese ships, their torpedoes sinking the enemy, dodging depth charges as they went along. This was an image dear to Reagan, and he loved to talk about how he played a submarine captain in the 1958 film Hellcats of the Navy."

  Reagan had a favorite story about those days, and he told it nowalbeit with only the details fit for screen-in Reagan's version, he effortlessly echoed commands whispered by a Navy officer and, with cameras rolling, set one of the nation's subs steaming out of San Diego in a Pacific sunset.

  As Bush and Baker began trying to hustle Reagan along, the president was still talking about his experiences on the Hellcats set and his admiration for the submariners he met there. This briefing had already gone on for 45 minutes, more than twice as long as it had been scheduled to run. Reagan, however, was in no rush. Turning to Haver, the president asked, "Where do you get guys like this?"

  "Sir, they're just Americans," Haver answered in his best for-thegipper style.

  On that note, Reagan finally seemed ready to leave. It was clear he wanted Haver to keep trying to puzzle out Soviet strategy and that he had given his tacit approval for the next round of submarine spying missions.

  All this occurred as Seawolf was ready to go to sea again. For the first time, the Navy could send both special projects boats out at the same time, in different directions to different seas.

  Before Parche could leave for her 1981 run, however, Commander Peter John Graef, her new captain, ordered what he thought would be a routine drug screening. The last thing he expected was to nail nearly 15 percent of his crew for marijuana use-twenty-two crew members, including three officers. There was no debate. They were off the boat, and replacements were rushed in.

  This was definitely not what Reagan had in mind during the briefing when he had asked Rich Haver where the Navy found "these guys," these superheroes of the cold war. Although, in retrospect, Haver's answer seemed far less corny. They were "just Americans" after all.

  Staffing these boats had never been easy. Navy recruiters went through bizarre contortions to keep their secret and at the same time find men who wouldn't mind trespassing in Soviet seas for the purpose of cabletapping. As one young submariner described it, the recruitment process was more like an interrogation. Men in leisure suits brought potential projects men into smoky rooms and began demanding to know: Did the recruit ever use drugs? Ever get in trouble with the law? The questions were peppered with promises that the government had ways of learning every dirty detail. "If you ever jacked off behind the barn, we will find out about it," one kid was told.

  Parche wasn't unique in her personnel problems, and the drug bust had intelligence officials worried. Seawolf's crew was disintegrating under the mounting frustrations of serving on a broken-down and cursed boat. The pressure inspired some of her crew to lose themselves in a marijuana haze. Some even proclaimed their drug use openly and loudly, just to get off of the Seawolf. Then there were Seawolf's isolationists, who were readying for the day when they would take singular stands against communism in mountaintop homes transformed into forts. These men had taken to going out to the mud flats near the base to practice with their non-Navy-issue assault rifles, blasting apart cans and at least one truck. One man sent a live round into his television. 'The rest of the crew, leery, sweaty, and exhausted, just looked on at the dopers and the gun fanatics.

  Such tensions remained as Seawolf finally headed out toward Okhotsk. By now, Michael C. Tiernan had been the CO through three years of overhaul and tests. This was to be the first time he commanded the boat through an actual operation. A Seawolf crew that had once compared his predecessor, Charles R. MacVean, to Captain James T. Kirk on the Starship Enterprise now nicknamed Tiernan "Milquetoast." The men had tried to take him out to the Horse and Cow to loosen him up, but they didn't think it had helped.

  Tiernan, in fact, was only slightly more popular than his new executive officer, J. Ashton Dare, whom the men referred to as "Jashton." If the men found Tiernan aloof, they found Jashton downright irritating. His father was an admiral, and it seemed to the men that he wasn't going to let anyone forget that. Worse for Jashton, he had replaced a crew favorite, Robert S. Holbrook, an officer who could chastise a man in the morning and redeem himself later that night by taking him out for a beer. Holbrook also had been the crew's good-luck charm. He had already survived an 85-degree dive on the diesel sub USS Chopper (SS-.342), saved only when an enlisted man thought to throw her into reverse, driving her back up toward the surface. Thereafter, Holbrook always wore a brass belt buckle adorned with Chopper's image, certain that it made him unsinkable. He had his men just as convinced.

  As far as they were concerned, Dare had neither the mythology nor the charm to redeem himself. He was their favorite target as they looked for ways to fight boredom. On one test run, some of the men stole Dare's mattress and flushed it through the garbage chute and out of the boat. The XO somehow missed the joke.

  In fact, humor was more than a little strained on this boat full of men who felt that they were being sent to Soviet waters in the equivalent of a Model T. By the time ice began forming on Seawolf's deck plates, morale was at an all-time low.

  Things only got worse on station. Tiernan directed his crew to plant the sub next to the Soviet cable. The plan was to let Seawolf sit secure on bottom, balancing her bulk on two ski-like legs that the crew had taken to calling skegs. The skegs were a gift of imagination and technology, a safety device designed after that first terrible storm that had torn Halibut from her anchors. But as Seawolf tried to land with those skegs now, she came down hard right on the Soviet cable.

  There was every chance that the fall had interrupted Soviet communications or sent a shot of static through the line, and there was every chance that the Soviets would
send surface ships, blasting sonar, or repair crews to cone and investigate. But there was no sign of a Soviet search. By the time the tapping operation was completed, Tiernan decided to go ahead and finish a secondary operation. Seawol f was going to move further into Okhotsk, and she was going on another search for Soviet missile fragments. But just as it seemed certain that the Americans were going to survive their mistake, they came under assault-not from the Soviets, but from the sea itself.

  Twin storms that had started hundreds of miles away, their winds swirling, were nearing Okhotsk. Beneath the sea, Seawolf sat too deep to put up an antenna, and the crew was unaware of the warnings flooding the airwaves about the cyclones moving up toward the Kuril Islands. The men didn't hear when naval command centers reported winds of S5 knots and swells leaping toward the sky. They didn't know when other craft were warned that the two storms had become one, a single, lethal typhoon.

  Within days of the first warnings, thrashed air, bullet rains, and massive waves were combining to force their wrath below the surface, pounding down until Seawolf began to shudder. At first, the men believed they could easily weather the squall. Unlike surface mariners, submarine crews are trained to fear detection, depth charges, and torpedoes, but there is usually little to fear from storms. Run deep. That was the standard procedure. Submariners are indoctrinated from the start with the faith that the skies could open up all they like, winds could gust threatening all who skim the surface, but below, where dark and calm hold court, submarines reign.

  Indeed, the 400 feet of water overhead, though shallow by submarine standards, would have been enough to frustrate most storms. But this typhoon was roiling even the depths. And for Seawolf, there was no going deeper. She would have to weather this out on the seabed.

  Seawolf began rocking from side to side. Three divers were out, and they were being tossed. The rest of the crewmen, safer inside, were trying to act nonchalant. Squeezing past one another within Seawolf's cramped corridors, they offered comments about the storm as if they were discussing the weather back home. Still, the currents that were hitting Seawolf every twenty or thirty seconds were so violent that her skegs were lifting from the seabed. At first, the submarine rolled only a few degrees, then more. Objects inside went flying--with the submarine on bottom, nobody had thought to secure for heavy seas. Beauregard was knocked from his high perch in the torpedo room and fell to the deck with a resounding crash. For a moment the torpedomen feared their mascot, their favorite ceramic frog, would be erased from their ranks in an instant.With great relief they realized that only his stand was destroyed.

  Outside the boat, the divers were losing their fight against the pull of the currents. One diver was sucked toward the rocking submarine and found himself beneath one of Seawolf's skegs. Something grabbed hold of him an instant later. Another diver? A lash of the current? Just as this man was about to he pinned, he was free.

  Finally the divers were able to scramble into the unsteady shelter of the submarine. That was what Tiernan was waiting for. He signaled the end of the operation. He wanted his submarine in deep water. He wanted out of Okhotsk.

  But Okhotsk was holding on. "Buddha," a reactor specialist who had earned his nickname for his size and despite his thick thatch of black hair, signaled the alarm first. He had been standing at a gauge for one of the heat exchangers that cycled cooled water before it went into the submarine's nuclear reactor. The temperature was not reading anywhere near correct levels. Something was clogging the system.

  Checking valves, moving equipment, Buddha started yelling: "I've got sand in there, Jesus Christ!"

  The nukes, those men who worked the reactor, came running, followed by Dare and Tiernan. They stood looking at a pile of sand. Seawolf's vents were sucking in muck, salt, the sea, and the seafloor into the cooling system. The storm began taking on new and terrible significance as they realized that the reactor was in danger of shutting down. Seawolf was at risk of losing all power.

  Crewmen began checking other points where the submarine borrowed water from outside, cycled it through the boat, and cycled it back outside. Sand, little animals, snails, coral, and sea creatures had gotten into the generators, the main engines, the turbines, and the half-dozen or so critical areas on board. There were piles and heaps of the wet, partially living mass around the boat. No one was sure how much weight they had taken on as the wet mass was sucked in from Okhotsk's bottom. Worse, the sand was coming in because the seawater intake valves that should have been several feet above sea bottom were resting practically flat against it. Each time the storm rocked Seawolf, a little more sand was pumped over the skegs. The currents were forcing the sub to dig herself in. Somehow the engineers who designed those legs as safety devices had ignored the properties of currents that children learn about when they stand in the surf at the beach. Now, Seawolf's skegs were almost entirely buried. She was stuck.

  Compartment by compartment, men began to fret. The machinist's mates knew that if the steam plant shut down, it could take a week to restart, if it restarted at all. The nukes worried that with the sand damage, the reactor might not start back up. The Seawolf was just not strong enough for this kind of a test.

  No one, it seemed, was immune to the growing tension. An electrician's mate lost control and began yelling, screaming, crying. A medic was ordered to sedate him and send him to his rack. Others began to have chilling visions of blank epitaphs: somewhere lies this seaman, sent to do something in an unknown place and killed somehow in a war that didn't exist.

  Seawolf was mired for nearly two days as the chiefs, the old salts who had ridden submarines for twenty years, joined forces with the junior officers. With Tiernan's approval they began trying anything they could think of. First they attempted to rev Seawolf's engines to see whether that would get her to pull up. That failed. Next they tried a controlled emergency blow, hoping the sudden loss of weight would send them floating out of the sand. It was dangerous-Seawolf might pull free, but she might also broach the surface, and that could mean detection and detection would mean a fight. Seawolf had few means of protection at her disposal. Most of her torpedo tubes had been used to store potatoes. There were still some torpedoes on board, but recent tests had proved them all but useless. Seawolf was the loudest thing in the water, so whenever she had launched a test dummy, its sonar guidance system turned the torpedo around and sent it hurtling back toward the sub.

  Seawolf's only chance was to remain hidden as she freed herself. Carefully, the crew began to blow ballast, slowly, steadily, gently, first from the bow, then from the stern. Nothing. Try again, someone ordered tensely. A little more water this time, with the anchors down to prevent an accidental flight to the surface. Again nothing.

  Another try, and the submarine seemed to move slightly, but only slightly. It was like trying to get a pickup truck out of a rut, rocking back and forth, hoping sooner or later to be able to push it out. But with sand still being sucked into the machinery, the men were in a race: would they get out before their systems shut down? All through the boat, men were trying to blow the sand out, but the submarine was sucking in more than they could discard. A key reactor system was already down to less than 50 percent efficiency, maybe as low as 35 percent.

  Somebody came up with the idea of cutting loose the anchors that were there to steady the Seawolf as she sat on her skegs. Anchors might save the sub from broaching, but right now the two concrete mushrooms were also weighing her down. The order was given to cut them loose.

  Seawolf began to rise. The main engines were being badly overworked, revving until it sounded as though a drill was whirring through the boat. Then there was a scratchy sound, more of a shriek really, loud enough that some of the men wondered whether their hearing would be forever affected.

  The skegs remained partially buried. The gondola under the Seawolf's belly, the huge "clamshell" that was built to hold missile pieces, partially ripped away. But Seawolf was free.

  As she limped home, she was dangerously l
oud in the water, louder than she had ever been. There was something dangling from below, a piece of skeg, the gondola. Whatever it was, it was making a lot of noise in the water as Seawolf made a slow race for the Kuril Islands and out to open ocean. Crucial systems parts worn down by sand were also grinding and seemed ready to give out any moment.

  Then, somewhere in the Pacific, not far from Okhotsk, she was detected. A Soviet boat, probably a trawler, began pinging with active sonar. There was no way to outrun the trawler-the submarine was too hurt-and no way to hide, because whatever she was dragging banged against her hull even when she was sitting stock still. Any speeds faster than 6 knots brought a cacophony of sound, a drum section gone wild.

  The Soviet pings rang through the submarine, adding to the din. The ringing would not stop. The Soviets chased, giving up the pursuit after only about twenty-four hours-for reasons that may have been as simple as a trawler captain's whim.

  When Seawolf finally pulled into a closed dry dock, the men could see the damage. There were dents in her superstructure and pieces torn off as if she had suffered depth charges. The bilges were still full of sand, hundreds of pounds of it, though a significant amount had been moved to the men's bunks, jars of gray, grainy souvenirs.

  There were no awards given for this mission, no formal recognition of the men's brush with death. A cruise hook, crafted much like a high school yearbook, mentioned the ordeal in only one cryptic cartoon memorializing the first and last leap taken by Beauregard the frog.

  Back in port, the men trying to repair Seawolf weren't told how sand got into the diesel engines, how it got into the lobe oil system and ate up all of the bearings. Officials in Washington had far more serious fears. Following Seawolf's misadventure, satellites uncovered evidence that the Soviets had found the cable tap in Okhotsk. Nobody was sure how, whether the operation had been compromised by Seawolf's drop onto the cable or by a mole within the crew or, unthinkable as it seemed, among the few intelligence officers who knew about the taps in the first place.