by Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story Of American Submarine Espionage
Parche finally came home after being at sea for 137 days. For this "endurance op" she won another PUC, maintaining her streak of one Presidential Unit Citation for every trip to the Barents. This PUC, her fourth in four years, was signed by Reagan, who also sent Graef a box of cigars. The certificate used the standard language about "extraordinary heroism," but then it went on to say that Parche had "established new standards for endurance and excellence in underwater operations." The president had immortalized the Navy's cover story.
With Parche scheduled to be in overhaul throughout 1983, there was no other submarine that could be trusted to service the Barents cable tap. Seawolf was in the shipyard, recovering from storm damage, but her days of tapping Soviet cables were clearly over. Naval Intelligence never imagined Seawolf clunking and hanging around the Barents, and the Soviets' discovery of the Okhotsk tap had ended any tapping missions in that sea. When Seawolf finally did emerge from the yards, she would mainly be used to search for pieces of test missiles and other Soviet hardware in the open ocean.'' It also was still just drawing up plans to convert the USS Richard B. Russell (SSN- 687) into its fourth and final special projects sub.
So Naval Intelligence was without its best source of information during what would become one of the most tense years of the cold war since detente. The Navy was trying to learn how to trail the Soviets under the ice by following them there from their ports, but as the U.S. Navy sent more and more attack subs, the number of skirmishes with the Soviets in the Arctic increased. Not only that, trailing the Soviets under the ice was proving difficult. The Navy was most successful in the deep polar regions where the waters had sound properties most like those of the open ocean. That wasn't the case in the marginal ice zones.
Still, the Navy had no choice but to keep trying. There was enough Soviet activity that Admiral James Watkins, who had succeeded Hayward as CNO, finally told the American public that the latest front in the cold war had moved far up north. And, he said, "if there are forces in that area, we'd better know how to fight them." He added, "The ice is a beautiful place to hide."
It was now more critical than ever for Naval Intelligence to spread what it was learning about Soviet tactics and strategy throughout the sub force. The captains and spooks on regular surveillance subs were filing thicker patrol reports than ever, and even much of the information from the cable taps, once tightly guarded, was being distributed to submarine officers, although first sanitized to disguise the source. Naval Intelligence was so desperate to out-think the Soviets that it was even willing to rely on a little knowledgeable guesswork. A group of submariners and analysts were gathered and told to write up what they thought would be found in a Soviet submarine operating manual. When that was done, they were sent to visit and brief attack-submarine commanders on what they might expect to face at sea.
By now, it was clear that no one else was going to champion Rickover's idea for a special class of Arctic subs. Instead, the Navy had decided to try to give ice capabilities to nearly two dozen remaining Los Angeles-class subs, still scheduled for construction. Conceived as open-ocean aircraft carrier escorts, the original LA-class subs lacked some of the sophisticated electronic-surveillance equipment and icecapable sonar that had been built into Parche and other Sturgeon boats. That had left the nation's newest subs unable to handle what had become the most crucial spying operations as easily as the boats they were replacing.
Lyon had been asked to help research what changes were needed to allow the LA boats to do better under the ice, but his funding never seemed to come through. While under-ice operations were increasingly focused on attempts to develop torpedoes and sonar that could better distinguish between ice ridges and missile subs in the deep polar regions, Lyon kept arguing that the fleet commanders were ignoring the greatest problem-that no U.S. sub had the ability to hunt or maneuver well enough to fight within the marginal ice, where he was certain the Soviets were most likely to hide. Nobody of rank, it seemed, wanted to hear it.
Just as the Soviet sea threat was growing, relations between the superpowers were disintegrating. Yuri V. Andropov, a former director of the KGB who had succeeded Leonid Brezhnev as the Soviet leader in 1982, was spinning apocalyptic visions of a U.S. first strike that even many KGB experts saw as alarmist.
Then Reagan began stirring Soviet fears. On March 8, 1983, he outpreached the preachers at the convention of the National Association of Evangelicals, held that year in Orlando, Florida. He offered a laundry list of national and international evils: abortion, teen pregnancy, clinics providing teen birth control. After an impassioned plea for school prayer, he turned his attention to the Soviet Union.
"Yes, let us pray for the salvation of all of those who live in that totalitarian darkness, pray they will discover the joy of knowing God," Reagan intoned. "But until they do, let us be aware that while they preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the Earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world."
Moments later, he concluded, "So, in your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride, the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil."
Reagan had equated the fight against communism as the fight between good and evil before. But the phrase "evil empire" became one of those sound bites that gets repeated over and over. It definitely captured the fearful attention of the Soviets. Their concern that Reagan might consider a first strike was bolstered on March 23 when, less than two weeks after his "evil empire" speech, the president went on television to introduce the world to "Star Wars"-the strategic defense initiative (SDl).
At first, the Soviets saw this plan to orbit lasers designed to blast Soviet missiles out of the sky as impractical. But Reagan's rhetoric, as interpreted by the KGB, further convinced some Soviet officials that the president was capable of ordering a first strike.
The Soviets weren't calmed either when, shortly after the evil empire and Star Wars speeches, the U.S. Pacific Fleet began its largest maneuvers since World War II. Navy warplanes from the carriers Midway and Enterprise flew over Soviet military installations on the Kuril Islands that mark the entrance to the Sea of Okhotsk. The show of force was another step in Lehman's efforts to get the Soviets' attention.
Following that, crucial arms control talks stalled as the Soviets protested a U.S. plan to place low-flying cruise missiles and Pershing lI intermediate-range ballistic missiles in West Germany and Italy. Then, on August 3 1, the Soviets shot down a Korean Airlines passenger plane, KAL 007, which had veered over Soviet military bases near the Sea of Okhotsk. All 269 people on board were killed.
Reagan accused the Soviets of premeditated murder, of knowingly shooting down the civilian airliner. Rather than admit that they had made a lethal mistake, the Soviets claimed that the airliner was a CIA reconnaissance plane. Following the KAI, incident, Soviet students at U.S. universities were called home on the grounds that anti-Soviet sentiment put them in physical danger. By the time Lech Walesa won the Nobel Peace Prize on October 6, the KGB was convinced that the award was part of a Western-Zionist plot to destabilize Eastern Europe.
Tensions mounted further on October 26, when Reagan ordered the invasion of Grenada. The United States claimed it was rescuing American medical students. But in the process, it overthrew the infant Communist government.
As all this was going on, the KGB was actively looking for signs that NATO and the United States were considering a first strike. The search, now a top priority, had been started by Andropov when he was still heading the KGB. It was code-named "Operation RYAN" for the Russian term for nuclear missile attack, Raketno Yadernoye Napadenie. According to Oleg Gordievsky, a high-ranking KGB off
icer who later defected to England, the KGB, throughout 1983, was pressuring Soviet agents around the globe to feed RYAN, to report alarming information even if they were skeptical of it themselves.
In the wake of the KAL shoot-down, the KGB Pushed RYAN agents even harder. By now, Andropov had fallen gravely ill, and one of his kidneys had been removed. He had not been seen in public since mid-August. But he was still in charge, and he still believed the world could be heading toward nuclear Armageddon.*
With Operation RYAN running wild and nearly unchecked, Gordievsky says there was a real danger of a catastrophic mistake. That was never more true, he says, than during November NATO exercises, code-named "Able Archer." From November 2 to November 11, the NATO forces were practicing release procedures for tactical nuclear weapons, moving through all of the alert stages from readiness to general alert. Because the Soviets' own contingency plans for war called for real preparations to be shrouded under similar exercises, alarmists within the KGB came to believe that the NATO forces had been placed on an actual alert.
RYAN teams were given orders to look for signs that NATO was about to start a countdown toward nuclear war: last-minute crisis negotiations between Britain and the United States; food-industry efforts to stockpile, such as mass butchering of cattle; or evacuations of political, financial, and military leaders and their families. The Soviet alerts eased after November 11, when Able Archer came to an end.
But there was little easing of the paranoia. That December, Marshal Nikolai V. Ogarkov, chief of staff of the Soviet armed forces, made a stunning public pronouncement. He said that the Soviets believed the United States "would still like to launch a decapitating nuclear first strike."
Reagan's secretary of State, George P. Shultz, met Ogarkov's announcement with outright disbelief. Shultz was certain that this had to be just more talk. But in January 1984, the Soviets followed through on a threat made during the dispute over the Pershing II missiles. Offering their own show of force, they sent some Delta missile submarines back out into the Atlantic to cruise off U.S. shores along with the Yankees that were still routinely patrolling there. The aim was to show that the Deltas could hit targets throughout the United States as easily as the Pershings in Germany could target the Soviet Union. Ironically, the Soviet move actually put the Deltas just where the U.S. Navy could track them most easily. But the implied threat was nonetheless clear. Both sides were stepping up the normal catand-mouse game, trailing one another more aggressively than ever.
The Reagan administration now realized that it had to try to calm things down. The incendiary rhetoric in Washington came to an abrupt halt. Shultz began talking privately with Soviet diplomats to try to dispel the tension and renew a dialogue about arms control. Reagan took the new line public in a speech on January 16, when he said, "We are determined to deal with our differences peacefully, through negotiations." He also touched again on the vision he had evoked when he made his Star Wars proposal. "As I have said before, my dream is to see the day when nuclear weapons will be banished from the face of the earth."
After a while, the Soviets began to soften as well. Andropov died that February, and his successor, Konstantin Chernenko, signaled that he might be willing to talk about arms cuts. He attached a condition, however, that Reagan wasn't willing to go for. Chernenko wanted Reagan to drop Star Wars. The Soviets feared the technology could enable the United States to launch a first strike without fear of retaliation.
Throughout, the intelligence community was struggling to keep up with these events. The CIA launched a study to try to figure out why the Soviets seemed to have gotten so edgy, and as U.S. satellites captured the first images of Soviet missile tests in the Arctic, Naval Intelligence and the NSA began anxiously planning Parche's return to the Barents.
Parche left for the Barents shortly after yet another diplomatic scuffle, in which the Soviets boycotted the Olympic Games in Los Ange les, answering the U.S. boycott of the games in Moscow four years earlier. When she returned, it was clear that she had brought home far more than even the most optimistic intelligence officials had hoped for. The taps had been recording all through the alert sparked by Able Archer and had captured a detailed look at the Soviet Navy's nuclear strategy. This was an ear to the Soviet Navy's nuclear command-andcontrol structure as it was placing some of its missile submarines on high alert, rehearsing for war. Some former intelligence officials say this information simply confirmed the picture that had been emerging from the taps about how the Soviets planned to use their missile subs. But other former CIA, NSA, and Navy officials say that Parche's take from this mission was so critical to their understanding of the Soviets that it qualified as "the big casino," or "the crown jewels."
Based on the tap data, they say, U.S. intelligence realized that some information collected by human agents had been dead wrong. The tap recordings chronicled the dispersal of key Soviet ships and submarines and offered a new picture of the state of Soviet readiness. Just as some of the younger Navy analysts had postulated years earlier, the emphasis was going to be on protecting missile subs. In the early days of a crisis, the Soviets planned to move some of their Typhoons and Deltas into safe bastions. Those bastions would be guarded by the bulk of Soviet attack subs and warships. Attack vessels would also ride shotgun as the missile subs made a dash for the safety of the Arctic ice.
This was the strategy that had so worried the Pentagon. The Soviets had engineered a way to avoid NATO forces waiting to attack at the mouth of the GIUK gap as well as any NATO sub that tried to follow Soviet boats into the Barents. Still, Parche had carried home confirmation of one more crucial fact that eased the Pentagon's worst fears: The Soviet Union was not preparing for a first strike from the sea. As one former intelligence official says of the tap data, both from this and other missions: "It conveyed a notion that, while preemptive war was an option, the Soviet forces were not designed to go for a first strike."
The bottom line was this: the balance of power was changing. Soviet technological advances-the increased missile ranges, the hardening of submarine sails and hulls to withstand the ice-had placed the Soviet Union on the verge of achieving nuclear parity with the United States in the last major area where it had lagged behind. Now that the Soviet Union could better protect its missile subs, it had in its grasp that allimportant "strategic reserve," a nearly invulnerable second-strike force. In the Soviets' view, this would make it even less likely that the United States would ever launch a first strike against them.
President Reagan was briefed on the findings, but he left it largely to the Navy and Defense Secretary Weinberger to grapple with the strategic military implications. Lehman and Watkins had been arguing for several years that if war came, the Navy would have to go up under the ice and try to root out the Soviet missile submarines, and they now decided to make this the Navy's official strategy. Their decision was based in part on extensive war games in which U.S. officials had been asked to act as they thought Soviet commanders would. And there were assumptions made, most notably that any major crises would take months to build, giving the Navy plenty of time to flood attack subs into the Barents, pick up Soviet missile subs leaving port, and "tag" them-follow them to their patrol areas.
Heady from their successes trailing submarines in the deepest waters of the Arctic, most admirals didn't want to hear Lyon's continued warnings that it was a lot easier to play tag than hide-and-seek. He was certain that the Soviets could lose a trail easily where the U.S. subs couldn't find them, in the shallow-water marginal ice zones. The admirals were even less interested these days in his critiques of the design modifications for the new LA-class submarines. In fact, after forty years as the Navy's key Arctic expert, Lyon was inexplicably under orders to stay away from the redesign of the LA-class boats.
Navy leaders acknowledge that the sub force would have taken big losses by trying to blast into the Soviet bastions or roust their missile subs from tinder the ice. But they also say they had no doubt that they could have bea
ten many of the Soviet subs to their war positions. To test that theory, they sent more than two dozen attack subs surging from Atlantic ports toward the Soviet Union one Sunday. Every intelligence sensor was aimed at recording the Soviets' reaction, and not a single one picked up any sign that the scramble had been noticed. Besides that, Navy leaders were counting on the fact that U.S. crews were better trained than their Soviet counterparts and had spent far more time at sea given how much of the Soviet fleet was usually broken down and out of service. And if the Soviets were willing to confine themselves to the Arctic and their home waters, the U.S. subs would know roughly where to hunt their prey. They also would have prior knowledge of favorite Soviet patrol areas from surveillance ops and from the sonobuoys now peppering the marginal ice where SOSUS didn't reach.
The limits and the advantages of the U.S. strategy were voiced most bluntly by Watkins, who was the chief of Naval Operations from mid1982 until mid-1986. He says the Soviets' strategy of pulling back their missile subs was "probably smart" and initially did make it more difficult to destroy them. But he also believed that if the Soviets started a nuclear war with land missiles, the United States could eliminate "a very large percentage" of the missile subs that they would have positioned to make a second strike from the sea.
Still, any strategy that allowed for even a few enemy missile subs to fire at U.S. targets was a far cry from the days when most of the Soviet Yankees traveled the seas with unknown and lethal shadows that could prevent them from shooting at all. And for intelligence officials, it was a huge relief to realize that the Soviets were not readying to use their improved position to start a war.