Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew

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

  Ironically, the 1984 run-the trip that brought home the "big casino"-was the first of Parche's five missions to the Barents that would fail to win a Presidential Unit Citation. (Instead, Parche was given a Navy Unit Commendation, the next highest award.) Parche may have supplied the United States with an amazing wealth of critical information, but her own role in the ongoing cold war drama was becoming more routine.

  Actually, Naval Intelligence was now hatching a plan to access the Soviet cable in real time, without having to wait for a submarine to travel there at all. The concept had been kicking around NURO since the mid-1970s, when some officials envisioned linking the Okhotsk tap by cable to Japan. John Butts, the director of Naval Intelligence, and his team were now pushing an ambitious idea to lay 1,200 miles of cable between the Barents taps and Greenland. He envisioned barges that would look so perfectly innocuous that no one would ever dream that they were involved in stretching and laying his imagined cable. And he saw a full-time staff of linguists and cryptologists dedicated to translating and decoding the material as it came in.

  The plan was grand. In fact, it was grandiose. Some of Butts's colleagues began to joke that he was trying to take over the world. They watched, wondering whether Butts and his aides would realize they were getting more than a little carried away. They waited as Butts tallied up the $1 billion cost. The intelligence committees in Congress didn't wonder or wait. They simply made it clear they were going to sink Butts's plan, barges and all.

  Throughout all of this, the two superpowers continued talking about shedding, or at least shrinking, their nuclear arsenals. And when Chernenko died in March 1985, the old Soviet guard all but died with him. For its new leader, the Politburo reached into a younger generation to find fifty-four-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev. He had been convinced ever since the Able Archer panic that the Soviet Union had to get back to the negotiating table. Now, as he took up his post as general secretary, he seemed more willing than any of his recent predecessors to consider major changes in U.S.-Soviet relations.

  Indeed, he made his first move late on the day of Chernenko's funeral. "The USSR has never intended to fight the United States and does not have such intentions now," Gorbachev flatly declared to Bush and Shultz. "There have never been such madmen within the Soviet leadership, and there are none now."

  During these first steps toward conciliation, U.S. authorities made startling discoveries that reminded the nation that the days of spies and old-style cold warriors were not over. Rich Haver, it seems, hadn't been seeing ghosts at all.

  It was early in 1985 when Bill Studeman, who was about to succeed Butts as director of Naval Intelligence, walked into Haver's office with a critical piece of paper. Haver, who was now the deputy director of Naval Intelligence, took it and read through the FBI's account of an interview with a woman named Barbara Walker, who had come to report that her husband, a former Navy chief, had been spying for the Soviets. The FBI noted that Walker had been living the good life, although his only visible means of support was a failing detective business.

  Haver knew instantly that he was holding the answer that he and Studeman had sought back in the late 1970s when they tried to convince admirals to investigate a possible communications break.

  John A. Walker Jr. was a retired Navy submariner and communications specialist. In 1967 he had been a watch officer in Norfolk handling communications with American submarines in the Atlantic. He had access to reports on submarine operations, technical manuals, and the daily key lists that were used to unscramble all of the messages sent through the military's most widely used coding machines. If the Soviets had gotten hold of any of this, they would have known that they needed to look over their shoulders, that their missile subs were being followed by much quieter U.S. subs. They also would have known just how quiet U.S. submarines were, and just how critical submarine-quieting technology was to the balance of ocean power.

  Later, Haver and Studeman learned that Walker had given all this to the Soviets, and more. In fact, when Walker retired from the Navy in 1976, he had continued his espionage by drawing others into his scheme. First he recruited another Navy communications specialist, Jerry A. Whitworth, who continued Walker's access to the crucial key lists. In the early 1980s, Walker enlisted his brother Arthur, who worked for a defense contractor. And soon after that, Walker began using his son Michael, an enlisted man on the USS Nirnitz, a nuclearpowered aircraft carrier. Walker was caught only because his ex-wife wanted to prevent him from recruiting their daughter into a spy ring that had already swallowed their son.

  The news was sobering. For all the years that the United States had been eavesdropping on the Soviets through the cable taps, the Soviets had been listening in on U.S. communications, and without the years of research, investment in technology, or risk to men's lives. In fact, Walker's ring had cost the Soviets less than $1 million over eighteen years, and for that money he had almost single-handedly destroyed the U.S. nuclear advantage.

  Walker was arrested on May 20. The next day, Haver was assigned to write the damage report, largely because he had written much of it ten years earlier when he first tried to raise the alarm. But the damage was worse than even Haver had predicted. Walker also had passed crucial secrets about U.S. techniques for quieting subs, such as cushioning engine equipment to prevent vibrations from resonating through hulls. Indeed, around the time Walker was caught, U.S. sonar operators were reporting that they couldn't identify some of the newest Soviet attack subs until their own boats were right on top of the Soviets-or in some cases, were surprised by them. A few of the newest Soviet subs, the Sierras and the Akulas, were, in fact, nearly as silent as the U.S. Sturgeon class. (It later turned out that the Soviets also had been helped by Japanese and Norwegian companies, including a subsidiary of Toshiba Corporation, which had surreptitiously sold them the huge, computer-guided milling machines needed to make the propeller blades on Soviet subs much smoother and quieter.)

  Studeman later testified before a federal judge, saying that Walker's ring might have had "powerful war-winning implications for the Soviet side." And when Vitaly Yurchenko, a high-ranking KGB officer, defected in July 1985, he told the CIA that the Walker-Whitworth ring was the most important espionage victory in KGB history.

  Walker pleaded guilty that October and agreed to help authorities assess the damage in exchange for leniency for his son. The elder Walker received a single life sentence, with eligibility for parole after ten years. The deal was approved by Defense Secretary Weinberger, but Navy Secretary Lehman was furious. In his eyes, Walker's treachery was being treated as "just another white-collar crime."

  Lehman rhapsodized that if it had been up to him, he would have applied one of the penalties for treason from back in the days following the American Revolution. The essence, as Lehman quoted it, was:

  That you ... be hanged by the neck, but not until you are dead, but that you be taken down again, and whilst you are yet alive, your bowels he taken out and burnt before your face; and that afterwards your head be severed from your body and your body divided into four quarters.... And may God Almighty have mercy on your soul.

  A month after Walker was sentenced, Lehman had one more body for his imagined gallows and Haver had caught his second ghost. This time it was Yurchenko who offered up the Navy's second spy.

  Back in January 1980, when Yurchenko was working in the Soviet embassy in Washington, he had fielded a call from a man who would only say, "I have some information to discuss with you and to give to you."

  The caller visited the embassy, but Yurchenko never learned his name or what he had to offer. Other Soviet agents had taken the case. That wasn't much to go on, but it turned out to be enough. The FBI began going through old recordings of Yurchenko's conversations that had been captured by wiretaps. Investigators found the call and played it back for some NSA employees. They recognized the voice.

  Yurchenko's mystery caller turned out to be Ronald W. Pelton, a former NSA cryptologist, who was arrest
ed on November 25, 1985. Some of the "information" he had been offering the Soviets turned out to be about the Navy's top-secret Okhotsk cable-tapping operation. Pelton had sold out the Okhotsk taps for $35,000. In an attempt to mask his own bankruptcy, he had exposed the nation's most criti cal submarine spy missions and risked the lives of the men on both Seawolf and Parche. Both subs had been sent to Okhotsk during the nearly two years that elapsed before the Soviets found the tap pods. Just why it took the Soviets so long to follow up on Pelton's tip remains unclear.

  After Pelton was arrested, the Navy finally turned over Haver's old report to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the one he had written in January 1982 outlining his suspicions that a spy was responsible for the loss of the Okhotsk tap. The senators were furious. At a closed hearing, they lambasted Navy representatives for withholding the report for three years. And they were indignant that the Navy had risked 140 men's lives, sending Parche right back to the Barents despite Haver's suspicions that there was a spy.

  William Cohen, a Republican from Maine, was one of the angriest lawmakers in the room. Cohen, who would become secretary of Defense under President Bill Clinton, demanded to know who had written the report.

  From the back of the room, Haver stood up.

  "Sir, I wrote the report." When one of the senators wanted to know how he could be so sure that this was his work, Haver cited the report's date and noted that he wasn't about to forget his own birthday.

  Cohen wanted to know why the Navy failed to react to Haver's conclusion that the Soviets probably had foreknowledge of the cable tap. He wanted to know why nobody searched for a spy.

  "They didn't believe it," Haver responded.

  Cohen pressed on. Was it prudent, he wanted to know, to continue to operate the cable-tapping program, push it full tilt ahead, when there may have been a spy?

  All Haver could do was repeat what he had said, that nobody believed he was right, that others in Naval Intelligence had failed to reach the same conclusion. Finally, in a gesture of loyalty, he tossed in that there had been some ambiguity. He did not say that he had never had any doubt, that he had known all along there was probably only one way to add up the facts.

  There was one good bit of news for the Navy and the NSA in Pelton's arrest. Now that they knew who the spy was, they also knew that the Barents tap was still secure. Pelton's job and his security clearances simply hadn't stretched that far. As long as he was in the dark, so were the Soviets.

  Pelton pleaded not guilty, and his trial was scheduled for May 1986. But that created another problem. Somehow the Navy and the NSA had to keep the glare of the trial off Parche, away from the Barents, and clear of yet another mission.

  It wasn't hard to persuade a judge to agree to keep the proceedings devoid of any real details. But Bob Woodward and other Washington Post reporters were already digging on their own. They had a cabletapping story ready for the Post's front page.

  Navy and NSA officials were frantic. Seawolf was in the Mediterranean at that moment trying to tap a cable that ran from West Africa to Europe as she sought to help out in a showdown with Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi. Seau,olf was working side by side in the Mediterranean with the NR-1 minisubmarine (though their efforts would not yield any worthwhile information). Not only that, but Parche was going to head back out to the Barents later in the year. She had to. The Soviets were being more aggressive than ever in the Atlantic. They had just sent a cluster of five Victor-class attack subs and for three weeks kept them so close to the East Coast of the United States that tracking them almost used up the Atlantic Fleet's store of sonobuoys.

  An article now could be devastating. CIA Director William Casey threatened to prosecute the Post for revealing intelligence secrets. Reagan personally telephoned the Post's publisher, Katharine Graham, beseeching her not to publish, as priceless secrets were at stake.

  In the end, the Post ran a limited story the day before Pelton's trial began. The article said little more than that Pelton had betrayed a high-tech and long-running submarine operation to intercept Soviet communications in Okhotsk. There was no mention of Halibut, Seawolf, or Parche. Not a word about the Barents or Libya. The trial disclosed no further details, and early in June, Pelton was convicted and given three consecutive life sentences plus ten years.

  Their secret safe, Parche's crew shoved off in early September, with Commander Richard A. Buchanan at the helm. This was the sub's seventh Barents journey, the sixth trip via the Arctic route, and the second trip with Buchanan as her captain. It was a trip that would stand out from all of the rest.

  Pelton's trial had left the crew nervous. By now, they would all had to have been lobotomized not to know that they were about to replicate the very sort of operation Pelton had given away to the Soviets.

  The code name from Pelton's day, "Ivy Bells," was dead. Now there were a series of new codes, including "Manta" for the overall operation and "Acetone" for the tap itself, and even those codes were being changed continuously. The men knew, however, that whatever the NSA called the operation, the Soviets had been given a look at their strategies, at their plans, at how they did business.

  Crew members talked about Pelton and the man they had come to call "Johnny Walker Red," often late into the night. They thought about how much classified information each man on Parche had handled. How many stacks of crypto material could easily have found their way to a photocopying machine if just one of them had the itch. They also talked about how hard the Navy had tried to keep secret from them the details of their own missions. It was galling. Secrecy, the men knew, couldn't be achieved through any terrific security measures, and it couldn't be preserved by trying to keep the guys on the boat in the dark. It could only be maintained because the men themselves found the idea of selling out to the Soviets unthinkable. And it could be lost when just one of them decided that maybe selling out wasn't so unthinkable after all.

  Still, as the boat made her way toward the Barents, the men also had a sense of payback and daring. The Soviets may have had Pelton and Walker, but the United States had Parche. And by now, her crew had the drill down cold.

  The trip through the Arctic went well. Parche was 20 or 30 miles from where she would retrieve the tap pods and plant new ones. She had already charted the corridor, the route she would take closer to Soviet shores. Over the years, various U.S. submarines had played chicken with the sonar buoys the Soviets had set up to pop out of the water and transmit should a sub try to pass. Before Parche arrived at the Barents, the buoys were all mapped out-the ones that worked, the ones that were duds. All she had to do was take a path through the duds, move in a little closer, and bend to the left.

  Then the message came. Hold off. Wait. Don't move. Parche was by now just outside the 12-mile limit. But her path in was now sealed-by presidential order. On September 19, while Parche was still en route, Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze had delivered a letter to Reagan from Gorbachev. The general secretary had written that he wanted to push the arms negotiations along by meeting with Reagan. He gave two choices of locales, and the United States picked Reykjavik, Iceland, a quiet spot halfway between Washington and Moscow.

  The meeting was set for October 11, 1986, a follow-up to the previous year's summit. At that meeting, there had been one sticking point, and that was Star Wars-Gorbachev wanted SDI eliminated. Reagan passionately insisted that SDI was the only way out of the precarious balance built on mutually assured destruction. He believed his lasers in space could forever erase the concept that peace depended on the threat that the United States and the Soviet Union could wipe each other out.

  During that last meeting, discussion had often deteriorated into a shouting match, but in the heat of battle, Reagan and Gorbachev came to like and respect one another. In the end, they also came out with a joint statement saying they wanted to work toward a 50 percent reduction in strategic weapons and other arms cuts.

  This second act being staged in Reykjavik promised to he the most unpred
ictable and remarkable superpower meeting ever. Both sides had agreed that rather than scripting everything in advance, they would just clear space for the two leaders to talk. No wonder there were such high hopes for this summit. No wonder Gorbachev unwittingly halted Parche in her tracks with his letter.

  On board, the sense of history about to happen was lost on the men. They were certain they would be sent in to finish their task. For them, the summit just meant an uncomfortable and possibly dangerous wait.

  "Let's get in, let's get out," one of the men began grumbling over and over to anyone who would listen. After a while, they were all saying it, in one way or another. They were so close to the prize, could almost see it, smell it, but their orders were to pull back, not to touch it.

  It was irritating. It was worse than that. 'There was too much time to think, too much time to listen as one warship after another passed nearby. There was too much time to recognize that the president didn't want to be anywhere around if Parche was caught. The men had always known that what they were doing was illegal and that if Parche were ever found or forced to self-destruct, the United States would deny they had ever been there. It was just that now the message was louder than they wanted to hear.

  A week passed. Then two. Parche was waiting, and by now, so was the rest of the world. October 11 came. Men crammed into Parche's radio room all day, trying to copy the news on the radio circuits, trying to follow what was going on. But neither they nor anyone on shore were allowed to hear the details. That had been the deal. No reporters, no reports, not until it was all over.

  Reagan and Gorbachev were meeting in Hofdi House, an isolated structure on the bleak edge of the North Atlantic. Shultz thought it looked haunted, and Icelanders were convinced that it was. They sat in a small room, Shultz and Shevardnadze, Reagan and Gorbachev, two translators, and two note-takers. There against a single window, looking out onto turbulent and frigid waters that would perhaps ultimately wash over to where Parche sat beneath the Barents, the summit began.