by Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story Of American Submarine Espionage
Other speakers were more moderate but still called for prudence and skepticism when it came to the Soviet Union. William H. J. Manthorpe Jr., then deputy director of Naval Intelligence, posed the question that was quickly becoming the rallying cry of the submarine force: "What will be the intentions of the Soviet leadership of the future? Can we depend on those intentions being benign? The answer, of course, is: No, I would not bet my country's security on it."
Before long, though, something happened that convinced even the most hard-line skeptics that the Soviet Union was no longer the most likely candidate to drag the United States into a war. Almost as if he realized that there was room on center stage for a new villain, Saddam Hussein stepped forward from Iraq and overnight annexed Kuwait. The United States had a new reason to fight, and this time it stood shoulder to shoulder with the Soviet Union, issuing an unprecedented joint statement denouncing the "blatant transgression of basic norms of civilized conduct" and calling for an arms embargo against Iraq. Secretary of State James A. Baker III would later proclaim that this was "The Day the Cold War Ended."
When war finally broke out in the Persian Gulf in January 1991, submarines played only a bit part. Still, the conflict dramatized the need to refocus defense efforts on regional conflicts, and with an eye to ensuring its place in future conflicts, the submarine force highlighted the role it had played against Iraq for all it was worth. The USS Louisville (SSN-724) and the USS Pittsburgh (SSN-720) together had fired a dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles against inland targets in Iraq. Other attack submarines stood guard for cargo ships in the Mediterranean, protecting vast quantities of war supplies. A string of subs from the United States and its allies-Turkey, Greece, Spain, Britain, France, and Italy-were positioned from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Suez Canal.
The war gave the sub force a chance to show its versatility, to show that it could do more than just chase Soviet subs and shadow Soviet ports. It also gave submariners themselves a sense that they could create a new mission-a comforting realization given the fact that any lingering doubts about Soviet intentions were soon to be wiped out by one dramatic event after another. Bush and Gorbachev announced a new deal to cut strategic stockpiles by one-third. Boris Yeltsin rescued Gorbachev from a reactionary coup, signaling the last failed gasp of the Communist hard-liners. And in a richly symbolic move, Bush also grounded the Strategic Air Command bombers that had been on nearconstant alert for thirty-two years.
The Pentagon began rethinking the nation's military strategy. The sub force knew it was going to have to re-create itself-just as it had been forced to do after World War II. It needed to find a new job and new enemies. There was no question that for much of the cold war submarines-missile and attack boats taken together-could stake claim to being the nation's most critical naval weapons. That made sense when the chief enemy had a fleet that was nearly as formidable. But the 1990s were bringing fundamental change, and it was already clear that the submarine was bound to fall from the pantheon. Like the clipper ships in their day, subs had been perfectly suited to their time, and they had so dominated that they defined an epoch.
For its part, the Navy started simply at first, writing new rules in mid-1991 legislating greater distances and caution for U.S. subs trailing Soviet subs. Then the Office of Naval Intelligence recommended that the number of missions off the Soviet coast be cut dramatically. No longer would the U.S. Navy try to maintain "cast-iron" coverage of the largest Soviet naval bases. No longer would one surveillance sub follow in the wake of another to Soviet waters. No longer would they keep constant watch, waiting for something-anything-interesting to happen.
Not even the vaunted special projects subs were sacred any longer. Desperate to update their fleet of spy satellites, the CIA and the Air Force began to eye the hundreds of millions of dollars still being invested in those subs. Because both Russell and Parche were in the shipyard throughout 1991, neither doing any missions, the rival agencies were able to suggest that two special projects boats might be too much of a luxury.
The process of attrition was stopped short by the surprising dissolution of the Soviet Union. On Christmas Day 1991, the Commonwealth of Independent States, a loose federation of republics, formally replaced the Soviet Union. Soon after, reports began coming out of a meeting of five thousand Russian military officers that painted a portrait of confusion, anger, and abject frustration. Members of the now-shattered Soviet Navy yanked the old hammer-and-sickle standards from their ships and began flying the flag of St. Andrew, which had marked Russian ships since the days of Peter the Great. Now U.S. Naval Intelligence desperately wanted to know who would get control of the Soviet missile subs and how they would be deployed under the new regimes.
Renewed surveillance had its price. On February 11, 1992, the USS Baton Rouge (SSN-689) collided with a Russian Sierra-class boat, among the newest and quietest to come out of the Soviet shipyards. Baton Rouge was tracking the Sierra near the 12-mile limit off Murmansk when the American commander lost his contact, which then struck Baton Rouge from below. Neither sub was damaged much, and nobody was hurt. But the incident was embarrassing.
Yeltsin quickly complained, and Baker met with him in Moscow to keep things calm. The next day, in an unprecedented move, the Pentagon publicly announced that the collision had occurred, and the Russian Navy began to complain publicly that the United States was still operating too close to its waters.
In the end, this embarrassment was what accelerated the shift in submarine surveillance away from Russia. The president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, chaired by retired Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, examined the special projects program. Shortly thereafter, Naval Intelligence was told that the board had decided that there was no longer any need for more than one special projects sub and that if the Navy was going to keep tapping underwater cables, then maybe it was time to find some cables in other parts of the world.
U.S. attack subs had already handled reconnaissance off countries like Lebanon and Libya, and in the mid-1980s two old missile subs had been converted to carry SEALs. The USS John Marshall (SSN- 611) had bobbed around in the Mediterranean for two months with fifty SEALs aboard during one crisis in Lebanon in 1989, waiting if needed to rescue hostages or mount a retaliatory strike.
Now as part of the Navy's new "From the Sea" military strategy, subs would ride shotgun for aircraft carriers and cruisers and take orders from task force commanders riding on those vessels. But the submarine force would also continue to lurk unseen near potential arenas of conflict and come up with the intelligence to "prepare the battlefield," before the task forces were ever called in. The term had been borrowed from the Army, but in this case it meant sending subs out two, three, four or more years before any anticipated conflicts to learn more about nations that loomed as potential foes, to determine their weaknesses, and to pave the way for U.S. victories in conflicts that would have fewer casualties because of these undersea efforts.
Iran, for instance, had already taken delivery of the first of three "Kilo" diesel submarines-silent and highly advanced boats built in Russia. A top Iranian admiral had boasted that he intended to use these subs to gain control of the Strait of Hormuz, the entrance to Persian Gulf ports and the starting point for about one-sixth of the world's oil. That was enough to send the USS Topeka (SSN-754) to the Persian Gulf to observe the Kilo's arrival in November 1992. It was typical of the new era of reconnaissance missions.
The new spy missions raised no agonizing debates at the National Security Council or within the White House, which was still approving all sub reconnaissance operations on a monthly basis. Still, there were accusations from Capitol Hill that the sub force was merely inventing enemies to keep itself employed. The Navy's answer was simple: some of the other targets had existed for years, and it was only the collapse of the Soviet Union that had offered the luxury of time and resources to allow subs to do a job they should have been doing all along. The enemies might he comparatively unsophisticated-an Iranian Kilo run
ning on diesel power can't really be compared to the high-speed Akulas the Soviets sent out in the later years of the cold war. But the U.S. Navy would still need to know how the Iranians would operate the Kilos, would still need to find their blind spots. "Can you imagine the embarrassment to the U.S. Navy if the Kilos sank the USS America?" said one high-ranking Navy official. Pausing, he added, "Not on my watch."
The shift to these new missions was well under way when President Bill Clinton took office in early 1993. But as he and his administration laid plans for his first summit with Yeltsin, scheduled for the first week of April, they got hit by what seemed to he an anachronistic and unwelcome blast from the past.
On March 20, the USS Grayling (SSN-646) collided with a Soviet missile sub in the Barents Sea. Grayling had been shadowing the Russian sub 105 miles north of Murmansk, smack in the middle of the Northern Fleet's training range. The Russians claimed that their sub had been moving for more than an hour at a steady speed, course, and depth when Grayling left a huge dent in their starboard how. Nobody was hurt.
The incident was everything the State Department had been worrying about since the final days of Reagan's tenure. Yeltsin was in the midst of a political crisis in Moscow. News that his friends within the United States were still sending submarines tooling about Russia's most sensitive ports and bases wasn't going to boost his popularity.
At first, the Pentagon said Grayling had been trailing one of Russia's newest missile boats, a Delta IV, but the Russians insisted that Grayling had been hot on the trail of a Delta III, a class of subs that dated back to the late 1970s. This provoked more than a few stinging comments from other submariners, all along the lines that the Navy already had so much information on the Delta Ills that "we could build one from the hull up."
Clinton was furious, and so were his aides. In exasperation, one senior administration official complained of the Navy's leaders: "One wonders if they've read the newspapers."
The Russian defense ministry issued an angry statement expressing "great concern." It was one thing to take such risks during the cold war, but now? As Rear Admiral Valery Aleksin, the chief navigator, put it, "We walk on the razor edge. Once, this hunt will end up in a disaster. I am sure today, too, that if such a practice doesn't stop, the disaster is inevitable."
Clinton offered Yeltsin a formal apology and smoothed things over with him at the start of the summit in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he also pledged $1.6 billion in aid to support Yeltsin's reforms. Declaring the collision "regrettable," Clinton said, "I don't want it to ever happen again." He ordered a review of both the incident and the policies "of which the incident happened to be an unintended part."
That last part of Clinton's promise worried the Navy. There needed to be damage control, and fast. Rear Admiral Edward D. Sheafer Jr., who was now the director of Naval Intelligence, along with the captain who coordinated the submarine reconnaissance program, prepared a detailed briefing for top officials, including Clinton's new national security adviser, Anthony Lake, and his deputy, Samuel Berger; Strobe Talbott, the deputy secretary of State; and nearly everybody, it seemed, within the office of Secretary of Defense Les Aspin. The Navy team stressed that submarine spying had indeed changed with the times. Now, only 25 percent of the missions were directed toward Russian waters. The remaining 75 percent had turned to Middle Eastern waters to spy on Iran and enforce the economic embargo against Iraq, to the Adriatic to help seal off Bosnia from Western arms shipments, to the waters off of Haiti to enforce an arms embargo there and to monitor potential threats in the Far East. Finally the submariners marched out their new rallying cry, the one about "preparing the battlefields" around the globe.
It was a briefing as good as any offered up during the cold war, one that showed how quickly the submarine force had reinvented itself. By the time Sheafer and his staff were done, even they were astonished. Here they had thought the Grayling collision might sink their program, and instead, the Naval Intelligence team ended up chortling that the collision "saved our bacon." In their desperation, they did such an impressive job of touting the sub force that several administration officials were practically cheering, saying things such as, "Goddamn, it's a free ocean," and, "There's no prohibition against being outside another country's territorial waters." High administration officials who might never have focused on submarines and submarine spying were impressed that the Navy had changed so much without having to be dragged away from its old foe. The Navy even got the go-ahead to keep watching the Russians, albeit at this greatly reduced pace, as long as the reconnaissance was done more cautiously and judiciously.
Since then, the submarine force has fared relatively well under Clinton. Perhaps his biggest favor has been keeping alive the Seawolf pro gram: Clinton agreed to build three of the mammoth $2.5 billion attack subs rather than halt the program at one, as Bush had tried to do. Clinton said he was doing that to prevent the industrial base that builds submarines from shriveling and dying altogether. There was opposition from normally hawkish Republicans, who described the Seawolf as a cold war relic.
Clinton also okayed a plan to build another new class of attack submarines, one smaller and cheaper than the Seawolf. Quieter and much more versatile than the Los Angeles subs, this new class, known first as "the New Attack Submarine," or NSSN, and now the Virginia class, is designed for the array of new missions in shallow, regional waters. Clinton agrees that the Navy will need new subs after the turn of the century to replace some of the aging Los Angeles vessels. His support has taken some of the sting out of a dramatic downsizing of the force. From a high of ninety-eight in the late 1980s, the number of attack subs had fallen to sixty-six by 1998 and is now expected to dwindle to fifty early in the next century and even further as the Los Angeles subs are retired. The fleet of nuclear missile subs, which are still circling quietly in the oceans, will dwindle to ten to fourteen boats from a onetime high of forty-one.
The Navy is asking Congress for the cash to build the new subs and is arguing that they will be capable of operating not only near Third World countries but also up against Russian shores. The Seawolf is said to be as much as thirty times quieter than the early Los Angelesclass subs that came out in the 1970s, and ten times quieter than even the newest LA-class subs. Both Seawolf and the Virginia class will be especially useful for the new missions closer in to shores and for assisting in conflicts on land. They will carry Tomahawk missiles, be equipped with sonar designed to be especially useful in the shallows, and they will be configured to carry detachments of Navy SEALs and other special forces. The Navy also has been pouring money into creating underwater drones-and even small pilotless aircraft-that could be controlled by these submarines and swim out ahead to look for mines or fly out to do surveillance.
The subs in use now are also being upgraded with new microprocessing technologies to enable them to better communicate a variety of intelligence to commanders of task force battle groups, including email and photographs-even video-taken through their periscopes. This same technology is also likely to help subs with some of the other new missions the Navy has taken on since the end of the cold war. Subs have occasionally tipped the Coast Guard to suspicious trawlers in the Caribbean that have turned out to he carrying shipments of illegal drugs. And subs have been alerting surface ships to freighters suspected of trying to make illicit shipments of arms and other cargo in violation of U.S. embargoes.
Still, the U.S. sub force remains most concerned with countering the threat from other submarines, including new models of both diesel and nuclear boats. Russia has been supplying advanced Kilo subs to Iran and China. Even some Western nations, such as Germany, have been exporting advanced diesel subs to Third World countries. In addition, the Russians continue to view the submarine as the most important vessel in their Navy, and they have kept improving the Akulas, their quietest and most sophisticated nuclear attack subs. (There are still significant flaws in Russian technology. According to Naval Intelligence officials, the l
atest Akulas are very quiet below 10 knots, but they develop audible knocks at speeds above that and become easy to detect.) The Russians also have started to build an even more advanced replacement, known as the Severodvinsk class, which some U.S. officials fear could he quieter than the improved Los Angeles subs. When and if a proposed START II treaty is finally ratified by the Russian Durna, the bulk of Russian nuclear might will shift to the sea. As long as Russia still has the world's second most powerful sub force-as long as "The Bear Still Swims," as Navy briefers like to say-it needs to be watched, though now it has little money to send its subs to sea.
Clinton has agreed to continue the limited surveillance operations off of Russia, and his approvals have resulted in a few lonely sentinels lurking off Vladivostok and Murmansk, at least at times when the Navy has reason to believe the Russians might be engaging in an exercise or testing new equipment. It also is with Clinton's nod that the special projects spy program has continued, although its focus has shifted away from Russia. Government officials say that one of the special projects subs-probably Russell in 1992-went back to the Barents to retrieve the tap pods after the Soviet Union collapsed. Russell went cable tapping in other parts of the world before she was retired in mid-1993. That's when Parche came back from her long overhaul, earning two more Presidential Unit Citations, in 1993 and 1994, and a string of Navy Unit Commendations. All told, Parche has now won at least seven PUCs, by far the most of any ship in Navy his tory. Details of exactly where Parche is going now have been tightly held, even more so than any of her cold war efforts, but those awards never would have been given had Parche not continued to pioneer new and dangerous missions. She can still tap cables, and since her refit, she can also retrieve military hardware off the ocean floor.