by Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story Of American Submarine Espionage
As a Soviet sub passed over Sturgeon (SSN-637) in the Barents Sea the men on board could hear crunching. The Soviet boat had scraped Sturgeon from above and to the left, pulling off metal plates above the conning tower.
June 1970: USS Tautog
In one of the most violent collisions of the cold war, the Tautog (SSN- 639) was rammed by the Soviet Echo II submarine Black Lila off Petropavlovsk. President Nixon was briefed that taped sonar sounds indicated the Soviet sub had sunk, though now her captain has come forward to say that his sub survived (see chapter 7).
1970: USS Dace
After Dace (SSN-607) hit something that rolled her to one side, her men were almost certain they had humped a Soviet submarine in the Mediterranean. Indeed, Naval Intelligence later learned that a Soviet sub pulled into a port soon afterward with the kind of damage that would have been expected from an impact with another sub.
March 1971: Unidentified Sub
On March 31, 1971, another Holystone sub collided with a Soviet boat, according to Hersh's May 1975 story in the New York Times. Hersh cited a memo addressed to CIA Director Richard M. Helms that put the collision seventeen nautical miles off the Soviet coast.
Late 1971 or Early 1972: USS Puffer
The Puffer (SSN-652) collided with a Soviet diesel sub in waters near Petropavlovsk when the Soviet boat took an unexpected dive just as Puffer was making one last surveillance pass. Both subs were moving at slow speed, and crewmen on Puffer say it was almost as if the Soviet boat sank on top of them and bumped.
May 1974: USS Pintado
Pintado (SSN-672) collided with a Soviet sub inside Soviet waters in the approaches to Petropavlovsk, according to a story in the San Diego Evening Tribune in July 1975. Both subs were about two hundred feet deep at impact. Crewmen said the collision smashed much of Pintado's detection sonar, jammed a torpedo tube hatch, and damaged a diving control fin. The Soviet sub, a Yankee-class ballistic missile boat, surfaced soon after the crash. The crewmen said that they believed Pintado had gone close to the Soviet harbor to check Soviet undersea defense systems. After the collision, Pintado raced from the scene.
November 3, 1974: USS James Madison
The Madison (SSBN-627) was leaving the U.S. submarine base at Holy Loch, Scotland, when she collided with a Soviet attack sub in the North Sea, according to reports by the columnist Jack Anderson and the Norwich (Connecticut) Bulletin in 1975. Madison dove onto the Soviet boat, which was shrouded by the noise of her baffles. One former Madison crew member noted that the Soviet sub was probably one of the Victor class.
Late 1981: HMS Sceptre of Great Britain's Royal Navy
This nuclear-powered British attack submarine collided with a Soviet nuclear sub that she was trailing in northern waters close to the Arctic, according to reports a decade later in the British media. One officer said the Sceptre had lost contact with the Soviet boat for as long as thirty minutes before his boat shook. "There was a huge noise," he said, adding, "Everybody went white."
October 1986: USS Augusta
In an especially embarrassing moment, the Augusta (SSN-710) bumped into a Soviet missile sub in the Atlantic while testing a new, highly computerized sonar system that had promised to make it easier to detect other vessels. The accident happened a few days after a Soviet Yankeeclass missile sub caught fire and sank off Bermuda, owing to problems with one of its missile tubes. But contrary to the story told in Hostile Waters, a 1997 Home Box Office movie, Augusta crew members and Naval Intelligence officials say Augusta did not hit the Yankee. Instead, the Augusta collided with a Delta I-class sub. The lingering confusion is the ultimate irony for Augusta's captain, who had once been so confident of his own abilities that he tacked a plaque on his stateroom door endowing himself with the lofty title "Augusta Caesar."
December 24, 1986: HMS Splendid of Great Britain's Royal Navy
According to Russian Navy officials, the Splendid was surveying a Soviet sub in the Northern Fleet's training range in the Barents Sea when the Soviets noticed and tried to get away. The Russians say that at that point commanders of both subs made maneuvering mistakes, and the Soviet submarine brushed against the Splendid, snagging its towed sonar array. The Soviet sub, possibly one of the huge Typhoon missile boats, made her way back to base, still entwined in the array.
February 11, 1992: USS Baton Rouge
Baton Rouge (SSN-689) collided with a Russian Sierra-class sub near Murmansk. In an unprecedented move, and in response to Yeltsin's complaints, the Pentagon publicly announced that the collision had occurred (see chapter 12).
March 20, 1993: USS Grayling
Grayling (SSN-646) collided with a Russian Delta III missile sub in the Barents Sea. Nobody was hurt, but Clinton was furious that the Navy was still taking such risks (see chapter 12).
Appendix B
FROM THE SOVIET SIDE
The U.S. Navy spent decades spying on Soviet submarines but never really knew much about what went on inside those boats, who their men were, or what they were going through. Periodically, word would come of horrible radiation accidents. The Pentagon was willing enough to share those incidents with the American public, along with constant and seemingly contradictory warnings about how big and dangerous the Soviet sub fleet was becoming. Now, with the end of the cold war, the Russian Navy has opened up and has been willing to offer some of the details about the tense days back when the Soviet Navy scrambled to catch up to the Americans. Former Soviet submariners feel free to say what they never could before-that their commands put more emphasis on numbers and deadlines than on submarine safety. As a result, the Soviets suffered some of the most horrific accidents of the cold war.
A Lethal Beginning
In the early stages of the arms race in the mid-1950s, Khrushchev called for the Soviet Union "to catch up with and pass America." And so a fleet of nuclear submarines was designed and constructed, all in a hurry, all haphazardly. The work was so bad that in 1959 Commander Vladimir N. Chernavin (who would ultimately succeed Admiral Gorshkov as commander in chief of the Soviet Navy) refused to take one of the first Soviet nuclear attack submarines out of the yard for her first sea trials. He stood firm when his command was threatened, and he stood firm until his sub was repaired.
While Chernavin stood his ground, another submarine, the K-19, had already been sent to sea with the swing of a champagne bottle. That the bottle failed to break was one of those omens that every submariner, no matter what his rank, rate, or nationality, knew to be omi nous. It was an inauspicious beginning for the first Soviet nuclearpowered submarine to carry ballistic missiles.
In the summer of 1961, K-19 was setting out for exercises in the North Atlantic, exercises code-named "Arctic Circle." She was to play the role of an American sub, hide beneath the surface, and make her way through Soviet antisubmarine forces. After that she was going to leave the rest of the fleet and find a polyi va, a break in the ice. She would surface at the edge of the Arctic and conduct a practice launch of a ballistic missile.
The rest of the fleet stayed behind to continue their exercises as K-19 broke away to make a submerged transit through the Norwegian Sea. The waters were calm. There were no storms. Her crew was already counting down to the end of this cruise and their homecoming.
On July 4, at 4:15 in the morning, just as the sub reached a point about one hundred miles off of Jan Mayen, the small Norwegian island above Iceland, K-19's radiation detection equipment came to life. A reactor scrammed, shutting down. The fuel rods in her nuclear core continued to heat. The primary cooling circuit had failed. A pipe had burst, pumps had broken, leaving nothing to control the chain reaction, nothing to stop the rods from heating up, nothing to prevent them from getting so hot that they would melt through the reactor itself. As the fuel rods climbed past one thousand degrees, the paint began burning on the reactor's outer plating. There should have been a backup cooling system, something to stop catastrophe. But K-19 was an early design, a first attempt.
Captain Yuri Pose
tiev gave the order to surface. He tried to radio for help, but communications had failed. Meanwhile, engineers on board began desperately trying to improvise a new cooling system from the sub's drinking water reserves. They came up with a desperate plan. Several men were going to have to walk into the now highly radioactive reactor compartment and climb inside "the Boa's Mouth."
Lieutenant Boris Korchilov was on his first submarine cruise, and he was the first to volunteer. Others from the reactor team followed. These men, still boys really, made their way into the compartment. There they stood, a team of eight, welding pipes, connecting them to pumps and valves. They remained in the compartment for two hours, braving the heat and the invisible particles that shot through their bodies. Each received one hundred times the lethal dose of radiation.
Ivan Kulakov, a twenty-two-year-old chief petty officer, watched as they came out of the compartment, each man barely able to move, unable to speak, their faces changed beyond recognition. He watched horrified as the first team's efforts failed. As the cooling pumps came apart, it became clear that someone had to jury-rig the jury-rig. Kulakov volunteered. He was certain that he could do the work fastest. And he was just as certain that he was going to die trying.
Kulakov's mind played back the faces of those first eight men, a running loop that wouldn't stop as he walked through a lake of radioactive water, ankle deep. As the water soaked through his leather shoes, as the radiation began to burn his feet, he thought he saw the walls and water shine, perhaps glow.
His hands were burned as he opened valves to draw steam from the reactor. He could barely see. He could barely breathe. All he could do was pray that he could finish, make his way out without falling headlong into the horrible, painful, radioactive lake that was already destroying his feet.
Finally, he did get out, only to watch another valve fail, only to know he had to go back in. He had already taken on five times the lethal dose of radiation. Outside the compartment were the living dead. Back inside, he was more certain than ever that he was one of them.
Then, just as the fuel rods reached 1,470 degrees, the pipes held, the valves held. The makeshift cooling system began to do its work. Kulakov stumbled out of the boa's mouth, and Captain Posetiev turned K-19 around in a run toward the fleet they had left still conducting exercises a lifetime ago, at least eight men's lifetimes ago. He knew he couldn't try for home. His entire crew would be fatally irradiated if he didn't get them off the sub fast.
The team of eight, those first men into the compartment during the crisis, died before the week was out. They were buried in lead coffins.
Posetiev lingered longer: three weeks. Other crewmen who had come too close to the outer door of the reactor compartment lasted a month, some a little longer, before they too succumbed. Kulakov, whose feet and hands were irreparably burned, managed to survive with transfusions and bone marrow transplants. He would always be crippled.
Even with all this, Moscow wasn't willing to let go of one of its few nuclear subs. Khrushchev was still racing the Americans. Men would one day be sent back into K-19, back into that reactor compartment. Only now, K-19 would bear a new name. She would be known as the Hiroshima.
The Missile That Was Never Launched
In 1962 the Soviet Navy wanted very much to appease Khrushchev, who wanted very much to see a nuclear submarine launch a ballistic missile from underwater. His naval leaders came forward with a sub that they told him would give him just what he demanded, another success to herald in the Krasnaya Zvezda newspaper.
Khrushchev witnessed just such a test and was so delighted that he declared a reward for a perfect missile firing to the crew of the nuclear sub on display, the K-3, which had also just made a successful transit to the North Pole. Nobody would ever dare tell him he had just offered up an award for a clever illusion.
The Soviet Navy was still having too many problems getting its nukes to shoot, much less shoot straight, to risk yet another failure with Khrushchev looking on. So, instead of letting K-3 even make the attempt, commanders strategically positioned a Golf diesel sub near the nuke. Hidden and in anonymity, it was the diesel boat that made the perfect shot.
And so Soviet naval history marched on, intermingling the heroic, the tragic, and the comic.
The Race to the Mediterranean
It was June 1967, the eve of the Arab-Israeli War, and the K-131 had been sent to the Adriatic Sea, outside the Mediterranean, to await orders from command. Those orders came as the first shots were fired. Captain Vadim Kulinchenko was given fifteen hours to bring his sub in position to aim nuclear missiles at Tel Aviv.
The captain was flabbergasted. He knew he didn't want to fire nuclear weapons at Israel, but he also knew he wouldn't have to. In order to make it from the Adriatic to the Mediterranean, in order to race past Greece, past Crete, and arrive within reach of Israel's coast, K-131 would have to somehow reach speeds of fifty-seven knots. Her normal transit speed was twenty knots.
He had to make a show of trying, but when the war ended six days later, Kulinchenko, K-131, and her nuclear weapons were still in transit. Eventually he met up with his battle group in the Med, forty surface ships and ten diesel subs from the Black Sea fleet. The K-131 didn't belong with this group, she wasn't from the Black Sea. But for their show of force in the Med, the Soviets wanted one of their new Northern Fleet nuclear submarines. It was a beginning. Soon the Med would be the new battleground in the submarine wars.
For now, however, most of the Soviet Navy had little idea of what nuclear subs couldn't do, or for that matter, what they could. Indeed, before the war, when K-131 was on her way to the Adriatic, a supply ship helpfully offered fuel and water-although, the supply ship noted, those were two commodities it was running low on.
"We have fresh water, as much as you like," came the answer from the submarine. "We've just cooked it and are ready to give it to you." The Black Sea fleet didn't have nuclear subs, and the astonished supply crew had no idea that water and fuel were two of the things any nuclear boat can produce for itself.
Disaster Strikes Again
One of the next Soviet subs to travel to the Mediterranean was the K3, the same sub that Khrushchev had rewarded for the nonexistent missile launch. Only this time, one of her officers, Lev Kamorkin, had a had feeling.
Two days before embarking from a port in the Barents, he walked with his five-year-old daughter and a friend, who recalls him confiding: "I don't know why, but I don't want at all to go to this voyage."
The feeling was so strong, the urge not to leave so powerful, that Kamorkin swore that this would be his very last trip on a submarine. Sadly for the little girl who listened as her father talked of his misgivings, Kamorkin was right.
On September 8, 1967, at 1:52 A.M., a fire broke out in one of K-3's oxygen generators. She was returning from that run to the Mediterranean and was near home, just off the North Cape of Norway, just about where Cochino had suffered her first explosion.
Showing much of the honor of Cochino's Rafael C. Benitez, Kamorkin raced to prevent the fires from blowing the torpedoes and sinking his boat. He ordered everyone out of the weapons compartment and stayed behind to let the ocean in and flood the room. As he watched the waters rise to cover the torpedoes, he knew that he had engineered his own death. He drowned alongside the weapons.
He would never know that forty of the men he had tried so valiantly to save would succumb to carbon monoxide poisoning and die moments after he did.
The Hiroshima Makes a Final Appearance
The sub already known as Hiroshima continued to cause problems for the Soviet sub command. In November 1969, she ran into the USS Cato with a blow that forced her into a steep bow-first dive, sending the huge volume of Navigational Astronomy tumbling down off a bookshelf and onto Captain Valentin Anatolievich Shabanov, who had been dozing. The collision also knocked out the sub's forward sonar and crushed the doors of her torpedo tubes.
Still, Hiroshima continued to operate long enough for one fin
al disaster. In 1972 fire broke out on the sub when she was about six hundred miles northeast of Newfoundland. This time, twenty-six officers and crewmen were killed. There were twelve others who expected to die, men who were entombed inside the sub's stern compartment, unable to make it through the gassed portions of the sub. They stayed there for twenty-three days until Hiroshima limped home.
That those twelve men lived is the only happy ending ever written for Hiroshima. She is remembered and memorialized as the submarine that earned her name for fire, radiation, and death.
Trawlers and Spies
The Soviets added a twist to the at-sea espionage routine by supplementing their fleets of subs with surface trawlers (specially equipped to eavesdrop), known as AGIs. There was a certain genius in this since it was the cheapest and easiest way for the Soviet Union to post a sentry off all the major U.S. bases, both here and abroad. U.S. missile boats went to great lengths to avoid these trawlers. One sub even grounded in the late 1960s while trying to keep from being detected by an AGI lurking off of Holy Loch, Scotland.
Mostly, the trawlers just sat there, but sometimes they were downright brazen. That was the case in 1979 when the crew of one trawler operating near Guam reached out and grabbed a torpedo fired in a practice round by a U.S. missile sub USS Sam Houston (SSBN-704). The trawler just rushed up, made the snatch, then began heading in a slow crawl back to the Soviet Union. Operational commanders were dumbstruck. They were also at a loss at just what to do. After some debate, they decided that sometimes there is no alternative to sending an obvious message, a show of military force to make sure no other Soviet vessel ever tried anything this audacious again.