When the multimillion-dollar Ocean Simulation Facility opened in 1975, it gave the Navy a state-of-the-art chamber of its own—in recent years it had had to borrow others, like Taylor’s Hydrospace Research Center, for some deep experimental dives. The facility’s centerpiece was an egg-shaped chamber three stories tall that could hold up to 55,000 gallons of water, like a massive wet pot, and could be pressurized to simulate ocean depths down to 2,250 feet. That was fifty feet deeper than the Taylor chambers and a depth that saturation divers were only just beginning to approach. The OSF was installed in a cavernous building a stone’s throw from Alligator Bayou, where Sealab I was first lowered into the water.
The investment in the OSF showed the Navy could be as serious as the offshore industry about staying in the business of cracking depth barriers. The Navy had also developed setups that were similar to those used by the offshore industry, such as portable saturation systems that could be placed on any ship. Two new submarine rescue ships, the Pigeon and the Ortolan, were equipped with a bell and chamber for saturation divers. But Bond still believed that sea floor habitats should be a Navy priority, and that the Navy was best equipped to handle their continued development, even if civilian agencies and partnerships might eventually take up the call, or entrepreneurs like Tap Pryor. The Navy had at least turned the Elk River, the Sealab III support ship, into a saturation diving school, and Bond still had hopes of reviving the Sealab III habitat itself, even as he worried that it was in danger of being scrapped.
In the meantime, with his retirement date approaching, Papa Topside got one more chance to watch over a habitat. Toward the end of 1975, the year the Ocean Simulation Facility opened, Bond was loaned to NOAA as senior medical officer for a multinational project bulkily called FISSHH, for First International Saturation Study of Herring and Hydroacoustics. Here was an arcane application of saturation diving and undersea living that was largely scientific, not commercial or military, the kind of civilian project showcased during Sealab, like the weather, current, and plankton studies. During FISSHH divers living in a habitat planned to study the mating habits of herring along with issues related to sound transmission in water. They would have ample time to observe schools of herring, much as bird watchers might study birds.
The FISSHH project was another product of partnerships, beginning with its German-built habitat called Helgoland. A Sealab-style cylinder built in the 1960s, Helgoland had been refined several times since its first test at seventy-five feet in the North Sea, about a mile from its namesake island in July 1969—the month of the Apollo 11 moon landing. A few months later oil was discovered in the North Sea. The German habitat was transported to American waters on a Polish factory ship and the sea floor study brought together teams of West German and American aquanauts, along with several dozen topside participants from both countries, including Captain Bond and a few former Sealab aquanauts. There were also to be observers from Poland and the Soviet Union, a collaboration like the rendezvous that summer of American and Russian spacecraft that showed how science could occasionally transcend Cold War politics.
The study, Helgoland’s deepest trial, got under way in the fall of 1975, about eight miles east of Rockport, Massachusetts. At a depth of just over one hundred feet it was hardly barrier-breaking, and no costly helium had to be added to the breathing mix. Five teams of four aquanauts were lined up to live in the lab for two weeks each, but almost from the start Helgoland was plagued by rough weather and equipment failures—a hot-water heater went on the fritz, one section of the habitat sprang a minor leak, and the entire cylinder swayed back and forth with each passing swell, a Rockin’ Ritz to rival the old Tiltin’ Hilton. There were struggles with oxygen levels creeping too high, posing a toxic threat. On top of that, it turned out that the herring were spawning too far from Helgoland to be readily observed—an inadvertent argument for mobile habitats like Argyronète. In the end only two teams were able to complete their missions.
Helgoland was designed so that aquanauts could decompress on the bottom, inside a sealed-off section of the habitat, and then make their way to the surface through the water, following a line that ran up to a support buoy from which they could be picked up by boat. Two aquanauts had just safely surfaced on a stormy September day, but a third, Joachim Wendler, was apparently hampered by gear he carried with him as he made his ascent through the roiling Atlantic. The young but experienced German aquanaut must have taken a deep breath at a fateful moment. Bond later theorized that a passing swell could then have lifted him ten feet or more, and with that sudden change in pressure deadly bubbles forced their way from his lungs into his circulatory system. He would suffer a case of gas embolism, like someone making a submarine escape who failed to properly blow and go as they rose through the water column. In circumstances similar to those that almost killed Charlie Aquadro early in Bond’s Navy career, Wendler died.
Despite the death of an aquanaut, the FISSHH program was allowed to continue, however fitfully. When it was over, Captain Bond noted that the project had as many close calls as he could recall in a similar span of time, and the experience gave him no shortage of material for his habitual writings. Bond still had at least one other diving project in store. It involved the recovery of millions of dollars’ worth of precious metals and artifacts from the Awa Maru, a Japanese ship sunk in the East China Sea during World War II. Bond’s friend Bill Bunton, a former Sealab II aquanaut, had been engaged for some time in delicate negotiations with the Chinese to enter into a joint salvage venture. Bunton had recruited Bond, Scott Carpenter, and Jon Lindbergh to take part, but the ambitious plans fell through.
Over the years George Bond had often returned to Bat Cave to relax at his old clapboard cabin retreat. In retirement he would have a lot more time to spend there, pondering life and literature, drinking in the solitude and a favorite bourbon. He liked to sleep on an old Army cot on the little back porch, just a few paces from a roaring, isolated rocky bend in the Broad River. Sleeping under the stars on that old cot had been his custom since the days when he brought his kids to the cabin, bouncing over a couple of rutty miles of rocks and dirt in his jeep. Now, at a table near the stone fireplace, Bond worked on several books, including one about saturation diving, to be called Tomorrow the Seas. There was one important chapter, however, that George Bond could not write. No one really could, because by the time of Sealab III the Navy had quietly altered the undersea program’s primary purpose. Instead of a single-minded quest to live in the sea, Sealab became the ideal cover story for the Navy’s secret preparations to send saturation divers to the front lines of the Cold War. As it turned out, Berry Cannon’s accidental death added to the cover. Sealab III could be halted, publicly perceived as a failure, and allowed to fade away. Even if Papa Topside had known the Navy’s secret, he would not have been allowed to reveal it.
17
THE PROJECTS
Only as Sealab III reached its premature end were certain aquanauts and support personnel informed that they would remain with the Deep Submergence Systems Project Technical Office, the DSSPTO, to work on a highly classified mission. From its inception, unbeknownst to all but a few, Sealab III was intended as a credible front for mission preparations, much as the famous, and later infamous, Hughes Glomar Explorer was masquerading as a massive civilian mining ship but was secretly being readied for a risky Central Intelligence Agency–led mission to raise a sunken Russian submarine from the Pacific floor, more than a thousand miles from Hawaii. Sealab III appeared to be an unabashedly public quest to live in the sea, with an international cast that included British, Canadian, and Australian aquanauts and even Philippe Cousteau, son of the celebrity diver. Planned experiments like the one to transplant dozens of Atlantic lobsters into deep Pacific waters could have produced real results, but they also provided a further smoke screen for a top secret program. A specially outfitted Navy submarine was going to be sent on a clandestine mission to the Siberian coast, where saturation divers could slip out
of the sub to retrieve the remains of Russian test missiles from the sea floor.
Commander Jack Tomsky was among the few higher-ups who knew that “the projects,” as the secret missions were discreetly called, were to be the true beneficiary of the methods and equipment developed for Sealab III and for saturation dives to six hundred feet or more. Tomsky oversaw the projects from the time he was brought in to head Sealab III until his planned retirement in mid-1969, after the end of Sealab and his thirty-year naval career. He was soon called back to duty, a rarity for retired officers, especially for one of Commander Tomsky’s modest rank. But the Navy wanted him to continue working on the projects, and for Tomsky there was a redemptive quality in this final role. It gave him a more satisfactory coda to his long career than the harsh words he received from the board of investigation for the failure of Sealab III. Captain Bond, the father of saturation diving, would not be told about his aquanauts’ new assignment with Submarine Development Group One, based at the same Ballast Point location in San Diego as DSSPTO, which Captain Mazzone had run until a replacement was brought in after Sealab III.
About a dozen divers and support personnel were just getting up to speed on the projects in the wake of Sealab III. The pieces began to fall into place when they paid their first visits to Mare Island Naval Shipyard, across the bay from San Francisco. Inside one of the buildings they were shown what, at first glance, appeared to be a cigar-shaped midget submarine, about fifty feet long, just a bit longer than Sealab I. It looked like a Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicle, the kind developed in response to the 1963 loss of the Thresher. A DSRV was essentially a submersible, lightweight and compact enough to be taken at a moment’s notice by air, land, or sea to the site of a disabled submarine. The mini-sub was designed to piggyback on a much larger mother submarine. In the vicinity of a downed submarine, a DSRV’s four-man crew could lift off and position their vessel so that the hatch in its underbelly could mate with a downed submarine’s escape hatch. The DSRV would then be able to pick up two dozen stranded sailors at a time and deliver them to the waiting mother sub. It needed no diver assistance and could reach depths down to five thousand feet—major advances over the tethered McCann Rescue Chamber of the 1930s, which was still in use.
Two DSRVs were indeed in the works but this vessel at Mare Island was not one of them. It looked like one from the outside, but on the inside it was a self-contained saturation diving system—like a mini-Sealab habitat, decompression chamber, and topside control station all rolled into one. The former Sealab crew members were able to look it over and offer suggestions before everything was finished and readied for training missions. Part of the need to disguise this mini-habitat was that, like a real DSRV, it would be mounted to ride piggyback at the stern of a submarine—in plain view of the Russians and anyone else who happened to see it. Tourists on the Golden Gate Bridge, for example, might be curious about the sight of a submarine cruising along the surface, headed out to sea with an unusual mini-sub on its back. The words “U.S. Navy DSRV Simulator” were painted in block letters on the side to bolster the Glomar-style cover story, which went something like this: The simulator was a stand-in for a real DSRV so that its mother submarine, the specially modified USS Halibut, could be sea-tested while carrying the added bulk of one of the forthcoming mini-subs.
Unlike a mobile DSRV, the simulator was permanently affixed to the top of the Halibut. The faux rear propeller was just part of the mock-DSRV’s disguise. Inside the hull were four main compartments, each roughly the same size, walled off from one another by bulkheads with hatches that could be opened and sealed shut. The compartment at the tail end was a diving station about the size of a Personnel Transfer Capsule, with hundreds of feet of umbilical hoses bundled up inside. And like a PTC the compartment had a hatch in the floor that opened to the sea. The next compartment forward contained tight quarters for four saturation divers. Besides the two bunks against each wall and the narrow passage between them, there wasn’t room for much else—a toilet, a sink, some pipes and valves, all the comforts of a pressurized prison cell and no room for interpersonal conflict. The divers’ meals would be prepared on the submarine and passed into the living quarters through a small medical lock in the next bulkhead forward, which separated the living quarters from the equally cramped control room. In the control room a couple of support crew members could work the valves and monitor the gauges of the saturation system, much as Bond, Mazzone, and others did during Genesis and Sealab.
The control room was reached by a hole in its floor, where a ladder came up through a short trunk, at about the midpoint of the simulator’s underbelly. The trunk was affixed to the top of the mother submarine. The supposed simulator’s most forward compartment was packed with gas storage tanks and the mechanisms for creating a high-pressure artificial atmosphere in the living quarters. When it came time for a diving mission, the proper mix of breathing gases was shot into the dive station, at the simulator’s tail end, to raise the pressure so that the saturated divers could open the hatch door separating their living quarters from the dive station. Once inside the dry, pressurized dive station, they could don hot-water suits and the latest incarnation of the deep-water breathing rigs developed during Sealab III, which were not so different from those in commercial use. The dark water outside stopped at the hatch in the floor, forming a liquid looking glass.
Divers selected for the projects would learn to use this novel system during test runs, including some just outside San Francisco Bay, where there were depths similar to those they would encounter on missions planned for the other side of the world. Their mother submarine, the Halibut, also known as the “flat fish,” would stealthily take them to the desolate Sea of Okhotsk in Russia’s Far East. During the winter months of 1971 and 1972—as Bond was finding new projects after Sealab III, Cousteau struggled to finance his mobile Argyronète habitat, and not long before Sea-Link entombed Ed Link’s son—the USS Halibut arrived at Okhotsk. All four divers then opened a new, secret chapter in military diving.
Once the submarine hovered over the seabed, carefully anchored into place, the divers’ work began. Upon dropping through the hatch of their mini-habitat, they landed on top of the Halibut, shuffled a few paces, and then jumped over the side of the hull for a slow-motion fall from the equivalent height of a three-story building, with an umbilical trailing precariously behind. The precise depth, like everything else about this first mission, was classified, although it was likely in the range of four hundred feet, similar to the depths at which some commercial saturation divers were beginning to work, especially in the North Sea.
The collection process began with the lowering of a “gondola”—a huge tray built in to the belly of their mother submarine. In darkness, with their mother ship hovering nearby, the divers swam around looking for their quarry like determined revelers on a midnight treasure hunt. They might find fragments they could carry themselves, but when they needed to reel in a big carcass of a weapon, the spy divers had at their disposal winches and other gear that was packed into the gondola. They used methods not so different from those of their commercial diving counterparts on jobs that could take hours and had physical and technical difficulties akin to wrangling with pipelines in the oil fields. The main difference was that out in the Sea of Okhotsk any mistake, accident, or equipment malfunction could result in more than just injury, or even the death of a diver. If the Soviet government discovered Halibut divers poking around in sovereign territory, the United States could find itself saddled with an undersea corollary to the capture of Francis Gary Powers, the U-2 spy pilot shot down over Russia in 1960.
Despite the extraordinary circumstances and high stakes, there were some lighthearted moments, like the time the divers spotted an enormous crab on the bottom. It was probably a king crab, about the size of a trash can lid, with menacing claws to match. A somewhat capricious, helium-spiked challenge was issued to grab and capture the impressive crustacean, and one of the divers somehow managed to s
hepherd it into the submarine, where it was boiled in the galley and turned into a memorable meal. So for a moment there, at the bottom of the Sea of Okhotsk, it felt like the more free-spirited early days of Sealab, with time for the occasional prank or some impromptu local cuisine, like Bob Sheats’s plankton soup.
In a matter of months, another diving team returned to Okhotsk, this time with a goal even more ambitious than collecting missile parts—so ambitious, in fact, it seemed like a plan conceived in George Bond’s journals. This one was dreamed up, almost literally, in the Pentagon by Captain James Bradley, the head of undersea warfare at the Office of Naval Intelligence. Bradley had a hunch that the United States could strike the intelligence equivalent of North Sea oil by having the Halibut locate submerged Soviet communication cables linking the submarine base at Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula with the mainland several hundred miles to the west. These lines, Bradley believed, were likely to carry a steady flow of strategic conversations. Once the undersea cables were found, saturation divers could do the necessary work of tapping them with electronic surveillance devices. On board the submarine, a half-dozen personnel from the National Security Agency, headquarters of America’s electronic eavesdroppers, could listen in, and all the intercepted telephone conversations could be recorded so NSA analysts could parse them back in the United States.
The first cable-tapping device worked by induction, so there was no splicing required that might cause disturbances in the line and arouse suspicions. The tap was about the size of a suitcase, and could record a few days’ worth of communications at a time. The Halibut waited nearby, its divers living in their saturation cell, awaiting their next foray into the sea. The NSA eavesdroppers on board soon recognized that Bradley’s hunch was right. Information from the taps did indeed flow like oil from a well, offering valuable insights into the minds of Soviet military planners. As a bonus, many conversations turned out not to be encrypted, probably because the Soviets assumed that hardwired undersea cables—unlike fickle airwaves—were not vulnerable to taps, especially cables close to their own, isolated shores.
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