In order to record for months or even a year at a time, Bradley and his intelligence staff turned to Bell Laboratories, whose engineers came up with a higher-capacity recording pod that also worked by induction and was far larger than the first pods. It resembled a twenty-foot section of pipe, two or three feet in diameter, and was crammed full of electronics that could pick up frequencies from dozens of lines within a fist-sized cable. Weighing about six tons, it made the divers’ job of getting it from submarine to muck-shrouded cable as tricky as lining up and welding two ends of an oil field pipeline.
A handful of newspaper articles and books over the years shed specks of light on the projects, most notably the watershed book about American submarine espionage, Blind Man’s Bluff, published more than a decade ago. Soon thereafter came a memoir by John Craven, a chief scientist in the Navy’s Special Projects Office. Craven, as head of the Deep Submergence Systems Project, had hired Jack Tomsky to lead Sealab III and simultaneously prepare for the intelligence projects. Within a couple of years Craven relinquished his DSSP post to focus on Halibut and its outfitting for spy missions. His insider’s account acknowledged that secret saturation dives took place, as did United States Navy Diver: Performance Under Pressure by Mark V. Lonsdale, a former commercial saturation diver and an expert on military diving and special operations. His history of Navy diving was published in 2005 with official blessings. There was even a History Channel documentary based on Blind Man’s Bluff.
But almost four decades after the first Halibut foray into the Sea of Okhotsk, and twenty years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, virtually everything about those early missions, including the names of the divers and any details about the dicey work they did for their country, remains classified. The Navy rejected two recent requests and two subsequent appeals for information about the projects made under the Freedom of Information Act. A third FOIA request, made in September 2010, went unanswered. The saturation dives and the American cable-tapping coups might seem historical, especially in the age of WikiLeaks, but despite the passage of time and what is known from a number of previously published accounts, the Navy steadfastly claims that the release of any relevant information, even from the early 1970s, is a matter of national security. So it is that saturation divers who carried out these secret missions feel bound by their long-standing oaths of silence and, to this day, will say little if anything about the history they made, and how they made it.
The trailblazing Halibut missions, initially code-named “Ivy Bells,” continued through the mid-1970s. When the Halibut was removed from service, the cable-tapping missions were taken over by other divers and other submarines—first the Seawolf, and in the late 1970s the Parche. In the early 1980s the Soviets learned of the Okhotsk taps but the United States did not know how until a Soviet defector put U.S. officials onto the trail of a low-level National Security Agency employee, Ronald W. Pelton, whose tips to the Soviets included information about the prized Okhotsk taps. Pelton was arrested in late 1985, convicted of selling intelligence secrets to the Soviet Union, and given three consecutive life sentences, plus ten years. In the meantime, the Russians were able to pluck two recording pods from the sea floor. They put photographs of one, along with some of the data-recording innards, on display in a Moscow museum, but there was never an international uproar over the missions.
Missions to the Sea of Okhotsk did taper off, but in 1979 Parche placed a first tap on cables in the more heavily trafficked, and thus more treacherous Barents Sea, and others followed. Saturation divers had to work at greater depths there than in Okhotsk—five hundred and even six hundred feet, the onetime goal of Sealab III. The missions paid off by providing a significant reading of Soviet military minds. One of the major revelations gleaned from the taps, in the mid-1980s, was that Soviet forces were not designed for a first nuclear strike from the sea and were not preparing to launch one—a significant relief to Pentagon war planners, and information that may have made the world a safer place.
Intelligence of this caliber was deemed worth the substantial risk that came with each cable-tapping mission—the risk to the nuclear submarine itself, to its crew of about 150, to the divers, and to international relations. A plan to run a cable to shore and open a conduit for real-time taps, possibly between the Barents and Greenland, was ultimately deemed too expensive. But periodic taps continued in the late 1980s and early 1990s by the Richard B. Russell until it was retired. By then the Parche returned to service after a long overhaul that included a hundred-foot addition to the hull, for “research and development” equipment. This R&D function included intelligence gathering and underwater salvage, according to Lonsdale’s United States Navy Diver, while Blind Man’s Bluff says the sub was equipped to tap cables and to pick up pieces of hardware. In the 1990s, after the Soviet Union ceased to exist, the focus of the projects that began with Ivy Bells shifted to other parts of the world, according to the authors of Blind Man’s Bluff. If so, this may explain the Navy’s insistence on maintaining a veil of secrecy that stretches more than forty years into the past.
The Parche was finally decommissioned in 2004, but the USS Jimmy Carter came specially equipped to pick up where the Parche left off. The new sub, at 453 feet, could have fit bow-to-stern on a football field if not for the hundred-foot hull extension that made it that much longer than the other two subs in its class. That additional space, the same length that had been added to the Parche during its overhaul, is officially, if obliquely, known as the “multi-mission platform.” The Defense Department has said that the platform’s uses include “tactical surveillance.” A 2006 press release went so far as to characterize one of the new sub’s missions as “intelligence collection.” A Navy spokesman, responding to a request to the Defense Department in mid-2009 for further information about the sub, made it clear that there would be no official statement as to whether the Carter, or any other sub, is equipped for saturation diving. Yet there seems to be very little doubt among experts that the extended hull includes the necessary chambers and systems to support saturation divers.
With a new generation of saturation divers on board, the Jimmy Carter—whose namesake approved some of the early cable taps—may very well continue the cable-tapping tradition. It’s also possible that the choice has been made to stop placing taps, for any number of reasons, not the least of which may be that the risks have become too great, the returns too small, and the technology required to tap newer, high-capacity fiber-optic lines too problematic because they carry so much more information than old-style copper cables, all in a dizzying rush of staccato light pulses. Literally thousands of telephone conversations, e-mails, and other data transmissions flow through each hair-width fiber-optic line, and a single cable of the kind laid on the ocean floor typically houses several lines.
Still, these individual lines can be tapped, with relatively inexpensive devices and fairly straightforward procedures. The hair-width lines themselves, made of a pure glass, are encased in materials that give them the thickness of pencil lead. A small amount of that casing must be carefully stripped away, almost like stripping insulation from an electrical wire, so that another hair-width line can be placed in close proximity. Once that is done, the enormous data flow—usually moving at a rate of ten gigabits per second—can be siphoned and stored on high-capacity hard drives. A week’s worth of data could fit on a cluster of drives that takes up no more space than a refrigerator.
All of this might seem extremely difficult, if not impossible, to do underwater, but technology advances briskly these days, transforming man-on-the-moon fantasies into standard features of the workaday world. Fiber-optic lines were themselves mere fantasy not long ago, but are now strung all over the globe and across oceans, making them natural targets for military eavesdroppers. To get to them, one can imagine the usefulness of a mobile workshop like the underwater welding habitats developed for the offshore industry—or, for that matter, a twenty-first-century version of Ed Link’s portable infla
table dwelling. If welder divers can precisely cut and fuse unwieldy pipe ends inside a habitat, a pair of spy divers with the necessary technical expertise might just as readily use a dry sea floor workspace to cut into heavy-duty cables and then perform the delicate task of tapping the fiber-optic communication lines housed within. The divers could live down there for a while, or return to their mother submarine, perhaps making the trip on board a mini-sub something like the DSRV. In the meantime, computer hard drives, placed either on the ocean floor or inside a nearby submarine, would fill with gigabits of siphoned data. With the right computer programs, the jumble of raw data collected can be sorted and specific contents revealed, right down to an individual phone call or e-mail message.
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ANSWERS AND QUESTIONS
With its Sealab program, state-of-the-art Ocean Simulation Facility, and the still shrouded projects that enabled divers to live in quasi-habitats on nuclear submarines, the Navy seemed to be the closest thing there was to a wet NASA. Indeed it was at the Ocean Simulation Facility, and at a select group of American and foreign research labs, that scientists continued to run latter-day Genesis experiments to unravel the mysteries of High-Pressure Nervous Syndrome and find answers to those old questions: How long can a man stay down? How deep can a man go?
In 1979, after Taylor Diving & Salvage cracked the thousand-foot barrier at sea and the Cognac platform had begun to drill its first wells, the OSF was the scene of another significant push downward. During a thirty-seven-day experimental saturation dive, six Navy divers stayed for eight days at 650 feet before easing past the thousand-foot mark en route to a depth of eighteen hundred feet. They spent nearly five days at that simulated depth before making their gradual return to the surface. Everyone survived, but not without experiencing the whole unpredictable range of HPNS effects: physical shakes, fatigue, dyspnea, dizziness, nausea, stomach cramps, vomiting, an aversion to food, and, perhaps not surprisingly, poor sleep. Some symptoms only seemed to get worse over time. A similar British experiment that year produced similar results. When the HPNS-riddled eighteen-hundred-foot test was finally over, the U.S. Navy established a diving limit of one thousand feet.
The end of the Navy test coincided with the beginning of an experimental series of four deep dives at Duke University called Atlantis and led by Peter Bennett, an Englishman-turned-American whose involvement in diving physiology dated back to the 1950s and his early observance of tremors during deep submarine escape trials in the mid-1960s at the Royal Navy Physiological Laboratory. Atlantis had the backing of the U.S. Navy and the National Institutes of Health. Henri Delauze, the Comex founder and a friend of Peter Bennett, also chipped in to cover the substantial expenses. The investment paid off. In 1981, Bennett and his Duke team broke a barrier that made the Stratton report’s two-thousand-foot diving goal look like an imminent possibility. Three volunteer divers lived in Duke’s new experimental chambers for more than four days under pressure equivalent to a depth of 2,132 feet, nearly a half-mile down, and a very distant sixty-five atmospheres away. As in the bygone days of Genesis, the Duke divers did a variety of tasks and exercises to simulate underwater work and were subjected to a full range of modern medical pokes and prods. During the final twenty-four hours prior to the start of a long decompression, the simulated depth was increased by 118 feet—about the height of a twelve-story building—to 2,250 feet. That was a true depth record in saturation diving, albeit in a dry chamber. Nonetheless, the successful test pointed the way down to a vastly larger undersea frontier.
The Atlantis experiment had demonstrated an improved antidote to HPNS, a new recipe for breathing gases known as “trimix.” Trimix was a traditional blend of helium and oxygen but with just enough nitrogen added to quell the effects of HPNS. (One researcher, as if summoning the frontier spirit, gave his test subject a shot of Scotch to stave off HPNS. It helped.) With nitrogen the trick was to keep its concentration high enough to curtail the dreaded effects of HPNS, but not so high as to induce a wildly drunken state of narcosis. A concentration of 5 percent in trimix seemed to alleviate HPNS, especially when combined with adjustments in the dive schedule, like using slower compression rates when approaching depths of a thousand feet or more.
When the Atlantis divers reached their deepest simulated depths, they were able to do hard physical tasks and displayed an impressive ability to adapt to the extraordinary pressure. Yet living all those atmospheres away still wasn’t easy. The divers found that the increased density of the pressurized gases became strangely palpable, almost as if they were breathing a liquid. The artificial atmosphere was, after all, about sixteen times as dense as ordinary air. They could also see it in the way objects like sheets of paper, or a rubber band shot through the chamber, would fall noticeably slowly, almost as if in water. In these conditions the subjects couldn’t get enough of a breath by inhaling through the nose. As if they were badly congested, they would breathe through their mouths. That made eating uncomfortable, but they could still manage it. Even when physiological problems were under control, there were logistical problems, like the extra time required when using slower compression rates. To bring the Atlantis divers safely to their 2,100-foot depth took seven days, longer than a flight to the moon. After five days at depth, the divers began a decompression schedule that would last thirty-one days.
Cost-conscious industrialists had embraced saturation diving in large part for its efficiency, but these substantially longer compression and decompression rates indicated that there was a point of diminishing returns. Even if divers could do a fairly long-duration job at depths beyond two thousand feet, would it be worth the price—and the danger? The question was almost rhetorical, at least in the business sense. The divers would have to be paid, fed, and supplied with an expensive artificial atmosphere while decompressing for an entire month—doing little with their time but reading, sleeping, and playing pinochle. Remotely operated vehicles, advanced forms of the flying eyeballs used during Cognac’s construction, looked like the better investment: Send a robot or a machine rather than a man.
But even in industry there were some who chose not to let the bottom line get in the way of pursuing deeper dives. After the final Atlantis dive in the early 1980s, a number of other deep forays were made, including several notable dives by Comex, whose tenacious founder, Henri Delauze, was fond of seeing diving records and barriers broken, especially by his company. In the late 1980s, Comex, in cooperation with the French navy, staged a stunningly deep demonstration in the Mediterranean, not far from company headquarters in Marseille.
In rough winter conditions, with winds gusting to fifty knots, the Comex saturation divers took turns riding in their bell to a working depth of 1,750 feet. This was nearly as deep as the U.S. Navy’s troubled 1,800-foot test a decade earlier, and these Comex dives were at sea, the true proving ground. Six divers put in a total of twenty-five hours on the bottom, bolting pipe flanges and generally replicating some common oil field jobs to show that saturation divers could still be productive at this incredible depth. To trump HPNS, and also to thin the palpable density of helium and oxygen under high pressure, Comex had developed a method for adding hydrogen to the breathing mix. Although highly flammable, hydrogen is the least dense of all gases, and that means it becomes proportionately less dense and difficult to breathe under high pressure. This record-breaking open-sea dive in 1988 made good advertising for Comex’s hydrogen alchemy.
Government funding of the kind that made the Atlantis dives possible had been drying up and experimental efforts to continue the push downward largely ended, at least in the United States. But the Duke University team responsible for Atlantis was able to prove the practical worth of its trimix recipe across the Atlantic, at a state-of-the-art chamber complex near Hamburg. The West German government had poured money into the new facility to gear up for future deep construction jobs in the North Sea. With the Duke team on hand as consultants, American, British, French, and German divers made more than two do
zen simulated working dives over the course of seven years at the elaborate complex, a real modern-day marvel. Although these dives were not at sea, the complex provided considerable vérité. It was set up so that divers had to take all the same steps they would take at sea to get into an underwater welding habitat—moving from their pressurized living quarters into a diving bell, from the bell into a tank filled with seawater, and from the seawater into the welding habitat. Soon after the last Atlantis dive in the early 1980s, and continuing through 1990, thirteen divers in all took turns putting in many full days welding. There was lots of useful work, long-duration dives, and depths down to almost two thousand feet—the stuff of pure fantasy not many years before. HPNS was barely a problem. But market forces intervened. The offshore industry continued to favor machines over divers, at least for jobs deeper than a thousand feet, and with declining oil prices, the industry contracted. Then, as the 1980s ended, the generous West German research funding tumbled with the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The collapse of markets and governments did not stop Delauze and Comex from taking yet another stab at the depth barrier. At the end of 1992, to further demonstrate hydrogen’s potential, Comex arranged to send a diver to a simulated depth of 701 meters, about 2,300 feet. This would be the latest in the experimental series called Hydra, which Comex had started some years before to develop its breathing mixtures with hydrogen. Henri Delauze was well aware that the planned experiment would be fifty feet deeper than the deepest Atlantis dive; it would be the deepest saturation dive ever attempted. In early November, three volunteer Comex divers climbed into one of the four interconnected chambers at the company’s hyperbaric research center. If all went well, they would be healthy and home in time for Christmas.
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