by Josh Dean
Weather made matters worse. Winters can be brutal in the North Pacific, and the Soviet fleet ran smack into violent storms, with heavy snow, gale-force winds, and waves cresting as high as forty-five feet. During the early days of the search, the ocean was as wicked as it could be, with conditions registering at or near a 9 on the Douglas Sea Scale—a scale designed to express the sea’s roughness for navigation that goes only as high as 9. At that level, waves can reach fifty feet and the sea is described, bleakly, as “phenomenal.”
Dygalo joined the search personally, aboard a nuclear sub, and at snorkel depth, his watch officer wore a full diving suit over a fur coat and pants and was strapped using a harness and chain to an iron brace on the bridge. There, Dygalo recalled, “he bobbed up and down like a cork in waters foaming about his chin whenever the sub plowed into an oncoming wave.” On the downside of waves, the sub would nearly roll onto its side. “To make anything out in those seething waters, in those conditions, was highly improbable,” Dygalo later said.
All the while, American Orion-class antisubmarine planes circled overhead, constantly audible to the Soviet watchmen but visible through sky scopes only on the rare occasion when the weather broke and the clouds parted.
The biggest problem was that the Soviets didn’t actually know where to look; they knew only where the K-129 had been last—on March 7—and where it was headed—to the Hawaii station—so they focused the search along that line, looking for oil slicks, debris, or anything else on the surface that could indicate a disaster. The initial search zone was vast, more than eight hundred thousand square miles, and got bigger as the search failed to locate any signs of the sub, growing to 1 million square miles, an almost impossibly large area, especially considering another factor: the ocean’s depth. In that area of the Pacific, the bottom was nearly four miles below, and because all signs pointed to a catastrophic loss, the K-129 wasn’t likely to be found on the surface. In all likelihood, it lay shattered on the bottom, more than three miles below.
• • •
The K-129’s return to port had been scheduled for May 5, and when that date came and went, the wives and parents back in Petropavlovsk, who’d been told almost nothing by the fleet leadership, began to accept that their husbands and sons weren’t coming home. They gathered in a square next to a monument erected for another lost sub, wearing black. Irina Zhuravina, wife of the submarine’s second-in-command, had been clinging to faint hope. “He loved life so much that he simply couldn’t die,” she told herself, and the friends from the fleet who fished with her husband and made caviar in their home kept coming by. “Sasha can’t die,” they told her. “He’ll come up. He’ll figure out a way.” For weeks, her eight-year-old son, Misha, kept asking the same question: “Where is Daddy? He’s never gone this long.” “Daddy’s at sea,” she told the boy.
Officially, the families were told very little. It wasn’t until September 12, six months after the K-129’s disappearance, that the supreme commander of the Soviet Navy issued an order stating that the sub had been lost while on duty in the Pacific and that all the men on board were “presumed dead.” That description wasn’t just insulting; it was financially cruel, because instead of the full salary and pension awarded to military men lost in the line of duty, it meant the families were awarded only a single lump-sum payment of fifteen hundred rubles plus a partial pension—the same pitiful amount they’d have been given if the men had died accidentally by slipping and falling.
Many within the fleet, including Admiral Dygalo, were ashamed of the Soviet response. Dygalo suffered a heart attack while writing personal letters to each of the families and was hospitalized for a month. “By the order of the Minister of Defense, K-129 was removed from the register of naval vessels, as though it never existed,” he later wrote. “Moscow decided that it was the end of the story.”
2
Is This What You Were Looking For?
APRIL 1968
Back in Washington, deep inside the Pentagon’s inner ring, Jim Bradley had an idea. Bradley, a captain, was officially the assistant for undersea warfare in the Office of Naval Intelligence, but his real job was as the Navy’s chief underwater spy. A former submariner himself, Bradley oversaw the Navy’s growing clandestine efforts in undersea intelligence, where advanced technology was beginning to give the United States an advantage that it desperately needed to make up for a distinct gap in on-the-ground human espionage, which the intelligence community refers to as HUMINT.
Bradley, forty-seven, was an enigma even to most people in his own branch. If you looked him up in the Pentagon’s official record, you’d see his assignment as “Naval Operations, Navy Department,” a designation about as specific as referring to a professor of chemistry as “Faculty, University.” In reality, Bradley oversaw highly compartmentalized black programs from an unmarked bunker on the fifth floor of the Pentagon, hidden behind three sets of locked doors. There, Bradley considered ways to use some of the Navy’s most sophisticated and secret tools to unlock mysteries of the Soviet arsenal, in particular its submarine, encoded communications, and ballistic missile programs.
It was obvious to Bradley and anyone else who had been told about the Soviets’ vast and fruitless search of the North Pacific that they’d lost a sub—a sub the Navy suspected with some confidence to be the K-129. This presented a tantalizing thought: If the US Navy could locate the sub’s precise location, it might be able to access the wreck and mine it for a host of valuable intelligence—including communication codes, code-breaking machinery, and most compelling of all, the nuclear warheads atop the ballistic missiles. Any combination of these things would provide the greatest intelligence haul of the Cold War to date.
Both the United States and the Soviet Union knew basically what the other side was packing, but when it came to the specifics of those atomic missiles and warheads, the two adversaries were guessing. Getting their hands on an actual Soviet missile, intact, would allow US nuclear analysts to unlock any number of secrets about the enemy’s arsenal, in particular the makeup of the warheads and the design of the guidance system, which could enable the United States to build better antimissile defenses specially calibrated to the Soviet design.
While the idea of finding a missing submarine in the Pacific Ocean, even when they had a general idea of where to search, proved so daunting to the Soviets that they’d ultimately given up looking, Bradley was fairly optimistic. He had a better way of locating it.
• • •
Starting in the early 1950s, the US Navy began installing a system of underwater hydrophones, anchored to the seafloor, designed to listen for the telltale sounds of enemy submarines. By the 1960s, it was increasingly clear that the balance of power in the Cold War was likely to be tipped under the oceans. Locating Soviet subs and maintaining an awareness of their positions at all times became tantamount for Naval Intelligence. It was the single most important part of the job.
The Navy recognized that every submarine—owing to the unique manufacture and wear of its moving parts, such as its propeller, cooling system, and diesel-electric engine—had a unique sound signature. It was basically a sonic fingerprint that analysts could listen for and locate. And putting large, fixed hydrophones at the bottom of the ocean provided a network of ears that were always listening.
The first hydrophone arrays were designed in secret by Western Electric, a division of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (today’s AT&T), in a program code-named Project Jezebel. It came together rather quickly, since most of the key components were already in use for other purposes. For instance, the “LOFAR actuator,” a low-frequency signal analyzer that recorded submarine sounds onto paper, was based on a technology built at AT&T’s famed Bell Labs to study human voice patterns in the hope of improving customer service.
The Navy’s prototype array was forty hydrophones on a one-thousand-foot-long line installed at a depth of 1,440 feet off of the Bah
amian island of Eleuthera in 1952. Once turned on, the system successfully detected a US submarine, and the program was rapidly expanded to cover the entire East Coast, stretching in an arc pattern from the Caribbean to Nova Scotia.
Two years later, the network was installed off the coast of California, and then Hawaii. Collectively the passive acoustic listening network was known as SOSUS, for Sound Surveillance System, and by the time it was finally operational on both coasts, in 1958, the US Navy had spent an estimated 16 billion dollars on the program. That was money well spent.
The ocean turns out to be a useful and efficient conveyor of some sound frequencies. Sound energy is absorbed by seawater at a very low rate, so it travels a great distance without losing much intensity. What’s more, the deep ocean has a horizontal layer known as the Sound Fixing and Ranging channel (SOFAR), which serves as a wave guide for sound, allowing the waves to travel extreme distances in a horizontal direction without much dissipation. The specific depth of that layer varies around the world and is dependent on the effects of temperature and water pressure, but awareness of this depth is very important in submarine warfare. Commanders are careful to avoid spending much time inside this layer because they know to do so means sending out the equivalent of a radio broadcast that says, “Hey, y’all! I’m here!”
Being a SOSUS operator was a highly specialized and often boring job. There were long stretches, days upon days, of no activity, but occasionally something exciting happened. The analysts, all trained at a secret school on Key West, began to identify particular submarines, and even to pick up spooky unexplained sounds, such as the deep, eerie howl of the so-called Jezebel monster, which was later identified as the never-before-heard ultra-low-frequency vocalizations of blue whales.
Bradley knew that the network of hydrophone arrays in the Pacific was especially vast and that SOSUS was likely to pick up any abnormally loud sounds that occurred in the ocean. Analysts were trained to distinguish signal from noise, and the sudden and violent sounds of a submarine in trouble—one that had either exploded on the surface because of an accident, or sunk and imploded at crush depth—would be picked up by SOSUS. So he asked Captain Joseph P. Kelly, who oversaw SOSUS, to pull the acoustic data from the area of the Soviet search during the period of March 1 to 15 and have his analysts look it over closely for anomalous events.
Kelly’s analysts found nothing suspicious. But there was another way.
• • •
As the arms race ramped up rapidly following World War II, President Dwight Eisenhower directed the US Air Force to find a means to eavesdrop on Soviet missile tests. He wanted the United States to have the ability to know when the enemy was detonating bombs and, to the best of its ability, where.
Working above a cigar shop in downtown Troy, New York, a young engineer named Carl Romney and a small team began a highly classified project funded by a secret group known as the Air Force Office of Atomic Energy. Romney’s team built a system that used seismography to sense abnormal signals in the earth that could indicate explosions—and by 1951 it was ready for installation.
When a particular site picked up a suspicious signal, that data was rushed to Troy by encrypted message for analysis so that Romney and the few other men trained to interpret the signals could try to determine the origin of the explosion.
This became the Atomic Energy Detection System (or AEDS), a top secret global network of seismic sensors that greatly enhanced the Air Force’s awareness of Soviet nuclear testing. But the increase of underwater testing in the late 1950s presented a new problem that would be addressed by a new agency, the Air Force Technical Applications Center (AFTAC). The land-based sensors easily picked up most underwater explosions, but if those explosions were to occur in an area with high natural seismic activity—and much of the Soviet east coast was exactly that—it was extremely difficult to distinguish between a nuclear test and an earthquake. Romney needed to put sensors under the water.
He knew that there were other secret acoustic intelligence-gathering systems at other departments, and SOSUS, with its wide coverage of the Pacific, was particularly attractive. Romney asked Kelly if he could piggyback on the Navy’s array and was given the okay, so long as the Air Force agreed to maintain the same level of secrecy. That wasn’t a problem.
Romney’s group designed a custom system of recording and installed their own hydrophones, tuned to listen to different signals. Whereas the Navy was looking for long, continuous, narrow-band signals—the kind of sounds put off by machinery that’s working—the Air Force was in search of short, broadband impulses that indicated short, violent episodes: explosions.
These sensors were also tuned for a second, even more secret purpose. The CIA wanted AFTAC to listen for the impact of Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that were tested over the Pacific. The Soviets routinely launched dummy ICBMs into orbit and out over Kamchatka, where they’d splash down harmlessly in the Pacific. There was no reason for the Soviets to worry that those missiles, or their secret guidance systems, could be recovered, but the Agency recognized an opportunity. If it could precisely locate the splashdowns using AFTAC, then perhaps a new kind of secret spy sub, already in development, could pick them up.
Romney had long since realized it was inefficient to sit in Troy and wait for data to reach him and had built up a network of listening stations where analysts studied data twenty-four hours a day. He himself had moved to Fairfax County, Virginia, where AFTAC centralized its operations. He was in his office there on May 14, 1968, when Commander Jacob from the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) paid him a visit.
Jacob told Romney that a curious episode had been observed in the Pacific in mid-March: The Soviet Navy mobilized an abnormally large fleet off Kamchatka, a ragtag armada of submarines, cruisers, and fishing trawlers. This fleet formed a tight line in an east-west direction and moved slowly to the south until it reached 40 degrees north, east of Japan’s Honshu Island. Here, the line turned and swept east, moving along the fortieth parallel, and searched all the way past the International Date Line, at 180 degrees east/west, before finally abandoning the mission.
Other intelligence suggested that a Soviet Golf-class submarine had been on patrol in that area in the weeks prior to the search but had not been heard from since. The ONI—and others in naval intelligence—suspected this was the target of the search.
Romney didn’t have to be a submariner to know that a sub that sinks is going to explode one way or the other—either on the surface, as a result of some catastrophic event (a battery explosion, a missile failure, a collision with another ship, enemy fire), or when it, an airtight vessel, reaches crush depth.
“Would your boys have heard such a thing?” Jacob asked.
Probably, Romney replied. A sub explosion or implosion would be far less powerful than a nuclear test, so analysts most likely wouldn’t have reported it. But it wouldn’t be hard to go back and look at that data and find such an event, he said.
And sure enough, there it was. A number of AFTAC hydrophones in the North Pacific showed a strong, short pulse on March 11. The signal was strongest at a single hydrophone attached to the SOSUS array off Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. Analysts were able to measure the time of the signal as it arrived at each station, and then—because they knew the speed at which sound travels through that area of the ocean—they could triangulate the signal and pinpoint its origin, with some precision.
The explosive event occurred at almost exactly 40 degrees north, 180 degrees west—the International Date Line—thirty seconds after midnight, local time. Romney knew immediately that this was a human event, because there was virtually no way that some natural occurrence—an earthquake, volcanic activity, or an especially loud whale—would be heard at the intersection of two important coordinates at almost exactly midnight. Nature is reactive and unpredictable; only people plan activities around precise times and locations.
&nb
sp; Six minutes later, a second, similar signal appeared in the data, and both were located well within the area where the Soviet fleet had been searching.
This had to be the missing sub, and since the Soviets had called off the search and gone home, it was still there, lying almost seventeen thousand feet under the Pacific—1,560 miles northeast of Oahu, Hawaii—just waiting for the Americans to come and find it.
3
Finders Keepers
The idea of recovering key components of a Soviet ballistic missile submarine with a full arsenal of nuclear warheads was quite a carrot to dangle in front of the US intelligence leadership, but actually pulling it off was an absurdly complicated matter. Without understanding what caused the sub to sink suddenly, before it had a chance to call out in distress, there was no way for any US analyst to know what kind of shape the K-129 was in, and that was critically important.
A catastrophic explosion aboard the sub on or near the ocean’s surface would have likely incinerated anything of value inside, while a violent implosion of the pressure hull at crush depth followed by a collision with the ocean floor would probably have left it in a pile of twisted pieces, no single one of them of much use as anything but an unnatural habitat for blindfish and other bottom dwellers. And the problem was that all of these questions could be answered only by actually getting close enough to analyze a wreck that lay more than three miles under the ocean, far beyond the capabilities of anything in the Navy’s chest of toys.
Or so it seemed.
• • •
Reaching the unexplored realms of the ocean bottom had been a focus of the US Navy since the mid-1950s, when a group from the Office of Naval Research contacted the sixty-nine-year-old Swiss inventor Auguste Piccard and his son, Jacques, after observing their quixotic experiments in deep-sea exploration from afar.