Authors: Kenneth Sewell
The Americans may have been willing to entrust their secret fail-safe technology to the Soviets, but the Soviet leadership inherently mistrusted the very men who had sworn to defend the Communist system with their lives.
Because Soviet missile submarines operated far from home with little direct control after leaving port, it is certain that special precautions were taken to prevent unauthorized or accidental launch of nuclear weapons. In the case of K-129, an extra safeguard in the form of a mechanical fail-safe system was likely installed by Soviet nuclear weapons scientists.
The PAL fail-safe system had been invented at the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) labs at Sandia, New Mexico, in 1960. Not only was this system widely used to safeguard U.S. nuclear weapons from unintended uses, but the system was evidently provided to the Soviets. While the secret Keeny memorandum indicates the technology was to be shared with the Russians, there is no follow-up notation to indicate when the actual transfer was made.
Select technicians were designated by the top ranks of the Soviet military to install the extra safeguard devices in all nuclear weapons carried by strategic bombers and sea-launch warships. Codes to the fail-safe devices, in both the U.S. and Soviet military, were assembled in sets, with no one person having the complete set until final, verified orders were given to attack. Each set of codes opened a door to the next segment of the code. While the KGB maintained operational control of nuclear warheads, it did not have access to all segments of the code to disarm the fail-safe device. For example, one segment of the code might be held by the KGB, the second by the missile officers on the plane or ship carrying the weapon, and the final sequence by Soviet supreme headquarters.
There was no reason for many in the military and other government agencies to even know about the fail-safe devices, because unless someone attempted to circumvent strict procedures and controls, the fail-safe device would never be needed.
The device, literally a little black box, was typically buried deep inside the missile or warhead in such a way that it could not be easily identified or tampered with.
Submarine commanders and the missile officers responsible for actually launching nuclear weapons were aware that safeguards against unauthorized release of weapons were in place. Therefore, if the men who attempted to launch the K-129’s missiles knew about the fail-safe system, they must have believed they had the knowledge to override it. Otherwise, they never would have attempted to launch.
Under the regular protocol, had an actual preemptive or retaliatory strike been ordered, the supreme Soviet military command would have radioed the codes necessary to disengage the safety system before initiating the launch sequence.
Later PAL systems used on American nuclear weapons were designed to lock up the electronic arming system of the warhead, thus freezing the mechanism and rendering the weapon useless.
However, in the 1960s, more lethal fail-safe systems were used to prevent unintended deployment of nuclear weapons. The early fail-safe systems included “emergency destruction devices” designed to destroy nuclear weapons without producing a nuclear yield. The crude devices could be set off if a sophisticated, but unauthorized, person tried to wire around or otherwise thwart the protective device.
The Soviets, whether because of less-advanced technical expertise or a darker paranoia, most likely installed devices that detected any attempt to hot-wire around the PAL system. Such a device would trigger a small explosion, which would permanently damage the weapon itself.
Unless properly disarmed, the PAL-type system quite simply would cause a nonnuclear explosion to destroy the warhead before the missile was launched. Certainly this added safeguard was not meant to be powerful enough to destroy the aircraft or submarine carrying the weapons. But Soviet technology, particularly electronics, was notoriously flawed, and the device designed to disable the weapons could have ended up destroying both the weapon and its carrier.
On the other hand, it is not too far-fetched to suggest that the Soviet fail-safe device installed on K-129 did exactly what it was designed to do. It may have been intended to cause a catastrophic explosion when it detected an unauthorized launch attempt. After all, the fail-safe system on a nuclear weapon was a final precaution to prevent an accidental or unauthorized nuclear incident that could have led to global war. The top leadership on each side wanted to avoid an accidental or rogue attack on the other. Even an unauthorized attack risked a response of unlimited retaliation.
Fortunately, on March 7, 1968, Pearl Harbor was allowed to sleep in peace. Unlike the first sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, in 1941, no one would have survived this intended strike. Instead, K-129 went quickly to a watery grave in the deep, nearly three miles down and more than three hundred miles west-northwest of its intended target.
S
OVIET
P
ACIFIC
F
LEET HEADQUARTERS
in Vladivostok failed to notice that missile submarine K-129 had not reported its arrival at the designated patrol area. It was several days past the sub’s scheduled arrival before a duty officer in command central realized that one of its nuclear-armed submarines on a mission in the North Pacific had not communicated with headquarters in almost two weeks.
The submarine had reported entering deep water off the Kamchatka Peninsula after departure from Rybachiy Naval Base on February 24, but had missed its next two routine transmissions.
When the duty officer finally discovered that the contacts were long overdue, the initial reaction was routine. A coded radio signal was dispatched, ordering K-129 to reply by March 12. When no reply was received another, more urgent, dispatch was sent on March 17. Still, there was no response.
When the admiralty was informed there had been no communications with the missile sub for more than three weeks, panic seized the Pacific Fleet headquarters.
As a routine matter, an admiral pulled the file on the tardy submarine, and was surprised to find that something besides the submarine was missing. The required manifest listing all crew members aboard the submarine could not be found, either at fleet headquarters or at the Kamchatka Flotilla headquarters. In the Soviet navy the failure of a submarine commander to file a complete and verified roster of officers and enlisted sailors on a combat mission was a serious criminal offense.
First Captain Kobzar, with years of outstanding service to his credit and a promotion to admiral at hand, was not the kind of officer who would make a careless mistake—especially when it came to compliance with mandatory procedures. His deputy commander, Captain Zhuravin, was also unlikely to be so sloppy when he was about to receive command of his first submarine. One of these conscientious officers would have certainly filed the report; the other probably would have double-checked it as well.
On this particular mission, the crew manifest would have received extraordinary attention, due to the replacement crew members from other submarines in the flotilla and the eleven extra men assigned to the boat. This focus on personnel matters would certainly have prompted the sub’s officers to file the required roster—most likely in duplicate, at several layers of the command structure. Its disappearance from the files at fleet headquarters in Vladivostok and flotilla headquarters at Rybachiy was not accidental. Someone did not want information about the members of this patchwork crew discovered. The theft of this critical document added another layer of mystery to the already strange circumstances surrounding the composition of the final crew manning the sub.
There would have been no reason to hide the names of the regular crew members of K-129. Likewise, there was no secret about the identity of the replacement crew members from other submarines in the Kamchatka Flotilla. All these men would have been known by their peers at the relatively small naval outpost. The only reasonable explanation for the roster to disappear would be to hide temporarily the fact that the submarine sailed with ninety-eight men aboard, rather than the normal complement of eighty-three.
The identities of the extra eleven who had inexplicably been added to an already overcrowded submarine at the last minute were not significant, since their names would probably have been fictitious, anyway. The KGB was no less adept at creating legends for their operatives than was its CIA counterpart. But the extra number might have raised an alarm.
The missing crew manifest is evidence that a major and well-designed plot involving this submarine was underway. Communist bureaucrats were efficient to a fault when it came to keeping lists of names. Even if technical equipment and other systems were prone to break down, certain procedures did not. Soviet submarine commanders were particularly careful about filing this document before sailing. Thus, no other conclusion can be drawn than that someone with extraordinary power had deliberately circumvented important personnel procedures that were sacrosanct to the Soviet submarine service.
By the middle of March, Soviet naval officials at both the Kamchatka Flotilla and Soviet fleet headquarters became alarmed that K-129 had met with some type of mishap. A check of the one recorded radio message that
had
been received revealed nothing unusual. All recorded radio transmissions for the rest of the fleet were carefully examined, to determine if any unidentified message or distress signals had been picked up between March 1 and March 15. All Soviet naval, merchant, and fishing vessels operating in the North Pacific for the previous two weeks were contacted. There had been no undocumented signals or unusual sightings at sea.
On or about March 21 the Soviets launched a huge flotilla to search for their lost boat. Submarines were sent from the northern bases, and surface vessels and naval aircraft were dispatched from Vladivostok. Sailors of the American attack submarine USS
Barb,
patrolling off Vladivostok, were startled when this armada of warships and submarines suddenly streamed from Soviet ports with their radios broadcasting in the clear.
The Soviet search boats covered a wide arc of the ocean as far north as latitude 65°, well into the Bering Sea, and to within 750 miles northwest of the U.S. Navy base at Pearl Harbor.
The center of the search was located in the North Pacific, the first location where K-129 had missed its position report—latitude 40° N by longitude 180°, on the International Date Line. This location, which was approximately seventeen hundred miles northwest of Pearl Harbor, came to be known as K-Point. It would be a site of major confusion and disinformation in the K-129 incident for years to come.
The North Pacific was in the throes of a winter storm when the search force of approximately forty vessels reached the area where the Soviets believed the lost submarine’s last signal should have originated. Soviet officers aboard submarines from K-129’s base at Rybachiy exhausted their crews, ordering their boats to dive, surface, dive, surface, and dive again, all the time pinging away with active sonars. Nobody seemed concerned that American surveillance ships might be listening. This major search effort continued for more than a month before the Russian sailors were ordered to cancel the operation and return to their bases.
Finally, in the last week of April 1968, the Soviet high command in Moscow officially listed K-129 as lost at sea, cause unknown.
The following week, K-129 wives who were living in the area of the submarine’s home port on the Kamchatka Peninsula or near fleet headquarters at Vladivostok were notified that their husbands were lost at sea and probably dead.
Irina Zhuravina, who had flown to the Rybachiy base after having suffered the strange emotional breakdown at her office on March 8, was back at her job with the Economics Ministry in Vladivostok.
“I didn’t believe they were gone,” Captain Zhuravin’s wife recalled. “I did not yet relate my strange illness on International Women’s Day with the loss of my husband. We waited for them to return. We could not accept they were dead.”
On May 5, the scheduled date for the return of K-129 to home port, the families became more convinced that their husbands and fathers were really gone.
“A government commissioner came from Moscow and asked us to put together documents,” Irina said. “They gave us one thousand rubles apiece, and another five hundred for each child. I never spent the money. I put it in the bank. Then came devaluation and it just burned up. That was what my husband’s life was worth to them.”
The subject was likewise treated as a nonevent in terms of what the public knew in Russia. There were no announcements that a submarine had been lost at sea. The families of the officers and the seamen were never given an explanation for the fate of their sailors. They were told only that K-129 was lost, with all hands presumed dead. Strangely, because the Soviets had no physical proof the men were actually dead, they did not provide full pension benefits to the widows.
Meanwhile, on the American side of the Pacific, the U.S. Navy’s curiosity about the huge Soviet search for the lost submarine became a priority project.
The Navy was notified by the North American Aerospace Defense Command that one of its satellites had identified and recorded an event in the North Pacific as having some of the characteristics of a Soviet missile launch. A satellite sensor had recorded two massive surges of radiant energy when the missile fuel in K-129’s launch tubes one and two exploded. The camera’s sensors were tuned to record the light spectrum created by the burning of specific chemicals known to be used in Soviet rocket fuel.
At first, the image did not raise concerns at NORAD, because the fireballs had quickly disappeared without the follow-on trail of a missile in flight.
U.S. Navy intelligence had already concluded that the Soviets had lost a submarine, because of the massive sea search. After the satellite images provided by NORAD revealed a more specific location for the accident, the American intelligence operators realized that the Soviet search was centered hundred of miles from the actual site.
Armed with a more precise location, the Navy began scanning SOSUS recordings from the previous weeks. These records, along with other intelligence gathered from the Boresight radio-tracking system and eavesdropping by American submarines off Kamchatka, soon revealed that the lost submarine was a diesel-electric missile boat. However, nothing in the Americans’ intelligence-gathering arsenal could provide clues to the actual cause of the explosion and sinking.
The hydrophonic screen employed in the SOSUS network was designed to track submarines sailing beneath the surface of the ocean. The system was not meant to locate surface explosions. SOSUS was designed to identify the general area where a submarine might be operating, so that ASW assets could be employed to visually and audibly pinpoint and track the Soviet submarines. The SOSUS system filtered out most man-made sounds, homing in on acoustical waves from submarine engines and propellers.
The Americans knew where the accident had happened, but not much more.
Because of the open hostility between the two navies, the Soviets were not about to ask the Americans for help, or even to admit they had lost one of their submarines. Eventually, the Soviets’ vague inquiries about whether the Americans in the Pacific had seen or heard anything unusual were met with even vaguer responses. While the Americans knew the Soviets were looking in the wrong area, correcting them would have revealed too much about U.S. surveillance technology.
The Americans may have even actively hindered the Soviet effort to locate their lost boat. There have been reports that the Americans did, at one point during the search, suggest that the Soviets examine an oil slick far to the north of where the U.S. Navy believed the submarine had sunk. Soviet investigators have alluded to this mysterious oil slick, but its location and source have never been explained.
Admiral Anatoliy Shtyrov, a Soviet intelligence officer from Pacific Fleet headquarters who was primarily responsible for the investigation of the K-129 incident, mentioned this oil slick years later. He said the Americans advised the “Soviets to examine the oil spill they spotted. The analysis of the oil from the spill confirmed that its composition matched the type of diesel oil used to fuel Soviet submarines.” According to his account, the U.S. Navy was not very cooperative in the search for K-129 and shared no specific intelligence data about the sinking.
“The Americans only informed the Russians about the fact of the disaster, but did not mention its [true] location,” Admiral Shtyrov said.
The oil spill to which the Americans directed the Soviets may have been a decoy. There was speculation among American submariners that the Navy flew out to a site near the Soviet search area and dropped into the sea several open drums of diesel oil of the type known to be used in Soviet missile submarines.
After the U.S. Navy realized the Soviets were searching hundreds of miles from the wreck site, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) saw a golden opportunity to examine an enemy ballistic missile submarine, up close and unhampered.
In the beginning, the American hunt for K-129 was a quest for military intelligence, and to determine the reason for the submarine’s unusual maneuvers before it sank. The project to find and closely examine the wreck was kept top-secret for two reasons. First, in peacetime, locating another country’s shipwreck without informing them of the discovery was legally questionable behavior under international law. The world would not look favorably upon any country that robbed the grave of another’s lost sailors. At this point in history, world opinion mattered as much as military strategy in efforts to win the Cold War. Second, the Americans did not want the Soviet Union to learn about the technology used to locate and exploit the wreck.
Thus, from the outset, the K-129 incident was wrapped in a cloak of secrecy.
The job of conducting the search and exploitation of the lost Soviet sub went to America’s relatively new military spy organization, the Defense Intelligence Agency. The DIA had been founded on October 1, 1961, drawing on existing military intelligence units from each of the service branches, to become the nation’s primary producer of operational military intelligence. Five years before the K-129 incident, the DIA had created the Scientific and Technical Intelligence Directorate. This clandestine think tank could call on the nation’s best and brightest scientific and technical brains, as needed. When this directorate was given primary responsibility for the K-129 project, a special task force of submarine intelligence experts and civilian scientists was quickly assembled to handle the assignment.