Authors: Kenneth Sewell
As U.S. intelligence pondered the best method to locate the K-129 in the Pacific, the Navy began a search for the
Scorpion
in the Atlantic. After Dr. Craven worked out the likely area where the
Scorpion
might have been lost, the oceanographic research ship
Mizar
was assigned to find it—an operation that was closely monitored by the Soviets. Dr. Craven did not wait for searchers to find the missing American sub, which would ultimately take five months. He returned to the Pacific and supervision of the search for K-129.
Even after the
Scorpion
wreckage was located, the cause remained a mystery, and officially the reason for the sinking was listed simply as “mechanical failure.” To this day, articles in Russian publications and on Internet sites suggest that the Soviets deliberately sank the
Scorpion
in an act of revenge for the Americans’ sinking of the K-129.
It was in this hostile environment of suspicion and intrigue that the K-129 incident unfolded. American and Soviet intelligence agencies joined in a clandestine competition to discover and hide the secrets of one of the greatest mysteries in maritime history.
T
HE
D
EFENSE
I
NTELLIGENCE
A
GENCY
was focused on Soviet naval secrets in its assignment to locate and exploit the wreck of the submarine K-129. The sunken submarine had carried valuable technology: a ballistic missile guidance system, nuclear warheads, and communications codes and encoding equipment. The DIA’s ambition to score an intelligence success was driven by the bitterness over the North Koreans’ high seas piracy of the USS
Pueblo
and plunder of that boat’s secrets. The Americans also knew the Soviets had been the primary beneficiaries of that international crime because Soviet intelligence agents had been seen on satellite images swarming over the
Pueblo.
The intelligence hunt for K-129 quickly became the most carefully guarded secret of the Cold War. Only those naval officers and civilians directly involved in the search were told of the operation, and then only on a need-to-know basis.
From the outset, U.S. military intelligence agents were fairly sure the missing Soviet boat was a Golf-type submarine. The U.S. Navy had intermittently tracked it since its departure from the Rybachiy base in late February. The mechanics of that upgraded World War II–style, diesel-electric submarine were of little or no intelligence value, but the submarine was known to have sophisticated missile weaponry aboard. The Navy needed to decide first if the project had a chance of succeeding, then if the weapons secrets were worth the cost and commitment of scarce resources required to recover or photograph them.
As far as the Office of Naval Intelligence was concerned, the answer to both questions was a resounding yes.
A comment leaked to the
Washington Post
by someone in the naval intelligence community who worked on the K-129 project indicated how important it was to the Navy. The unidentified source told reporter Thomas O’Toole, “The lost submarine was a rare opportunity to get warheads and coding devices, either of which…would be in the gold mine category of an espionage find.”
Captain James F. Bradley, Jr., the Office of Naval Intelligence’s leading submarine expert, encouraged the Navy to commit resources for the project. He had worked closely with Dr. Craven and the DSSP group to retrieve dummy warheads and other paraphernalia dropped into the oceans from Soviet missile tests. The retrieval of operational missiles, complete with guidance and control systems like the three that were on the Golf submarine, could be a priceless intelligence coup. Captain Bradley and civilian scientist Dr. Craven easily convinced Admiral Paul H. Nitze, then secretary of the Navy, to support the recovery effort. The military phase of the K-129 hunt was launched in late April 1968.
A review of satellite and SOSUS recordings had identified a general area of ocean between 350 and 400 miles northwest of Pearl Harbor, but the exact location of the wreck was far from clear. The K-129 sank in deep water, more than three miles down. Because the submarine had been cruising on the surface at approximately two knots when the explosions took place, the doomed boat could have traveled miles on a descending angle before coming to rest on the seabed.
A deep-sea reconnaissance vessel could not begin the search until the wreck site was better defined. Even with a more precise location, it would require long days, even weeks, for a search vehicle to scan the murky depths for the wreck of a lone submarine. Dr. Craven and his team from the Deep Submergence Systems Project knew the difficulty from firsthand experience. They had experienced both successes and failures in locating Soviet hardware from missile tests. Success in such searches depended as much on interpreting the monitoring records as on the search itself.
There were gaps in the SOSUS tracking records the Navy had produced for the K-129’s journey to the mission box. The submarine had gone silent after its last snorkeling maneuver on March 6 was recorded. It disappeared from the SOSUS track for a time; then the tapes showed two small and one large blip on the continuous paper printout. The disturbances had come during the night of March 7. The area where the blips occurred covered as much as thirty square miles.
The team secured SOSUS printouts from listening stations at Midway Island and Adak in the Aleutians, to compare data with the record from Hawaii. Intercepts from Hawaii and Midway would have been strong, while the Adak recordings would have been faint. Dr. Craven had created a hydrophone data triangulation methodology to narrow down the location of a sound emitted from vast areas of the ocean.
Next, the U.S. Navy team asked for assistance from other entities involved in some of the most clandestine intelligence work in the American spy arsenal. In the mid to late 1960s, the U.S. Air Force and National Security Agency were already covering much of the earth’s surface with satellite-borne surveillance equipment. Though sky spying is still very much a vital part of U.S. national defense efforts, American satellite intelligence remains among the nation’s most guarded secrets. Little information of significance has ever been declassified.
However, there have been published acknowledgments that satellite spy photography was used in the search for the K-129 site. A number of U.S. Air Force and intelligence spy satellites were operational in that period. The hyper-secret spy camera orbiter, code-named Corona, was at its prime from May 1966 to February 1971. During that time, the Corona covered 750 million square miles of earth with precision photographs that could identify, on land and sea, objects as small as five feet in diameter.
Another, and probably the most likely, source of satellite intelligence that could have been used to pinpoint K-129’s location at the time of the explosion was a dual-purpose program that disguised orbital spies as part of the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program—ostensibly for weather forecasting. This system, code-named TIROS, began in 1965, and employed heat-reading infrared, multispectral scanners that could both track the heat in storms and pinpoint the heat trails of missile launches, from ignition and liftoff through the complete flight of the missile. The TIROS, which employed a television infrared observation satellite, eventually led to the development of today’s civilian weather satellites.
These satellites were in constant orbit over the earth’s oceans, as well as the landmasses of Europe and Asia. In 1968, a Pacific Ocean–orbiting TIROS would have easily spotted and recorded the heat generated by the missile explosion in the middle of the cool waters of the northern Pacific. The Soviet submarine would have had to be riding on the surface at the time of the mishap for the infrared television camera to detect the heat image.
There were other specialized satellite spy programs during the height of the Cold War, and any one of these could have been the source of satellite intelligence the team used to pinpoint where the K-129 sank. The Discoverer and SAMOS programs conducted continuous photo-reconnaissance missions during this period. The MIDAS program was designed specifically to detect missile launches and provide early warning that Soviet or Chinese missiles had left their launch pads. The MIDAS sensors picked up the specific spectrum of light given off by the combustion of the liquid fuel that propelled Soviet rockets. If the K-129 explosion were spotted by a MIDAS satellite, there would have been no doubt that a Soviet missile was involved.
While there has been no official confirmation that a spy satellite was used in locating K-129, there have been a number of clues in recent publications that a final location was determined by the glow on a satellite photograph. Satellite imagery, along with SOSUS data, and the site of the oil slick discovered by the University of Hawaii research vessel
Teritu,
provided Dr. Craven’s team with enough information to make an educated estimate about the location of the Soviet submarine when it started its death journey to the bottom of the sea.
The bottom of the sea was where the wreck would have to be found, and the U.S. Navy had several ways to go down and take a look.
Navy intelligence was reasonably sure that K-129 had sunk approximately sixty to seventy miles north of a large reef that ran between the barren Necker and Nihoa islands in the Hawaiian Leewards. Still, secrecy was imperative. Even though the area was not on any regular shipping lanes and was approximately 360 miles from Honolulu—considerably closer to the inhabited Hawaiian islands of Niihau and Kauai—Soviet commercial freighters and spy ships disguised as fishing trawlers were always on the prowl. They spied as close to American territory as they dared without creating confrontations with Navy ships from Pearl Harbor.
The presence of these Soviet ships prevented the Navy from calling on its workhorse oceanographic ship for the search. The Navy’s premier deep-sea research ship, the surface vessel USNS
Mizar,
was not considered an option by the DIA because of this overriding requirement to keep the K-129 operation a secret from the Soviets. The Americans also operated two small deep-sea submersibles, the
Alvin
and
Trieste,
but these had to be controlled from a mother ship riding on the surface. The 266-foot
Mizar
had been converted from an icebreaker/cargo ship to a research ship with deep-submergence support capability in 1963. Later, in order to provide a cover story for the method used to find the K-129, the Navy leaked a story that the
Mizar
had actually located K-129. That never happened, because the DIA knew all too well that the Soviets kept a particularly close eye on
Mizar,
and any operation in which it was involved was bound to draw attention.
Dr. Craven’s Deep Submergence Systems Project had recently acquired just the right boat for the K-129 mission. It was a converted guided-missile submarine that had been conducting covert operations, including locating and recovering Soviet test missile parts from the seabed in the Pacific.
The boat was the USS
Halibut
(SSGN-587). Before it was converted to serve as a spy vessel,
Halibut
was already a unique submarine. It was the first submarine to have been designed exclusively as a launch platform for guided missiles. The weapon was a cruise missile called the Regulus, which served as a primary sea-launch deterrence system in the early 1960s. The 350-foot submarine was commissioned in 1960, and as a warship had a regular complement of eighty men. It was propelled by a nuclear reactor.
When the Regulus short-range missile system became obsolete because of the Navy’s rapid deployment of the sea-launched Polaris ballistic missile system, the
Halibut
faced early retirement. Then Dr. Craven learned of the submarine’s peculiar design characteristics and saw the boat not as a rusting candidate for the scrap-iron heap but as a thing of beauty.
The
Halibut
had a large, watertight bay—twenty-eight feet wide by fifty feet long by thirty feet high—built inside the hull to store the five Regulus cruise missiles it carried on war patrol. This area was accessible through a twenty-foot-wide deck hatch. Most submarines had tiny hatches designed for passage of men and small equipment. Everything that made the humpbacked boat noisy in the water and ugly to the combat submariner made it perfect for the deep-sea spies in Dr. Craven’s squad.
The Navy’s underseas scientists had leaped at the chance to have their own submarine. The
Halibut
was redesignated as an attack submarine to cover its true mission and sent to Pearl Harbor shipyards for major overhaul. At the shipyards, the conversion was conducted in complete secrecy. The submarine’s large missile storage room was changed into a seagoing den for spies that became appropriately known as the “bat cave.” It was so nicknamed because a pair of flarings used to streamline the large missile-room hatch resembled bat ears or horns, giving it the appearance of the secret entrance to Batman’s headquarters in the popular comic book series.
The large bay was filled with scientific equipment, computers, a photographic darkroom, television monitoring screens, and a storage space for twelve-foot-long, deep-sea probes called “fish.” In the center of the bat cave were giant spools and winches that could dispense seven miles of steel cable from which the fish were suspended. The fish had strobe lights and cameras, to explore deep holes in the ocean and televise and film objects with a high degree of quality. A watertight well in the room was designed to drop the fish beneath the submarine, while the mother boat cruised, unseen, hundreds of feet below the surface of the sea. The
Halibut
could operate at depths of approximately six hundred feet, but its fish tethered on a cable could roam miles deep, to the very bottom of the ocean.
The submarine was modified with side thrusters that could hold the boat motionless during tricky underseas operations, or maneuver the boat precisely above its target. The
Halibut
’s full capabilities remain top-secret. Its towed fish may have had grasping devices that could snatch small items and bring them up to the submarine. By the 1960s, the Navy was using small, deep-sea vehicles that could be towed or operated remotely from mother ships to retrieve almost anything from the sea floor. The robots could cut or blast through steel without damaging the contents of a sunken airplane or boat.
There were other devices mounted on small underseas rovers that could grasp and lift items from inside a wreck. It is not know if the
Halibut
had one or more of these sophisticated robots aboard at the time it exploited the K-129. However, had the crew been ordered to salvage some specific equipment from the wreck, the Navy’s scientists could have quickly customized the required device and shipped it to the
Halibut.