Authors: Kenneth Sewell
American submariners from the Cold War era are especially embittered about the Walker spy case. Many of them suspect that the traitor’s stolen secrets resulted in the sinking of the USS
Scorpion.
It is widely believed that the Soviets used the code machines and encryption codes to zero in on and torpedo that boat.
Although the Navy has repeatedly denied that the
Scorpion
was the victim of a Soviet submarine attack, stories persist among both American submariners and former Soviet submariners that the U.S. boat was attacked in retaliation for the sinking of K-129 several weeks earlier. However, two official courts of inquiry have ruled that a malfunctioning torpedo from the
Scorpion
itself was the most likely cause of the sinking.
Walker began delivering classified information from the day he approached the KGB at the Soviet embassy in Washington in March 1967. After the end of the Cold War, his KGB handlers confirmed that the material he provided was particularly impressive because of its high level of secrecy, and that Walker was most prolific during the first months after he began spying, when he was trying to impress his handlers with the value of his services.
The KGB paid Walker millions of dollars for the information he provided. Former KGB general Boris Aleksandrovich Solomatin, who was Walker’s handler in the Soviet embassy in Washington, said the American traitor was “the most important” spy the Soviets ever developed. John Walker “gave us the equivalent of a seat inside your Pentagon where we could read your most vital secrets,” Solomatin told Court TV.
Oleg Kalugin, another former KGB official whose work with Walker was extensive, confirmed the importance of Walker’s spy work. Kalugin, former chief of KGB foreign intelligence, was promoted to the rank of major general because of the extraordinary amount of intelligence gained from the American naval spy.
Kalugin, who became disillusioned with the Soviet system, and was forced out of the KGB in 1990, said in a CNN television documentary that Walker dropped “big brown bags filled with top-secret, classified information” into the hands of the KGB in Washington.
Among the thousands of classified documents Walker delivered to the KGB were certainly some of the extensive files produced from 1964 through 1966, which were replete with warnings about China. It has also been reported that Walker gained access to the U.S. strategic nuclear plan, known as Single Integrated Operational Plan, prepared in 1963 (SIOP 63). One of the scenarios in that supersecret war plan called for devastating nuclear retaliation for a limited sneak attack by a Chinese missile submarine.
This information would have been of great interest to some in the Kremlin who were equally alarmed about the Chinese nuclear threat to the Soviet Union. A Stalinist faction in the Kremlin had agitated for a nuclear attack on the Chinese since 1966, when Mao began a campaign to shift the leadership of world Communism from Moscow to Beijing.
The discovery, in documents turned over to the KGB, that the Americans feared a sneak attack against a U.S. city by a nuclear-missile-armed Chinese submarine was of particular interest to Moscow hard-liners. A radical element in the Kremlin controlled the KGB leadership. Yuri Andropov, who had become chairman of the KGB and a candidate member of the Politburo in 1967, was the most visibly powerful man in the clique. But there was another, more likely leader, operating in the shadows of this group. He was the power broker Mikhail Suslov, who had been behind every palace intrigue in the Kremlin since Stalin’s death.
Andropov had all the credentials needed to recognize the significance of America’s fear of a Chinese sneak attack. Before assuming the chairman’s post in the KGB, Andropov had been one of the men leading the Kremlin’s ideological campaign against the Chinese Communists.
This tiny cabal in the KGB was one of the most ruthless that the post-Stalin Soviet system produced. Despite the lessons of the Stalin purges, it was dedicated to returning the Communist state to the internal and international policies of the dead dictator.
“I think [if] we compare Hitler to Stalin, and the Gestapo to the KGB, the KGB was far more ruthless,” former KGB general Kalugin told CNN. “Not because they killed far more people, but because they were indiscriminate in the selection of victims. The Soviet system was a lawless system, and the KGB was a tool of lawlessness,” he said.
At the time the K-129 mysteriously disappeared only a short distance from America’s greatest defense asset in the Pacific, the small KGB-centric group of reactionary Stalinists in Moscow was nearing the peak of its power in an otherwise weak central government headed by Leonid Brezhnev.
“After years of scorn and travails under Khrushchev, the security ministry once again was ascending to its rightful place at the heart of Soviet society,” Kalugin wrote in his autobiography,
The First Directorate.
“And in 1967, when the forceful Yuri Andropov took over the KGB, our power would know no bounds.”
This dangerous group of plotters had the will, the power, and the keys to the machinery necessary to cynically launch a devastating attack on any enemy, within or without, that stood in the way of restoring a hard-line, Stalin-like regime to accomplish world domination.
All this cabal needed was a foolproof plan that guaranteed its own survivability in the aftermath of its horrific deeds. Ironically, American intelligence—thanks to turncoat Johnny Walker Red’s sacks of pilfered military secrets—may have supplied that perfect plan.
N
AVAL INTELLIGENCE ANALYSTS
and civilian scientists piecing together the puzzle surrounding the K-129 incident did not have access to important evidence that would have answered major questions about the boat’s unusual final maneuvers. Without a well-placed mole at navy headquarters in Moscow or Vladivostok—such as the spy John Walker in Washington—the American investigators were unaware that K-129 had been manned by a suspicious contingent of seemingly extraneous personnel.
The highly unusual makeup of the crew, with fifteen more men aboard than were needed for normal operations, has never been addressed by former Soviet admirals in their published accounts of the K-129 incident. At least eleven of those extra crew members had no apparent reason for going on the mission. These men had no known operational assignments, and there is no record that they came from elsewhere in the fleet. Some of the other replacements assigned to the K-129 have been identified as submariners from boats in the Kamchatka Flotilla.
In all the interviews with former Soviet admirals from the Pacific Fleet concerning the loss of the K-129, this obvious anomaly in the crew size has never even been acknowledged. Some of the headquarters officials, who were in the best position to know something was wrong with the composition of the crew, have been the most vocal in blaming the Americans for the sinking, rather than answering questions about the known violations of operational procedures. These same former admirals have repeatedly accused the U.S. government of hiding information about K-129. Yet they have shed no light on discrepancies in the K-129 account, such as the unusual orders to return to sea before the regular schedule, the failure of the officers to file a crew manifest, and the extra men on that last mission.
The oversized crew is thus a particularly strange part of the story—not just the fact of its existence, but the way it has been almost “officially” ignored. In every commentary on the K-129 incident by Cold War–era Soviet admirals and government statements by the new Russian Federation Navy, no one has attempted to explain why an always uncomfortably crowded submarine carried fifteen more men on a lengthy mission than the boat regularly required.
Two former Soviet submarine commanders, speaking off the record for fear of political retaliation under the new crackdown on press freedom in Russia, have recently confirmed that such overmanning of a submarine on a long combat patrol would never have been sanctioned by the Soviet navy. These retired officers stated that K-129’s extra crew was a significant factor in understanding what went wrong on that mission. Both expressed amazement that no inquiry about the number of lost seamen has ever been conducted by the post-Soviet government.
One of these former commanders, who is now living in St. Petersburg, Russia, did respond to a published explanation that the extra men on the doomed submarine might have been trainees or cadets.
“The notion that cadets were sent on a regular autonomous patrol is wrong,” said the retired captain. “Naval cadets used to serve on board submarines only for short training exercises at sea. They never served for patrol duty. So you can’t find any cadets [trainees] on board the K-129 on her last patrol.”
There is no question about the number of crewmen who served on this type of submarine. Several authoritative sources confirm that the Golf II submarine had a full crew complement of eighty-three, which included twelve to fourteen officers and sixty-nine to seventy-one sailors. The Golf I boat required even fewer crewmen, numbering only eighty.
The most definitive source on Cold War–era Soviet submarines,
Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces,
edited by Pavel Podvig, describes the crew as numbering eighty-three officers and enlisted men. That encyclopedic book was researched and written by top experts at the Center for Arms Control Studies at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and other scholars in Russia, Canada, and the United States. The book, which is widely recognized as the most accurate account of Soviet nuclear weapons systems, was published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In recent years, the book has been banned in Russia and its researchers harassed, as public access to information is once again being restricted by the Russian government, which is increasingly being run by former KGB officials.
Two other authorities with expertise in Soviet submarine technology also confirm that submarines such as K-129 had crews of no more than eighty-three men. These are the prestigious Federation of American Scientists (FAS) reports on Weapons of Mass Destruction, and the editors at
Chinese Defence Today,
an unofficial but well-regarded publication on Chinese military technology.
There is little doubt that ninety-eight men were aboard K-129 when it sank. No questions were raised in Russia in 1996, when President Boris Yeltsin posthumously awarded the Order of Valor to ninety-eight men who died aboard the submarine K-129. The names have been etched into a monument at the Kamchatka Peninsula headquarters of the Russian navy, and widely published in Russian newspapers, magazines, and books.
When the unusual number of men in the crew is coupled with the revelation that no crew manifest was found when Soviet Pacific Fleet headquarters first determined that the submarine was lost, it seems obvious that someone did not want the odd composition of K-129’s crew to be known. The mission becomes even more suspect when the strange behavior of several officers of the regular crew on the eve of sailing is added to the mix.
Paul Neumann, a naval engineer and Soviet-era naval historian in Vancouver, British Columbia, who has studied the K-129 incident and conducted numerous interviews with former Soviet submarine commanders, was also curious about the makeup of the crew. In researching post-Soviet Russia, he uncovered a published statement by Rear Admiral (retired) Y. A. Krivoruchko, former commander of the 15th Submarine Squadron at Kamchatka, concerning the K-129 crew.
“A full list of the crew, signed and stamped by the division commander, had never [before departure] been made,” according to Admiral Krivoruchko. “And it did not occur [was not noticed] until twelve days after K-129 was pronounced missing. From the point of view of the military regulations, it is not just negligence, it is a crime. The submarine did not go for training or target practice. It was a combat patrol in the times of the Cold War.”
There are a few other tantalizing pieces of evidence that suggest something was not normal on board the K-129 on this last mission.
Author Clyde W. Burleson conducted scores of off-the-record interviews with government agents and civilians who worked on the K-129 inquiry. He was told a strange story about one of the bodies recovered from the submarine.
A “personal journal” belonging to a young missile officer was recovered along with the junior officer’s dog tags, which were used to identify him. By cross-referencing a list of the officers aboard K-129, which was released after the end of the Cold War, it is possible to determine that this man was probably the assistant weapons officer, Captain-Lieutenant Victor Zuev. The diary was found alongside his body in a bunk in the officers’ quarters in compartment two of the boat. The diary, along with other papers about his training, may have given the CIA some special insight into the last days of the submarine.
What makes that find significant is that the officer apparently thought K-129’s mission was so unusual that he risked being sent to a gulag for keeping a forbidden diary. Operations aboard missile submarines at the height of the Cold War were top-secret, and both the U.S. and Soviet navies forbade crewmen from keeping unofficial records such as journals.
American intelligence was so interested in the young man’s account of the sub’s journey that the book was rushed to a NASA laboratory for restoration. An ultralow vacuum chamber and lasers were used for restoration, in a major effort to read whatever secrets the diary’s author had recorded. This diary or trip record was reported as one of the most important pieces salvaged from the evidence later recovered.
Did this illicit diary, kept hidden under a mattress in the missile officer’s cabin, tell the full story of what had happened on the submarine? Years later, U.S. intelligence officials made a point of letting the Soviets know that such a written account of the mission existed. But there is no record that the diary was ever returned with the other personal items from K-129 that were handed over to the Russians after the Cold War ended.
Diplomats, spies, and even U.S. intelligence agents involved in the K-129 investigation also appear to have, at some point, informed Soviet intelligence or the Soviet navy that a large number of bodies—estimates range from fifty to seventy—was discovered crowded into the forward two sections of the doomed submarine. Whether this information was derived from photographs taken inside the sunken boat by the USS
Halibut
or from later salvage efforts is not clear.
Officially, the U.S. government has never admitted to recovering more than six bodies, which the CIA claims were reburied in somber naval ceremonies at sea. However, several former Soviet admirals and a Soviet navy intelligence officer have written or told interviewers the Soviets learned from American sources that up to seventy bodies were found in the forward third of the submarine, which corresponds roughly with compartments one and two.
On a combat patrol, it would be inconceivable for more than a dozen men to have been in these two sections, if the submarine had been operating normally at the time of its destruction. The first compartment contained only the torpedo room, a tight space manned by a half-dozen sailors during battle stations. Compartment two housed the officers’ quarters, the officers’ wardroom, the sonar room, and the main battery controllers. Even at maximum normal usage, there should have been no more than ten officers and seamen in this section of the boat.
Since there were no exit hatches in this section, trained submariners would have fled
out
of these compartments in an emergency rather than
into
them, if they were seeking to exit the ship. The only logical explanation for so many men being jammed into such a tiny space is that they had been forced into the area and compelled to remain there.
Suspicions about the motives of the crew were first expressed by Dr. Craven, the U.S. Navy’s original scientific investigator into the K-129 incident. He summed up the mystery in his autobiography
The Silent War
with these words: “The secret residing in the secret—the motivations of that Soviet captain and his crew—had remained intact and that, ironically, is the secret that ought to be revealed.”
Dr. Craven confirmed in his memoirs that the investigators suspected the boat was a rogue, and that it had destroyed itself in an attempt to launch, or while launching, against Pearl Harbor. Under a lifetime confidentiality contract, Dr. Craven is quick to qualify that conclusion each time it is mentioned in his book.
Most likely, however, it was not the motives of Captain Kobzar or his senior commanders that should have been questioned. There are good reasons to believe now that the officers and senior sailors in the regular crew of K-129 had nothing to do with an attempted rogue attack on the United States. Once the longest leg of the journey to the mission box had been completed, only a small part of the regular crew would have been needed to divert the submarine from the mission box, position it near Hawaii, and attempt to launch a missile.
The key to this assumption may be found in the eleven-man unit that is known to have boarded K-129 at the last minute. Just as evidence about the inexplicable extra manning of the boat came to light after the end of the Cold War, other military information not available to U.S. agencies has recently surfaced that can explain a great deal about the incident.
The officers of K-129—particularly the submarine’s commander, Captain First Rank Vladimir Kobzar, and its first officer, Captain Second Rank Alexander Zhuravin—were known to be devoted husbands and fathers, and they had unblemished service records. While these admirable traits would not necessarily have precluded their willing participation in a rogue operation, they do make these men unlikely suspects for leading a revolt against the homeland and defying orders by participating in a serious unauthorized activity. These top officers and other staff officers seemed to be no less loyal or patriotic to their homeland than their counterparts commanding American submarines with similar capacity to launch nuclear war. They were the best and brightest their countries had to offer, and the last people who would have contemplated a suicidal and terrorist attack that could have caused World War III.
The officers and crew were highly respected by the admirals and fellow submariners of the Soviet Pacific Fleet. We know this is true of Kobzar, Zhuravin, the senior missile officer, Captain Third Rank Gennady Panarin, and his assistant, Captain-Lieutenant Zuev. Rather than perpetrate an unauthorized sneak attack, it is reasonable to believe that these men would have fought against any rogue element attempting to take over their submarine. These men would certainly have known that any unauthorized attempt to launch a nuclear missile would have been thwarted by the fail-safe system. They probably went to their deaths with the knowledge that K-129 would be severely damaged or even destroyed in such a launch attempt. They may even have warned those attempting the launch of such a consequence, and been rebuffed. It is far more likely that they were unsung heroes than rogues.
If the launch was not attempted by the regular crew of K-129, then who would have been qualified to do so? The evidence points to the mysterious strangers who boarded the submarine shortly before sailing.