Authors: Kenneth Sewell
Suslov knew that the Soviets had provided China with one Golf submarine of the older type and, more important, with seven sea-launch ballistic missiles. He also knew that China had since developed and tested its own nuclear warheads and was perfectly capable of mounting such a weapon on the missiles. This intimate familiarity with the way the Chinese systems worked would be key to plotting a successful attack on America and carefully fabricating a trail that would lead straight to Mao’s front door.
It was Suslov who headed the delegation that made a last-ditch effort to mend the rift with Red China in 1963. When it failed, it was Suslov who recommended the hard-line Soviet approach against Red China to the Central Committee Plenum in 1964.
More may have been at play than an ideological struggle for dominance of world Communism. Suslov harbored a visceral, personal hatred for Mao, who had publicly humiliated him before delegates at the fortieth anniversary celebration of the October Revolution in Moscow, in November 1957. American author Harrison Salisbury interviewed delegates to that plenum, who said Mao had openly boasted that his “little guy [Deng Xiaoping, who would become China’s premier]…bested Mikhail Suslov, the tall ideologue.” For years after, Mao took every opportunity to insult Suslov on the international stage by reminding the world that the Soviets’ ideological Red Eminence (Suslov) had lost the debate over who should lead international Communism. The incident has been described as the genesis of the Sino-Soviet rift. Suslov was not the kind of person to get angry over an insult; he had a personal history of getting even.
Suslov’s clique was the prime force calling for the destruction of Mao by any means necessary. His insider experience dealing with the Chinese gave Suslov a unique depth of knowledge about the inner workings of the secretive government in Beijing. This special insight provided the plotters with all the intimate details necessary to carry out a scheme to frame the Chinese for the K-129 attack.
The plotters in the K-129 incident needed absolute command control of unquestionably loyal fanatics in the military structure. They had to have access to records that identified lower-echelon personnel who were willing to risk everything on one dangerous mission. In addition to finding the men needed to implement the plot, the ringleaders had to be able to get control of exactly the right equipment (submarine and missile), accomplish everything with precise timing, and be able to manage a master plan to avoid the American retaliation that would certainly follow such an attack.
This ability to recruit such a specialized crew willing to commandeer a submarine and risk death to start a nuclear war took someone in the highest ranks of the Soviet government. Logistically, carrying out such a plan required the steel nerves of a highly placed manager who was no stranger to life-and-death plots.
Suslov could not have carried out such a grand scheme alone. But the plot only required a few people—the fewer the better. Secrecy was of the essence. Suslov found willing allies in such insiders as Andropov, whose career he had engineered into the post of director of the KGB in 1968.
For years, Suslov had been the Kremlin’s chief bureaucratic watchdog of the KGB. This position, while anonymous, gave him unquestioned access to officers and men skilled enough to take charge of a Soviet missile submarine and ruthless enough to launch a sneak attack. Suslov and Andropov had the necessary pipeline through the KGB to circumvent the regular Soviet navy and place the KGB’s specially trained
osnaz
unit aboard K-129.
Had the mission succeeded, and the K-129 somehow eluded furious U.S. naval sub hunters from carriers in the Pacific Ocean, no medals would have awaited the surviving crew. Considering the villainy of Suslov and his associates, all of the common sailors and officers would certainly have been liquidated, probably including the
osnaz
team itself.
The plotters evidently believed that the dangerous risks to carry out the clandestine attack on the United States base in Hawaii would be worth taking. There was the whole world to be gained, and only human lives to be sacrificed. Such niceties had never deterred men such as these in their pursuit of ruthless ambition. This time their outrageous plot failed because of a technicality; their only concern then was to make sure no one in Moscow or Washington ever learned the whole truth.
R
ICHARD
M. N
IXON WAS INAUGURATED
as the thirty-seventh president of the United States on January 20, 1969. The Johnson administration turned over the reins of government after eight years of Democratic Party rule that had seen tensions with the Soviet Union intensified by the Cuban Missile Crisis and the escalating Vietnam War.
By all reckoning, the K-129 incident should have been packed away with the boxes of the outgoing administration, and the case closed. It was a chilling near-nuclear catastrophe, but fortunately it had somehow been averted. True, questions were left unanswered. But since no nuclear attack against America had actually succeeded, there was no residual emergency facing the incoming Republican team. The K-129 incident remained virtually unknown to the general populations of America and the Soviet Union. The public was not even aware that a submarine had sunk near Hawaii. The U.S. Navy was willing, officially at least, to chalk up the sinking of the Soviet submarine to an accident caused by battery gas combustion.
This should have been the end of the story of K-129, another unexplained mystery of the Cold War to bury in storage boxes until some naval historian declassified the files for study at a future date.
But for some inexplicable reason, the strangest part of the saga of the aging submarine was only beginning, as the vanguard of the Nixon team took over the defense and intelligence agencies of government.
Instead of disappearing into bureaucratic obscurity, the ghost of K-129 resurfaced with a vengeance, and events were set in motion that would haunt the troubled waters of the Pacific for decades to come.
There has never been a satisfactory explanation for why some of the most powerful men on earth became so obsessed with raising, figuratively and literally, this aging submarine from its three-mile-deep grave. But that is exactly what they did, and the strange behavior of the world leaders involved in the K-129 incident from that point on posed an even greater Cold War mystery than the circumstances surrounding the sinking itself.
Even before the Nixon inauguration, a key figure in the new administration, who was destined to become one of the most enigmatic men of the Cold War era, took almost complete control of the diplomatic and intelligence affairs of the United States. Henry Alfred Kissinger, a forty-five-year-old Harvard University professor, was named assistant to the president for national security in December 1968, a month before Nixon took office. Kissinger quickly positioned himself between the president-elect and the heads of the government’s intelligence agencies, so that all information would have to be funneled and filtered through him before it arrived on Nixon’s desk.
While the Nixon transition team was still operating from suites at the Pierre Hotel in New York City, Kissinger took charge of the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) given by the CIA. He decided what would be shown to the president—which items needed the president’s attention and which did not. During this transition period, daily briefings for Kissinger were conducted by a career CIA agent, Paul Corscadden, in a secure room built in the basement at 450 Park Avenue, where the New York headquarters of the presidential campaign had been located. Kissinger established the pattern that kept CIA directors removed from personal contact with Nixon, who held grudges against the Agency from perceived past slights.
The haze of intrigue that would surround the Nixon administration was cast early in this preinauguration briefing center, established in the basement of an old office building. The door to the briefing room was, appropriately enough, black. The furtive comings and goings of government agents through the black door soon drew the attention of other building occupants. Whispers that some highly clandestine operation was being conducted from the location spread throughout the neighborhood. The setting was only a harbinger of the secrecy that would characterize the administration’s conduct of foreign and intelligence dealings.
In mid-December, Kissinger directed that National Intelligence Estimates (NIE) also were to go to him personally. Kissinger culled the material and briefed Nixon on matters he deemed important. This practice continued after the move into the White House, where Kissinger remained in charge of all intelligence and sensitive international matters.
One of the first directives from the Oval Office was Nixon’s announcement that he would personally conduct all foreign policy from the White House, rather than through the State Department. As the president’s national security advisor, Kissinger became one of the most powerful men in Washington and, thus, the world. He ran the intelligence and foreign policy program through the National Security Council. Kissinger personally chaired six NSC subcommittees. One of the work groups under his direction was called the Forty Committee, which was responsible for approving all clandestine operations of the United States government. Kissinger was so secretive that he often advised his enemy counterparts sitting across the table in unpublicized negotiations to caution their diplomats against telling the U.S. State Department anything about the talks.
From his first day in office, Nixon’s dealings, even between agencies of the government, were shrouded in mystery and intrigue. It was the way the administration worked, but few politicians or diplomats had any idea how global his schemes really were.
If the Johnson administration had been too exhausted to make use of the stunning Defense Intelligence Estimate and photographic packet on the K-129 incident, the top national security team in the incoming Nixon administration knew exactly what they had and what to do with it. In the new Nixon era of global intrigue, this was the kind of material on which grand strategies could be built, not to mention its potential value for geopolitical blackmail.
For President Nixon, the incriminating analysis and supporting photographs provided a ready-made tool to pry cracks in the Iron and Bamboo curtains. The president and his advisors were soon busily planning how to use this top-secret intelligence to maximum benefit. The K-129 incident was the linchpin for an aggressive, and sometimes bizarre, new foreign policy.
The DIA’s findings on the rogue submarine came to the attention of the White House within a few days of Nixon’s inauguration. A member of his inner circle of newly appointed advisors learned of the intelligence trove from the USS
Halibut.
General Alexander Haig, then assistant to National Security Advisor Kissinger, was the first of Nixon’s men to see the photographs. He was impressed by the quality of the underwater photography, but more excited by the DIA’s interpretation of what the photos revealed. The probability assessment, attached to the package of photographs and written catalogue of military secrets snatched from the rogue submarine, was a stunning document. Rogue or not, a finding that a Soviet submarine had actually tried to launch against America and had blown itself up in the act was priceless. Such a document, along with its supporting evidence, could have many uses—all of them good for the Americans, bad for the Soviets.
Haig insisted the photo package and naval intelligence analysis be delivered immediately to his boss. Kissinger, who was likewise impressed, wasted no time in sharing the stunning evidence with the president.
The K-129 matter was soon removed from the aegis of U.S. Navy intelligence and deposited in Nixon’s National Security Council. Whereas the Johnson administration had tried to gloss over the intelligence finding about the rogue attack with a quick fix and forget it, the incoming Nixon administration was excited about its potential geopolitical value.
Kissinger would become America’s master of back-channel diplomacy, and this was the first intelligence plum to drop in his lap. The information regarding the K-129 incident was exactly the kind of enemy intelligence that lent itself to shadowy communications between adversaries that thrived in an environment of secrecy and black operations.
As a piece of military intelligence, the K-129 wreck had proven of limited value. As bait for a political trap, the sunken submarine suddenly had unlimited value.
The Navy’s deep-sea intelligence operatives soon guessed that their prize was being snatched away by the spooks and politicians.
“The discovery of a high probability that the Soviet submarine was some sort of rogue, and that at the outset the Soviets had no idea that its loss was not just an accident, was a situation made to order for Kissinger,” said Dr. John Craven in his autobiography. “Moreover, our disclosure to the Soviets of what we had learned about their submarine would likely raise an unanswerable question in Brezhnev’s mind about his command and control of his armed forces.”
Possibly a scheme was developed in the White House to use this material to blackmail the Soviets, since revelation of a sneak attack with nuclear missiles would have been a crushing embarrassment to Brezhnev and the Soviet military, regardless of who in Moscow had orchestrated it. Brezhnev was already reeling under world criticism over the Czechoslovakia invasion and the “Brezhnev Doctrine,” which called for the armed invasion of any Communist satellite state that dared deviate from the Moscow line.
It was only a short time until the Soviets had been secretly apprised that the Americans had found their sunken submarine. A small, but tantalizing packet of classified material about the missing boat mysteriously fell into Russian hands. Reports that an unmarked packet of information on the K-129 had been left on the doorstep of the Soviet embassy were obviously part of an effort to hide the real source of the leak.
The KGB had covertly contacted Kissinger even before Nixon was elected. Oleg Kalugin, Washington station chief for the KGB, established a back channel to Nixon through Kissinger as early as August 1968, three months before the election. The KGB, at the time, was being run by Andropov and his mentor Suslov.
A high-ranking Soviet intelligence officer sent Kissinger a series of letters to be delivered to Nixon, stating that the Soviets would welcome his election. There were already signs of a growing rift in the Soviet leadership. This clandestine contact exemplified the aggressive plotting in Moscow because, concurrently, Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin was secretly contacting the Democratic campaign of Hubert Humphrey. Dobrynin sent word that the Politburo supported the Democratic candidate’s campaign. An offer of campaign contributions was refused by Humphrey.
Regardless of the origin of these clandestine contacts and the appearance of Soviet meddling in American politics, Kissinger would use the opportunity to establish personal contacts that were to be the hallmark of American foreign policy for the next four years.
Kissinger almost certainly recognized the significance of the DIA’s conclusions about the K-129 incident for another reason. He could see through the sinister plot of the schemers in Moscow because he had envisioned a similar scenario in his early writings. He had hypothesized a plot involving a sneak attack by a fledgling nuclear power against a superpower, with the goal of placing blame on a third superpower adversary. Kissinger wrote extensively about such an attack in his book
The Necessity for Choice
published in 1961, while he was still a professor at Harvard University. In his hypothetical case, the smaller nuclear power was called the Nth country.
“The Soviet Union cannot look with equanimity on the emergence of a powerful China armed with nuclear weapons,” Kissinger wrote. “The unchecked diffusion of nuclear weapons is said also to raise the specter of what has been called catalytic war—a conflict started by an irresponsible smaller country with a nuclear attack on a major nuclear power. Since, in the missile age, the direction from which the blow comes may be difficult to determine, the attacked nation may react by an all-out blow against its chief opponent.”
Kissinger pointed out that this idea of a sneak attack by a smaller country to induce two larger powers to destroy each other was the storyline of a popular 1960s nuclear holocaust movie. He wrote: “As described in
On the Beach,
a catalytic war starts with a nuclear attack by one of the Nth countries on a major power which, unable to discover the origin of the blow, retaliates against its chief opponent.”
Of course, in the K-129 incident the scenario was reversed. A cabal in Moscow had planned a sneak attack against the United States, and had attempted to make the lesser nuclear power appear to be the attacker, so that the Americans would obliterate Red China.
If the plotters used the ideas of an unwitting Kissinger to help design their horrific scheme, they were somewhat selective in what they chose to plagiarize. Kissinger predicted, accurately, a few paragraphs later, that by the time the Nth countries had developed rudimentary nuclear missile technology, the major powers would have perfected systems for determining, with high accuracy, the point of origin of an attacking missile. In 1968, the United States was not quite at that point of perfection with its satellite and SOSUS surveillance systems, but it was much closer than the Soviet navy or the plotters in Moscow were aware.
With the KGB’s recognition of the critical position Kissinger assumed in the administration, his earlier writings were most certainly scrutinized by KGB Chairman Andropov. Long before Kissinger became the most prominent foreign-affairs figure in the Nixon administration, his influence on Western defense policies was widely recognized and undoubtedly closely followed by the Kremlin and the KGB. His 1957 book,
Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy,
had established him as one of the West’s leading authorities on strategies for dealing with the Soviet bloc’s nuclear threat. He was director of Harvard University’s defense studies program from 1958 to 1971, and served as an advisor on nuclear defense to every U.S. president during that period. Kissinger’s prescient warning in
The Necessity for Choice
describing a duplicitous nuclear attack, coupled with John Walker’s documentation of the Johnson administration’s fear of a sneak attack by a lone Chinese submarine, seemed to provide a blueprint for the plot. The germ for the Kremlin plotters’ idea, ironically, could have originated in American political books and U.S. intelligence documents.