Authors: Kenneth Sewell
News outlets all over Russia revisited the all-but-forgotten K-129 sinking, with far more information being given after the
Kursk
disaster than at any time since the 1968 incident. In fact, when K-129 sank, there was no information released to the public that a submarine was even missing. Russian authorities soon found the
Kursk
sinking was caused by an on-board explosion in the forward torpedo room and had nothing to do with the Americans. Still, a hue and cry arose throughout the former Soviet Union for an explanation about the K-129.
This sudden spotlight on a mystery that the former Soviet admirals had kept secret for so many years made a number of officials in Moscow nervous. Faced with new evidence that the Soviet submarine sank much closer to American territory than the location in the far North Pacific, an official scrambled to explain why K-129 seemed to be so far off its designated course.
The former ranking Soviet admiral in the Pacific Fleet offered an explanation that made the reason for dispatching K-129 on this mission even more sinister. He suddenly came up with a claim that the missile submarine had been sent on a spying mission to Pearl Harbor. That explanation is highly unlikely, since only the attack submarines of the Soviet navy were used for reconnoitering. Ballistic missile submarines were far too valuable in the strategic scheme to be risked on spy missions. In 1968, the Pacific Fleet had 85 long-range and 171 medium-range attack submarines assigned in the Pacific Ocean. So there were ample resources for underseas spy missions without calling on a missile submarine such as K-129.
The Russian Federation, which also wanted to scotch the rampant rumors, finally issued an “official” cause of the sinking of K-129. The new official version was that K-129 was destroyed when the submarine accidentally exceeded its maximum diving depth and was crushed by the deep-sea pressure.
The new openness that existed temporarily in the Russian Federation under President Boris Yeltsin led to the belated recognition for the families of the submariners lost aboard the K-129. The government posthumously awarded ninety-eight crew members Medals of Courage and acknowledged that their deaths had been due to circumstances beyond their control. This belated recognition of the lost crew was certainly appropriate for most of the men of K-129. Some of the officers and men probably were true unsung heroes and went to their deaths trying to stop an unspeakable act of terror. The recognition allowed the surviving widows to draw full pension benefits for their husbands’ service.
At least eleven named on the roster of the honored were rogues, and the names themselves were probably aliases carefully prepared by someone high in the KGB. They did not deserve medals, but to withhold the honor would have been to admit something was terribly wrong on that mission.
Nevertheless, a stone memorial to the lost crew was also commissioned and erected near the K-129’s home port on the Kamchatka Peninsula.
Another memorial was placed in a cemetery in Moscow for at least one of the lost sailors, who was likely among the real heroes of that doomed mission. Irina Zhuravina, the widow of K-129’s first officer, Alexander Zhuravin, had a tombstone erected over an empty grave with the photograph of her lost submariner etched into the stone. The state’s honors had been painfully long in coming. Their son, Mikhail, who had become an engineer in a Soviet nuclear plant, died of cancer in 1992, without ever knowing that the new Russia had honored his father’s naval service. The son is buried beside his father’s empty grave.
“We were told nothing for months, and then warned, ‘Do not place your personal interests above the interests of the state,’ ” the widow, who is now in her seventies, laments. “You could not talk about it. The secrecy was so strong, we could not even think about it. An admiral of the fleet once told me that I needed to forget about it and not stir up the past. Neither the old Soviet government nor the new Russian Federation government has ever told us anything about what happened, or what they learned from the Americans,” she said. “But we will keep on asking, anyway.”
When the
Kursk
sank, several of the surviving widows of the K-129 traveled to Vidyayevo, the doomed boat’s home port in far northern Russia, to offer solace to the young wives of the newly lost submariners.
The Russian families of K-129 are not the only ones left in government-sanctioned darkness by the layered mystery. A well-orchestrated campaign by professional secret makers and keepers in both the former Soviet Union and the United States has done an expert job of keeping everyone, both high and low, in ignorance about this most strange Cold War incident.
The official silence and deliberate obfuscations about the sinking of K-129, along with the eerily similar mysterious sinking of the USS
Scorpion
less than two months later in the Atlantic, originate at the highest levels of government.
Retired Navy captain Peter Huchthausen, who has written several books on the submarines of that era, was confronted with this stone wall of deliberate silence shortly after the end of the Cold War. Captain Huchthausen told
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
military reporter Ed Offley of a strange encounter he had in the former Soviet Union after asking about the lost submarines.
“Captain, you are very young and inexperienced, but you will learn that there are some things both sides have agreed not to address, and one is that event [the
Scorpion
] and our K-129 loss, for similar reasons,” a Soviet admiral told Huchthausen, who was then serving as U.S. naval attaché in Moscow.
The saga of K-129 contains one of the greatest mysteries in maritime history. It is no accident the secrets have been kept.
T
HE INCIDENTS OF EARLY
1968, and the subsequent détente with the Soviets and rapprochement with Red China, did not end the Cold War. But the horrific reality of what had almost happened at Pearl Harbor in 1968 profoundly affected the outcome, and may have prevented that long Cold War from turning any hotter.
The Soviet empire did not fall for another twenty-three years, largely because the discovery of sixty oil fields and soaring oil prices that resulted from the Arab oil embargo of 1973 gave the Communist system a temporary reprieve. The economic collapse, which was forecast to begin in the 1970s, and may have been a major impetus for the plot behind the K-129 affair, did ultimately occur. In 1991, the Iron Curtain came down, and with it the ruthless totalitarian Communism that had held the Soviet Socialist Republics in captivity for more than half the twentieth century. George Herbert Walker Bush was presiding over the U.S. government when the end finally came. President Bush declared that this was the beginning of a “new world order,” a time of peace and prosperity all over the globe. Huge peace dividends were expected; and, indeed, disarmament on a massive scale seemed possible for a time.
A year after the end of the Cold War, Russia stopped its massive submarine-building program and began to dismantle much of the nuclear fleet, which had numbered more than five hundred boats at the peak of the crisis. The United States also began to dismantle and mothball some of its submarine force.
Unfortunately, both the Americans and the Russians were naively arrogant enough to think that if they called a halt to hostilities against each other, all the world’s hostilities would cease. Some political philosophers even pronounced this the “end of history,” and predicted the world would now concentrate on making permanent peace through global capitalist democracy. That was in 1991.
One decade later, on September 11, 2001, the world was brutally reminded there could be no peace after all, only different and more deadly enemies to challenge world order. It has become increasingly clear that the proliferation of chemical, biological, and nuclear technology currently poses an even greater threat to humanity than it did at the peak of the Cold War.
The still-secret incident of K-129’s near nuclear strike on an American city becomes a cautionary tale. It resonates in today’s global war on terrorism, as rogue states rush to acquire weapons of mass destruction.
Now, instead of two major powers with weapons capable of killing civilian populations on a massive scale, there are thirteen countries known to have biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons. Terrorist states are eagerly developing these types of weapons, and stateless terrorists are avidly seeking to acquire them. Russian Federation intelligence officials recently reported that al-Qaeda has been seeking to buy loose nuclear weapons on the black market since the mid-1990s.
One of the causes for alarm over this new threat is that terrorists or even rogue states are not constrained by the notion of mutual assured destruction, as were the great powers of the Cold War. The MAD strategy as a deterrence against starting nuclear warfare in the Cold War era has been replaced today by a policy of preemptive strikes against fanatics whose primary strategy is mass murder for the sake of creating chaos and terrorizing whole populations. The stated aim of al-Qaeda is the use of unconventional means to destroy Westerners and their modern civilization. There is more than ample proof now that the goal of the anti-West terrorists is to acquire weapons of mass destruction and any means necessary to deliver them on population centers of America, Europe, the Middle East, and southern Asia.
Not only are WMD proliferating, but around the world unstable and/or terrorist-friendly nations are acquiring submarines to stealthily deliver the deadly weapons. A half-dozen European and Asian nations are now making and selling sophisticated submarines to the highest bidder—no questions asked.
The Canadian National Defense Association Network warned that in the post–Cold War world “submarines could be a factor in drug running, illegal immigration, or disagreements over rights of passage.” The 1997 report said Canadian maritime forces must be prepared to protect its ports and support peace operations overseas.
The three largest powers have reduced their strategic forces considerably since the end of the Cold War. The United States currently maintains an active fleet of about 75 nuclear submarines, the Russian Federation has 65 nuclear submarines, and the People’s Republic of China has 64 nuclear submarines. Today the navies of lesser military powers maintain a combined 255 submarines. Many of those are advanced diesel-electric models similar to the K-129. Most of these diesel-electric boats have been upgraded to make them comparable to modern-day nuclear submarines when running on their battery-powered motors.
Chillingly, one of the largest submarine fleets in the world is now operated by a totalitarian rogue state, the People’s Republic of Korea. North Korea alone maintains a fleet of 50 attack submarines, although only half of them are believed to be operational, and another 36 midget subs. While this fleet would be no match for the modern submarines of the three major military powers—the United States, Russia, and China—the North Korean submarines are nevertheless stealthy, and capable of delivering deadly packages to any place on earth.
The Defense Intelligence Agency recently raised the estimate of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal from two weapons to eight, and forecast a potential production capacity of six additional weapons a year by 2007. Experts are concerned that because of its economic plight, North Korea might sell a nuclear weapon to a terrorist organization. North Korea could also sell one of its surplus submarines along with a nuclear weapon.
Other countries identified at various times as sponsoring terrorism maintain submarine forces, including Iran, with three regular attack submarines and three midget subs, and Libya, with two attack subs.
In addition, the CIA recently announced it had identified eleven commercial blue-water surface ships that are owned or under the control of the al-Qaeda terrorist organization. One of the greatest new fears is that terrorists will deliver chemical, radiological, or biological weapons to the harbor of a major American or European city in the cargo hold of a tramp freighter.
As ludicrous as it sounds, even narco-terrorists have tried to acquire submarines. Colombian government troops who raided a suspicious warehouse in Facatativa, Colombia, in the year 2000 discovered a homemade submarine being built by Russian mobsters for a South American drug cartel. The hundred-foot, nearly completed submarine would have been capable of carrying at least 150 tons of cocaine to the Unites States, submerged out of sight of the U.S. Coast Guard.
China’s aggressive development of a submarine-based nuclear missile program is proceeding in the opposite direction from the American and Russian programs. China today maintains a fragile balance of power between the progressive civilian leaders and the hard-liners in control of the PRC’s powerful army and navy. There are fewer safeguards to prevent a disgruntled Chinese submarine commander or group of plotters from repeating the K-129 rogue scenario.
In the event of another coup d’état such as the one that brought the now-friendly military regime to power in Pakistan, there is no international protocol to keep a radicalized Islamist military, or even a terrorist group, from getting their hands on a Pakistani submarine, complete with a nuclear weapon.
Robert Baer, a twenty-two-year veteran of the CIA with extensive experience as a field officer in the Middle East, recently warned of the devastation a rogue submarine attack on the Sea Island Oil Terminal off Saudi Arabia could have on the Western economy. Baer said that a commando or submarine attack on the offshore loading terminal could take almost five million barrels per day of vital oil supplies off the world market for months. He said the loss of that much oil would raise the price to $150 a barrel, at least triple the mid-2004 price. Such an event would result in economic and social calamities. Baer noted that an attack on this most vulnerable link in the world’s oil supply would be simple to accomplish. He warned that any enemy of the West with a submarine “available in the global arms bazaar” could devastate the great Western powers.
In April 2004, al-Qaeda terrorists attempted to cut off the flow of nearly one million barrels of Iraqi oil in a thwarted seaborne attack against offshore loading facilities near Basra.
It would not take a sophisticated missile system to deliver a nuclear, chemical, or biological bomb to the harbor of any city in the world. A large, bundled WMD device could easily be dropped by a submerged boat that had silently crossed an ocean and sneaked into the unprotected ports of America, Europe, or friendly countries of Asia. In the United States, key ports and harbors are wide open, with only naval reserve units in charge of mobile inshore undersea warfare (MIUW) available for defense.
Recently discovered mission logs of a Soviet Foxtrot submarine, which is now on exhibit in Seattle, revealed that the boat had successfully evaded U.S. defenses during the Cold War and sailed undetected into Puget Sound. And that penetration of homeland waters by an enemy submarine was accomplished in a time of much more extensive U.S. antisubmarine warfare operations.
The threat that stateless terrorists or rogue governments will acquire nuclear weapons or other WMD has caused a major rethinking of U.S. defense policy. The National Security Strategy promulgated in September 2002 warned, “The gravest danger our Nation faces lies at the crossroad of radicalism and technology. Our enemies have openly declared that they are seeking weapons of mass destruction, and evidence indicates that they are doing so with determination. The United States will not allow these efforts to succeed. America will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed.”
Only a fail-safe device prevented a nuclear attack on Pearl Harbor on March 7, 1968, which would have been far more catastrophic in loss of American lives than either the December 7, 1941, sneak attack that precipitated U.S. entry into World War II or the September 11, 2001, attacks that launched the global war on terrorism.
In the K-129 incident, a group of ruthless men, probably no larger than the al-Qaeda cell that more recently attacked America came very close to successfully putting a nuclear weapon on a U.S. city. While the enemy’s ideology is different today—fanatical religious Islamism, as opposed to fanatical secular Communism—the motivation to destroy or severely cripple democratic society is no less fervent.
There are no fail-safe systems to prevent the kind of asymmetrical warfare now being waged against the West by stateless terrorists. A combination of vigilance, imagination, and new policies on many fronts will be required on a scale not yet implemented by our government. And to date, the potential of an attack from the sea—as real as ever—has been largely ignored. Only by knowing and facing the truth can the American people make the right choices in their individual lives and elect the right leaders to steer the Free World through the troubled waters ahead.