Authors: Kenneth Sewell
The key to the success of this “have-not” strategy was the ballistic missile submarine. While the Americans held vast technological and numerical superiority in airborne nuclear missiles and intercontinental ballistic missiles, the Soviets believed their sea-launched ballistic missiles would be more than enough to deter a first strike. A crash program of naval construction also focused on launching a number of destroyers and cruisers armed with surface-to-surface missiles. But since these ships were vulnerable, too, the primary element in the short-term deterrence plan was the missile submarine.
By 1967, the Soviet navy had launched a powerful and dangerous blue-water armada in the Atlantic Ocean and, for the first time, was a force to be reckoned with in the Mediterranean Sea. Soviet fleets began sailing missile cruisers and submarines into the ports of Third World countries, a strategy that won new converts to Communism. The increasingly powerful Red fleet served to further intimidate vassal Socialist Republics around the Baltic and Black seas, and to keep the always-restive Warsaw Pact countries of Eastern Europe in line.
The Soviets boasted of their new sea power. Marshal Rodion Mali-novsky, the Soviet minister of defense, pronounced in a speech shortly before his death in 1967: “First priority is being given to the strategic missile forces and atomic missile-launching submarines—forces which are the principal means of deterring the aggressor and decisively defeating him in war.”
In October 1967, Admiral Gorshkov clearly defined the new Soviet ambitions in a speech delivered on the fiftieth anniversary of the Soviet fleet. He warned, “In the past our ships and naval aviation units have operated primarily near our coast, concerned mainly with operations and tactical coordination with ground troops. Now, we must be prepared for broad offensive operations against sea and ground troops of the imperialists on any point of the world’s oceans and adjacent territories.”
Nowhere was the role of the Soviet navy, and particularly the Soviet submarine force, as essential to the strategic ambitions of the motherland as in the Soviet Pacific Far East. Soviet naval bases were strung the length of the Soviet Pacific coast, from Rybachiy Naval Base on the Kamchatka Peninsula to Vladivostok, fourteen hundred miles to the south. The warships of the Soviet Pacific surface fleet and Pacific Fleet headquarters were located at bases near Vladivostok.
The Soviet navy also had several submarine bases at Vladivostok, around the eastern edges of Peter the Great Bay, in Vladimir Bay off the Sea of Japan, on the Tatar Strait between Sakhalin Island and the mainland, and in several bays on the Sea of Okhotsk. In addition to its own permanent submarine facilities, the Soviet Union had secured a submarine base from its client state North Korea at the port of Wonsan near the Demilitarized Zone. That facility was about to become the focus of one of the bitterest confrontations in the already heated Cold War.
Rybachiy Naval Base on the Kamchatka Peninsula was the home port for the Soviets’ increasingly menacing ballistic missile force in the Pacific. In part because of its isolation, Avachinskaya Bay was one of the most important strategic assets in the USSR’s Pacific battle plan. Although the huge natural bay was in the far northern Pacific on the edge of the Bering Sea, a climatic anomaly left its main open waters ice-free the year round. This all-weather bay provided the home port for more than half of the Soviet Union’s sizable Pacific submarine fleet. The bay was deep enough that departing submarines could submerge well before leaving the narrow inlet for the open sea.
The U.S. Navy was well aware that Rybachiy Naval Base was the key to the new Soviet submarine strategy in the Pacific. It was almost as close to American military bases in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska as it was to its own headquarters at Vladivostok. This proximity, and the fact that it was primarily a ballistic missile submarine base, made the entrance to Avachinskaya Bay one of the most watched waterways on earth.
Elsewhere in the Pacific region, America was mired in the Vietnam War. The Soviet navy aimed to take advantage of the situation to lay claim to a share of America’s undisputed Pacific realm. The U.S. Navy had ruled this ocean from the Ross Sea to the Bering Sea, and from the Americas to Southeast Asia, since the end of World War II. In 1968, the Soviets, with their far-flung submarine and naval bases from the Arctic Circle to the Sea of Japan, were poised to challenge the American claim. In the early 1960s, the Soviet naval formations from the Pacific bases had begun making calls throughout Southeast Asia and into the Indian Ocean. The Soviets became the naval patron for the nonaligned nations of Indonesia and India, giving the Red fleet new, friendly ports of call for refueling.
The United States Navy, with its major bases in Japan, Okinawa, the Philippines, and Vietnam, and its midocean headquarters at Hawaii, still ruled the Pacific realm, but the Soviets’ new emphasis on a sea-launched ballistic missile navy was intended to challenge that supremacy.
In the mid-1960s, a new problem appeared on the Pacific horizon that boded trouble for both the Soviets and the Americans. The impenetrable naval ring these great powers sought to build around the Pacific Ocean had a sizable gap in its southwestern front. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) had joined the fraternity of nuclear nations in 1964, when it successfully tested its first atomic bomb. The Chinese wasted no time in adapting their new nuclear capability to tactical and strategic missiles. In a matter of a few months, there was a major new nuclear-armed threat in the Pacific Ocean.
Although Communist China had been a near-vassal state to the mighty Soviet Union from its creation in 1949, in the early 1960s the sleeping giant turned on its patron. By 1967–68, the relationship had become so hostile, a powerful faction in the Kremlin was urging that Mao Tse-tung’s China be designated people’s enemy number one, replacing the United States and its NATO allies as the prime target.
The American CIA watched the developing feud between the two Red giants with growing interest.
“[Soviet] relations with China have deteriorated to the point that major hostilities could occur. It is clear that the Soviets now regard China as a major threat to the USSR, and they apparently see this threat as active, growing, and of long duration,” revealed a top-secret National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), which was declassified at the end of the Cold War. “The Soviet military buildup in the Sino-Soviet border area has primarily involved the theater forces, but there have been some related developments in the strategic forces. Substantial Soviet forces will almost certainly be stationed on the eastern frontier for the foreseeable future.”
The instability was made all the more frightening by the near-anarchy that spread throughout the Chinese mainland with the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which had begun in 1966. The thought of an out-of-control nation with nuclear weapons posed a nightmare scenario for both Washington and Moscow.
The NIE pointed out that the developing hostility between the Soviets and Red Chinese had critically stretched the Soviet military capabilities. It stated that “the Soviets only five years ago faced two major military problems: the strategic capabilities of the West and the security of Eastern Europe. Now there is a third, a hostile China with an emerging nuclear capability.”
Thus, the rapid Soviet naval buildup in the Pacific was designed to confront a new enemy, as well as the old American nemesis. The ballistic missile submarine was the primary weapon in the Soviet arsenal to carry out that new military policy.
The Chinese nuclear threat was equally disturbing to the United States, especially in light of Chairman Mao’s repeated harangues that China would welcome an all-out nuclear war. The Chairman boasted that China alone could prevail after the nuclear holocaust because of its vast population and immense land area. He predicted the Soviet Union and the United States would be reduced to postindustrial wastelands.
Even as this new nuclear adversary in the Pacific theater emerged, the United States Navy remained focused on the Soviets’ rapidly expanding submarine force. In a 1968 confidential report, the Navy told Congress: “Of all elements of Soviet naval strength, the most alarming is the growth of its submarine force. The chief naval threat comes from the USSR’s huge underseas fleet of 250 attack submarines and 100 missile-firing submarines, the largest force of submarines ever created.”
The report warned that the Soviet Union was developing an offensive maritime strategy and was seeking supremacy at sea. Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, chief of naval operations, provided this assessment:
“By any measuring stick, they [the Soviets] are today the second largest sea power in the world. In a mere ten years, the Soviet Union with dedication of purpose, large outlays of funds, and with priorities equivalent to or even surpassing their space program, has transferred itself from a maritime nonentity to a major sea power.”
The new Soviet naval capabilities for offensive action in the Pacific Ocean temporarily relied on weapons systems such as the Soviet diesel-electric submarine K-129, known as a Golf-class sub to the United States and its NATO allies. (To facilitate identification and communication among its multilingual members, NATO assigned code names to Soviet submarine classes, using the standard military phonetic alphabet, although in no particular order.)
K-129’s seventy-day mission at the end of 1967 may well have been one of the first probes under the new strategy that called for sending missile submarines to within close range of the Pacific coast of the United States. Supreme Navy Commander Gorshkov and his political counterparts in the Kremlin would have certainly been fully aware of such a mission before Gorshkov’s aggressive anniversary speech in October of that year.
The American Navy, which was only beginning to deploy systems in the Pacific to track Soviet submarines, argued in frustration for more funding to match the new threats, but the Vietnam War was soaking up every penny of increases in the defense budget.
The U.S. Navy’s report to Congress concluded that the USSR’s “transformation from a land power to also being an aggressive oceanic power” was bound to produce new belligerence.
Other reports not shared with Congress at the time were even more specific about the new submarine-launched missile threat in the Pacific. A National Intelligence Estimate prepared by the CIA warned that, while the Soviets were building and launching large numbers of new nuclear-propelled ballistic missile submarines, the Golf-class diesel submarines with nuclear missiles had already become a major threat in the Pacific. The secret NIE concluded: “We believe that G-class [Golf] submarines operating in the Pacific would probably be used against Alaska, Hawaii, Asia, and other targets in the Pacific Ocean. A few may be committed against targets in the northwest U.S., perhaps as an interim measure until more nuclear-powered types become available.”
The Kamchatka Flotilla based at Rybachiy was the largest submarine force structured to carry out that threat in the Pacific. K-129 was one of six boats of the Golf type assigned to the 29th Ballistic Missile Division of the Kamchatka Flotilla. In January 1968, K-129 was part of the 15th Squadron, tactical number 574, which was under the command of
Kontr
(Rear) Admiral Rudolf A. Golosov. The division commander was Admiral Viktor A. Dygalo.
The Kamchatka Flotilla also included three other major divisions. The 45th Nuclear Submarine Division consisted of the Soviets’ first nuclear-powered, ballistic missile submarines known to NATO as the Hotel class. The 8th and 25th divisions were deploying the newer Yankee-class, nuclear-powered, ballistic missile submarines as rapidly as they could be turned out at overextended shipyards. In addition to the ballistic missile boats, the Kamchatka Flotilla also included scores of smaller attack submarines, which were sent out to protect the Soviet coasts and to spy on the Americans and their allies in the Pacific and on the fledgling Red Chinese navy.
Although K-129 was a transitional model between the upgraded technology of World War II and the nuclear-age boats, its stealth and long-range capability made it a formidable adversary. It was almost certainly one of the first Soviet ballistic missile submarines to challenge the Americans on their own shores. Before 1967, there was no evidence that Soviet missile submarines were approaching closer than their maximum missile range, about eight hundred miles, to the U.S. Pacific Fleet headquarters at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. U.S. intelligence knew the Soviets frequently sent smaller attack subs much closer on spy missions. The Soviets had not even sent missile boats near the American coasts during the Cuban Missile Crisis; they had dispatched only the attack boats to Cuban waters. The U.S. Navy’s antisubmarine warfare (ASW) capabilities to protect the base at Pearl Harbor were fearsome, and the Soviets knew it.
Soviet missile subs regularly patrolled in midocean within a one-hundred- by two-hundred-mile rectangular mission box northwest of Hawaii. The outer edge of that patrol area was approximately 750 miles northwest of Hawaii. This patrol area brought the Soviets to within striking range of Pearl Harbor, but not close enough to provoke an incident between the two most powerful navies the world had ever known.
K-129 had probably conducted autonomous missions to this patrol box in the mid-Pacific. Whether this submarine had patrolled off Hawaii in 1967, farther north on the coast of Alaska, or along the northwest coast of the United States, is still a secret of the Soviet navy.
A mission did not necessarily have to be spectacular to be shrouded in secrecy. As with all its extended solo missions, information on the exact patrol areas navigated by K-129 in 1967 remains top-secret within the Soviet navy. Sealed orders came from Moscow to fleet headquarters in Vladivostok and were delivered unopened to the Kamchatka base. The mission orders were opened by the captain and political officer only after the submarine sailed.