Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew (18 page)

The Mediterranean had become the latest cold war arena. Since the Arab-Israeli War in 1967, the Soviet Union had been sending growing numbers of attack subs armed with nuclear cruise missiles to stalk U.S. aircraft carriers and to try to trail U.S. missile subs roaming from a base in Rota, Spain. U.S. surveillance subs were also watching ports in Egypt, where some of the Soviet vessels stopped. The traffic was so thick that by December the Med saw its first underwater collision, between the USS George C. Marshall (SSBN-654) and a Soviet attack sub.

Most of the time, however, the problem was simply detecting the Soviet subs. SOSUS listening nets, which helped in other areas of the world, didn't reach into the Med-or, for that matter, down the west coast of Europe, a key Soviet route to the area. The Med itself has horrible sonar conditions, with saltwater meeting fresh water, warm meeting cold, all of it sending sonar bouncing in unpredictable directions. Besides all that, nobody on the U.S. side really understood how the Soviets operated in the Med, or how many subs they were sending. Indeed, submarine analysts in London and their counterparts in Norfolk, Virginia, were having long analytic arguments about Soviet operations, arguments that went on all the longer because there were so few facts to back them up.

On the assumption that sheer numbers would fill in the gap left by expertise, the United States began trying to train its allies' sub forcesthose in southern Europe and the Middle East-in the art of sub-chasing. Scorpion, in fact, was sent to the Med to play rabbit, to be hunted by foreign forces as part of their training. For Scorpion's men, this should have been a plum assignment, one with the rare perk of port stops in sun-sprayed Spain, Italy, and Sicily. But many would have preferred to have stayed onshore with Rogers, at least judging from their letters home.

"We have repaired, replaced, or jury-rigged every piece of equipment," twenty-four-year-old Machinist's Mate Second-class David Burton Stone wrote to his parents on April 12. Stone sent his letter two months into the trip, just before Scorpion got caught in a dangerous game of chicken with a Soviet destroyer. The incident was typical of operations in the Med: both sides had taken to harassing the other at sea. When Scorpion surfaced to exchange messages with the USS Cutlass (SS-478), the destroyer raced forward as if to ram the submarine. With a crash seemingly moments away, the Soviet ship backed off.

"It did it three or four times," says Herbert E. Tibbets, the commanding officer of Cutlass, who watched the incident from his bridge. "I kept sweating, thinking, `I hope those guys back it down this time."'

Reports of that incident and rumors of another mission have left many of the families convinced that the Soviets were the likely cause of Scorpion's destruction. According to the most virulent story, Scorpion supposedly was hit by a Soviet torpedo during a final mission in which she tried to chase a Soviet attack submarine away from a U.S. Polaris boat out in the Atlantic.

There was, in fact, a final mission, but it had nothing to do with chasing Soviet attack subs. It began in late April. Scorpion was on her final port visit, this one to Naples, Italy. From there, her men expected to be going home. Instead, they were told they were being sent to monitor strange Soviet activity. U.S. satellites had photographed a group of Soviet surface ships, just outside the Med, flying balloons about the size of weather balloons. The Soviet ships had been engaged in this baffling behavior for nearly a month. In the Pacific, the Soviets had been known to launch balloons equipped with electronic sensors in the vicinity of U.S. nuclear tests. Perhaps this was a new application of that spying technique.

Figuring that Scorpion was going to pass near the area on her way home anyway, Captain James Bradley, still the Navy's top submarine intelligence officer, ordered the sub to swing by and take a look. Slattery and the other Scorpion officers were distressed. After more than two months at sea, the officers wanted to go straight home, and they made that clear at a farewell cocktail party in Naples, cornering Bradley with their concerns. He was sympathetic, but the orders stood.

Scorpion set out toward the Soviet ships on April 28. Slattery stopped outside the breakwater at Rota, Spain, to drop off a crewman and a spook who had become ill, then went on. Scorpion lurked near the Soviet ships for two or three days before Slattery turned his sub for home. When he reached a safe distance from the Soviets, he radioed a message that he had collected a few photographs but little insight about the Soviet exercise.

It is not entirely clear where this group of ships was working, but declassified Navy documents cite one possibility. Air-reconnaissance planes had spotted two Soviet hydrographic survey ships-a submarine rescue ship and an Echo 11-class nuclear attack submarine - conducting an unspecified "hydro-acoustic operation" southwest of the Canary Islands, which lie about 300 miles off northwest Africa. Air reconnaissance was cut off on May 19 and resumed on May 21, just about the time Scorpion would have left the area.

"There were no observed changes in the pattern of operations of the Soviet ships, either before or after Scorpion's loss, that were evaluated as indicating involvement or interest in any way," the Navy would later report in a document prepared in 1969 by a court of inquiry into the Scorpion disaster and kept classified for years.

On the evening of May 21, the Scorpion's crew radioed in their location and reported that they had embarked upon their assigned route home, the "Great Circle Track" through the North Atlantic. Ordered to transit at 18 knots, they said they expected to arrive in Norfolk at 1:00 P.M., Eastern Standard Time, on May 27.

Admiral Thomas Moorer, the CNO, and Vice Admiral Arnold E Schade, commander of submarines in the Atlantic, began to worry when Scorpion failed to answer messages on May 23 as well as repeat messages over the next two days. They quietly asked a few Navy ships and planes to scan for signs of the submarine. No general alarm was raised. After all, Slattery and his men could be racing home underwater and out of radio contact.

Concern turned to fear on May 27, at 12:20 P.M. It was twenty minutes before Scorpion was supposed to arrive at Norfolk. By now, she should have been on the surface, her crew talking with the base. Schade initiated an intensive communications check. Ships and planes flooded the air with Scorpion's call name.

"Brandywine.... "

"Brandywine.... "

"Brandywine!"

There was no answer.

At 3:15 P.M., Scorpion was declared missing.

Back at the dock, the crewmen's families waited, waited for their husbands, sons, and fathers to come back from sea, waited in a spring rain that washed the dock clean. They knew nothing about the frantic radio messages tearing through the air around them. Then the Navy told them to go home, told them that Scorpion had been delayed. It was only when news reporters started calling that the families learned that their sons, husbands, and fathers were missing.

By the time Craven turned for the Pentagon, intelligence officers had already been frantically scrambling for acoustic evidence or other signs of an accident, a collision, or a battle. Reconnaissance pilots placed all known Soviet and Eastern Bloc surface warships, merchant ships, and submarines at least 50 miles away from any point Scorpion was expected to pass. The Navy would later report that there was "no evidence of any Soviet preparations for hostilities or a crisis situation such as would he expected in the event of a premeditated attack on Scorpion." Indeed, by the time Craven walked into the War Room, the Navy basically had ruled out Soviet involvement in Scorpion's loss.

Vice Admiral Schade set out himself to join the search on the USS Pargo (SSN-650). Rogers, the former crewman, went out looking as well, aboard his new submarine, the USS Lapon (SSN-661).

There was a moment when everyone on Lapon believed that Scorpion had been found. Lapon's radiomen picked up an SOS from "Brandywine." But soon it became sickeningly apparent that the message was a fake, a sadistic joke from merchant seamen or pleasure boaters.

Meanwhile, Craven launched a search that would take so many twists, and leave him so at odds with the rest of the Navy, that he himself would begin to wonder whether he had indeed gone mad. He began routinely enough, thinking of ways to acoustically delve the ocean depths. It was clear that the SOSUS listening nets were going to be useless. While the listening system in the Pacific had picked up that one pop, the only sign of the Soviet Golf's loss, the extensive SOSUS arrays in the Atlantic could not do the same thing. The Atlantic SOSUS system was designed to filter incoming noise, allowing the sonar nets to record the consistent clatter of machinery, the whir of submarine screws, and all the other music made by submarines as they move underwater, while muffling the blasts of oil exploration, undersea earthquakes, and the calls of whales. That sane filtering system would have eliminated any evidence if Scorpion had fallen to the ocean bottom, would have broken apart the terrible cries of a submarine imploding, rendering them nearly indistinct from the normal ocean din.

"How the hell are we going to find these poor bastards?" Craven muttered to himself. Within days, he would be named chairman of a technical advisory group convened to help find Scorpion by Robert A. Frosch, the assistant secretary of the Navy for research and development. Craven and the other group members were to report directly to the CNO and the commander of the Atlantic Fleet.

He began calling upon the small oceanographic research stations that dotted the Atlantic. Top on his list was Gordon Hamilton, a friend who ran an oceanographic laboratory in Bermuda that was funded by the Office of Naval Research.

"Hey, Gordon, do you have any hydrophones in the water that could have heard the Scorpion?" Craven asked without bothering to offer a greeting.

"Well, I don't, but part of my laboratory in the Canary Islands has a hydrophone in the water all the time," Hamilton answered.

The hydrophones generated mounds of scrawled paper, those peaks and blips that accumulated as pens moved over continuously rotating drums. There was a problem, though. Six days had passed since Scorpion's last message to shore, and laboratory workers were supposed to clean up and toss the records after two or three days. Any scrawls that could have registered a final tragedy aboard Scorpion should have gone out with the trash.

Still, Craven firmly believed that people rarely do what they are supposed to do. Housekeeping, he reasoned, is usually the first thing to go. Within a couple of hours, Hamilton called back. Craven was right. There were piles of paper all over the lab, and buried within those piles were two weeks of acoustic records-including eight separate ocean explosions or severe disturbances during the six days Scorpion had been out of contact. But the disturbances could have been caused by almost anything, including blasts from illegal oil explorations, a fairly routine sound ringing through the North Atlantic. And they could have come from almost anywhere, and from any direction.

With only one set of records, Craven had no way to come up with a geographic fix on any of the blasts. To do that, he would need to triangulate three separate recordings from three different hydrophones set up in three different points. Since he didn't have the data to come up with a precise fix, Craven worked backward, charting the times of the explosions against Scorpion's known path and speed. He came up with eight mid-ocean locations where he assumed the sub would have been at the time of any of the disturbances. Bathymetric charts showed all eight sites to be in waters deeper than 2,000 feet, deeper than the crush depth of a submarine.

Acting on Craven's data, the Navy sent planes to all eight spots. The pilots were looking for floating wreckage and oil slicks. They found none. The lack of debris was far from conclusive, given that the water was so deep. But Craven needed more to go on. The hunt for sonic evidence continued.

Independent of Craven's efforts, Wilton Hardy, the chief scientist of an elite acoustic team at the Naval Research Laboratory, the Navy's primary underwater testing facility in Washington, D.C., came up with the next clue. He knew that the Air Force kept two hydrophones near Newfoundland to track underwater shocks from Soviet nuclear tests. One was right off the peninsula of Argentia. The other was about 200 miles from there.

Hardy sent for the records, knowing he was playing a long shot. Both Air Force hydrophones were about as far from the Azores, and Scorpion's last-known position, as any listening devices could be and still be in the North Atlantic. And sitting right between the hydrophones and Scorpion's track was the largest chain of mountains on earth, the undersea Mid-Atlantic Ridge. The mountains were enough to block most sounds from the Azores.

Indeed, at first glance the Air Force records looked useless. There were none of the dramatic peaks that had been registered by the Canary Islands lab. But, to Hardy, it seemed that if he looked real hard, maybe squinted a bit, he could just possibly see something. He laid the Canary Island recordings directly on top of the Argentia recordings.

There they were, almost entirely buried in local noise, slight blips that seemed to match the more dramatic peaks picked up by Hamilton's lab. Hardy called Craven, who was by now coordinating the Navy's entire acoustic search effort. Craven decided to convince himself that the Argentia recordings were neither coincidence nor phantoms.

If the Argentia blips were worthless noise, then the plots would probably fall hundreds of miles or thousands of miles from the relatively tiny line of ocean that made up Scorpion's track. But if the new data pinpointed any one of the eight events picked up in the Canary Islands on that tiny line, the acoustic matches would almost certainly have to be valid.