Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew (33 page)

The Soviets had also been going up to the Arctic for decades. By the 1980s, it looked as though they had found a way to use the ice to steal a crucial nuclear advantage.

U.S. subs traveled to the Arctic one at a time and in groups almost every year since Nautilus, but the frigid waters remained a mystery-the one place where the prey had the distinct advantage over the hunter.

Susan Nesbitt sits with her husband Bob in Norfolk, Virginia, at the 30th anniversary memorial ceremony for the men who died on Scorpion. They mourn her lost brother, Richard Shaffer, petty officer second class on Scorpion.

Danielle Petersen-Dixon hugs her aunt Gerry, as they remember Petersen-Dixon's father, Daniel Petersen, a chief petty officer who also died on Scorpion.

Throughout the United States and in Russia, families are asking, was the secret submarine spy war worth the risks? Was it worth the cost?

Kissinger was half an hour late. He walked in, leaned back in a chair, put one foot on a table in front of him, and pointed the other foot at Bradley. "Veil," he began, his trademark German accent evident in every word. "You have got ten minutes. Go ahead and start."

Bradley knew better than to cower.

"Dr. Kissinger, I can't do this in ten minutes. If ten minutes is all you've got, we ought to go away and come back and do this another time. Because with ten minutes, we're just going to waste your time and mine."

"Veil, yell. You start, and I'll tell you when to stop."

More than forty-five minutes later, they were still talking. It seemed a crucial victory to Bradley.

Now, the captain knew that news of the hunt for a sunken Soviet communications cable would be just the sort of exclusive that Haig would want to bring to Kissinger, and that the national security adviser would relish bringing to Nixon. Bradley had no intention of being scooped before he was ready to present his plan, so he told only the people who absolutely had to know: the Pacific submarine fleet commander and Harlfinger.

Normally Bradley also would have marched his plan before a national oversight group known as the "40 Committee." Chaired by Kissinger, its ranks were filled with the country's highest national security officials, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the director of the CIA. It was the committee's job to evaluate all international covert operations, everything from CIA interventions in Third World countries to eavesdropping operations aimed at the Kremlin. Other presidents had had similar oversight committees, and since the Pueblo incident, routine missions, such as the usual submarine forays into Soviet coastal waters or sorties flown by spy planes, were included in a monthly list for review. Committee members usually just provided a final glance before checking off boxes marked "approved."

But more dangerous operations-presumably any effort that carried as much risk as a plan to tap into a crucial Soviet communications line-were, in theory, subject to far more detailed hearings where the operations were supposed to pass the most basic of all tests: Are the potential payoffs worth the risk? The riskiest missions were then supposed to be presented to the president for final approval. That was the primary job of the 40 Committee: to provide a test of common sense, a dispassionate analysis of what otherwise might be a noholds-barred quest to gather intelligence. The committee was, in short, a layer of oversight designed to rise above parochial concerns, interagency rivalries, machismo, and the ever-present temptation to venture from the daring into the stupid.

But that ideal was often little more than fantasy. The committee almost never marked any mission "disapproved," and members of the intelligence agencies and the armed forces knew they could bypass the rest of the group as long as they didn't bypass Kissinger, who treated the committee as something to be utilized or ignored as he saw fit. Sometimes, after he okayed missions on his own authority, he would poll the committee by telephone, seeking back-door approvals. Sometimes he didn't even bother to do that.

The message Kissinger sent was clear: the only oversight that mattered was his. That suited Bradley and Harlfinger, who in the spring of 1971 were happy to avoid a formal committee hearing. It wasn't hard for them to imagine what such a hearing would be like.

"Where were those signs? Along the Mississippi, you say?"

"So, Captain Bradley, you say you came up with this sitting alone in your office at 3:00 A.M.?"

No, no, no. It would make so much more sense, Bradley reasoned, to try to get quiet approvals from the top and to wait to tell the full committee about the plan once he knew for sure that the cable was there, to come in saying, "Look what we've done."

Any step into Okhotsk, from the Soviets' point of view, was blatantly illegal, although the United States considered most of that sea to be open to international traffic. And a search for signs on a Soviet beach would have to take place at least partly inside the Soviets' 3-mile coastal limit, recognized internationally as sovereign territory. No one would see Halibut's jaunt inside as anything less than trespassing.

Bradley hoped Kissinger would look past that, as much as he hoped Kissinger would ignore the fact that the timing for this kind of risk was just awful. Halibut would be trespassing when Nixon was publicly painting himself as a peacemaker and statesman. The president had just gone on national television to declare that he personally had rescued flagging arms control talks in secret communications with Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev.

All this left the captain apprehensive when he went to see Haig. With as few details as he could manage, Bradley outlined his plan to search out the cable. "If we can find it, we think we've worked out a way to tap it," he told Haig. There was also, Bradley said, a secondary mission-an underwater search for parts of a new kind of cruise missile being supplied to Soviet subs that stalked U.S. aircraft carriers.

Haig asked no questions, offered no words of caution. He didn't even bother to bring Bradley before Kissinger. Instead, he said, "Keep us informed."

Bradley realized he had just gotten all the official approval he would need. Haig would surely let Kissinger know, but the Navy's diciest plan had passed with the simplest approval process possible. Halibut was going to Okhotsk.

By the end of the summer of 1971, Halibut's refit was almost complete. In addition to the huge hump-the Bat Cave-that had inspired her conversion to a so-called special projects boat, she also sported an extra lump, a secret and crucial piece of equipment that was so ingeniously hidden atop her deck that the Navy proudly advertised its presence with no fear of a security breach.

Local newspaper headlines heralded the accomplishment of this new addition, while intoning that the Navy had relaxed its secrecy surrounding Halibut. Halibut, the papers declared, was to be the mother ship for the Navy's first post-Thresher deep-submergence rescue vehicle. In fact, the lump wasn't a DSRV at all, but a divers' decompression and lockout chamber. Welded in place, it was where they would begin breathing the mixed gases developed at SeaLab, and it was where they would get ready to go out and work underwater.

In these final weeks before Halibut was to leave, Bradley's team began making frequent anonymous visits to Mare Island. Most of the sub's officers and crew knew them only as the men from Washington. Halibut's captain, Commander John E. McNish, wasn't revealing much more.

Even in the final days before their October departure for Okhotsk, the crew still didn't know their destination. They knew only that they were leaving home for three months. That in itself was inspiration enough for the enlisted men to fill the submarine bars around San Francisco. Some of these boys were only months past their high school proms. Others were salted chiefs, veterans of smelly diesel boats or the first nuclear submarines. Together, they spent their final night onshore, in an era when being a hard-drinking, chain-smoking man of the sea was not yet an anachronism.

With their wives and girlfriends looking on, they drank themselves under the tables at Helen's. They drank until they danced buck-naked on top of the tables at the Horse and Cow. This was their favorite place, the "Whinny and Moo" to the initiated, with its darkened rooms, walls lined with photos of submarines, a Klaxon cutting through the air to announce each new round, and stolen pieces of equipment crammed onto every free surface: submarine commodes, plaques, dishes, ceremonial pennants, a torpedo casing, an anchor, enough contraband to drive naval investigators mad.

Snorkel Patty was probably there: she almost always was at these last-night events. For a decade, she had been mother, big sister, and lover to scores of submariners. She was the woman who knew what they would face on patrol without needing to be told, and she taught other young women braving the brash bar not to ask where or how or why. She was the woman who would make the men feel safe when they got home. A tender Mae West-Mary Magdalene of the submarine set.

In return, these men and boys gave her their hard-won silver dolphins, hundreds over the years. They gave her a volcano's worth of lighters decorated with their submarine insignias. And they gave her their undying adoration.

The Klaxon blew, an air-driven howl, a wolf's song mated with the bray of a sick mule. The men drank some more and hooted, then hooted louder when some innocent knob walked into the place still wearing underwear-just about everyone was checked, and anyone found wearing was unceremoniously stripped.

Inspired, the veterans dropped their pants, stood on the bar, and turned around to show off the screws tattooed in twin sets, making sterns of their rears. Legend has it that those inked propellers would ensure a safe and speedy passage. The especially brash powered their screws with a long trail of paper from the head planted in the only place possible on their naked bottoms. With the paper set afire, they raced smoky circles around the bar in what had become the ritual "Dance of the Flaming Asshole."