Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew (48 page)

Reagan and Gorbachev were meeting in Hofdi House, an isolated structure on the bleak edge of the North Atlantic. Shultz thought it looked haunted, and Icelanders were convinced that it was. They sat in a small room, Shultz and Shevardnadze, Reagan and Gorbachev, two translators, and two note-takers. There against a single window, looking out onto turbulent and frigid waters that would perhaps ultimately wash over to where Parche sat beneath the Barents, the summit began.

Compromises were offered and concessions were made. Staff negotiators agreed that they could cut ballistic-missile arsenals in half, to roughly 6,000 warheads and 1,600 delivery vehicles on each side, and that they could also slash the number of shorter-range missiles. Reagan and Gorbachev themselves were talking about making these cuts over the next five years, and then eliminating the rest of their nuclear arsenals within five years after that. It was on the table, ten years to a nuke-free world. They were actually talking about the end of the terrors that had existed since the Manhattan Project, talking about forever rendering false Robert Oppenheimer's horrifying 1945 prophesy, "I am become death, destroyer of worlds," a quote from the Bhagavad Gita that the physicist intoned after the first atomic bomb had been tested.

Gorbachev still wanted Reagan to give up SDI, or at least limit Star Wars research to the laboratory and to agree to refrain from testing in space for ten years. Reagan wanted to conduct space tests, at least enough of them so that SDI could be deployed in ten years. At that time, he promised, the United States would hand the entire system, all of the technology, over to the Soviets.

Gorbachev wasn't buying it, and Reagan pleaded for resolution. "I have a picture that after ten years you and I come to Iceland and bring the last two missiles in the world and we have the biggest damn party in celebration of it!" He continued, "A meeting in Iceland in ten years: I'll be so old, you won't recognize me. I'll say, `Mikhail?' You'll say, `Ron?' And we'll destroy the last two."

They parried. Gorbachev said he might not be alive in ten years, that he was just entering his "danger period," and that Reagan had passed through his and could now count on making it smoothly to age one hundred.

"I can't live to one hundred worrying that you'll shoot one of those missiles at me," Reagan answered.

The argument went on. Reagan insisted that he had promised the American people he wouldn't give up SDI; Gorbachev insisted that the president would still have SDI even if he confined testing to the lab. Finally Reagan spoke the words that might have sounded like just so much lofty rhetoric in any other context: "It would be fine with me if we eliminated all nuclear weapons."

"We can do that. Let's eliminate them. We can eliminate them," Gorbachev shot back.

This could have been the defining moment. Maybe it should have been. But Hofdi House was living up to its reputation. The men were indeed haunted, by this single impasse.

"It is a question of one word," Reagan said, pleading for Gorbachev to give up his insistence that SDI proceed only in the laboratory.

"It's `laboratory' or good-bye," Gorbachev insisted. The meeting ended on that note.

Outside, a crush of international press was learning how close the two had come to an agreement. Reporters were rushing off to wire the world their postmortems that would declare the summit a failure.

Beneath the water, another wire reached Parche.

Word shot through the sub as a single line was quoted throughout the boat: "You are authorized to penetrate the 12-mile line." Parche was going in.

She was now only six or seven hours away from her mission. Conversation on board turned to other missions, other close calls. It was how the men admitted without admitting how scared they were. They talked about tracking Yankees and the ultra-quiet new Akula and Sierra attack submarines that had come out in the last couple of years. They called the Akula the "Walker sub" because the spy had inspired the Soviet move toward deadly quiet engines. In fact, Soviet technology was moving ahead so fast that more U.S. attack subs were being detected by the Soviet boats they were trying to trail. American subs were also being detected near the Soviet coasts. It was there that the spooks would hear the Soviets react in a burst of messages. The spooks had taken to calling the Soviet detection warning "stutter nine": in their code, eight bursts meant a suspected detection, nine meant one confirmed. The stutter came from repetition. The men talked about all this knowing all the while that on Parche detection was likely to mean self-destruction.

Maybe it was to avoid that fear that just about everyone was getting EB-Greened to the walls these days-Pharaoh's tomb under the Barents. But the mission was unfolding without a hitch. The divers went out, the spooks listened, the divers retrieved the pods and left others in place to keep collecting.

Slowly, quietly, Parche began the trip away from the cable to the point where she could signal the companion sub that all was well.

That's when they felt, heard, the ping, that awful sound of active sonar ringing through the hull. Someone above knew a submarine was there. Fortunately, there were two-Parche and her escort sub, some recall the USS Finback (SSN-670). Finback quickly moved in, got the Soviets' attention, acted like this was just another game of tag under the sea. It worked. Parche stole away.

They were hundreds of miles from the moor when they popped up an antenna. With sonar making certain no one was around, they sent a quick message to Washington: "Mission accomplished."

It took Parche about a month to reach the waters outside San Diego, where she stopped briefly on her way home. Bruce DeMars, who was now the admiral in charge of submarines, came out in a small motorboat to meet her and ride back to port with the men. He was ecstatic. Casually dressed, he made it clear that nobody had to put on the spit and shine for him, not on this run anyway. DeMars carried his congratulations and videotaped copies of the New York Mets battling their way through seven games of the World Series. Baseball was the theme on the ride back to port. As usual, the men's families, wives, and girlfriends were waiting for them on the pier when they arrived.

In Washington, someone else awaited Buchanan. President Reagan wanted to meet this captain, wanted to personally congratulate the man who had earned Parche yet another PUC. It would he Parche's fifth, on top of the three NUCs she also had won. The way the crew heard it, the brass was all there, the president, Vice President Bush, the CNO, members of the joint Chiefs of Staff.

Buchanan stood there, commander of the Navy's most sensitive spy sub, feeling like an E-1, the lowest-ranking man on a sub. Certainly he was the lowest-ranking man in the room. Then Reagan looked him in the eye and called him a modern-day John Wayne. It was the part of the story that Buchanan's men liked best. They figured Reagan had to be sincere. He had known John Wayne.

   If the cold war wasn't quite over, it was definitely beginning to wane. Reykjavik had been the start, and both sides seemed to sense it. Even as the U.S. Navy gave chase to a cluster of Soviet Victor III attack subs off the East Coast in 1987, and as U.S. subs continued their pace of spy missions, something was changing, something that was at first almost intangible.

To he sure, Gorbachev continued to bristle about Star Wars and blew up in frustration at nearly every meeting with Shultz, at least once because he was convinced that the American people would never forgive Soviet acts of aggression dating back to the 1960 shoot-down of Gary Powers in his U-2 spy plane. But these tirades were almost all over the failure to reach a peace soon enough, or deep enough. Just two years after the paranoid reign of Andropov, the Soviet Union was saying it had had enough.

In fact, in May 1987 the Soviets announced a formal military doctrine-one aimed simply at defending their homeland. That December, Reagan and Gorbachev met in Washington, D.C., for the first follow-up summit to Reykjavik. They finally signed a treaty to eliminate an entire class of nuclear arms, the intermediate-range nuclear forces. It was the angry impasse over a similar INF treaty that, in 1983, had made some top Soviet officials fear that the United States was considering a first strike. Now, as both sides agreed to sign, there was only a shadow of the old hostilities.

"Doveryai, no proveryai-trust but verify," Reagan said, evoking an old Russian maxim at the signing.

"You repeat that at every meeting," Gorbachev teased, chuckling.

"I like it," Reagan agreed.

Who could have imagined Ronald Reagan kidding around with a Soviet leader? These two men were so ebullient that Gorbachev stopped his motorcade on the way to the White House so he could shake hands with the crowd. Reagan answered at the next summit by allowing Gorbachev to introduce him to the Soviet people milling about Red Square. Georgi Arbatov, the director of the Soviet Union's Institute for the Study of the USA and Canada, put it all into words: "We are going to do something terrible to you. We are going to deprive you of an enemy."

Still, while Gorbachev and Reagan had set the tone, it was going to take both sides some time to accept the enormity of what was happening, to believe that this friendship could last and that the cold war was really coming to an end. That much was clear as the top men in uniform began holding summits of their own.

Admiral William J. Crowe Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, met Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, the chief of staff of the Soviet armed forces. The marshal and the Joint Chiefs mixed socially. Crowe took Akhromeyev on a guided tour of a U.S. aircraft carrier. They even met in the Pentagon's "Tank," the secure room where top U.S. military men planned their moves against the Soviets. Still, as Akhromeyev sat with the Americans talking about newfound friendship, he could not disguise his frustrations over U.S. sub spying and tracking operations, which seemed unchanged from cold war days.

"You, you're the problem," he blurted out at Admiral Carlisle A. H. Trost, now the chief of Naval Operations. Not only were U.S. subs still lurking off Soviet waters, but Akhromeyev was convinced that he could track all of his own subs by simply following the American P-3 Orion sub-hunters in the air. It was a stunning revelation of just how effective U.S. antisubmarine efforts continued to be.

Trost simply tried to calm him down, saying that U.S. strategy was not intended to threaten anyone. But even as he faced Akhromeyev, Trost realized he was being given a took deep inside the Soviet psyche, and what he saw was different from what he had long believed. It had once all seemed so clear to him that Soviet forces were designed for aggression. But now Trost could see how strongly Akhromeyev believed that he had only been part of an effort to defend his country, a country surrounded by enemies, by NATO ships, submarines, and airborne sub-hunters.

Gradually, these men from such different worlds were breaking through to one another. They were connecting and realizing just what a shared experience the cold war had been. One telling moment came when Admiral Kinnaird McKee-one of the Navy's most successful sub captains, Whitey Mack's chief nemesis back in the Lapon days, the man who had later become Rickover's successor as the submarine force's nuclear czar-sat swapping sea stories with a top Soviet admiral at a luncheon at the Pentagon. Also there was Rich Haver. When he was introduced as a Naval Intelligence analyst, Haver heard the Soviet translator mutter to his admiral, K. A. Makarov, something about "CIA."

The tense moment seemed to pass as McKee sat with his guest of honor, blowing the old ballast tanks. McKee reminisced about his days as captain of the USS Dace. At the time, Makarov had his own command of a 671-project sub, the kind, he pointed out helpfully, the Americans called "Victor." Then Makarov let slip that he had been near the Dace on one of its patrols, that he had known it was the Dace even then.

"I wonder who trailed whom," Haver said, knowing quite well that it was McKee's spotting and trailing of the first Victor during its sea trials in 1968 that had helped launch the admiral's career. Makarov gave Haver an icy stare and continued staring as he offered his answer through his interpreter: "Now is not the time to discuss that."

But that look said more. It seemed to acknowledge, "I know who trailed whom, and it wasn't me." These were old wounds, and Haver had supplied the salt. He had reminded the Soviets of the long years when they were behind, when they could have been called downright inept. They may have closed the gap in the final years of the cold war, but that hadn't eased the humiliation. Haver had broken a rule of this special glasnost, of this still-new and uneasy openness among military men, and when lunch was over, Makarov made that clear. "Tell this young man that when veterans get together, it doesn't matter who won or lost," he said through his translator. "It's enough that both survived."

Although Makarov's use of the past tense may have been a bit premature, it certainly fit the Soviet perspective. After that flurry of activity off the American coast in 1986 and 1987, Soviet submarines had been pulled back home. On the U.S. side, however, it was business almost as usual. Spy subs had gotten more cautious. Improvements in sonar and the electronics-intercept gear meant they no longer had to go quite as close to Soviet subs or shore to capture intelligence. (Los Angeles subs weren't as maneuverable in tight spots anyway.) The pace of operations had not let up. For instance, Submarine Squadron 11 in San Diego alone sent eight of its ten nuclear attack submarines out on surveillance operations in 1988, keeping up with the rate set during the height of the cold war. The USS Salt Lake City (SSN-716) operated for nearly seven months in the northern Pacific, followed by the USS Portsmouth (SSN-707), the USS Pintado (SSN-672), the USS La Jolla (SSN-701), and others.