Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew (58 page)

In one recent article in the May 21, 1998 Seattle Post-Intelligencer titled "Navy Says Sinking of the Scorpion Was an Accident, Revelations Suggest a Darker Scenario," Offley suggested that Scorpion may still have been close to Soviet vessels when she sank. But no one who examined the wreckage found any evidence of an attack, and search teams back in 1968 were told all Soviet vessels had been far from the scene.

The information that we attribute to "declassified Navy documents" at various points in the chapter comes from more than seventy pages that the Navy released to the Chicago Tribune and other news organizations under the Freedom of Information Act on October 25, 1993. The most important document was the final report of the findings of the Navy's court of inquiry that investigated the Scorpion disaster in 1968 and 1969. Citing cold war secrecy, the Navy did not make the report public at that time. Instead, the Navy and the Defense Department simply issued summaries in news releases, dated January 31, 1969, saying that the "certain cause" of Scorpion's loss could not be determined. The news releases-which are masterful examples of government obfuscation-did not disclose that the court of inquiry had concluded that the most likely cause of the Scorpion's loss was some type of torpedo accident; indeed, the releases included several misleading statements that made that possibility seem improbable. The Navy did not declassify the court of inquiry's report until 1984, when Ed Offley, then a reporter at the Norfolk papers, petitioned for the documents and wrote the first comprehensive story examining how the court had come to believe that a hot-running torpedo was the most likely culprit. That article, "Mystery of Sub's Sinking Unravels," was published on the front page of the Virginian-Pilot and the LedgerStar on December 16, 1984, and included the first interview with John Craven on his role in finding the Scorpion's wreckage. Christopher Drew also described the hot-running torpedo theory in "How Scorpion Killed Itself: Navy Discloses Sub Sunk by Own Torpedo 25 Years Ago," Chicago Tribune, October 26, 1993.

Our own reconstruction-and the disturbing new information about how torpedoes were being rushed out to the fleet despite rampant safety failures-is based largely on extensive interviews with John Craven and various torpedo experts and weapons engineers. Early in May 1998, we attempted several times to reach Rear Admiral Arthur Gralla who headed the Naval Ordnance Command when Scorpion was lost and to whom the safety engineer's alert about the torpedo battery failures was addressed. He was traveling abroad and did not return messages. He died a few weeks later.

The 1970 examination of the Trieste photos of Scorpion's wreckage was analyzed and written up in the Navy's "Evaluation of data and artifacts related to USS Scorpion (SSN-589)" prepared by the Scorpion advisory group and released in 1998. Among the people we called upon to help us evaluate that report were Ross E. Saxon, who dove down to the wreckage on Trieste; Robert S. Price, who re-analyzed the acoustic data after Craven retired; several submarine officers who served in Scorpion's era, and various weapons safety experts. The review of the work of the first Technical Advisory Group set up to help find Scorpion in 1968 under John Craven was also released in 1998, "The Scorpion Search 1968, An Analysis of the Operation for the CNO Technical Advisory Group (TAG)." The letter summarizing the Jason's findings was released in the same group of documents, "Scorpion Artifacts," January 14, 1987, signed by Peter M. Palermo.

Robert Price, research engineer at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory, which was at White Oak, Maryland, and separate from the Naval Ordnance command, says that when his team went back in 1969 or 1970 and examined the original acoustic data, their read on it was far different than Craven's. For one thing, Price and his team believed that the first sound that registered at the Canary Island's hydrophone was not the sound of an explosion of either a torpedo or the main battery that powered Scorpion. "The acoustic evidence we examined does not indicate why the sub went down," Price says, "All we know is that it wasn't a full-scale outside-the-hull type explosion which would be very loud."

Instead, he says, the first sound recorded was the implosion. The subsequent sounds that began 91 seconds later, he says, were likely caused by the tail of the submarine rattling around inside the auxilliary machine space after two sections had telescoped. Further, he says that a model submarine sent down in a one hundred foot tank began to spiral on the way to the bottom almost immediately, suggesting that there was no predicting the direction Scorpion would have fallen.

His data does not shed light on why Scorpion went down. He also does not know why Scorpion was found just where Craven had predicted, using his very different interpretation of the data. That, Price says, may have been coincidence, or luck.

Though he did not know about the malfunctioning torpedo batteries, Mark A. Bradley provided the best published analysis of the newly released documents in "Why They Called the Scorpion `Scrap Iron,"' U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, July 1998, pp. 30-38.

In describing the months of searching for the Scorpion's wreckage, we owe a large debt of thanks to Jack W. Davis Jr., the president and publisher of the Newport News (Virginia) Daily Press, who granted us access to the newspaper's voluminous files of news stories on the Scorpion. Many of the articles provided helpful background. One that we relied on in describing the Mizar's role in the search was Alexander C. Brown, "The Cruise of the Mizar in Quest of the Scorpion," Newport News Daily Press, December 15, 1968. The Daily Press files also included copies of the original press releases about the court of inquiry's findings, and we quoted from the one issued by the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Public Affairs), "Navy Reports Findings of the Court of Inquiry on the Loss of the USS Scorpion," January 31, 1969, no. 80-69. We also interviewed retired Rear Admiral Robert R. Fountain, the former Scorpion executive officer who helped with Craven's tests in the submarine simulator.

The bitterness among the survivors of Scorpion crew members at the Navy's failure to tell them the truth about the possible reasons for the boat's sinking came through clearly in several news articles. Barbara Baar Gillum expressed her disappointment in a sidebar story by Stephen Johnson, "The Explanation That Never Came," Houston Chronicle, May 23, 1993; William H. McMichael, "What Happened on the Scorpion?" Newport News Dail}, Press, October 31, 1993, and Mike Knepler, "Families Mark 30th Anniversary of the Loss of Norfolk Sub Scorpion," Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, May 26, 1998, also brought home the poignant suffering that the families have endured.

Chapter 6: "The Ballad of Whitey Mack"

Main interviews: Former crew members of the USS Lapon, the USS Dace, the USS Ray, and the USS Greenling, and former top submarine and Naval Intelligence officials.

Government documents and other sources: George T. "Tommy" Cox, the singing spook, copyrighted and pressed 3,500 copies of his own album of 13 submarine songs, Take Her Deep, in 1978 and easily sold his entire supply at stores near Navy bases. Other songs had titles like "Big Black Submarine," "Diesel Boats Forever," and "Sailor's Prayer." There also was a poignant ode called "Scorpion."

The dates of some of the deployments mentioned in this chapter come from annual command histories for the Lapon, Dace, Ray, and Greenling, some of which are in files for each of those subs at the USS Bowfin Submarine Museum & Park in Honolulu and at the Submarine Force Library & Museum at the Naval Submarine Base in Groton, Connecticut. An unclassified excerpt from Vice Admiral Arnold E Schade's congratulatory message to the Lapon on October 13, 1969, is in a file on the Lapon at the Groton museum. That file also contains an unclassified excerpt from a message sent to the Lapon on October 22 by Admiral Ephraim P. Holmes, the commander of the Atlantic Fleet: "FOR C.O. I HAVE SEEN THE RESULTS OF THE LAPON'S EXPLOITS ON TWO PREVIOUS MISSIONS, BUT THIS HAS TO BE THE BEST. THE PERFORMANCE OF YOU AND YOUR FINE CREW IN THIS MOST DEMANDING TASK HAS BEEN SUPERB." Both messages were originally coded top-secret. In an

interview, Admiral Schade said the significance of the Lapon's feat was easy to see: "That we were able to do it, trail them, that was it. In fact, that was about all we wanted to know. What were the weak spots? If we had to go after them, how would we find them, detect them, and destroy them?"

Chapter 7: "Here She Comes ... "

Main interviews: Former crew members of the USS Tautog, former top Pentagon and Navy officials, retired Soviet Navy Captain FirstRank Boris Bagdasaryan, and Rear Admiral Valery Aleksin, the former chief navigator of the Russian Navy.

Government documents and other sources: The fact that two U.S. attack subs were fooled by Soviet missile drills and radioed warnings in the early days of trailing the Yankees was disclosed to us in an interview with a former high-level U.S. submarine official. He said: "Our submarine in trail was always alert to any activity of the Soviet that indicated he was getting ready to launch. Like the opening of the outer doors of the missile tube, fourteen or sixteen of those things banging open, like flooding the tube, this is a critical indication that he's getting ready to launch. We would then be instructed to, the hell with security, get up and get the word out with as much early warning as possible.

"We did discover they were conducting a drill a couple of times. Instead of opening sixteen tubes, they opened two. Instead of flooding sixteen, they'd flood two. This, of course, was critical to their own training, to do that, and so we, the first couple of times, panicked everybody, but we learned to live with it." In those two instances, he said, the trailing American subs quickly rose to periscope depth, stuck up their radio antennas, and sent warnings back to military command authorities. "But luckily it was a thing where they'd get up and transmit and then they very soon thereafter would be in a position to say, `Cancel, it is a drill,' and within three or four minutes we'd be in a position to follow up and take away the urgency of this thing." He said some of the first subs involved in these trailings taped the sounds of the Soviet drills so other attack sub captains could listen to them and know what to look for. After that, he said, "It was a waiting thing. It was just that one period in the beginning that everybody got a little goosy."

This official and several other former senior Navy officers said that, to avoid mistakes, U.S. attack subs involved in such trailings did not have the authority during the cold war to attack Soviet missile subs on their own; even if they radioed in an alert that the Soviet sub's missile doors were opening, they had to wait to receive orders from shore before taking further action. But if hostilities had broken out, that would have changed. "A sub captain's orders would depend on whether it was peacetime, we were already at war, or we were on heightened alert because of the possibility of war," one retired admiral said. He added that there normally would be "a range of orders, with the most aggressive coming, of course, if we were at war."

The reaction of Soviet Navy Commander-in-Chief Sergei G. Gorshkov to the collision between the USS Gato and the Soviet Hotel-class sub K-19 was described to our researcher Alexander Mozgovoy by two Russian naval officers. They are Rear Admiral Vladimir Georgievich Lebedko and Captain Second-Rank Valentin Anatolievich Shabanov. Shabanov was the captain of the K19 in November 1969, and Lebedko was a deputy submarine division commander. Both were on the K19 at the time of the crash.

The information that Gato was armed and ready to fight after the collision, and that its captain prepared false mission reports showing his boat had broken off her patrol two days before the accident, comes from a front-page article in the New York Times on July 6, 1975, by Seymour M. Hersh. Former Gato crew members told Hersh that, immediately after the crash, Gato's weapons officer ran two decks below and prepared for orders to arm the sub's torpedoes, including some with nuclear warheads. "Only one authenticationeither from the ship's captain or her executive officer-was needed to prepare the torpedoes for launching," Hersh wrote. "No order came from the Gato's captain because the Soviet vessel-obviously confused-made no attempt to pursue the Gato." Hersh also quoted crew members as saying that the Gato's captain was ordered by the Navy's Atlantic Fleet command to prepare twenty-five copies of a top-secret after-action report alleging that the sub had broken off her patrols two days before the date of the collision because of a propeller shaft malfunction. He also was told to prepare six accurate reports describing the collision and the events right after it and to deliver those by hand to a unit of the Atlantic Fleet command. Navy officials acknowledged both the collision and that some falsified reports were prepared.