Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew (10 page)

The Navy was watching for Soviet subs as well, but much of the surveillance was taking place just outside the natural bottleneck created by Greenland, Iceland, and the United Kingdom. It was an enormous advantage for the United States. Soviet ships and subs had to pass through this chokepoint, the "GIUK" gap, to take the Atlantic route to the United States. A string of U.S. diesel subs were often stationed on "barrier ops" outside the gap, and British naval forces also kept watch for Soviet subs. In addition, the U.S. Navy had begun seeding both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts with underwater listening devices-creating an underwater eavesdropping net known as SOSUS, for sound surveil lance system-to detect ships and subs. Still, analysts trying to decipher the SOSUS recordings needed more data to be able to pick out the sounds of Soviet warships from all the background noise made by fishing trawlers and merchant ships. They needed a library of sound signatures, and that could best be created by sending spy subs to listen and record.

There was one other thing the Navy was looking for: a chance for retribution. It wanted to get the Soviets back for Gudgeon and other acts of harassment against U.S. subs. Admiral jerauld Wright, commander in chief of the Atlantic Fleet, posted a framed proclamation outside his office:

Whereas, the presence of unidentified submarines in the approaches to the United States has been frequently reported, and

Whereas, the submarines have been uncooperative in declaring either their identity or their intent as is required by the customs and usages of honorable seamen, and

Whereas, tangible evidence that these surreptitious operations are being conducted would result in appropriate embarrassment to those involved.

Therefore, I do hereby pledge to donate one case of Jack Daniels Old No. 7 Brand of Quality Tennessee Sour Mash Corn Whiskey, made as our fathers made it for seven generations at the oldest registered whiskey distillery in the United States, established 1866, to the first Scene of Action Commander in the Atlantic who produces evidence that a "non U.S. or known friendly" submarine has been worn out.

/s/ Jerauld Wright

Admiral, U.S. Navy

In May 1959, Wright declared a winner. The USS Grenadier (SS-525) chased a Soviet submarine near Iceland for nine hours before forcing it to surface, completely "worn out." Grenadier's skipper, Lieutenant Commander Theodore F. Davis, got the whiskey, and the Navy had surfaced its first Soviet sub.

More important, the Navy also had its first good look at a Soviet missile boat. Davis had trapped one of the Zulus that had been converted to carry missiles. He also brought home photographs and sound tapes, and the Navy quietly broadcast his success all over Washington. In fact, later that year President Eisenhower's special assistant for science and technology, George B. Kistiakowsky, noted in his diary that he had received "a very interesting account of the ways in which our Navy gets intimate information on the Soviet naval activities," a briefing that was so "hush-hush" he couldn't put it on paper. "Someday," he mused, "it will make a very exciting news story."

Something else came out of these dogfights as well. There was a growing realization on both sides that as much as the snorkel had revolutionized submarine warfare, it had massive limitations. As long as submarines could be held down and their crews choked, they were still too vulnerable. For the U.S. sub force, it was clear that Rickover's nuclear navy could no longer remain a curiosity. It was time for his submarines to move to center stage.

Rickover's revolutionary boats had a seemingly endless source of power. Reactors split atoms and turned water into steam, steam enough to power a propeller shaft and run a submarine longer and faster than any diesel boat ever could. They also could generate their own oxygen and scrub excess carbon dioxide from their air. Hold downs would no longer be a threat. These boats would he able to stay underwater indefinitely.

Nuclear attack subs began to take on missions that closely mirrored those pioneered by diesel subs, invading Soviet waters with impunity. The orders remained similar. Drive close to Soviet craft, even closer to Soviet shores. Take any risks. Don't get caught.

For instance, in late 1960, Commander William "Bill" Behrens drove the USS Skipjack (SSN-585) into the mouth of the long ship channel that led to Murmansk. He got so close to another Soviet port that his officers could look through a periscope and see the pier only 30 or 40 yards away. That may have been closer than even the Navy would have liked-at least closer than the Navy ever wanted to admit. Indeed, just before Behrens snuck into the channel, crewmen saw one of his officers disable a mechanical tracing device that plotted the sub's movements so there would never be any written record of the incursion. Later on that same mission, Behrens also monitored the sea trials of one of the first Golf-class subs, a diesel-powered boat that was the first Soviet submarine designed from the start to carry ballistic missiles. Behrens, who initially struck some of his crew as stuffy and dull, had proven that he could play as dangerously as other cap twins, that he could he one man on shore and quite another at sea, especially at sea in Soviet waters.

In this sense, Behrens was not alone. This was an era of daredevil nuclear-sub captains who seemed rooted in the no-holds-barred diesel heritage. Over in the Pacific, a couple of captains briefly turned off their reactors to cut down on the background noise when they tried to get sound signatures-and suddenly found their own boats drifting way too deep. Another sub lurking at periscope depth got humped by a Soviet sub that started to surface from below.

One of the most urgent goals was to find out where the Soviets stood in their quest to develop nuclear-powered subs. Though some top U.S. officials were reluctant to believe it, it gradually became clear that the Soviets were starting to turn out three types: "Hotels," each armed with three ballistic missiles; "Echos" carrying cruise missiles meant for use against other ships; and "November" attack subs. Still, early surveillance showed that these subs were so crude and noisy that the U.S. Navy had taken to using a shorthand built on a convenient acronym, nicknaming them the "HENs." And neither the Golfs nor the Hotels were anywhere near ready to head out on patrol.

It was clear that the United States had won the race to position missile subs within range of enemy shores. Four diesel boats with the primitive Regulus missiles had led the way in the Pacific in 1959 and 1960, and the first Polaris sub, the USS George Washington (SSBN- 598), ventured out into the Atlantic in November 1960. In no time, the Regulus subs were spending so much time lurking in terrible weather off the Soviet coast that their crews took to jokingly calling themselves the "Northern Pacific Yacht Club." One, the USS Growler (SSG-577), was heavily damaged when it ran into an ice floe near the Kamchatka Peninsula, just off the Soviet base at Petropavlovsk. Before long, the men designed lapel pins showing an anchor crossed by three semaphore flags, labeled "S," "M," and "F." The initials stood for the typical cry during a storm: "Shit! Man! Fuck!"

Throughout these deployments, the Polaris program was pushing on. President Eisenhower had given William F. "Red" Raborn, the garrulous rear admiral in charge of Polaris, unprecedented authority, allowing him to bypass the usual red tape and to hire anyone he decided could do the work of designing and building Polaris subs well, and fast. There were predictable snags with new technology. (Raborn's aides showed enough humor to compile a classified film of Polaris bloopers test missiles that barely rose at all and others that just cartwheeled.) But Polaris succeeded, and timetables were met, largely because the program was given top priority. Everyone was working such ungodly hours that the submariners came to believe that the new boats were designated SSBNs not because "SS" stood for submersible ship, "N" for nuclear power, and "B" for ballistic missiles, but because the initials stood for "Saturday, Sunday, and a Bunch of Nights."

While Raborn and his team labored to ensure that the subs were built, it was up to Rickover to oversee the installation of the nuclear reactors and the crews that would run them. Rickover was looking for men who would be unflinching in a crisis, men willing to pay attention to exact detail, men who were as meticulous as he was. He was convinced that was the only way to ensure reactor safety, and he knew that reactor safety was the only way to maintain public support for his nuclear-powered submarines. With all of this, he was helping to create a submarine force that would be unparalleled. Now Rickover's men were about to drive the most lethal subs ever built, subs that would prove crucial to the balance of power in the cold war.

The first Polaris subs were 382 feet long, about 60 feet longer than nuclear attack subs, and they carried sixteen nuclear-tipped missiles that could be aimed at targets more than 1,000 nautical miles away. They also were given two crews, blue and gold, who went out on alternating 60-day cruises-keeping the subs at sea as much as possible. The duty was tough. The 1,000-mile missile range forced these boats to ride the rough waters off the northern coast of Europe to stay near targeting distance of Moscow. Their job was to "hide with pride," to be an intercontinental missile force lurking and ready to fire a second strike if the nation were attacked and land missiles destroyed."

For their part, the Soviets had only a few nuclear-powered subs, and those so ill designed that men were dying. One submarine suffered such a horrible reactor accident that it was redubbed the Hiroshima by survivors. By the time the Soviets tried to locate missile launchers in Cuba in 1962, the United States had moved so far ahead that it was able to quickly scramble several Polaris submarines, ultimately nine in all, to points within shooting distance of the Soviet Union."

The United States had the clear advantage, but for how long? The crisis might have taught Soviet leaders that it would be impossible to build a nuclear missile force on land near U.S. shores. But by scrambling the Polaris subs into firing position, the United States had also shown the Soviets a better way to accomplish the same thing.

    Flying on the wild success of his Polaris program, Admiral Red Raborn began looking ahead, thinking about new, imaginative ways of furthering nuclear deterrence. He quickly turned to the dreamer within his ranks, a young civilian whom the admiral had plucked from obscurity a few years earlier and anointed the chief scientist for Polaris.

John P. Craven was only in his midthirties when Raborn found him, but it was his job to look over the shoulder of everyone involved in the development of the missile subs, to find the problems, to come up with the answers. He was, as he put it, "chief kibitzer."

The moniker fit. Talking a torrent, his ideas usually overflowing, Craven was the kind of man who could dissect a blueprint and still have time to spout a few lines of poetry, biblical verse, or one of his endless series of self-scripted maxims of the sea. Sometimes he'd mix verse with maxim and sing the result aloud. He preached fantasy amid military discipline; he carried romance to the mechanics of nuclear war.

It was a role Craven had been bred to. He was the product of a family that reached back to Moorish pirates on his mother's side and was divided on his father's between Presbyterian ministers and Navy officers yawning in the family pew.

The Navy brass was the part of the lineage that most of the Cravens liked to boast about, the part that went back to Tunis Agustas MacDonough Craven, who skippered the Civil War Union ship Tecumseh when it was rammed by a Confederate mine during the Battle of Mobile Bay and inspired Admiral David Farragut's memorable cry to the remaining fleet: "Damn the torpedoes. Full speed ahead."

In noble tradition, Tunis drowned at the helm. Most of the Craven clan would stop the story there. John Craven, however, delighted in presenting a footnote: that Tunis died while fighting to get off the sinking ship ahead of the harbor pilot. And only John Craven boasted of what the rest of his family dared not even whisper: the pirate blood he inherited from his mother's side.

That John Craven was going to he different was evident from the moment he made his first appearance on the planet, landing in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. It was a Halloween night, a fact that his paternal relatives chose to ignore as they instantly christened him Navy, fully intending that he would live a life of rigid military discipline. That their plan was doomed to fail became clear some fifteen years later when Craven was rejected by the Naval Academy. It wasn't for lack of intelligence. He'd skipped through to high school by the time he was eleven years old. But once there, he took the rogue's route to popularity. He convinced his much older classmates that he was merely small for his age and then proceeded to win their respect by becoming the class wise guy, the kid who was too tough to do homework.

Ultimately, he fulfilled at least part of his family's expectations. He never earned a Naval Academy degree, but he did get his commission in the reserves and he became an ocean engineer. From then on, he took to sermonizing about the deep, about underwater maneuvers that most of the Navy passed off as impossible, or at least hugely improbable. He expected no easy converts. But like any minister preaching the coming of a miracle, Craven was drenched in the faith that he would ultimately be proven right.

Now Rahorn was handing Craven a nearly blank check to do what he did best-come up with ideas, as many as he could. By 1963 Craven was working hard on Rahorn's vision of an Advanced Seabased Deterrent Program. As his first step, he set aside $1 million a year, thinking that would he just enough to create a small political science program to dissect the strategy of deterrence. In the process, he discovered he had hired just about every political scientist specializing in strategic defense.