War of the Whales (24 page)

What he hadn’t discovered was that Ken Balcomb had trained as a Navy pilot at the Pensacola flight school one year ahead of Admiral Baucom. And he didn’t know that Balcomb had served as an acoustics expert in Navy sound surveillance for seven years.

By the end of the first national news cycle, Balcomb realized that the Navy had outflanked him. He assumed by now that Navy officials knew a lot more than they were saying. Someone had made a calculated decision to let the public affairs office disclose the sonobuoy experiments being conducted by ONR north of Abaco—a red herring that shifted the public’s focus away from the site of the strandings and gave the Navy some plausible deniability. Anyone who claimed that sound experiments conducted on the Atlantic side of the island could cause the strandings on the west side, in Providence Channel, would come off sounding like an idiot.

Balcomb had let himself sound like that idiot. He knew that the destroyer and frigates he’ d seen in the channel weren’t connected to any sonobuoy experiments. But he wasn’t ready to talk about the fleet’s presence in the canyon. Not yet. He wanted more facts about the stranding. Without them, all he could do was speculate.

Balcomb hadn’t been prepared for the rapid-fire questions from reporters angling for a pithy sound bite or an impassioned accusation directed at the Navy. He felt conflicted. He’ d served for seven years and was loyal to the Navy’s mission. But he’ d also learned a healthy distrust of the Navy on an institutional level, especially when it felt exposed. Within the ranks, there was a strict code of accountability, and a rigorous process for after-action investigations when things went awry. But for most of the admirals in the fleet, accountability began and ended with the Navy. They only grudgingly answered to their civilian overseers, and they didn’t bother to veil their contempt for the press.

Balcomb wanted to keep the Navy honest and accountable, and he wanted to make sure that people understood what had happened to the whales in Providence Channel. But he hadn’t formulated a coherent hypothesis yet, and he didn’t want to come off sounding half-cocked. He also wanted to preserve his role in the ongoing investigation. So he decided not to mention the destroyer and frigates he’ d seen in the channel, or his own naval history and his knowledge of marine acoustics.

The day the Associated Press story ran, a
60 Minutes
producer called Balcomb from New York. She said she wanted to feature him in an investigative piece and use his videotape of the mass stranding, which she’ d heard about from the CBS affiliate in Miami. Balcomb told her he wasn’t ready to work with anyone on a story, but she insisted that she was planning to bring a crew down to Abaco whether Balcomb cooperated or not.

•  •  •

As soon as the newspaper stories began to appear, Balcomb started taking flack from ONR and Fisheries. Gisiner fired off an email telling him to sit tight and stop talking to the press. Then came a phone call from the head of marine acoustics at Fisheries, Roger Gentry.

Gentry, Gisiner, and Balcomb had all been grad students together at UC Santa Cruz. They were the young, second-generation marine mammal scientists, a band of brothers who vied like siblings for the attention and patronage of their professors, who were the founding fathers of the field. But Gentry had stood apart from the other grad students, the first among equals. He was tall and movie-star handsome, even amid the seaweed and slime of marine biology fieldwork. By the time Balcomb showed up at school, Gentry was already teaching undergraduates and publishing articles on gray whale distribution in Mexico and California.

Balcomb and Gentry had become friends that year. They spent a long winter together in an unheated hut on the Baja coast with nothing to do but tally the whales migrating along the shore, and nothing to eat but what they could scavenge on the beach. After he earned his PhD, Gentry authored a half dozen books on Steller sea lions and the fur seals of the Pribilof Islands off the coast of Alaska. Then he ran Fisheries’ Northwest Regional Science Center for six years.

Rumor had it that Gentry and Gisiner had been up for the same job at ONR in the early 1990s, but Gisiner won out. Although Gentry had more academic chops, Gisiner had deeper ties to Navy research. Then, in the mid-1990s, Fisheries found itself in the middle of acoustic controversies involving Navy sonar and the oil and gas industry’s use of air guns during seismic exploration for undersea deposits. Gentry wasn’t a bioacoustics expert—at least not where whales were concerned—but he was a respected academic who’ d done a good job running the Northwest Science Center. When headquarters decided it needed a marine acoustics department, Gentry got the nod.

Balcomb had never felt competitive with Gentry or Gisiner—they’ d been on totally different trajectories. Decades after university, Balcomb was still doing field research, while Gentry and Gisiner had graduated to administrative jobs with big budgets and staffs, piling up co-author credits on the publications of studies their agencies funded. But now that their paths had crossed again, he felt a familial tug toward the past. When he heard Roger’s voice on the phone, it was as if the fraternal bonds of grad school had been embedded in amber.

Gentry spoke to Balcomb as an older, wiser brother would. “You have to be patient, Ken. Let the process play out.” He assured Balcomb that Fisheries was committed to a full and independent investigation. Hadn’t they sent their top people down there, and wasn’t Darlene working with Ken as a partner? But if Balcomb wanted to be part of the team, he had to act like it. He couldn’t go shooting his mouth off to reporters before the investigation had even gotten under way.

Balcomb couldn’t tell whether Roger was being sincere or was simply naïve. They both knew that the Navy was providing most of the personnel and funding for the investigation. Balcomb also suspected that Fisheries would only get the fleet records and acoustic data that the Navy wanted to share with it. As Balcomb knew from his two tours, the Navy was the most secretive of all the armed services, and never more so than when things went wrong. Internally, the Navy was relentless in its search after the facts. But it tended to erect a firewall between its internal investigation and any public accounting.

Ketten had agreed to keep Balcomb involved and informed, but he was glad to have Gentry—someone he had personal history with—working inside the Fisheries end of the investigation.

•  •  •

The day after Ketten left Abaco, the Earthlings decamped, and Ken and Diane could finally exhale. Having the volunteers around had been like hosting houseguests during a family crisis. That afternoon, they took the boat out to the canyon to troll for whales. They took along their catalogue of ID photos in hopes of identifying those they’ d pushed off the beach the first day of the stranding. They spotted two whales, but none of the ones that had come ashore. The canyon was eerily quiet.

Back at the house in Sandy Point, alone except for Dave Ellifrit, Ken and Diane felt swamped by sadness. For a decade, they had built their life in the Bahamas around the beaked whales—a community that had made its home in the underwater canyon for millions of years. They could only guess at what had driven the whales onto the beaches or, they assumed, to their final rest on the floor of the canyon.

13

Cease and Desist

From the moment Navy Secretary Danzig heard about the Bahamas stranding while meeting with Pacific Fleet Command in Pearl Harbor, he knew he’ d have his hands full managing the fallout, both inside and outside the Navy. He fully expected to have to deflect attacks, both legal and rhetorical, from groups such as NRDC and the Humane Society—which also meant he’ d have to carefully manage the Navy’s messaging to the media. And lurking in the background was Fisheries, which might feel pressured by the press coverage to assert its regulatory authority.

Eventually, he’ d have to deal with the admirals. Fleet Command’s priority was to protect its combat readiness—which meant the admirals would be at loggerheads with the Navy lawyers, both inside the secretariat and N-45’s environmental division.

Simply sorting out the facts of the fleet’s involvement, if any, would tax all of Danzig’s skills as arbiter among the Navy’s competing branches. Danzig put his Assistant Secretary for Installations and Environment, Robert Pirie Jr., in charge of interviewing the Atlantic Fleet commanders. As the highest-ranking former commander in the secretariat, Pirie was the obvious person to reconstruct the Atlantic Fleet’s movements in the Caribbean.

Pirie was a second-generation blue-suiter—the son of a highly decorated vice admiral and a former submarine commander himself—so he wasn’t bashful about butting heads with admirals. The Atlantic Fleet was led by some of the fastest-rising stars in the Navy, many of them poised for their next move up in rank. Danzig had to update his org chart almost weekly to keep abreast of the Navy’s ever-changing leadership. The commander of the Atlantic Fleet, Admiral Vern Clark, was due to take over as Chief of Naval Operations in July. His successor as fleet commander, Admiral Bob Natter, and the commander of the Second Fleet in the Caribbean, Admiral Bill Fallon, were widely perceived as being on track to becoming Chief of Naval Operations themselves someday.
^*

Pirie understood that these men hadn’t risen to three- and four-star admiralty simply by seniority. In addition to talent, smarts, and a strong work ethic, they all had robust survival instincts and high levels of testosterone and ambition. None of these admirals wanted a black, or even gray, mark on his record that could slow his ascent to the pinnacle of Fleet Command. Pirie had conducted enough after-action reports to know that when something went wrong during exercises, the cockroaches always came from someone else’s compartment.

Like many large organizations, the Navy suffered from “stovepiping.” While the name for this syndrome was originally coined by the intelligence community, the problem of vertical, nonshared silos of information was endemic to the Navy. Among the competitive fleet divisions, surface ship commanders didn’t always know what the submariners or the aviators were up to. And nobody in the fleet paid much attention to Environmental Readiness, since that division reported to Installations, not Operations. The fleet viewed environmental compliance as just another round of paperwork with boxes to check and signature lines to sign and file, a bothersome distraction from its combat mission—which at the time was focused on supporting NATO operations during the Bosnian Civil War in the former Yugoslavia. Meanwhile, a scientific research division like ONR operated in a stovepipe of its own, and its reports rarely rose to fleet level. Other than trying to avoid colliding with right whales, the fleet hadn’t been much focused on ONR’s marine mammals research.

Pirie’s mission was to shine a light down all the stovepipes surrounding the Bahamas incident and reconstruct a coherent, comprehensive account for the Secretary. Danzig had a reputation for being thorough and fair. The more complete Pirie’s reconstruction of events, the more influence he could exert over the Secretary’s decision making. The final judgment on whether or not to limit sonar exercises was Danzig’s, but Pirie knew the admirals would expect him to take their side in any face-off with the civilian Secretary.

Pirie flew down to Fleet Forces Command headquarters in Norfolk, Virginia, to meet with Admirals Natter and Fallon. First on his plate was figuring out why the fleet was conducting exercises in the Bahamas. He soon learned that the trail to the Bahamas stranding led back to another environmental and political fiasco in the Caribbean: the US naval base in Vieques, Puerto Rico.

Since 1948, the US Navy had been using the eastern part of the small Puerto Rican island of Vieques as a missile and bombing range and the western end for weapons storage. Problematically, the middle of the island was still inhabited by 9,000 local civilians. According to the Puerto Rican protesters, the Navy had dumped more than 20 million pounds of industrial waste on the island, including lead paint and acid. The Vieques Fishermen’s Association claimed that the Navy had poisoned the reefs and killed off the fish. Puerto Rican health officials reported spikes in cancer rates among the islanders.

The Navy had managed to keep the government officials on its side, until a wayward bomb killed an islander named David Sanes during target practice in April 1999. Within days of his death, demonstrations broke out across Puerto Rico. Soon protesters started coming ashore on Vieques and setting up tents inside the practice grounds. As soon as they were arrested and removed, another group would land and set up camp on the beach.

Eventually it became a badge of honor for Puerto Rican celebrities in the States to get arrested on Vieques. Singer Ricky Martin and actors Jimmy Smits and Edward James Olmos all jetted in, with TV cameras in tow. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson flew in to show solidarity. NRDC attorney Robert Kennedy Jr. came down to sue the Navy for toxic dumping, and then stuck around to get busted and hauled off to jail. He even named his newborn son after the island: Aiden Vieques Kennedy.