War of the Whales (25 page)

After more than 200 straight days of protests on the Vieques range, the Navy decided it was time to shut down the media circus. It brought in 1,000 US Marshals and Marines to tear down the shantytown settlement and haul the protesters off the island and into jail. Hundreds of demonstrators were arrested. But days later, hundreds of new agitators came ashore. This time they brought a whole new cast of characters: Hollywood celebrities, members of Congress, priests, nuns, ministers, and the mayors of every town in Puerto Rico. Even the archbishop of San Juan got himself arrested.

Vieques had turned into an international embarrassment for the Navy. But Admiral Natter had a more pressing question to answer in the winter of 2000: Where to stage the Atlantic Fleet’s training exercises now that it had become impossible to operate on the Vieques range?

Every Navy carrier strike group had to complete war-game training exercises before deploying overseas.
¹
The USS
George Washington
battle group—including an aircraft carrier, three destroyers, two frigates, and three hunter-killer subs—needed to train in a deep-water environment that could simulate antisubmarine scenarios in the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf, which is where this battle group was headed after completing its sonar training. Specifically, Admiral Natter was looking for a “choke point” training site such as Vieques, which was adjacent to a deep underwater canyon with limited entry points at either end. Providence Channel, which traversed the Great Bahama Canyon, was the obvious choice.

Natter liked that the Bahamas were closer than Puerto Rico to Atlantic Fleet’s home port in Norfolk, Virginia. Any support aircraft needed during exercises could fly out of the Mayport Naval Station in Jacksonville, Florida. Best of all, the underwater landscape of Great Bahama Canyon had been extensively mapped by the Navy, going all the way back to its deep sound channel research off Eleuthera during World War II. Although the Bahama Islands were in foreign waters, the US Navy had a good working relationship with its government, which received tens of millions of dollars a year in rent for the AUTEC submarine testing range off Andros Island.

Natter’s planning goal was to avoid the sort of “single-point failure” of the Vieques debacle that threw the entire Atlantic Fleet training schedule into disarray. He envisioned the exercises in Great Bahama Canyon as a test run. If things went smoothly, the Navy could move most of its Vieques-based exercises up to the Bahamas on an ongoing basis.

Things hadn’t gone smoothly.

Natter and Fallon confirmed that the Second Fleet had been operating with sonar in the canyon the night before the strandings. But no one on the ships had been alerted to the presence of whales, and none had been sighted during the exercises, either in the canyon or stranding on the beach. Of course, they were nighttime exercises, so visual sightings would have been difficult, if not impossible. Regardless of the coincidence in timing, Natter and Fallon were not willing to concede that the exercises had caused the strandings.

As soon as Pirie got back from Norfolk, he briefed the Secretary’s general counsel, Stephen Preston, on what he’ d learned from the fleet admirals. After spending most of the 1990s trying to keep Preston’s predecessor, Steven Honigman, from “giving away the store to the environmentalists,” as he saw it, Pirie was reassured by Preston’s more pugnacious style. In light of the briefing he was about to give the Secretary, Pirie hoped that Preston could present a legal rationale for allowing sonar training exercises to proceed on schedule.

Admiral Paul Gaffney was due to depart as chief of ONR in three months to become president of the National Defense University in Washington, DC. Gaffney didn’t want to exit ONR under a cloud. Nor did he want ONR to become the fall guy for the fleet exercises in the Bahamas. Unusual among flag officers, Gaffney was a trained oceanographer who’ d devoted the shank of his career to directing the Naval Research Lab and the Office of Naval Research. As a man of science, he wanted to present the Navy Secretary with a science-based defense of ONR’s sea tests in the Bahamas.

With more than 500 scientists and other staff working under him at ONR, Gaffney couldn’t keep abreast of every field program in every ocean. But he quickly located the acoustics expert in charge of ONR’s Littoral Warfare tests in the Bahamas, and called him into his office.
²
Gaffney and the acoustician agreed that ONR’s sonobuoy testing on the northeast side of the islands couldn’t have caused the stranding on the western coastlines. They both assumed that some sort of acoustic event was to blame. Maybe it was military, or maybe it was something seismic, like an earthquake or commercial explosives. Meanwhile, the Secretary was rattling the cage for hard data, not just theories.

Gaffney directed the acoustician to produce a real-time acoustic model of whatever had happened in the canyon on the night of March 15. The admiral would get him the logs of ship movements and sonar transmissions from the fleet. Gaffney wanted the modeling and analysis to be conducted by a team of expert acousticians from
outside
the Navy—either arm’s-length academics or private contractors. If this all ended up in the press or in the courts, the Secretary would need to have an impartial, non-Navy assessment.

The acoustician pointed out that there
weren’t
any marine acoustic experts that the Navy hadn’t hired or funded at some point. At least not in the United States. And he couldn’t imagine the fleet sharing classified ship logs with foreign nationals. Gaffney considered this problem for a minute. “Okay, then just get the best people you can find on it,” he said. “I want unassailable experts.”

After lengthy discussion, they decided to hire two different research groups to work up independent models, using different algorithms: one at the Naval Research Lab, which had the best Navy acousticians; and another at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a longtime Navy contractor that boasted the best computers and software.

Just three days after the stranding, Secretary Danzig had called Gaffney with direct questions about what ONR was doing in the Bahamas and if it could have caused the whales to beach. Gaffney had referred the Secretary to Bob Gisiner as ONR’s resident expert in bioacoustics.

Gisiner had been working late at his office on Saturday and was taken aback by the unexpected call from the Secretary. As he reviewed the basics of beaked whale sensitivity to sonar and recounted the details on the Greek stranding in 1996, Gisiner could hear Danzig taking notes on the other end. He was impressed by the Secretary’s questions about the underwater topography of the Great Bahama Canyon compared to the Ionian Sea. Danzig told Gisiner to make sure that Darlene Ketten joined the conference call he was setting up with the fleet. In the meantime, he told Gisiner to call him on his cell phone day or night with any important developments from the Bahamas investigation.

The Navy Secretary’s conference call wasn’t due to begin until 0900 hours, but retired Rear Admiral Dick Pittenger had been pacing his office since dawn. After a decade of civilian life, Pittenger still hadn’t adjusted to a nine-to-five regimen.

It had taken time to get used to the casual work style at Woods Hole, where the marine biologists wore shorts and flip-flops and everyone addressed him by his first name. When he’ d earned his first star, Pittenger was assigned a personal adjutant to carry his briefcase and open the back door to his car, which came with a driver and a Navy flag on the hood. But it wasn’t the trappings of power that Pittenger missed from his days in the admiralty. It was the actual power to make decisions about the future of the Navy and national defense.

For a man who would rise through the ranks of the US Navy to become its Director of Antisubmarine Warfare at the peak of the Cold War, Dick Pittenger had an unlikely and unpromising childhood. He grew up “sickly and dust poor,” as he described himself, in Lexington, Nebraska, during the worst of the 1930s Dust Bowl drought. Before his first birthday, he almost died of pneumonia, as his older brother had. After his family lost its farm to the bank and moved to Tacoma, Washington, Dick joined the Sea Scouts—a sailing program of the Boy Scouts—and fell in love with all things marine. At 14, he was a malnourished 80-pound boy who’ d never seen a doctor or a dentist. A few years later he enjoyed a growth spurt that raised his weight to a normal range and lowered his voice in the barbershop quartet he sang with from soprano to bass.

Dick joined the Navy Reserves at age 17 during the Korean War and managed to pass the Naval Academy entrance exam by going back to high school for an extra year of study. He scored so high on the Navy IQ test that the Academy was willing to overlook his lung problems, which would persist throughout his life. After squeaking through the Academy physical, and after his first-ever dentist visit, he headed east to Annapolis.

The Academy was like Oz for Dick, who was the first in his family to graduate high school. He couldn’t help feeling like a rube alongside his fellow midshipmen, many of whom—such as his classmate John McCain—were born into Navy royalty. But he worked hard at his studies and graduated in 1958 in the top third of his class.

His first assignment out of the Academy was to the same Fleet Sonar School in Key West that Ken Balcomb would later attend. After earning a master’s degree in the physics of underwater acoustics at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, he skippered a minesweeper off the coast of Vietnam. Then he attended the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, where he wrote his thesis on the history of surface sonar. During his Cold War tour in Europe, Pittenger commanded a fast frigate and led an antisubmarine warfare squadron of destroyers that tracked Soviet subs throughout the Mediterranean. By the end of the 1970s, he had risen to the admiralty and become the Navy’s chief sponsor of midfrequency active sonar.

In the mid-1980s, when the Soviet subs became too quiet to track with the passive SOSUS system, the Navy brought Pittenger to the Pentagon as a two-star admiral to direct and revamp its antisubmarine warfare strategy. Faced with a Soviet submarine fleet he described as “virtually silent and underfoot,” he devised an intricate system for “acoustic cueing” across wide ocean areas. His master plan for expanding active sonar systems included low and mid-frequency platforms on surface ships, sonobuoys, towed arrays, and aircraft. When he became Oceanographer of the Navy in 1988, he continued to promote his antisubmarine warfare plans in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill.

Then, in 1989, the Soviet empire began to wobble, and soon after, to tear apart. After feverishly “hunting Ivan” in every ocean of the world for four decades, the US Navy was suddenly a fighting force without a mission. Pittenger had spent his entire 35-year Navy career as a Cold Warrior, and now the war was over.

Unless they are tracking toward the very top of the four-star command chain, most two-star admirals, such as Pittenger, retire from the Navy in their fifties, at the peak of their careers. Some move on to academia. Others, who need to better support their families after decades on a military salary, take jobs in defense contracting. An admiral whom Pittenger worked with closely at the Pentagon had retired to become director of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Soon afterward, he recruited Pittenger to join him at Woods Hole to coordinate its arctic research program and upgrade its fleet of research vessels. So in 1990, Pittenger quietly retired from active duty and settled down in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

Pittenger had served with total devotion to his Navy. But his shoulders sagged when he thought about how he’ d shortchanged his family. They’ d had to move 22 times over the course of his career, and he’ d been at sea much more often than not, missing most of his four kids’ birthdays. His wife named their first two daughters, Beth and Meg, after the sisters in Louisa May Alcott’s
Little Women
, whose father, Mr. March, was away constantly during the Civil War.

His worst memory was during the Vietnam War. The minesweeper he commanded was stuck in port at Subic Bay riding out a typhoon, while his wife was in labor with their third child back in Huntington Beach, California. Pittenger received a ship-to-shore radio message from the Red Cross reporting that his son had been born. There was no phone on board the ship, but he was able to see a phone booth a hundred yards away on the other side of the storm-driven harbor. He made a run for it, reached the booth, dropped a coin in the phone box, and convinced the operator to put a call through to his wife in California. During the call with his wife, he learned that his daughter Beth was at the same hospital in a full body cast, having suffered a spiral leg fracture in a bike accident. The storm raging outside the phone booth seemed to mirror his swirling emotions of joy, anxiety, and frustration at being 7,000 miles from his family and powerless to help them. When the call was over, he had to get back onboard his ship to ride out the second half of the typhoon with his crew.

Retired admirals such as Pittenger play an important, though largely unseen, role in Navy policy making. On a logistical level, the fleet relies on its retired admirals to officiate at war games and to review after-action reports, which is why Pittenger had been invited to participate in the conference call from Woods Hole, along with Darlene Ketten, who worked across campus. On a more informal basis, retired admirals network with their far-flung “flag buddies” to exert influence on a range of policy issues—such as keeping Navy leadership from compromising national security in the name of political expediency.

Pittenger had been anxiously awaiting the Secretary’s conference call all week. But then, he had spent his entire naval career in a state of chronic, even obsessive anxiety. For decades he had worried about the next generation of Soviet subs growing too quiet for SOSUS sensors to detect. He worried about spies and about any subs that might leak through the global acoustic net the Navy had woven across the oceans. As a ship commander, he worried about the safety of the men under his command. During his time at the Pentagon, he worried about the politicians on Capitol Hill who cut defense funding every time peace broke out, as if national security were a onetime battle that you could win and then forget about. When the Cold War ended and the Soviet navy retreated to dry dock, he worried about where the next submarine threat might emerge—from China or from North Korea, or from any rogue nation with a submarine that might be lurking, unseen and unheard, anywhere in the world’s dark oceans.