War of the Whales (45 page)

23

In the Valley of the Whales

Ken Balcomb spent the summer back on San Juan Island writing letters to members of Congress, speaking to the handful of powerful businesspeople he’ d come to know over the years in the Pacific Northwest, talking to any journalist who would listen—doing whatever he could to keep the pressure on the Navy to fully investigate the Bahamas stranding and change the way it used sonar in training exercises. Balcomb worked on his own, rather than allying himself with NRDC, the Humane Society, or any of the conservation groups that were starting to engage on the issue. He was past caring whether he was perceived as an environmentalist, an activist, or a whistle-blower. But he’ d always been a lone wolf, and he felt too old to start running with a pack.

By mid-September, all the summer interns had left Smugglers Cove, and by early October, the orcas had begun their migration south toward the Oregon and California coasts. Ordinarily, October was when he and Diane would be folding up camp and heading back to Abaco to start up the winter beaked whale survey. That fall, for the first time in memory, Balcomb had nowhere he was supposed to be.

When the
60 Minutes
segment finally aired in early October, Balcomb hoped it would generate a chain reaction of public outrage. But to his dismay, millions of Americans watched his videotape of the mass stranding and listened to David Martin of CBS News indict the US Navy as the likeliest culprit—and then went back to speculating on whether or not the New York Mets and the New York Yankees would face off in the first Subway Series since 1956. Except for a few calls from journalists, the
60 Minutes
broadcast didn’t seem to move the meter.

Ken heard from Dave Ellifrit that Diane was back in Abaco after spending most of the summer in Los Angeles. Dave had joined her in mid-September to help get the boats back in the water and restart the survey. Ken and Diane had communicated only a few times over the summer, in awkward phone conversations that were mostly about Ken’s shipping her some personal effects from Smugglers Cove. He’ d left behind gear in Abaco, including a couple of precious beaked whale heads he’ d salvaged from around the Caribbean over the years. But he was afraid that asking Diane to ship them back to him would slam shut a door he still hoped to keep ajar.

The only follow-up contact he had with Diane was to co-author an article for the
Bahamas Journal of Science
titled “A Mass Stranding of Cetaceans Caused by Naval Sonar in the Bahamas.”
¹
Their meticulously detailed account documented the time, location, and condition of each stranded animal, provided preliminary analysis of the specimens they collected, discussed the acoustic threat that military sonar posed to whales, and offered suggestions for reducing the risks to marine mammals. It was a bittersweet collaboration, executed through dispassionate emails and a few stilted phone conversations over the course of several months.

For years after its publication, their article would remain the most cited primary reference for the Bahamas stranding. It also served as a somber epitaph for their research subjects.

“None of the Cuvier’s beaked whales that we had documented in our nine-year study have returned since the March 15 naval exercise, and none of the ‘rescued’ whales has been seen again, either . . . Mitigation of naval activities during peacetime exercise appears to be the only reasonable solution to this problem.”

Six months after its ill-fated antisubmarine training exercise in the Bahamas, the USS
George Washington
battle group had deployed to the Persian Gulf. After transiting the Atlantic and Mediterranean, the USS
Cole
led the battle group through the Suez Canal and into the Red Sea. On October 12, while the
Cole
was refueling at the Yemeni port of Aden, a small motorboat packed with 500 pounds of explosives pulled up, unchallenged, along the port side of the destroyer. Two suicide bombers aboard the boat detonated their payload, blowing a 40-by-40-foot hole in the ship’s hull and flooding the ship’s galley and engineering spaces. The USS
Hawes
and the USS
Donald Cook
arrived soon to assist in the rescue and evacuation of the injured. Seventeen sailors were killed and 39 were injured. The
Cole
narrowly escaped sinking and had to be towed all the way back to the United States for repair.

The
Cole
bombing dashed any illusions the US Navy may have held about its invincibility in the post–Cold War era. It was painful proof of just how vulnerable its warships were to a low-tech suicide attack, despite highly sophisticated sensors and unparalleled firepower. Arleigh Burke–class guided-missile destroyers were designed for deployment in the open ocean against Soviet planes, ships, and submarines. But operating inside narrow gulfs in other countries’ territorial waters, where they were hamstrung by politically driven rules of engagement, battleships were almost impossible to defend.

For the Navy, the
Cole
bombing marked a clear escalation in America’s tit-for-tat war with Islamic terrorists. Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for the
Cole
attack as revenge for ship-based cruise missiles launched two years earlier against Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan—which President Bill Clinton had ordered in retribution for the deadly Al Qaeda attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Al Qaeda’s founder, Osama bin Laden, had planned for two years to retaliate against an American cruise missile destroyer, before the USS
Cole
arrived in the Gulf. US Navy and intelligence services girded for the next attack on a soft target, military or civilian.

A year after the
Cole
attack—and another year into the snail-paced Navy and Fisheries investigation of the Bahamas stranding—Balcomb heard the news of the four hijacked commercial airliners crashing into the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania. He understood immediately that America was at war—a hot war unlike the tense cat-and-mouse drama of tracking Soviet subs he knew firsthand. Like so many Americans, particularly veterans, Balcomb had a powerful urge to jump to the defense of his country. It was instinctive.

He had spent the past year bird-dogging the Navy and Fisheries’ joint investigation. A few weeks after 9/11, he went back to writing letters to politicians and lobbying journalists to keep the forgotten joint inquiry in the news. Despite his horror at the terrorist attacks, he resolved not to let the Navy off the hook for the acoustic storm its sonar training exercises continued to unleash inside whale habitats. Balcomb felt no contradiction between his patriotism and his conviction that the Navy needed to walk the walk when it came to its proclaimed commitment to being responsible stewards of the ocean environment.

Eighteen months after announcing their joint investigation, the Navy and Fisheries released what they titled an “interim report” on their long-delayed investigation of the Bahamas stranding. Following the time-honored dictum of Washington politics that the best way to bury a story is to release it after 5:00 on a Friday afternoon, the Navy and Fisheries waited until 5:30 on December 21, 2001—the last day of the federal work year and the beginning of the Christmas weekend, when virtually the entire news media was heading out of town on vacation.

Rick Weiss, a science reporter at the
Washington Post
who was working the Death Valley shift between Christmas and New Year’s, found his lead on page one of the report’s executive summary:

“The investigation team concludes that tactical midrange frequency sonars aboard US Navy ships that were in use during the sonar exercises in question were the most plausible source of the acoustic or impulse trauma suffered by the whales.”
²

Weiss didn’t have any trouble tracking down Balcomb, who was spending the holiday alone on San Juan Island. For 15 years, he had celebrated Christmas with Diane’s family in Eleuthera. But he hadn’t been back to the Bahamas since the stranding, and now he was marking his second solo Christmas in Smugglers Cove, the loneliest week of the most solitary stretch of his life.

He spent Christmas Day reading a copy of the Navy and Fisheries’ report that Rick Weiss had emailed to him on Christmas Eve. His only Christmas present, Balcomb mused to himself. He accepted the fact that this carefully worded interim report, released in the midst of the Christmas holiday, was the closest to a mea culpa the Navy was likely to offer. It might seem slender satisfaction to a man who had lost so many pieces of his heart to the Bahamas stranding. But Balcomb knew that when you’re trying to turn a wheel as big as the US Navy, you should expect to get only a small turn out of it. The Navy’s grudging admission of responsibility for the Bahamas stranding may have been a small turn, but it was a turn in the right direction.

Balcomb called Roger Gentry at home and asked him when a final report was likely to be released. Gentry told him, in friendship, not to hold his breath. In all likelihood, there would never be a final report. Gentry made a point of telling Balcomb that if he hadn’t stuck it to the Navy, there never would have been even an interim report. He said as much to the
Washington Post
reporter when he called him for comment on the report he’ d helped shepherd past legions of Navy and Fisheries lawyers over the past year and a half.

Gentry had agonized while watching the Navy and Fisheries navigate sideways for 18 months to arrive at essentially the same conclusions it had reached three months after the stranding. He had felt for a long time that Balcomb got a bum rap from the Navy, from Fisheries, and from his peers in the research community—including Gentry himself—all of whom had their own reasons for fearing or resenting a whistle-blower in their midst. It relieved Gentry’s guilt a bit to tell Rick Weiss that he credited Balcomb for sticking his neck out for the whales.

Balcomb didn’t so much mind the personal smears he’ d had to endure; he’ d fully expected to be attacked from the moment he stepped up to the lectern at the DC press conference. What made him angry, and a bit sad, was the realization that in all likelihood Fisheries would never return the beaked whale heads to him, despite Ketten’s promise to him back at Nancy’s Restaurant.

After he finished talking to Gentry, Balcomb went back to his computer screen and printed out the entire 58-page report, including full-color acoustic modeling charts that were similar to the ones presented at the closed-door Navy meeting 18 months earlier—the meeting he had been barred from attending.

Beyond the five-page executive summary, the report was written in technical jargon that would be incomprehensible to a lay reader. But for a beaked whale expert and seasoned veteran of antisubmarine warfare like Balcomb, it all made for a deeply immersive read: the details of the forensic evidence from the necropsies,
³
the movements and sonar transmissions of each warship in the battle group, and the elaborate acoustic modeling of how the pressure waves from the sonar moved through the underwater canyon. Taken together, they filled in all the blanks that had remained in his imagination about the Bahamas stranding narrative.

Every day for the past 20 months, Balcomb had speculated on precisely what had transpired that night on the surface of Providence Channel and in the underwater depths of the Great Bahama Canyon. Now, as he studied the acoustic models and the ships’ sonar logs, he could visualize the entire drama as it must have unfolded across the northern Bahamas.
^*

This is what he saw:

Viewed from the Navy’s Keyhole spy satellites 30 miles overhead, the
George Washington
battle group looked almost puny as it steamed out of its home port in Norfolk, Virginia, en route to the Bahamas. The unmanned surveillance planes flying cover at 15,000 feet had a more realistic view of the strike force’s scale.

The battle group maintained a defensive formation around its highest-value vessel, the Nimitz-class supercarrier
George Washington
. More than 1,000 feet long and 20 stories high, it housed a crew of 6,000 sailors and 90 aircraft. Escorting the carrier were three destroyers, the
Cole,
the
Caron
, and the
Donald Cook;
and two guided-missile frigates, the
Hawes
and the
Simpson
. Each warship was longer than a football field and armed with the latest cannons, missiles, torpedoes, radar, and sonar. For added antisubmarine reach, each destroyer had a Seahawk helicopter parked on its back deck. And this was merely the visible portion of the battle group. Six hundred feet below the sea’s surface, two fast-attack submarines scouted ahead for enemy submersibles.

This war game was the battle group’s dress rehearsal before it could be certified battle ready for its scheduled deployment to the Persian Gulf in July. As the group entered Bahamian waters, its commander received his final battle problem:

“Intel indicates there are two enemy submarines hiding out somewhere in the underwater canyon below Northwest Providence Channel; search and sanitize this choke point so that the carrier can transit safely through it.”

The war game’s goal was to replicate real-world battle conditions and to stress the battle-group crews with as many unknowns as possible. The narrow, deep-water passage through the Bahamas resembled the Strait of Gibraltar and the Strait of Hormuz, which the battle group would soon be transiting en route to the Persian Gulf. Two hunter-killer submarines from another strike group were playing the role of enemy targets.