He made the only decision he could. Bessac told his crew to surface.
No one had been wounded, no swords had been broken, and no territory had been given up. But the United States had just lost a crucial battle. For the first time in this cold war under the sea, a U.S. sub had been forced to give up, to come out from hiding and sit vulnerable on top of the waves.
After that, Bessac told his men to send out an all-too-late cry for help.
"Send the damn thing in English," he shouted, answering a question from the radioman the crew called "Bad Ass."
There was no use trying to hide who they were anymore. The message went out unencoded. Meanwhile, the captain began climbing the long ladder that led from the hatch in the control room to the sail and up to the bridge. After him climbed one of the officers, a signalman, and a crew member to man the voice-powered phones that would send Bessac's orders ringing through the ship if the Soviets moved in for a fight. If there was a destroyer out there, Gudgeon didn't stand a chance.
It was still daylight outside. And the men on the bridge could see the Soviets. Two ships, maybe three, were left on the surface. All of them were smallish sub-hunters. The Soviets had pulled the rest of the ships hack. It didn't take a crowd to herd a sub on dying batteries.
The Soviets signaled "Able. Able."-international Morse code for Who are you? Identify yourself."
Gudgeon sent back, "Able. Able."
The Soviets answered, "CCCP," Russian for USSR.
Gudgeon sent back, again in international Morse code, "USN. We are going to Japan."
The response came hack, a directive for Gudgeon to get under way and away from Soviet seas. The signalman blithely interpreted for the crew: "They said, `Thanks for the ASW exercise."' Thanks for helping us practice antisubmarine warfare. He unsuccessfully suppressed a grin. The rest of the crew was grinning as well. In fact, the men were elated. They were getting the hell out of there.
The celebration had already begun when, it seemed like hours later, U.S. planes flew over to see whether Gudgeon was okay as she raced on the surface, putting as much distance as possible between herself and the Soviet Union.
For the first time in days, the cooks heated up the ovens. There was steak for dinner that night and two cans of beer per man. The men were amazed. It had never occurred to them that there would he beer on hoard, certainly not cases of it. But there it was, and these men would much rather drink than quote regulations to the old man. They were moving, they were breathing, the batteries were charging. They were embarassed, even bloodied. But at that moment, they didn't care. They were safely away, and for the first time the men admitted to one another that they had never been certain they would escape. The Soviets had obviously been capable of sinking the sub. They just didn't want to. Or maybe, the crew mused, they did want to but weren't allowed.
There was no official celebration for Gudgeon's return back at Yokosuka when she pulled in that Monday, August 26, eight years to the day since Cochino had sunk. The mood at the base was grim: the Soviets announced that day that they had conducted their first successful flight test of a land-based intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). In such a tense climate, the Navy wanted the Gudgeon incident squashed and squashed fast.
"Bad Ass," the radio tech who had sent the message in English, was promoted to chief and transferred off the boat instantly. Word was, the sub force made him send messages from then on with his left hand, lest his style, his signature of sorts, tell anyone intercepting communications that a U.S. sub was around.
Bessac was off the boat as well. Slated for transfer before the holddown, from diesel boats to a billet in Admiral Rickover's nuclear Navy, his orders didn't change. What did change, however, was Gudgeon's operating schedule. The Navy hastily announced that she was going to become the first submarine of any nation to circumnavigate the globe. It was the best way to get her out of the Pacific, where she was now well known to the Soviets, and it was the best way to try to keep the story from spreading throughout the sub force.
Of course, the Navy offered other explanations for the trip. Deeming it designed to implement a "People to People" program, President Eisenhower personally designated each man on the boat "an Ambassador of good will to the world." Each of these ambassadors was ordered never to talk about the incident.
Meanwhile, energized by its victory, the Soviet Navy began roughing up other U.S. spy subs. Among them was the USS Wahoo (SS-565), which was caught near a Soviet beach early in 1958 but managed to escape even though one of her engines blew out. Perhaps because subs went about their work quietly, the Soviets showed more restraint than they did with spy planes, some of which deliberately lit up defense radars in order to measure those systems. As nasty as the underwater battles got, no subs were sunk, and the "depth charges" were usually no more powerful than the small explosives dropped on Gudgeon.
But submarine battles in Soviet territory were now firmly entrenched as part of the cold war, and tensions only intensified as both sides prepared to deploy their first missile subs. After the Soviets launched Sput nik in the fall of 1957, President Eisenhower quickly accelerated plans to build nuclear-powered subs that could fire Polaris ballistic missiles while hiding underwater. In the meantime, the Navy was refitting some diesel subs to carry Regulus guided missiles, descendants of the German buzz bombs with ranges of between 300 and 400 nautical miles. The Regulus subs would have to surface to launch, and the missiles would have to be guided by radar from launch to landing by both the sub and a second boat positioned closer to the Soviet coast, but they would still he a potent new threat to the Soviets.
The fear that the Soviets would answer by sending their own spy subs and missile boats close to U.S. waters prodded top officials in Washington to extend their grasp over this business of underwater spying. Suddenly, operations that Navy fleet commanders had become used to controlling were being reviewed by the White House and the Pentagon. The CIA and the National Security Agency-the codebreaking agency that was so super-secretive that even people who worked there joked that NSA stood for "No Such Agency" or "Never Say Anything"-also began to play a larger role in setting the priorities for what intelligence would be collected.
Hardly any of the Soviet diesel subs had made the long transit to U.S. shores yet, but that didn't stop an outbreak of "Red hysteria." One member of the House of Representatives proclaimed that nearly two hundred Soviet subs had been sighted off the Atlantic coast. Ordinary citizens began manning "submarine watchtowers," and over the next several years submarine "sightings" became more frequent. One woman identified in Navy documents only as Mrs. Gilkinson would report seeing three subs near a Florida beach, including one that she said came within ten feet of her while she was skin-diving. A man in Texas reported spotting a periscope in what turned out to he five feet of water.
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.