It was only later that Craven realized that the disaster was about to mark him among the most important players in a new and dramatic chapter in this saga of undersea spying. Craven's opportunity would spring from the almost impossible promises the Navy made in its efforts at damage control.
In the wake of Thresher, the Navy promised a massive effort to learn about the unforgiving ocean depths. There would be a "Sub Safe" program. There would be "Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicles."
This was the Navy's chance to calm the public, a chance to erase tragedy with visions of ocean wonder, a chance to obscure submarine dangers beneath visions of safety innovations. Almost everyone involved recognized that some of the proposals were more science fiction than science, especially the prospect of deep-submergence rescue vehicles (DSRVs) for sunken subs. Anyone who was to be rescued would have to have the good fortune to go down over a continental shelf or atop an undersea mountain, in waters far more shallow than the two, three, or four miles of depth that made up much of the world's oceans. Most submariners knew that a severe casualty at sea almost always meant that they would disappear-no survivors, no rescue, nothing more to say.
Still, Congress okayed these popular proposals and offered up funding that caught the attention of the Office of Naval Intelligence. The Navy might have been promising an era that mirrored Jules Verne, but a few submarine espionage specialists now saw the means to launch a new age of spying that would he much closer to James Bond.
These intelligence officers were already crafting their plans when Craven began directing a massive post-Thresher study. He had also taken charge of the Deep Submergence Systems Project, a program created to design the Navy's promised deep-submergence rescue vehicles and to build an underwater laboratory, a habitat known as "SeaLab," where the Navy could study the physiological effects of deep-sea pressures on divers.
Craven saw opportunity, especially in the DSRV program. Like nearly everyone else with knowledge of the oceans, he knew that the DSRVs were largely fantasy. But he reasoned that maybe the push to build them might give him an edge in pursuing another of his dreams-a fleet of mini-submarines made of glass. Chemically, glass is a liquid, so Craven reasoned that glass submarines would be at their strongest under the most powerful deep-ocean pressures.
He wasn't the only one trying to sell the Navy on the idea of some kind of mini-submarine. Reynolds Aluminum Company was building its own boat, hoping to gain a lucrative contract. The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, with the Office of Naval Research, was designing the Alvin, a three-man submersible that could go down 6,000 feet. At this point, the only deep-submersible the Navy had inhouse was the Trieste If, a mini-dirigible that had to be carried or towed to dive sites. It had only limited maneuverability, but it could bring a crew of three down to 20,000 feet. The first Trieste had been lowered nearly 7 miles in 1960 to the deepest spot in the world-the Challenger Deep in the Marianas Trench, about 200 miles from Guam. Both Trieste I and II explored Thresher's wreckage.
It was just as Craven began to work out the mechanics of self-propelled, independent, deep-sea mini-subs that he was approached by a Naval Intelligence officer, one of the men who helped coordinate the submarine surveillance operations off the Soviet coasts. By now, those operations had been expanded to provide a year-round presence. Operating under the code name "Binnacle"-later "Ilolystone"-the Navy's growing fleet of nuclear subs and diesels were keeping constant watch on the Soviets as they aimed test launches of missiles from land silos and ships into the oceans. U.S. subs were also tracking the rapidly expanding fleet of Soviet nuclear subs as they finally began to venture out into the Atlantic and the Pacific. The Soviet Navy was beginning to enact its long-threatened plan to become a blue-water force.
With all this going on, the U.S. Navy nearly always had at least one surveillance sub in the Barents and two off the Soviets' Pacific ports, where they still had to dodge occasional Soviet depth charges. Even some of the early nuclear subs, like the USS Scamp (SSN-588), got chased with small depth charges, and more diesel subs, such as the USS Ronquil (SS-396) and the USS Trumpetfish (SS-425), got held down Gudgeon-style in the early 1960s. In addition to these operations off the Soviet coast, some diesel subs carried Russian emigres back to the Soviet Union to spy for the United States, and other diesel subs were landing commandos in places like Borneo, Indonesia, and the Middle East to track the expanding Soviet influence.[2]
Submarine spying had become so important that the chief of Naval Operations in Washington had taken charge of coordinating all operations, and a special undersea warfare office had been set up within the Office of Naval Intelligence to plan them.
Intelligence officials were so anxious to learn the latest about new Soviet subs and missiles that submarine spooks were under orders to flash off messages with mission highlights on the transit home. The Russian-language experts among them began transcribing tapes of stolen communications as soon as they left Soviet waters. Couriers met returning submarines at the dock, ready to whisk the intelligence directly to NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. The spooks themselves were so valuable that the Navy ordered them to travel to and from ports by train rather than on commercial plane. The Navy wasn't willing to risk even a slim chance that they might be hijacked to Cuba.
Now the Naval Intelligence officer had come to Craven, asking him to help with a grander effort than any that had been tried before. The officer handed Craven a top-secret document, actually a very long wish list that Naval Intelligence had been amassing for several years, a document that had been touched by barely a dozen people before him.
Stamped across the front page were the words "Operation Sand Dollar." From there the list went on for pages. These were the splashdown points for Soviet ballistic missiles painstakingly monitored and noted by Navy surface ships and Air Force radar and underwater hydrophones, as well as the locations of planes and other Soviet military hardware glimpsed or heard plunging through the waves. Only a few miles away, three at most, lay the Soviets' most sensitive defense secrets: the best in Soviet missile guidance systems, metallurgy, and electronics-all of it tantalizing trash and all of it out of reach. No wonder the Soviet Union didn't even try to guard the cache. Nobody could have imagined an undersea raid through stars of luminescent plankton to the utter blackness of the deep.
But why not, intelligence officers reasoned, use the comforting notion of deep-submergence rescue vehicles to mask an effort to reach the items cataloged in Sand Dollar? Why not use the budgets of rescue gadgets that would hardly ever be used to create some tools that might just give the United States the definitive edge?
The Thresher tragedy would be the excuse, the new safety programs the stuff of a complicated cover story. And all of it was dependent on Craven's answer to one question. Could he manage a deep-water treasure hunt?
It was a matter of top national security, Craven was told. Left unsaid was that it was also a matter of pride, political standing, and turf. The intelligence arm of the Navy was in a desperate game of catch-up with that of the Air Force, which had just launched a new generation of spy satellites. With their growing coverage of the Soviet Union, these new "eyes in the sky" were sending back images of sites where the Soviets were digging silos for powerful landbased missiles and dry docks where the Soviets were preparing to create their own generation of Polaris-like submarines. The Polaris program had managed to prevent Air Force bombers and rockets from monopolizing the business of nuclear deterrence. Now maybe Navy spies could compete with the satellites, diving not for mere pictures but for actual Soviet arms and craft.
2
The U.S. public never knew just how afraid its government had become that the Soviets would escalate any naval confrontation. Just months earlier, a Soviet defector had presented what had become known as the "lronbark Papers" — details of Soviet plans to use tactical nuclear weapons against U.S. ships and subs if a war broke out at sea. President John F. Kennedy's advisers were haunted by the thought that the Soviet Union could have engineered the first crude steps of that plan. Indeed, Kennedy was afraid that any battle at sea might intensify the crisis, with or without nuclear weapons being fired. As he instituted the U.S. naval blockade of Cuba, a Soviet sub was spotted near two Soviet freighters. When Kennedy heard that, he asked his aides: “Isn’t there some way we can avoid having our first exchange with a Russian submarine? Almost anything but that!"
There were such exchanges, but none lived up to Kennedy's worst fears. U.S. surface ships and aircraft near Cuba spotted a handful of Soviet diesel subs and easily surfaced three of them.
Shortly after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, Navy commandos used diesel submarines to engineer the escape of prominent Cubans from Castro's regime. Over several weeks, commandos slipped from the subs and rowed to shore in inflatable rafts. The Cubans who were piloted back to the subs often had to dive 15 to 30 feet through dark waters to enter the submerged craft though special pressurized compartments. Many of those rescued likely would have been jailed or executed for plotting to overthrow Castro, according to former U.S. sailors involved in the operation.