"Charlie, Victor, Red Star, come in."
"Red Star, come in."
"Red Star, come in, come in, come in."
Back on shore, U.S. intelligence agents gathered around electronic intercept monitors and listened in. Barb watched, keeping radio silence. A message flashed in from shore command: "Stay on station." Kauderer felt a flash of frustration. He had planned on turning for home, planned on arriving in time to attend his only son's bar mitzvah. But now his boy would become a man without him. Kauderer was legally forbidden from telling his son why.
As Barb and other U.S. surveillance craft listened, it was clear that the Soviets had no idea where to find their submarine. Back in Washington, Bradley thought that he might know better.
For some time, Bradley's Office of Undersea Warfare had been keeping a long and frustrating vigil over an obscure set of Soviet submarine communications that U.S. intelligence had never figured out how to decode. The Soviets were using sophisticated transmitters that compressed the communications into microsecond bursts. Bradley thought the key to finding the missing sub lay in these indecipherable bursts of static.
Intelligence officers had figured out that the transmissions were coming from Soviet missile submarines on their way to and from patrols within firing range of U.S. shores. The United States had been monitoring and recording them using a series of reception stations that were built upon German technology-dozens of antennas were strategically placed along the Pacific Coast and in Alaska.
After a while, it didn't matter much that the bursts couldn't be decoded. There was a wealth of information to be found just within the pops and hisses. Slight variations in frequency distinguished one Soviet submarine from another, and the Soviets were so regimented that their submarines created a running itinerary for U.S. intelligence to follow as they ran, tag-team style, through the 4,000 miles from Kamchatka to one of their main patrol stations 750 to 1,000 miles northwest of Hawaii. A burst typically was sent when the submarines hit the deepsea marker just outside Kamchatka. Another was sent as they crossed the international dateline, about 2,000 miles away from the Soviet Union at 180 degrees longitude. A third marked their arrival on station.
It was as if they were saying "We are leaving…. We have hit 180 degrees longitude…. We are on station." The progress reports continued as the subs headed back to Kamchatka, and Bradley's men believed they could almost hear within the static the Soviet requests for fresh milk, fresh vegetables, vodka, women.
Now Bradley's team searched the communications records and found what they were looking for almost immediately. A Golf II submarine-one of a class of diesel subs that filled in between the first Zulu subs converted to carry missiles and the coming of the first Soviet nuclear-powered missile subs-had left port on February 24, 1968. The sub had been transmitting as usual until it hit midcourse. Then the transmissions stopped. There was no message when it crossed 180 degrees longitude; none saying it had left deep water; nothing that could be construed as a request for milk or fruit or anything else that would mark a safe return.
Bradley rushed the news to the Navy's top admirals: the Soviets had indeed lost a submarine, one that carried three ballistic missiles. He believed that the sub had to have gone down between the last burst transmission and the next expected one that never came, but the Soviets weren't looking anywhere near the area Bradley had pinpointed.
What if the United States could find the sub first? There in one place would be Soviet missiles, codehooks, a wealth of technological information-and Bradley thought he had the means to find it. Halibut might not have been able to find a relatively small missile fragment, but a submarine was a much bigger and better target.
Halibut Commanders Moore and Cook were called to Washington. Waiting for them were Rear Admiral Philip A. Beshany, deputy chief of naval operations for submarine warfare, Craven, and Albert C. Beutler, who supervised Halibut's work.
"We've got some intelligence that the Soviets may have lost a submarine in the Pacific," Beshany announced as soon as the men walked in. Then Beshany filled in the details and the punch line, that Halibut was going after the Soviet Golf.
From Beshany's office, Craven rushed Moore and Cook in to see Paul Nitze, secretary of the Navy. This time, the officers were grilled on Halibut's failure to find any missile fragments. Craven held his breath while Cook offered up a spiel that rivaled the best that Craven himself could have delivered.
Failure or not, Cook said, Halibut's crew had now had time to work out the kinks in their equipment. The men could, he insisted, find a submarine if given the chance. It wasn't a hard sell. There was no other craft in the Navy that could attempt this kind of a search as long as the Soviets were out in force. Cook's optimism was enough to send the secretary straight to the White House to seek the okay.
Craven, Moore, and Cook could do nothing now but pray for the final go-ahead. They barely had time to kneel. Within a few hours, Nitze telephoned Beshany, who called Moore, Cook, and Craven back into his office with the news.
"You have a new mission."[4]
Craven now began looking for any other evidence that might further pinpoint the location of the Golf. He was convinced that there had to be other audible signs of a sub going down, so he contacted Captain Joseph Kelly, the man chiefly responsible for expanding the SOSUS net of underwater listening devices that the Navy had been laying throughout the oceans.
Kelly's staff ran through a series of SOSUS records, looking for signs of death: the convulsive terror of an implosion followed by the smaller explosions that together indicate a submarine falling to the ocean bottom. But as Kelly's staff searched, they found no massive aberrations that would indicate a powerful implosion. There was, however, a tiny blip on their paper tapes, a little rise indicating a single loud pop. It was right in the area where Bradley believed the Soviet sub had gone down.
What if, Craven reasoned, the Golf had somehow flooded before hitting crush depth? She would have fallen without a searing, deafening, blinding, cataclysmic, implosive crash of steel. Her death would have been much quieter than that. Craven needed to know what a sinking submarine sounded like, one going down with hatches open, filling with ocean water, internal and external pressure equalizing long before the boat reached crush depth. There was only one way to find out.
Craven and Bradley prevailed upon the Navy to sink a submarine in sacrifice, a submarine whose death could be taped. The Navy gave him an old diesel submarine, a warhorse that had probably escaped countless Japanese torpedoes during World War 11. Now she would suffer a vainglorious end.
World War II submarines had been executed before, made targets for torpedo practice. But those boats went out running, their engines on, their rudders wedged into position. There was something almost noble about that kind of death, downed with a single shot like a valiant old steed.
This submarine, on the other hand, was just given up to the waters, while SOSUS engineers recorded her descent. She died silently, which was just what Craven and Bradley had expected. Now, they reasoned, if a submarine with every hatch and watertight door carefully opened went down silently, then another boat might go down with a small pop if one of its watertight doors had remained shut. So, calling on data from other hydrophones that had also picked up the pop, Kelly and Craven triangulated what they believed was the Golf's most likely position: 40 degrees latitude and 180 degrees longitude. That put her just about 1,700 miles northwest of Hawaii, where the water was more than 3 miles deep.
Beshany still wasn't convinced. He believed there would have to have been implosions. The fact that the Soviets weren't anywhere near the area also caused him doubts. But he had nothing else to go on. So he gave the nod, and Halibut was sent to the spot Craven had pinpointed.[5]
4
As Craven and company began to look for the Soviet sub, and the chance to study Soviet technology from underwater camera c!ose-ups, other photographs had Admiral Rickover in the sub force convinced that U.S. national security had been greatly compromised. As top-secret photos go, these appeared to be pretty innocuous. A bunch of submariners off the USS
5
There was another subtle irony to the fact that it was