Moore was removed from command of Halibut three months after his run-in with Rickover. Although the move was wrapped in the paper of a usual transfer, few people doubted that Rickover was behind it. "That to me was one of the numerous irrational personnel actions that the gentleman was capable of doing and did do," says Rear Admiral. Walter L. Small Jr., then commander of submarines in the Pacific. Rickover was going to dismiss anyone he wanted to dismiss "whether he had the authority or not."
Much of Moore's wardroom chose to resign from the Navy-some in silent protest over Rickover's treatment of their captain, others simply to avoid the endless barrage. Even Doc Wheat, the corpsman who had poured the brandy that revived Charlie Hammonds, had come under fire when Rickover's crew deemed that the records of the crew's radiation exposures were a mess.
Moore was moved to the Pentagon to work with the deep submergence group, and ironically ended up being part of the team seeking missions for Rickover's beloved NR-1. Rickover had engineered Moore's firing, but he hadn't gotten rid of him. And despite Rickover's ire, Moore made full captain along with the rest of his class. He had too many favorable fitness reports, had accomplished too much, for anyone to deny him, even Rickover.
But full captain or not, Moore had lost his boat. It was a bizarre reward. After leading the Navy's boldest undersea spy program, Moore would never command at sea again.
Five — Death Of A Submarine
It was May 27, 1968, and the end of a long day. John Craven was driving along the Potomac, on his way home, when the news ninety-nine men were missing. L came over the radio: the USS Scorpion (SSN-589) was missing;
Barely two months had passed since U.S. intelligence had realized the Soviets had lost their Golf submarine. And Craven was still helping Bradley figure out where it had gone down when this latest news came. Craven listened hard for details about Scorpion, but there weren't any.
Nobody had any idea where Scorpion was or what had happened to her. All they knew was that the 3,500-ton nuclear attack submarine was due back in Norfolk, Virginia, and had failed to arrive. She hadn't been slinking off Soviet shores or even plumbing new depths, as the USS Thresher had been doing when she was lost five years earlier. Scorpion had simply been cruising through the Atlantic Ocean on a straight track for home. Just like the World War II submarine she was named for, Scorpion had vanished without a trace and seemingly without reason.
Craven slowed his car at the next exit and turned for the Pentagon. As Craven stepped into the controlled pandemonium of the War Room, all he knew was that, as the Navy's top deep-water scientist, he would be needed. A submarine was missing; ninety-nine men were missing.
Surveying the crowd of captains and admirals and other officers already there, Craven sensed something he had never encountered in a room full of top-ranking military men: abject fear.
The fear could be seen in the tensed faces of the men who stood scrutinizing a huge wall chart mapping Scorpion's assigned track, and it could be heard in the shaken tones of others who were intently studying navigational charts strewn all over the room. Men were laying out hypotheses and search patterns. They were plotting Scorpion's track, creating a path for search planes above and looking for the sparse undersea mountains below. Just a few months before, the USS Scamp (SSN-588) was nearly lost when she rammed into an undersea mountain in the Pacific in her race to go monitor a Soviet missile test. A similar accident, and Scorpion might be lost forever. Then again, those mountains might also be the only places along her path where she and her crew could have sunk without meeting instant, crushing death.
Other officers were studying the positions of nearby Soviet ships and submarines, wondering whether any had crossed Scorpion's path. People all over the room were trying to weigh the possibilities, wanting to believe that Scorpion was still intact, her crew stranded but alive.
"What can my organization do to help?" Craven said over the worried voices, the roar of competing conversations, and the rustle of the charts. Nobody looked up or even seemed to notice him speaking from the doorway. Most of these officers knew nothing of Halibut, of Craven's role in preparing her for deep-sea searches, or even of his success in pinpointing the atomic bomb the Air Force lost in the deep Atlantic near Palomares, Spain. To most of the rank and file here, Craven was just another skinny engineer. Those few who did know him well found him to be a man full of odd ideas and strange search methods that didn't sound like anything ever penned in a Navy manual. Few of the officers in the War Room that day would have believed that Craven might he their best and perhaps only chance of finding Scorpion.
Craven repeated his question. This time, someone answered: "We haven't been able to find Scorpion on the acoustic nets. We don't know where it is. If there's anything you can do with respect to that, do it."
With that, Craven was left on his own, left to try to figure out why and where Scorpion had vanished. Odds were worse than a million to one against anyone finding the boat. She could have been anywhere on a track that covered 3,000 miles of the Atlantic.
The families of the Scorpion crew had begun to worry as early as February 15, 1968, three months before Craven heard the news on the radio, three months before rumors began swirling through the sub force that the Soviets might have sunk her.
There, standing on the dock tossing the final mooring line to the crew as Scorpion departed, was Dan Rogers, an electrician's mate who had risked his career by demanding to he transferred off the boat, writing to his captain, Lieutenant Commander Francis A. Slattery, that everyone on board was "in danger." The Navy had always portrayed the 252-foot-long sub as a gleaming showpiece, but Rogers said Scorpion was so overdue for a thorough overhaul that the crew had taken to calling her the "USS Scrap Iron." There were oil leaks in the hydraulic systems and seawater seeping in through the propeller shaft seals. Her emergency ballast systems weren't working, and the Navy had restricted her depth to 300 feet, less than one-third of the operational depth of other boats of her class.
There had also been a frightening incident three months earlier when Scorpion had vibrated so violently during high-speed maneuvers that she seemed to corkscrew through the water, sending huge pieces of equipment swaying on their rubber mountings. The cause was never diagnosed. Rogers and other crewmen feared that the problem could reappear at any time.
Most of the submarine fleet had undergone massive safety overhauls after Thresher was lost. The bulk of the work on Scorpion, however, had been postponed due to tight budgets and the relentless pace of intelligence operations, which were growing rapidly toward a peak never before seen during the cold war. As she set out, Scorpion was one of only four of the Atlantic Fleet's submarines that was still waiting to be refitted with post-Thresher safety features.
Rogers and his mates complained to Slattery that he and his officers weren't taking their concerns seriously. Rogers wasn't even released from the boat until he agreed to Slattery's demand that he erase the Cassandra-esque warning of "danger" from his request for transfer.
One month later, Scorpion was assigned to join in NATO exercises in the Mediterranean. She was sent there only because the Navy needed a last-minute replacement for Seawolf, the same submarine that Craven had bypassed in favor of Halibut when it came time to pick a special projects boat. Seawol f had knocked herself out of the fleet rotation by ramming an undersea mountain in the Gulf of Maine, badly crushing her stern.