Two spooks on board, George T. "Tommy" Cox and Joseph "Jesse" James, were so shaken by the incident that when they later tried to grab a smoke in the radio room, neither man could steady himself long enough to light up. Cox wanted to be a country-western singer, had once taken first place at the Gene Hooper County Western Show Talent Contest in Caribou, Maine and had worked his way through high school playing backup at a place called Cindy's Bar. After this trip on Lapon, he recorded a ballad called "Torpedo in the Water" on his first and only collection of submarine greatest hits, Take Her Deep. The song was an ode to a close calclass="underline"
From her encounter with the torpedo, Lapon carried back transcripts and photographs of the initial part of the test, as well as rolls of film filled with other Soviet activities-all of it interesting, none of it crucial, none of it enough to make Whitey a star-the star-of the Atlantic Fleet.
Instead, it was another man who was so heralded, Kinnaird R. McKee, a lithe southern gentleman with bushy eyebrows and a showman's flair. He had set the standard for surveillance operations when he was on the USS Dace (SSN-607), and even though McKee's stellar command was nearly over by the time Mack photographed the Yankee in March 1969, he stood as an icon in the sub force. In 1967, McKee had not only photographed a Soviet nuclear-powered icebreaker as it was being towed, but he grabbed radioactive air samples that proved the ship had suffered a reactor accident. The next year, in one breathtaking mission, McKee collected the first close-up photographs and sound signatures of not one but two of the second generation of Soviet nuclear-powered subs: an attack sub and a cruise missile sub that NATO had named the "Victor" and the "Charlie." He had found one of the new subs in the waters off Novaya Zemlya, a large island between the Barents and Kara Seas that was one of the Soviet's main nuclear test areas.
Like Mack, McKee had been detected. Indeed, he had snapped a photograph of a Soviet crew member standing on the deck of one of the subs and pointing right at the Dace's periscope just before the Soviets began to chase. McKee had to outrace a group of Soviet sur face patrols pinging wildly with active sonar. He finally managed his escape by driving Dace straight under the hazardous reaches of the Arctic ice. When it was safe to emerge, he continued his mission, locating the second new Soviet sub within a week.
"Gentlemen, the price of poker has just gone up in the Barents Sea," McKee announced on his return at a session with the joint Chiefs of Staff and members of the Defense Department. With typical flair, he captured his audience with a briefing no less dramatic for his exclusion of the detection and his omission of the shot of the Soviet crewman pointing at Dace. McKee's presentation and his slide show of other photographs shot through his scope went over so well that his immediate superiors never thought to criticize him for allowing his sub to be detected. Instead, for McKee, the mission was marred only by the fact that the Navy had refused to let him name the Soviet submarines he had found.
His manner, as much as anything, was what separated McKee from the likes of Whitey Mack. McKee was everybody's idea of a hero. While Mack bullied his way through the system, McKee was one of those officers pegged early on for the fast track to the top. This was a man who courted his sweetheart, Betty Ann, by spinning her through a winter's night in a Jaguar convertible with the top down and then spun her about with a marriage proposal thirteen days later. On Dace, he courted the vigilance of his junior officers by promising cases of Dewar's scotch and Jack Daniels to any who helped him spot the new Soviet subs. He won over admirals with the same flair, conjuring up such amazing tales of his exploits that the men who reigned over the U.S. submarine force never thought to question the risks he took.
Mack also had other competition in the Atlantic Fleet. There was Alfred L. Kelln, the commanding officer of the USS Ray (SSN-653), who had shot the very first pictures of a Yankee. Then there was Commander Guy I–I. B. Shaffer of the USS Greenling (SSN-614), who had slipped his sub directly beneath both a Charlie and a Yankee a few months before Mack spotted one. That gave Greenling's crew a chance to record the noise levels and the harmonics that the Soviet boats created in the water and the chance to film the hull and propeller, underwater through the periscope, with a new low-light television camera. Indeed, Greenling got so close to the underside of the Yankee that had the Soviets checked their fathometer, the ocean would have seemed very shallow, perhaps not more than 12 feet deep.
The job, known as "underhulling," was enormously dangerous. At any time, one of the Soviet submarines could have moved to submerge right on top of Greenling, but the payoff was enormous as well. The United States had the first acoustic fingerprint of a Yankee submarine, and the sounds from Greenling's tapes were quickly plugged into the SOSUS computers.
Now one question remained: Would the data collected by Greenling he enough to make the Yankees stand out as they moved into the open ocean din of fishing boats, marine life, and currents? Nobody would know that until somebody accomplished the longer trail through an actual deployment.
The race was on. Mack and the other commanders took their turns, steaming again out past 50 degrees north latitude, out of U.S. waters, and out of touch with fleet leaders back home, toward the Barents Sea and the Yankees' home ports.[9]
Mack's chance came in September 1969. As Lapon pulled out of Norfolk, she was stocked with a mountain of eggs, meat, and syrupy drink mixes known as "bug juice"-typical fare for a long mission. There was, however, one major exception: her mess held three months' worth of frozen blueberries. Mack had a voracious appetite for blueberries and blueberry muffins, and he shared his passion with his crew. On board were also ingredients enough to fuel weekly pizza nights and a one-armed bandit to stave off boredom.
There never would have been room for a slot machine on Gudgeon or any of the other diesel boats that went out on the first spec ops. That's not to say Lapon wasn't cramped, but at least each man had his own rack-no hot-bunking, no sharing. The racks were still stacked one atop another-shelves with mattresses on them-and some mattresses were still crammed in among the torpedoes, but there was some relief in having 15 square feet or so of private space that could he curtained off from the rest of the crew. The shorter guys even had room to stow a few hooks so long as they didn't mind designating the bottom square of their beds a bookshelf. And just about everyone had a single drawer, although that was all the space they had to store three months' worth of skivvies, uniforms, and anything else they believed they couldn't live without.
The diesel stench was gone with these nukes, as was the condensation that had plagued the diesel submarines. Lapon was downright comfortable, practically climate-controlled for anyone who didn't mind the constant clouds of cigarette smoke that massed despite the advanced air-filtering system. Nobody expected much more from life in their "closed sewer pipe." For most of the guys, contact with the outside would be pretty much limited to periviz and "family grams": the three- or four-line messages that wives and parents were allowed to send a few times each deployment.
Beyond that, the men's existence was charted out in a rhythm that amounted to six hours of watch, followed by twelve hours of equipment repair, endless paperwork, and qualifying exams. Nobody was handed his dolphins, the mark of an official submariner, until he had qualified on nearly every system on the boat.
9
Tightly coordinating their efforts with U.S. submariners, British subs sometimes helped till in what had become a nearly seamless round-robin surveillance of the Soviet ports in the Barents. There were only a couple of British subs trained for the task, and they went near Soviet shores only during spring and fall, but those subs were dedicated to the spy mission, and that's what their commanders and crews specialized in. They were good at it, and they were aggressive. The British Royal Navy just didn’t mind confronting the Soviets.
Once, a Soviet surface ship tried lining the Strait of Sicily near Italy with twin-cylinder buoys, and it seemed to U.S. intelligence that it was an effort to create an acoustic barrier — a sort of floating SOSUS net. There was great hand-wringing from the U.S. State Department to the Navy, debates about whether the United States should just go in and grab the buoys, when suddenly somebody noticed they had vanished. It turns out the British had a squadron of destroyers in Malta that went in and sank each and every one of the devices with naval gun fire.