Balderston asked Laidig whether he'd ever been afraid, really afraid. That was Laidig's cue. He launched into a harrowing tale about the time he had led a platoon after a sniper who had been firing on Americans from across a rice paddy. When the Americans were surprised by a second gunman, Laidig sought the only shelter available, a skinny tree. As he pressed against it, a barrage of bullets sawed his pack off his back.
The officers listened, their hands still quaking from the crash. They decided that as bad as their day had been, Laidig had been through worse. He said he wasn't so sure. The men concluded that they were probably all more comfortable dealing with the devil they knew. With that, the officers turned their attention to the devil at hand.
For more than two hours, they tried to reconstruct the accident, and came to a single conclusion. Tautog should have been traveling at a different depth. No one talked about what might have happened to the Soviet sub or her crew.
For the first time, Balderston's officers saw him almost humble. At one point he just shook his head, saying, "You take care of things that need to be taken care of, the safety of the ship, the safety of the crew, and of course, nondetection……
Balderston didn't finish. He didn't have to. His men understood what he meant. Later he would say what everyone was thinking, but not for several hours. Not until Tautog had surfaced and his officers had assessed the damage. Not until he was sure his submarine could make it hack to Pearl Harbor.
"Well, there goes my career," Balderston finally said. "I can forget about stars." He had lost his chance to make admiral.
When they were 150–200 miles away from the Soviet Union, Balderston gave the order to surface. Several officers climbed out the forward hatch into the darkness. They couldn't take the usual route out to the sail and up to the bridge. The hatch leading to the bridge had been breached and the sail flooded.
When the officers climbed on deck, they saw that their sail had been dished in one-third of the way hack, maybe more. It was almost as if the massive structure had been made of cardboard. A fist-sized chunk of the Echo's propeller was lodged in the tower's upper hatch, which was bent and crammed back into its housing. One of the sub's two periscopes was hopelessly bent. Most of Tautog's antenna and electronic masts were jammed inside the damaged sail and useless. That was going to make it tough to send a message back home, but it was very definitely time to let Pacific command know what had happened.
The crew strung a makeshift antenna-little more than a wireacross the top of the submarine. Then they flashed the bad news: there had been a severe collision; a Soviet submarine was involved; and Tautog was ending her operations two months early.
Commanders onshore flashed back: Tautog was to bypass all closer ports and return directly to Pearl Harbor. Later, the instructions would become more detailed. The submarine was to remain away from port until the dead of night. Then she was to creep in, all lights out.
On the way hack, Balderston ordered the crew to gather, in shifts, on the mess deck. As if anyone really needed to be reminded, he told them that any discussion of the collision outside of an official inquiry was definitely out.
Tautog's arrival at Pearl Harbor was logged late on July 1. She was maneuvered into a shipyard dry dock where a huge shroud was draped over her sail. No one without authorization would be able to see the damage, not even her crew. The men were to be kept aboard for another twenty-four hours, until the damage was well hidden and they had signed formal secrecy oaths. One man tried to hold on to a piece of the Echo's hull as a souvenir, stashing it in a locker on board behind some cleaning fluids and alcohol. Some months later, he was discovered, and security officials insisted that he turn the piece over.
Rear Admiral Walter Small, commander of submarines in the Pacific, met Tautog at the pier and was among the first to learn the details. Also briefed was Admiral Moorer, who was just being promoted from CNO to chairman of the joint Chiefs of Staff. It was either Moorer or a top Pentagon intelligence official who carried the bad news to Melvin Laird, Nixon's secretary of Defense. These reports were made verbally. No one wanted to leave a paper trail.
Laird briefed Nixon himself, telling the president that there had been a collision and it looked like the Soviet sub had sunk. Nixon's reaction, Laird recalls, was inscrutable.
It was clear that the United States would not tell the Soviet Union about the unmarked, underwater grave officials believed existed perhaps only 50 miles off the coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula. Given the secrecy that surrounded all submarine operations, it went without saying that the White House was not going to announce that two nuclear-powered submarines, both carrying nuclear weapons, had met in one violent, possibly fatal, moment. Besides, the Soviets were suffering so many at-sea accidents at the time, Nixon and his advisers decided the Soviets would likely blame another lost submarine on their own jinxed technology.
A court of inquiry was convened, although just about everyone involved was already certain that the Soviet boat was lost. Indeed, Small, Moorer, and Laird all say they remember specifically being told that the Echo had sunk. Other former senior Navy officers, including one who heard the sonar tapes, say that conclusion was based largely on the terrifying sounds captured on the recordings. But officials say that, without more definitive evidence, a formal declaration that a Soviet sub had sunk would not have been made part of the Navy's official records.
Shortly after the accident, James Bradley rushed out to Pearl Harbor to try to determine a cause. As best as anyone could guess, the Echo's captain had just made an unlucky and sudden maneuver. That in itself raised another issue. Bradley realized that U.S. captains were going to have to alter their techniques. As things stood now, the danger was too great that two subs would meet head-on at flank speed. If that happened, both subs would be lost.
So Bradley wrote some new rules for trailing, one institutionalizing a favorite Whitey Mack technique: subs would now trail slightly to port or starboard of the enemy. That would leave the Americans more maneuvering room, while still allowing them to hide in the wash of noise coming from the hunted sub. There was another rule, however, that ran directly counter to Mack's style: subs would now try to trail from safer distances.
Bradley didn't blame Balderston for the incident, and Balderston, who had already been scheduled to leave Tautog, became commander of a division of four submarines that included her. Still, he had been right about making admiral. It would never happen. He retired seven years later and became a Baptist minister. His heart weakened by his childhood rheumatic fever, he died in 1984. He never told his wife or children about the collision.
Balderston's silence was typical. Bound to secrecy, submariners could not seek the kind of emotional solace that most men get from their wives and children when something goes wrong on the job. "It was not for him to tell," Irene L. Balderston says. "And I would never have dreamed of questioning him or of prying anything out of him."
Just about the only ongoing discourse about the incident took place among members of Tautog's crew, who passed the story on to new members as they joined the boat. They whispered to one another about what had bent their crooked sail, and crew after crew of sonarmen passed along a hidden bootleg recording-the sonar tapes made during the collision. Off the boat, the tapes were played in sonar school as an anonymous example of a Soviet sub sinking. Then two decades later the fate of the Echo 11 came surprisingly into question.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Boris Bagdasaryan, a former Soviet submarine commander, stepped forward to say that he was the captain of the Echo II that collided with Tautog and that he was very much alive. With so few people in either the Soviet Union or the United States aware that their governments had long hidden a terrible accident, his account got little attention. But Bagdasaryan tells a story that has been supported by high officials of the Russian Navy, and his tale meshes with many of the details provided by Tautog crew members, although there are a few small discrepancies.