Sitting in his Moscow apartment, cigarette in hand, Bagdasaryan's slight build and graying hair make him look more like an aging professor than a Soviet sea captain. But he had been a commander for more than a decade before he took the Echo II submarine the Soviets called the Black Lila out on a three-day training run in June 1970.
Bagdasaryan had survived early experiments on Soviet diesel subs, staying underwater on one of the boats the Americans called "Whiskey" for thirty days despite a design flaw that allowed exhaust gas to be sucked back into the sub through its snorkel. By the end of the month, the crew was so poisoned that their legs and hands were swollen to nearly twice their normal size. The Soviet Union chalked up the voyage as proof of the superiority of Soviet manhood.
No wonder Bagdasaryan had such a well-developed sense of political cynicism and was so willing to speak out. He especially despised the zampolits, the Kremlin's political officers who were assigned to every submarine. Ostensibly, they were there to ensure that crews remained Communistically correct, but Bagdasaryan thought them drunks, pests, and inept nags and let them know it. He roared at one, "You have been as useful as a suitcase on my submarine for two months," after the man accused Bagdasaryan of playing "outlaw's music" when he put on a tape of a new popular singer to inspire his men.
Nor was Bagdasaryan afraid of the Americans. As he put it, he had once "attacked" the American battleship USS New Jersey, stalking her as she headed full speed for Vietnam's Gulf of Tonkin. Had he been given the order, he could have sunk her. He also had gone inside U.S. waters to try to trail an American ballistic missile submarine as it left Guam, later falsifying his patrol reports, as some U.S. commanders did. He never did manage to keep tail on a U.S. sub longer than eighteen hours-a mere wink in comparison to the feats of Whitey Mack-but that was long enough to win him a reputation as one of the most daring commanders in the Soviet fleet.
Yet through all this, he always remained superstitious and fearful of disaster. He once delayed deployment rather than leave without his crew's lucky mascot, Mashka the rat. To buy time, he told an admiral that much of the meat in the ship's refrigerator was dated 1939. "Rat flight is a well-known sign," Bagdasaryan says. "It was necessary to delay our departure." Black Lila, however, had no such good-luck charm on that fateful day in 1970. Perhaps she should have.
Bagdasaryan says that he was moving Black Lila, formally identified as K-108, through a series of exercises, a set of planned revolutions through the water similar to angles and dangles, much as Tautog's crew had guessed. By early in the morning of June 24, his submarine was running circles at a depth of 40 meters and a constant speed of 5 knots.
She came to periscope depth to scan for messages from shore. Then she went back to 40 meters and began to turn 90 degrees to her right. The idea was to practice checking for sounds in the area that had been shielded by the din of Black Lila's own propellers-just as the Americans had thought.
As Bagdasaryan tells it, his sonar men soon heard sounds that they identified, not as an American submarine, but as a "submarine imitator," an exercise device that looks like a torpedo and creates the same kinds of noises as a trailing submarine. Four minutes later, they lost the contact. Two minutes later, there was a crash.
What happened next inside Black Lila was very much like what Tautog sailors say they heard, and very much like what they say they imagined.
Black Lila's deck began to slant forward. First by 20 degrees, then by 30 degrees. The submarine was starting to slide out of control.
"We had 2,500 meters below us," Bagdasaryan says. "I announced the emergency alarm. Ordered to blow the main ballast bow part. No change. We started to blow the entire ballast. Useless again. The sub kept sinking. Gave an order, `Lock in compartments!"' Silence in response. His crew was apparently in shock.
"Truth to tell, I began to doubt at that moment a possibility of successful surfacing," Bagdasaryan says.
He shouted at his stunned men. Finally they began to report in. "I hear air being slackened," sonar said.
By then, the commander realized that they had collided with another submarine. The noise of slackened air could have meant that the other sub was sinking along with the Soviets, or it might have been surfacing.
Bagdasaryan's chief engineer, Volodya Dybsky, crawled into the control room, literally pulling himself by his arms. His legs were paralyzed with fear and shock. The engineer continued to give orders, lying down.
Meanwhile, Black Lila continued to fall, for what seemed like several minutes. Bagdasaryan shouted what he thought would be his last order ever: "Reverse!"
It was a desperation move. If his crew could reverse the engines, their sub just might drive herself to the surface. But descending this steeply, Bagdasaryan knew the reverse clutch was likely to fail.
Black Lila began to vibrate. Inside the sub, "the depthometer's hand shook, then stopped, near 70 meters, then it moved back to 50 meters, to 25 meters. From the depth of about 25 meters, we went like a shot from the gun to the surface," he said. "Suddenly we appeared on the surface, like a cork from the champagne bottle." After that dive, he added, referring to his men, "they have a toast to the engines."
As soon as Black Lila hit the surface, her men opened a hatch. The sun was shining. They could see no other boat for miles around, and they feared the worst for the American sub. "I thought for a second, `I have sunk a brother submariner,"' Bagdasaryan says. "It was hard to have realized it."
The Soviets were reporting the incident to their shore commanders when they caught the sound of what Bagdasaryan now believes was Tautog, moving away from the scene of the accident at 15 knots.
Bagdasaryan says his submarine limped back to port with only one propeller still working. Her right propeller shaft was hopelessly bent, and there was a large hole in her outer hull. The sounds of that outer hull cracking up could have created the popcorn effect recorded in Tautog's sonar room.
But the Echo had a second reinforced inner hull. American submariners used to joke that the Soviets used a two-hull design because their metallurgy was, well, Soviet metallurgy. But it was very likely that the second layer of steel held back the crushing ocean and kept Black Lila's men alive.
The hole in the outer hull "was so big that a trolley bus with antennas up could drive into it," Bagdasaryan recalls. "Truth to tell, if the Tautog had run into our sub a few meters closer to the center, we would have been very unlucky. The American submarine's speed was fairly high. And she would undoubtedly thrash both the light hull and the pressure hull of our sub."
Crammed into the hole between the inner and outer hulls, Bagdasaryan believes, were pieces of Tautog. He says he was certain that the crash had completely sheared off Tautog's conning tower. Like the men on Tautog, who had tried to hold onto pieces of the Echo, Black Lila crew members tried to keep pieces of the American sub for themselves, but the chunks of HY-80 were confiscated by the KGB. Only Bagdasaryan, who refused to give his up, still has a souvenir.
After that, Bagdasaryan's story departs from the tale told by Tautog's crew. He insists that it was Tautog that rammed Black Lila, not the other way around. And he says that the Soviets tracked Tautog heading back to Japan. He also says Soviet intelligence sources reported that once there, Tautog remained to undergo a long overhaul. But Tautog never went to Japan-she returned directly to Pearl Harbor.