When Bagdasaryan returned to the Soviet Union, he faced a torturous hearing before a Communist Party commission. He says his squadron commander gave him advice: "Don't fly into a rage. Drop some tears on dusty boots."
A severe reprimand was registered on his service card. The transgression meant that he would no longer be allowed to teach at the naval academy. Instead, his boat was overhauled, then sent to spend two and a half months hiding outside of San Francisco. This "combat service," Bagdasaryan says, was meant to make amends for his failure, to "wash out the fault with blood."
After the crash, a new joke began to make the rounds among Soviet submariners, although the facts it was based on were altered somewhat, as no one wanted to be caught referring directly to a classified incident. With such constraints, it's little wonder that the humor is somewhat strained.
The joke went like this: "An American nuclear sub collided with an iceberg in the ocean. The iceberg's crew had no casualties."
After about six months, Bagdasaryan's superiors decided to rescind the reprimand. Somehow, it wasn't erased from party documents until many years later, and by then, Bagdasaryan wanted to hold onto his unique blemish.
His reason: "It would be hard to find a Communist whose service card would say `Severely reprimanded by the party for the collision with an American nuclear-powered submarine in underwater position.",
As Bagdasaryan spoke, he paused and wondered aloud whether he might meet Commander Balderston, perhaps to "have a drink and think together how to avoid similar collisions in the future." Told that Balderston had died, the former Soviet commander seemed crestfallen.
"It's too bad about the commander," he said. "I guess this incident did not pass easily for him."
Eight — "Oshkosh B'Gosh"
It was after 3:00.v.M., and even the Pentagon seemed almost still. Official Washington wouldn't start to churn for hours, not until the sun began baking the asphalt-and-concrete moat that surrounded the 34 acres taken up by the building.
James Bradley sat beyond that moat, deep within the long creamcolored corridors, still on the fifth floor of the Pentagon's E Ring behind three sets of locked doors, his suite of offices empty but for him. It was late 1970, Bradley's fourth year as the director of undersea warfare at the Office of Naval Intelligence, and it was in these early morning hours that he could dream best, immersed in the quiet of his office and in the deep oceans beyond.
He was preoccupied with notions bordering on the fantastic, plans for a new mission for Halibut, one that would shake the intelligence community even more than the photographs of the Soviet Golf submarine that had so caught the imagination of President Nixon and, unfortunately for the Navy, the CIA.
Bradley wanted to send Halibut into the heart of a Soviet-claimed sea after a quarry that was living-practically breathing-and beyond almost anything U.S. intelligence had attempted to grab before. Closing his eyes for a moment, he could almost see his target. It was a telephone cable, a bundle of wires no wider than five inches.
But what a bundle of wires. Bradley imagined the cable as it ran from the Soviet Union's missile submarine base at Petropavlovsk, under the Sea of Okhotsk, and then on to join land cables going to Pacific Fleet headquarters near Vladivostok and then to Moscow. If Halibut's camera-toting fish could find that cable, if her crew could tap it, then the United States would violate the very soul of Soviet secrecy. Here could he an open ear to the plans and frustrations of Soviet leaders, intelligence unmatched by any human spy or even the newest surveillance satellites floating high over the Kremlin.
Bradley could almost hear the words flowing through the line, technical analysis clear of propaganda, measures of the abilities and problems of Soviet submarines, information that might make them easier to trail, tactical plans for patrols that would take those submarines and their missiles near U.S. shores. If he was right, maybe the Americans could even grab the Soviets' own assessments of the test flights of ICBMs and sea-based missiles that smacked down on the Kamchatka Peninsula and in the northern Pacific. That cable might provide entry inside the minds of Soviet commanders themselves.
Of course, the Soviets would probably see Halibut's intrusion into Okhotsk as an act of piracy. If she were detected, they might try to board or destroy her, forcing an international incident that might end the delicate dance toward detente.
And there was another hitch, a big one. Bradley had no proof that this cable existed at all. Even if it did, there was no way to tell where it lay beneath the 611,000-square-mile expanse of Okhotsk. Even Bradley could see the humor in his predicament. How could he present this idea to the cadre of White House, military, intelligence, and State Department officials who were supposed to have final say over an operation as dangerous as this one? How could he say that he wanted to send Halibut out on a hunch in search of an ethereal strand?
Still, as far as Bradley was concerned, it was a pretty good hunch. After all these years of watching the Soviets, American intelligence knew that Soviet defense officials insisted on constant reports from the men in the field and that the Soviets painstakingly coded most communications sent through the air to thwart interception. If Bradley's intuition was right, Soviet admirals and generals would be far too imperious and impatient to suffer an ocean of cryptographers already overwhelmed by the sheer bulk of their work. Top Soviet officers would want, would insist upon, an immediate and simple communications method, and the only simple and secure way to talk was through a hardwired telephone system.
Any telephone line the Soviets set up between the mainland and the submarine base at Petropavlovsk would have to run beneath the Sea of Okhotsk. Petropavlovsk was, after all, a tiny, desolate port across that sea, isolated on the Kamchatka Peninsula and nearly hidden among ancient volcanoes and primeval birch forests. Okhotsk itself was almost empty, save for a few fishing trawlers and occasional submarines engaged in missile tests.
The Soviets had to consider the sea secure, given that it was nestled into the crook of Kamchatka and the east coast of the Soviet Union as neatly as the Chesapeake Bay fits into the U.S. eastern seaboard. The way in for an enemy submarine or ship was through narrow, shallow channels that sliced through the Soviet-controlled Kuril Islands. Those channels could be easily blocked in an alert.
But even if the cable was out there, where was it? Where in all those miles and miles of water lay a strand that couldn't be more than five inches wide?
Bradley cleared his mind of charts and maps, freed himself from official assessments, from the meetings, memos, and briefings that swamped the business of intelligence in Washington. He let his eyes close and his thoughts wandered to simpler journeys taken in simpler times, before the cold war, before World War II, hack to the waters of his childhood.
There he found an answer that was beguilingly simple and just strange enough to be true. It was buried in his memories of St. Louis in the 1930s when he was a boy and his mother packed him up to escape the summer's heat on riverboat rides along the Mississippi River. From the point where the Mississippi meets the Missouri River through Alton, Illinois, the boats steamed through water dyed with brown silt and banked by miles of flood plains painted with wild upward strokes of grasses until the green gave itself up abruptly to towering gray harrier bluffs. Eagles traced circles above, while sand cranes left leggy tracks along the shore. It was this scenery that captured most people riding the river-that and the riverboat orchestra and social scene on board.