But for a boy, there were other sights that marked the trip. The young Bradley had taken to passing time with the steamer captains in the pilothouse, and from there he could see a series of black-and-white signs placed discreetly along the shore. Most of the signs marked mileage and location. But there were a few, he remembered now, that declared: "Cable Crossing. Do Not Anchor." These signs were there to keep some idiot in a boat from snaring and snapping a phone or utility cable in the shallows.
Bradley's eyes snapped open as he realized that what was true of the Mississippi just might be true of Okhotsk. That's how they would find the cable, he thought. That's how they would engineer one of the most daring acts of tele-piracy of the cold war. Halibut would be led directly to her quarry by signs placed somewhere on a lonesome beach in the Soviet Union, declaring: "Watch Out! Cable Here."
This wasn't the way intelligence operations were normally crafted in Washington, but Bradley's imagination had always been vast, sometimes too vast for the rigidity that often ruled much of the military crowd. He had been dreaming about a possible cable tap almost from the moment he had gotten the job and control of Halibut. He and his staff had spent hours talking about the possibilities for Halibut and that mythical communications cable. They scanned maps and pored over charts of Soviet seas and bases, and they soon came to realize that there were three spots that held special promise, three places on the maps where Soviet naval bases were separated from Moscow by miles of water: the Baltic Sea, the Barents Sea, and the Sea of Okhotsk.
Of these, only Okhotsk was truly desolate. Covered with a layer of ice nine months of the year, the sea was as dreary and cold as Petropavlovsk, where nuclear submarines and missile arsenals were secreted among buildings that had been decaying for a century or more. Soviet naval officers made dingy homes in these cheap squares of concrete built among civil defense shelters and radar receivers.
The more Bradley thought about Okhotsk and the sub base on Kamchatka, the more he knew that Halibut was destined to go there. But throughout his first three, even four years directing her missions, there had been no safe way to allow men to leave a submarine, walk the sand 300 to 400 feet under the sea, and reach out and tap a cable. Bradley had to wait for the technology to catch up with his vision. And that had finally happened.
The same post-Thresher panic that had prompted the Navy to put money into underwater research, the same push that had given birth to a redesigned Halibut, had also paid for a program to create new ways for divers to survive in the deep. Bradley's old friend John Craven had overseen much of this work until he retired from the Navy. Under Craven's direction, the ability of divers to work in the depths had progressed at an incredible pace.
The problem had been daunting. What is life-giving air on the surface can kill divers down deep. By 300 feet down, air compresses so much that a single lungful contains about ten times the surface amounts of oxygen and nitrogen. At these concentrations, oxygen becomes poisonous and nitrogen has a druglike effect-nitrogen narcosis-that makes divers go squirrelly.
Specially trained Navy divers and scientists had been experimenting with recipes for a new underwater atmosphere that replaced much of the oxygen and all of the nitrogen with helium, which is nontoxic. On ascent, those gases could he remixed to fulfill the divers' increasing need for oxygen in shallower waters. Animal experiments had given way to human underwater habitats called SeaLabs. Placed 200 feet down off La Jolla, California, the living was dangerous and uncomfortable. At one point, the plumbing failed on one and the habitat tilted, but four divers inside survived on the new gas mixtures.
Everything was progressing well until one of the Sea Labs developed leaks in 1969. A diver was killed while trying to make repairs-not at all the kind of publicity the Navy was looking for just a year after Scorpion had been lost. The SeaLab program was unceremoniously canceled, and to outsiders, it seemed as though the Navy had abandoned the effort altogether. But development quietly continued, and Bradley and Craven prepared to put the new gas mixture and the new "saturation diving" techniques to use for divers on Halibut.
The sub was now at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard outside San Francisco being fitted with a portable version of SeaLah, a pressurized chamber to support the divers as they acclimated to the water pressures they would find if they walked the seafloor to tap the Soviet cable. But before Halibut could navigate the bottom of Okhotsk, Bradley had to win the funding and political support that the mission would require.
Bradley's office was still the clearinghouse for all submarine spy missions. He and his staff collected wish lists from top policy-makers within the National Security Agency, the Pentagon, and the White House. It was up to Bradley to come up with the operations that could fulfill those requests-the submarine trailings, the observations of missile tests, the gathering of electronic signals.[10]
After that, Bradley had to sell those missions to the fleet commanders, who still had the final word on whether any of their submarines went out and where. Bradley had already made dozens of trips to Pearl Harbor, Norfolk, and Yokosuka, 'Japan, to brief and debrief submarine captains, and he had earned their respect and trust. Besides, the daring of the cable-tap mission would make it an easy sell to these men.
Navigating through Washington required more finesse. Still, Bradley knew how to court the crowd in this town where information was currency and was jealously distributed under the amorphous guideline of "need to know." This was a place where power was measured by access, and Bradley traded access for approvals, packaging facts within a romantic haze of deep-ocean wonders. His briefings drew on the storyteller's art that he had picked up decades earlier listening to his father weave wondrous yarns of wine, women, and sea.
In fact, Bradley's idea to search for a Soviet cable was inspired almost as much by its dramatic impact as it was by its potential intelligence value. If that cable did exist, finding it and tapping it would do more to bring his office high-level exposure and funding than just about any mission he could think of. Bradley was already counting his successes in dollars and in enemies. His bounty usually came straight from the zipped pockets of other Navy departments. After he nearly decimated one project headed by a naval aviator, the man was ready to punch Bradley in the nose right there in the Pentagon. "You sonof-a-bitch," swore the burly aviator, pouncing on the captain in the corridor. Bradley didn't blame him, didn't blame him a bit. But Bradley also was unapologetic. He felt completely sincere in believing that his group was doing better work than anyone else.
As long as his program had money, Bradley had power, and more of it than any four-stripe Navy captain had a right to expect. He still reported to Rear Admiral Fritz Harlfinger, the director of Naval Intelligence, and through him to Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr., who was now the chief of Naval Operations. But power or not, Bradley was still a captain in a town full of admirals, and a mere Naval Intelligence officer in a town where the top spooks reported to the president. There also were more than a few admirals who resented his refusal to take them into his confidence. One man, especially powerful within the Pentagon, insisted that he had to approve every operation before Bradley could send a spy submarine out. It was a directive Bradley found impossible to comply with. "You gave me an order that was not legal," Bradley answered when the irate admiral confronted him. Then he added, "By the way, I don't work for you."
10
Some of those missions were almost as far off the usual track as Bradley's imagined underwater cable, and not all of them were successful. In the early 1970s, a series of subs were sent to the Strait of Sicily to investigate what U.S. intelligence believed was a Soviet effort to plant an underwater system that would operate like SOSUS — one that seemed even more sophisticated than the sonobuoys that the British had destroyed a few years before. First the USS