The admiral stared Bradley down for what seemed like a long time. Finally he intoned, "All right. You can get away with this, this time. But I'll tell you one thing, Bradley. You're never going to make admiral."
"So be it," Bradley stood his ground. "So he it." Then with a soldier's flourish, he did an about-face and walked away, the drama of his departure filling him with satisfaction. There would be time enough later to realize that the admiral might just make good on his threat.
At the moment, Bradley was more concerned with his battle with the CIA over control of Halibut. The agency had already snatched command of all salvage operations surrounding the sunken Golf and was still waiting for Howard Hughes to finish building the monolithic salvage craft that would attempt to tear the entire sub from its ocean grave. Most of that was being engineered through the National Underwater Reconnaissance Office, the top-secret Navy-CIA office that was still being run mainly by the CIA. Worse, the CIA seemed hell-bent on broadcasting news of all of the Navy's best submarine missions and taking credit for them.
When those missions were still entirely under Bradley's watch, fewer than a dozen top officials in Washington knew of the Soviets' lost submarine and Halibut's find. Now Bradley saw CIA officers assigned to NURO handing out clearances like candy corn on Halloween. The Velvet Fist photographs, Halibut's abilities, and even other submarine spying missions were fast becoming the main attraction in a circus where having a ticket to the show was more important than the performance, where the labels "top-secret" and "need to know" made the spectacle irresistible.
Bradley saw every briefing as a potential leak. He wanted to be the one to go to Kissinger or his top deputy, General Alexander Haig (Kissinger's chief liaison to the military), and then only when the time was right. Bradley had worked hard to earn his access to the two powerful men. The captain played on his realization that Kissinger was the ultimate bureaucratic infighter, someone who wanted to control everything about foreign policy and covert actions affecting foreign policy. Bradley knew that, more than anything else, Kissinger wanted to choose what would be presented to Nixon and wanted to make those presentations personally. As long as Bradley's missions reaped key intelligence, he knew the door would be open to Kissinger and to Haig. That had been clear the last time Bradley went to see Kissinger about Halibut's exploits.
In 1900, the Navy purchased its first submarine, the USS Holland. She could carry six men.
Almost one hundred years later, the Navy floated a monolith, the USS Seawolf (SSN-21), the largest attack sub ever built.
The last picture of Cochino was taken as she was leaving England in 1949 for the first U.S. submarine spy mission in the Barents Sea. Cochino's commander Rafael Benitez had to speak the worst words any captain could utter: "Abandoning ship."
Tusk traveled with Cochino and saved most of her men. Seven men were washed off Tusk and were lost during the rescue operation.
Cochino's men survived explosions, poisonous gas and stormy seas. Refugees from submariners' hell, they gathered in Norway before leaving for home on board Tusk.
Red Austin may have avoided the group photo, but he penned Cochino's epitaph on the back. He joined the Navy at nineteen looking for action and became a spy on Cochino because he had to have something "spooky" to do.
Gudgeon and diesel boats like her drove the spy program until the Soviets proved beyond any doubt that diesel boats could be too vulnerable.
With the undying belief that nuclear power should and could move submarines, Admiral Hyman Rickover changed the sub force, the Navy, and the course of the cold war.
Nautilus was the first U.S. nuclear powered submarine and the first sub ever to travel submerged to the North Pole.
If the president could have Air Force One, then Rickover would have NR-11, the only mini-submarine powered by a nuclear reactor.
John Craven dreamed fantastic dreams of deep ocean exploration and a new kind of warfare. Here he stands with his wife, Dorothy, his son David, and Secretary of the Navy John H. Chafee (far right).
Even before the Navy sent a submersible to photograph the undersea wreckage of Thresher, her loss inspired the Navy to declare a new era of sub safe programs. What emerged, however, was modeled more after James Bond than Jacques Cousteau.
Halibut had a mammoth shark's mouth hatch that screamed flood to most submariners. It screamed potential to Craven.
As he pushed Westinghouse engineers to build camera-toting "fish" that could withstand punishing ocean pressures and find sunken Soviet hardware, Craven loved to announce a daily wire-brushing. One day the engineers answered in kind.
Commander C. Edward Moore brought Halibut out to sea, found a Soviet submarine buried in the deep, and returned to stand before Admiral John Hyland (left) to receive the highest award possible for any sub: the Presidential Unit Citation.
Scorpion was outside of Naples when a photographer shot what might be the last picture ever taken of her. She was lost only a few weeks later.
Craven (left), Harry Jackson and project coordinator Robert H. Gautier stood on a floating drydock, while deep below, three men on the Trieste II examined and photographed Scorpion's wreckage.
Scorpion's shattered hull offered no conclusive answers-only a lingering mystery. Now, evidence has emerged that Scorpion may have been primed for disaster before she ever left port.
Commander Whitey Mack was just arrogant enough to believe that he could drive Lapon on a mission unmatched by any other sub. He believed he could trail a Soviet Yankee missile boat throughout a patrol.
When Lapon rode home after her feat, her men pulled down their standard and rose their own flag: Snoopy had given his doghouse up for a submarine and had beaten a new red baron.
Lapon and Mack were immortalized by Tommy Cox, the spook who really wanted to be a country and western star, in his album of submarine greatest hits.
After Tautog crashed with a Soviet Echo II sub, Tautog fled from the scene, leaving her men and the U.S. government convinced that as many as ninety Soviet submariners were dead.
Commander Buele Balderston had been a rising star, but he knew the underwater crash would also crash his career.
Boris Bagdasaryan was commander of the Echo II that met Tautog. He called his sub the Black Lila.
