Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story Of American Submarine Espionage

^{Captain James Bradley reached back to boyhood trips down the Mississippi to find a telephone cable deep beneath the Soviet Sea of Okhotsk. He is congratulated by Secretary of the Navy John Warner (right).}

^{The Navy announced that Halibut was carrying the first deep submergence rescue vehicle. But that DSRV was a welded-down fake, a disguised decompression chamber for deep sea divers who would tap Bradley's cable.}

^{Fritz Harlfinger, director of Naval Intelligence, knew if Bradley could convince Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig to okay Halibut's search for the cable, no other approvals would be necessary.}

^{Crammed full of stolen sub banners and parts-enough contraband to drive naval investigators mad-the Horse and Cow was where men readied to launch some of the most daring operations of the cold war.}

^{The CIA commissioned the mammoth Glomar Explorer to do what key Navy officials believed too difficult and absolutely unnecessary: to reach down and steal an entire Soviet submarine off the ocean floor.}

^{One of the oldest and most broken subs in the fleet, Seawolf took over cable tapping operations in Okhotsk. She was nearly moored there forever.}

^{When the Soviets discovered recording devices attached to a cable beneath Okhotsk, there was no mistake who had put them there. Inside one of the 20-foot-long pods were the words: "Property of the United States Government." One tap pod ended up in a museum in Moscow.}

^{The Navy feared the tap's discovery in Okhotsk might signal that the Soviets also knew about an even more daring operation being carried out by Parche in another sea.}

^{When Richard Buchanan led Parche on a mission that earned her one of her seven Presidential Unit Citations, President Ronald Reagan compared him to John Wayne.}

^{Waldo Lyon's decades-long adventures and study of the Arctic led him early on to ride with Commander William Anderson (right) on the Nautilus to the North Pole. More than twenty-five years later, Lyon would still be trying to discover how U.S. subs could fight effectively under the sonar-muddling ice.}

^{The Soviets had also been going up to the Arctic for decades. By the 1980s, it looked as though they had found a way to use the ice to steal a crucial nuclear advantage.}

^{U.S. subs traveled to the Arctic one at a time and in groups almost every year since Nautilus, but the frigid waters remained a mystery-the one place where the prey had the distinct advantage over the hunter.}

^{Susan Nesbitt sits with her husband Bob in Norfolk, Virginia, at the 30th anniversary memorial ceremony for the men who died on Scorpion. They mourn her lost brother, Richard Shaffer, petty officer second class on Scorpion.}

^{Danielle Petersen-Dixon hugs her aunt Gerry, as they remember Petersen-Dixon's father, Daniel Petersen, a chief petty officer who also died on Scorpion.}

^{Throughout the United States and in Russia, families are asking, was the secret submarine spy war worth the risks? Was it worth the cost?}

Kissinger was half an hour late. He walked in, leaned back in a chair, put one foot on a table in front of him, and pointed the other foot at Bradley. "Veil," he began, his trademark German accent evident in every word. "You have got ten minutes. Go ahead and start."

Bradley knew better than to cower.

"Dr. Kissinger, I can't do this in ten minutes. If ten minutes is all you've got, we ought to go away and come back and do this another time. Because with ten minutes, we're just going to waste your time and mine."

"Veil, yell. You start, and I'll tell you when to stop."

More than forty-five minutes later, they were still talking. It seemed a crucial victory to Bradley.

Now, the captain knew that news of the hunt for a sunken Soviet communications cable would be just the sort of exclusive that Haig would want to bring to Kissinger, and that the national security adviser would relish bringing to Nixon. Bradley had no intention of being scooped before he was ready to present his plan, so he told only the people who absolutely had to know: the Pacific submarine fleet commander and Harlfinger.

Normally Bradley also would have marched his plan before a national oversight group known as the "40 Committee." Chaired by Kissinger, its ranks were filled with the country's highest national security officials, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the director of the CIA. It was the committee's job to evaluate all international covert operations, everything from CIA interventions in Third World countries to eavesdropping operations aimed at the Kremlin. Other presidents had had similar oversight committees, and since the Pueblo incident, routine missions, such as the usual submarine forays into Soviet coastal waters or sorties flown by spy planes, were included in a monthly list for review. Committee members usually just provided a final glance before checking off boxes marked "approved."

But more dangerous operations-presumably any effort that carried as much risk as a plan to tap into a crucial Soviet communications line-were, in theory, subject to far more detailed hearings where the operations were supposed to pass the most basic of all tests: Are the potential payoffs worth the risk? The riskiest missions were then supposed to be presented to the president for final approval. That was the primary job of the 40 Committee: to provide a test of common sense, a dispassionate analysis of what otherwise might be a noholds-barred quest to gather intelligence. The committee was, in short, a layer of oversight designed to rise above parochial concerns, interagency rivalries, machismo, and the ever-present temptation to venture from the daring into the stupid.

But that ideal was often little more than fantasy. The committee almost never marked any mission "disapproved," and members of the intelligence agencies and the armed forces knew they could bypass the rest of the group as long as they didn't bypass Kissinger, who treated the committee as something to be utilized or ignored as he saw fit. Sometimes, after he okayed missions on his own authority, he would poll the committee by telephone, seeking back-door approvals. Sometimes he didn't even bother to do that.

The message Kissinger sent was clear: the only oversight that mattered was his. That suited Bradley and Harlfinger, who in the spring of 1971 were happy to avoid a formal committee hearing. It wasn't hard for them to imagine what such a hearing would be like.

"Where were those signs? Along the Mississippi, you say?"

"So, Captain Bradley, you say you came up with this sitting alone in your office at 3:00 A.M.?"

No, no, no. It would make so much more sense, Bradley reasoned, to try to get quiet approvals from the top and to wait to tell the full committee about the plan once he knew for sure that the cable was there, to come in saying, "Look what we've done."

Any step into Okhotsk, from the Soviets' point of view, was blatantly illegal, although the United States considered most of that sea to be open to international traffic. And a search for signs on a Soviet beach would have to take place at least partly inside the Soviets' 3-mile coastal limit, recognized internationally as sovereign territory. No one would see Halibut's jaunt inside as anything less than trespassing.