Meanwhile, the missile fragments were sent to a Department of Energy lab secreted away in the Pacific Northwest, a so-called black installation with no outward signs of the work that went on inside. There, in a large, empty room, sat the basketfuls of junked missile pieces. Bit by tiny hit, engineers sorted through the baskets, laying out pieces on a long board. They were at it for months, but finally they had a board filled, 20 feet of junk transformed into a flattened, shattered version of nearly an entire missile, a 20-foot-long jigsaw puzzle with few pieces larger than 6 inches.
Still, in all those heaps and baskets, engineers never found the infrared homing device the Navy so desperately wanted to study. (It was assumed that the devices must have shattered when the missiles careened headlong into their targets at speeds of Mach 1 or Mach 1.5.) But the radar altimeter and other crucial parts of that device were found, allowing U.S. engineers to try to build a countermeasure, one that would hopefully send the Soviet cruise missiles plunging harmlessly into the ocean.
Meanwhile, word about the cable recordings came back to Bradley from the NSA. His guess had been right. Flowing through that cable was pure military gold: conversations between the submarine base and high-level Soviet Navy officials, many of them unencrypted or coded in fairly rudimentary ways.
The find separated the cable tap from most of the communications intelligence available to the United States. The growing network of spy satellites, planes, listening stations, and subs had watched and listened as the Soviets moved troops, built bases, and sent their fleets swimming through exercises. But even the most advanced eavesdropping system, the prototype of the Rhyolite satellite launched in 1970, could not penetrate a hardwired phone line. And the few eavesdropping satellites the United States had were focused on Moscow and the Soviets' northern coast. None pointed toward the Pacific bases, the bases that were linked by the cable through Okhotsk.
To be sure, Soviet agents provided occasional insights into the Soviet psyche. But for all the drama in dead drops and late-night forays through dark Moscow streets, finding a way to consistently intercept conversations among Soviet military leaders was something that the United States had been trying to do for decades with only limited success. A set of antennas placed atop the U.S. embassy in Moscow had captured Brezhnev complaining about his health and other Politburo members talking about the traffic or their sex lives, but no Soviet leader was going to make a habit of talking about state secrets over something as vulnerable as a car phone.
Now the cable tap was providing the first inside look at the Soviet Navy's fears and frustrations, its assessments of its own successes and failures, and its intentions. And the full potential for the Okhotsk cable tap had yet to be measured. These first recordings were only samples, an ear to conversations and reports that took place over a few days on a few of the dozens of lines that ran through the cable under the sea.
Bradley saw the next step, and he saw it clearly. He wanted to tap as many of the lines as possible, and he wanted to plant a device that could record for several months or even a year, a device that would keep working in Okhotsk even when Halibut was docked at Mare Island. His staff contacted Bell Laboratories, whose engineers were familiar with commercial undersea phone cables and began designing a much larger tap pod. Just like the smaller recorder Halibut carried on her first trip, the new device worked through induction, but this tap pod was huge. Nearly 20 feet long and more than 3 feet wide, it weighed about 6 tons and utilized a form of nuclear power. It would be able to pick up electronic frequencies from dozens of lines for months at a time. Halibut could plant the tap one year, then go back and retrieve it the next.
Leaving behind proof of intrusion was risky, but Bradley's group reasoned that even if the Soviets found the tap, the United States could argue that the induction device was legal. Under U.S. law, the Constitution's prohibition against illegal search and seizure had already been ruled not to apply to currents emanating from buildings, homes, or cables.
Navy lawyers wrote up highly classified papers to that effect. These legal contortions might seem disingenuous, but they accompanied almost all covert operations. It was, after all, the United States that kept insisting that other countries operate on high moral ground and within the bounds of international law.
When the new tap was finished, it looked like a giant tube that had been squashed some from the top and welded shut at the ends. The device was crammed with miniature electronics circuits and had the capacity to record for weeks at a time.
Finally it was time for Bradley to wade through the formal approval process that he had avoided when the cable was still only a Mississippi River hunch. If Halibut was going to leave evidence of intrusion sitting in Okhotsk, the project would need more than a quiet nod from Haig and Kissinger. Despite Bradley's tensions with the CIA, it had been easy to get the agency officials he worked with to go along. They were so busy building the Gloinar Explorer they didn't mind leaving the cable tap operation to him. So Bradley presented Halibut to the 40 Committee in early 1972, while the American public was being presented with details about Nixon and Kissinger's peace initiatives with Vietnam and their historic trip to China.
Given the timing, approval for the tap mission was anything but certain. For one thing, the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) were at a make-or-break stage. For another, Kissinger and Zumwalt, the CNO, were engaged in an open feud. Kissinger had made a glaring mistake during arms negotiations that threatened to leave the Soviets with a dangerous lead in submarine-based ballistic missiles. In
secret talks away from his military advisers, he had agreed, offhandedly, not to ask for limits on the Soviets' massive effort to build the Deltas, a new class of submarines that would far surpass the Yankees and carry ballistic missiles with ranges of 4,000 miles. Zumwalt was furious, convinced that Kissinger and Nixon had given away the barn in their zeal to get SALT completed before the year's elections. Zumwalt, who passed off words of caution from State Department officials-calling them "bed-wetters"-was trying to force Kissinger to pay for his negotiating mistake by pressuring him to approve an even more powerful new class of U.S. missile subs: the Tridents. It was a battle he would win.[11]
Now that the CNO had thrown his considerable weight behind Halibut and her return to Okhotsk, and damn the risk, it seemed that the cable tap could easily become a pawn in the battle between the White House and the Navy. Bradley did what he could to play down the risks, making his presentation without reference to a what-ifHalibut-were-caught scenario. Beyond that, much of what he offered the 40 Committee was pure drama. The captain pulled out a map of Okhotsk. He pointed to where the signs were found on the beach and drew a path over the sea to indicate the cable. Then he boldly stated what had once been only a guess-that this was a cable that carried crucial information about the operations and development of Soviet ballistic missile submarines. His discussion of the dangers was limited to the harrowing undersea walks facing Halibut's divers.
What Bradley didn't tell the committee was just how he knew there was a cable in the first place. He left out the fact that Halibut, on Haig's nod, had already visited the wire. He only assured the committee that the Navy was certainly not going to draft the operations orders until it was convinced that it could engineer a cable tap.
11
Zumwalt did have another edge. Submarine spying had received a boost in Kissinger’s and Nixon’s eyes in mid-1972, when U.S. surveillance subs detected one of the rare overt Soviet moves to intervene in the Vietnam War. Shortly after Nixon announced the mining of Haiphong Harbor, the Soviet Navy sent three Echo II subs toward Vietnam. After they were detected by U.S. subs, Washington sent a message to Moscow, essentially saying, send them back home, or they’re history. The subs left.