Still, something had made White decide to do just that, something that he refused to talk about, that day on the pier or since. In the end, he would say only that he wasn't reacting to the mission or to the selfdestruct charges on hoard; that it was all "more personal than that." Whatever his reason, Halibut pulled from port without him. White was flown back from Guam to California, where he was given an honorable discharge with a normal twenty-year pension.
For the rest of the trip, it was White the chiefs talked about. Soon they were back in the spook shack listening to the Soviets. This time they even understood a little of what they heard, as one Soviet sailor used the telephone line to practice wooing his girlfriend in English. The chiefs listened and laughed, but the joy of conspiracy had left the boat with John White.
This was to be the final leg of their trip. Their orders were to collect every last hit of information they could, then leave behind the tap to silently record the Soviets through the months that would pass before Halibut could again make the long trip back to Okhotsk. They hovered over the cable for a week, maybe more, long enough for even White's dramatic exit to become blurred into the general monotony of watch, meals, poker, sleep, watch, meals, poker, sleep. By now, the sub had been out for nearly five months, and most of the men just wanted to start their crawl home.
Then, abruptly, their routine was broken. A storm above began boiling beneath the surface. The divers were trapped outside, unable to climb back into the DSRV chamber as Halibut strained against her anchors one moment and slammed into the seafloor the next. All the men could do was try to keep a safe distance and watch.
There was no way the officers and crew manning the diving planes could keep Halibut level. The gauge measuring anchor tension moved from 10,000 pounds to 50,000 pounds to zero to 20,000 pounds to 50,000 pounds and back to zero again. An hour passed, then another. Then there was a loud crunch. Both steel anchors snapped at once, broke so easily that they could have been rubber bands.
Outside, the divers watched as Halibut began to drift upward. The men were still linked to the submarine through their air hoses. They knew that they would die if Halibut pulled them up before they could decompress. If they cut themselves loose, they would suffocate. Inside, the officer of the deck was well aware of the danger when he shouted a desperate order: "Flood it!"
He said it a second time. Valves were rolled wide open, and Halibut began to take in tons of water, filling her ballast tanks in a matter of seconds. Belly first, she crashed into the sand. The divers scrambled into the DSRV chamber.
The horrendous ride was over. But there was no guarantee the submarine would ever be able to break free of the muddy sand. Rocks scraped against and past the hull, an ongoing crunch, until the men on board were certain the barrage would wreck their boat, that they would never leave Okhotsk.
"Christ, we're here forever," one mechanic said through gritted teeth.
"Hell, we weren't supposed to be here in the first place," another man muttered.
Halibut sat, one day leading into another. The storm passed, but McNish wouldn't try to raise the boat until he had milked the cable for everything he could record. He and his crew were going to go home with their tapes full, if they went home at all. When McNish finally gave the word, one good emergency blow freed Halibut from the bottom.
She had an entirely uneventful trip across the Pacific. The response to her return, however, was anything but uneventful. Bradley got the word from the NSA almost immediately. The tap had recorded as many as twenty lines at once. The NSA had been able to separate all of them electronically. Halibut had hit the mother lode. There were conversations between Soviet field commanders covering operational tactics and plans and maintenance problems, including defects that could cause missile submarines-like the Yankees, which were now beginning to patrol in the Pacific-to make noises that might help U.S. submarines in their efforts to track the enemy. Logistical business was conducted through the line, reports that ships couldn't get under way for lack of spare parts. There was also other high-level reporting of command and control, decisions made about when and if patrols would get under way, and which submarines would be sent to lurk off of U.S. shores.
There were discussions of personnel problems, training problems, requests for more men, complaints when those men failed to arrive at Petropavlovsk. Then there were the intangibles: the dreaded political officers on Soviet submarines revealing their own private views about party leaders. The Soviet command also allowed young submariners to use the lines, patching their calls through to local stations where the men could wish Mama a happy birthday or ask their sweetheart to wait. All this put a human face on the massive enemy across the ocean.
This second effort to tap the cable confirmed one disappointment. There seemed to be little if any information about missile tests running through the line-Bradley had had great hopes that there would he information about the success of splashdowns of land- and seabased intercontinental ballistic missiles. But overall, the tap was an intelligence gold mine.
Nevertheless, there would have to be a few changes. Bell Laboratories was asked to find a way to program the next tap pod so that it could hone in on what were deemed the most crucial lines, and so the recorders could turn on and shut off to conserve tape. The idea was to program the tap for prime time, although at this stage no one at the NSA was really sure what constituted prime time, any more than they knew for certain which lines were best.
Bradley's office also had to let Rickover in on the program, at least in a limited way, despite his rancor toward the boat and her previous commander. Bradley needed Rickover's permission to make an important structural change. The captain didn't want to risk another incident like the one that had almost killed Halibut's divers. She was going to get a pair of sleighlike feet. From now on, she would not anchor over the tap site. She'd be equipped to sit on the bottom when she went hack to Okhotsk again in 1974 and 1975.
The details of Halibut's mechanics didn't interest the greater intelligence community, but the recordings did. The Navy had pulled the ultimate in one-upmanship. No human agent or standard spy boat could have collected the wealth of information that Halibut brought home.
The NSA bestowed a code name on what was now an ongoing operation: "Ivy Bells." Bradley would plan more of these missions, and other submarines would he refitted to follow Halibut's path to Okhotsk.
But Bradley would never know firsthand what his efforts had wrought. The NSA would give Naval Intelligence detailed summaries of the take, but unlike Halibut's chiefs, he would never hear a single minute of the tapes. The NSA decided that Bradley, who had imagined the cable, envisioned the signs pointing it out, and labored to get funding and clearances for the mission, hadn't earned this bit of currency. Bradley, it was deemed, simply had no need to listen, no need to know.
Nine — The $500 Million Sand Castle
It was October 22, 1973, and journalist Seymour M. Hersh was taking notes in a reporter's staccato, partial sentences-partial secrets that he ingested along with dinner as he sat in a suburban restaurant with a source whose name he was bound by ethics and bargain never to reveal.
At the moment, anyone would have expected this thirty-six-yearold Pulitzer Prize winner to have been entirely embroiled in Watergate. He was, after all, the top investigative reporter for the New York Times, albeit one who was rumpled and stubborn and given to bursts of profanity. And he was running a frustrated second to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post in the race to uncover the story that would make legends of these unknown, scruffy reporters and felons of their more polished and powerful targets.