Word quickly got around the Navy that Pike wasn't playing by the old rules, or any rules-that he was trying to take a hard look at the most secret operations. Some admirals were recommending that the Navy simply stonewall him. But a few submariners, veteran enlisted men, phoned the committee with stories about submarine groundings, falsified patrol reports, and news of another collision in which a Soviet submarine had been struck and was presumed lost.
The disclosures were unprecedented. Nothing in Pike's tenure on the Armed Services Committee had prepared him for any of this. Most members of that committee were told little about submarines, even about the basic surveillance ops. Before Watergate wrecked the old congressional seniority system and elevated some younger firebrands like Pike, the submarine community had been allowed to run past Congress. When a nod was needed, well, there was always a senator or two who could be counted on to push a program through-especially the late Senator Richard B. Russell of Georgia, who single-handedly oversaw most intelligence programs in the I 960s. (Or as Admiral Moorer, who supported the Glomar operation as CNO and then as chairman of the Joint Chiefs from 1967 to 1974, put it: "Generally speaking, in the sixties, it was sufficient simply to tell Senator Russell that you were doing it, and no one else, and it never leaked.")
Things got really interesting when somebody phoned with a description of a submarine that could search deep, a submarine able to sit on a seafloor. It wasn't long before Pike's crew heard about the cable taps recording away beneath the Sea of Okhotsk.
The source was one of the Navy's handpicked elite, one of the men of the Halibut, and he was frightened. He was still in the Navy. He was still hound to secrecy. He was not supposed to be talking to anyone, certainly not a congressman known not only for kicking military tires but for pricing them, scrutinizing them, and complaining loudly and publicly when he found them to be flat. This was, for any submariner, a potentially career-crashing move.
Pike's staffers did what they could to reassure the man. They just asked him to point out what they should explore. The exploration, they promised, would occur through other means. They would confront the Pentagon directly. They saw no reason to haul some low-level guy up before a public committee, no reason to destroy an informant.
And so the submariner talked-of the Bat Cave, of Okhotsk. Then another man from special projects called. In the end, both submariners were actually looking for answers, much as Halibut's chiefs had been when White refused to get back on the sub in Guam. They wanted to know how invading Soviet waters and planting the telephone tap to end all telephone taps during talk of detente was going to accomplish anything. They wanted to know why they were being asked to sit as targets in a Soviet sea. They wanted to know whether the submarine command had become overzealous and reckless, whether their lives were being risked in patently illegal operations. They were sworn to go in harm's way. This they accepted. But they wanted to know, why these risks, why this mission? They especially wanted to know why they were being sent to a Soviet sea in two of the oldest and loudest submarines in the fleet. By this point in late 1975, Halibut had completed her last mission and was going to be taken out of service entirely. Seawolf, the boat taking Halibut's place, was turning out to be even more of a clunker.
As Pike's team began to follow up on these concerns, one of his most driven young staffers, Edward Roeder III, was assigned to take the lead. Admiral James L. Holloway III, who was now the chief of naval operations, countered with Inman, the director of Naval Intelligence.
Roeder was all of twenty-five years old, a former freelance journalist who was seen by the rest of Pike's staff as demanding and cantankerous and somewhat overzealous in his attempts at gaining information. Other staffers were apalled when he tried to date a secretary at the National Security Agency, hoping to get her to spill secrets over dinner or coffee-a maneuver that turned out to be a complete failure.
Still, Roeder was able to put a very human face on much of the mystery surrounding the high-tech undersea spy war, and even his critics believed he had come up with a shrewd explanation of how the secrets of decades had survived most of those moments when the United States and the Soviet Union caught one another in action. The way Roeder saw it, the United States and the Soviet Union were behaving much like two men in a smoke-filled room endlessly playing cards. Both of them were cheating, but neither was able to accuse the other because that would end the game.
Now Roeder had to figure out how to break through to a world where the U.S. Navy was protecting not only its own methods but its enemy's as well. What Roeder didn't figure on, however, was Bobby Inman. Inman had already decided to shock Pike and his staff with facts.
Inman was ignoring the pointed suggestions inside the Navy that he should remain silent, certain that wouldn't work. Just a couple of years before, he had served as an executive assistant to Holloway when he was the vice chief of Naval Operations. It was Inman's job to monitor Congress and the press. While there were few challenges to the sanctity of naval secrecy in those days, even the Navy had to suffer through budget hearings. He had watched as budgets were slashed after Hollywood-handsome admirals marched into hearings armed with cadres of assistants but few answers. On the other hand, he had also watched programs survive after being represented by overweight, unkempt, and gruff officers facing Congress sans entourages but with information and courtesy.
Now he approached Roeder and the rest of Pike's staff with little of the expected burnish of his brass. He didn't look or speak like any other admiral. Instead, he was plain, skinny, and decked out in hornrimmed glasses and a uniform with a collar so worn and oversized that the admiral's stars on his shoulders seemed out of place. Pike's staffers saw him as "kind of scary smart." But what surprised them more was that the head of Naval Intelligence seemed willing to cooperate. Inman had decided to head off any criticism or unwanted attention by giving Pike what he wanted, at least some of what he wanted. Inman wanted to hand Pike enough information to swing him around to the Navy's basic point of view: that submarine operations were providing critical information that could be obtained in no other way, and that they were actually saving lots of money by helping the Navy tailor its own construction programs to a well-defined Soviet threat.
With the CNO's blessings, Inman met Roeder with promises to research submarine collisions and groundings. Inman also said that he would look into the cable-tapping. There was a condition, though. Inman wanted guarantees that none of the information would leak. He insisted that the most sensitive documents be held in a safe, a so-called 20-minute safe, one that took that long to burn open with an acetylene torch. Roeder promised to use the safe and promised that only he would have the combination. But when he brought that demand to his bosses on Pike's staff, they told him that no such safe was available. They also quickly determined that Roeder had become a little full of himself. In a grand gesture, perhaps out of honor, perhaps out of selfimportance, Roeder quit over the issue, certain that Inman would know he had walked out in the name of national security.