The gesture did impress the admiral, but not enough for him to give up his effort to win over Pike and crew. Instead, Inman simply turned his brand of open and honest charm on Pike and the rest of his staff. They met several times in the committee's inner sanctum, a windowless room that staffers called the "Cone of Silence" in salute to Get Smart, the popular comedy series about spies. Actually it was more like a horrible little closet, with barely space for chairs around the 18 inch-wide conference table. Within the room hung a seemingly permanent cloud of stale smoke. Inman ignored his dingy surroundings and just talked. There was, he admitted, too little coordination between submarine operations and the more statesmanlike mission of detente. By offering all this without doublespeak and without excuses, he separated himself from the larger intelligence community and endeared himself to Pike's staff.
As time went on, Inman had his aides provide Pike with a detailed study of submarine mishaps. It revealed that there had been at least nine collisions with hostile vessels in the previous ten years and more than 110 possible detections of U.S. surveillance subs. Inman admitted that some sub captains were fudging patrol reports to hide the risks they took and the moments when they were detected. He had even assigned Naval Intelligence officials to look into incidents when either reports made by the spooks on board or intercepted Soviet communications contradicted U.S. sub captains' official reports. Inman also briefed Pike personally about the cable-tapping operation.
In the end, this frank, skinny intellectual with the crooked smile ensured that he wasn't nearly as attractive a target as the likes of Colby and Kissinger. Pike's marauders moved on, spending much of their time looking into the imperious ways in which Kissinger had run the 40 Committee and conducted foreign policy. But when Pike's report was finished in early 1976, the intelligence community and the Ford administration convinced Congress to vote to suppress it. A copy was leaked, though, and the Village Voice printed the lengthy report in its entirety. But, as it turned out, only eight paragraphs were devoted to submarine spying, and not a word was said about the cable taps. Instead, general references were made to the basic submarine surveillance programs now deemed valuable by Pike, and the Navy came in for only a gentle scolding: "The Navy's own justification of the program as a `low risk' venture is inaccurate," Pike's crew wrote. They went on to say that the committee was troubled by risk assessments that were "ritualistic and pro forma" and never varied from "low." It also complained that none of the captains of subs involved in collisions had ever been disciplined.
The public had lost its first real opportunity to assess the value of the ongoing undersea grab for intelligence. The Navy's spymasters were rolling right along, just as they always had, and within the submarine ranks it was business, and silence, as usual. All operations would continue. Holystone surveillance operations would now be referred to as "Navy Specials," short for Special Navy Control Program. And Inman and Vice Admiral Robert L. J. Long, the Navy's top submariner, decided to pour even more money into cable-tapping. They decided to get Rickover's okay to finally convert a modern, frontline sub for the work. NURO-the joint CIA/Navy office-had survived the Glomar fiasco, though the CIA would never again have that kind of day-to-day control over any of the Navy spy missions. Instead, NURO had become a funding vehicle for the special projects subs, and Congress quickly approved the money for the latest refit, though it would take a couple of years to ready the new boat.
In the meantime, it was up to the poor and nearly broken Seawolf to carry on with the cable tapping operation. Although a few submariners had risked everything to talk to Pike, little had changed. Nothing was going to stop these missions, even if they were now to be conducted by a sub that was loud and had been ill-fated from the start.[13]
Seawolf had missed her champagne baptism when a congressman's wife missed her aim. This was the same sub that Craven had rejected in the mid-1960s for special projects. She ended up being converted anyway only because Rickover had little use for her, especially after she ran into an undersea mountain in training exercises in 1968. Even after the Navy equipped her with the high-tech deep-sea gear, Seawolf was most notable for her 1950s technology. Her barely-working reactor was so antiquated that her crew joked that if the Soviets ever captured the sub, it would set their nuclear program back 50 years. Just as memorable was the alarm system that the men were calling "the Bitch in the Box," because it rang with a woman's voice-a 1950s telephone operator actually, who was chosen because someone in the Navy decided that she sounded soothing. She announced fires, floods, and other catastrophes, and as far as the Seawolf's crew was concerned, she talked far too much.
Together, Seawolf's mishaps and her missions left her men torn between abject disillusionment and abject pride. One rare diary, kept by a young Seawolf crew member, often reads like a catalogue of complaints. He was well aware that it was patently illegal for anyone in the crew to keep an account about the Navy's most secret missions. But despite everything, Seawolf was making history, the country's history and his, and he was determined to write it.
He describes successful cable-tapping missions in both 1976 and 1977. Indeed, the diary starts off like a techno-thriller: "JUNE 20, 1976-Somewhere off San Francisco, destination: Russia. No doubt about it though we aren't supposed to know-strange things have happened and stranger things I've seen-that book next to the QM stand-Russian sea coast and charting and piloting showing their buoys…"
In some ways Seawolf was just like any other sub. Her crewmen played the same virulent game of "pinging" that existed throughout the fleet, as they took delight in attacking one another with inelegant phrases such as "I wouldn't piss in your mouth if your teeth were on fire." And many of the diarist's entries chronicle the boredom and loneliness of life on a sub where the outside world was represented mainly by stockpiles of girlie magazines and "crotch novels" with titles like Cocksure Girls hidden on hoard. On Seawolf, there was a twist: the sub's top-secret camera-toting fish had been dubbed "Happy" and "Linda" after the Happy Hooker and Linda Lovelace, the porn queen.
Monotony was interrupted by mechanical breakdown, which was even more dangerous because many of those breakdowns were taking place in the middle of Soviet waters. There were fires and reactor scrams. Nuclear technicians were so wearied by their faulty reactor that they were popping speed to keep themselves going. Problems with Seawol f's air-conditioning systems got so had that, while she was on the tap site, the crew was forced to relive the days of the Gudgeon-lighting oxygen-generating candles and then snorkeling to ventilate while they were still in the Soviet Sea of Okhotsk.
Soon after that incident the diarist gave up his crotch novels for Alive, a true account of survivors of a plane crash who turned to cannibalism to survive the desperate month when they were lost in the frigid Andes Mountains. He mused about "rum and fresh fruit dreams" as he scribbled, hiding behind the curtain covering his rack, the only place where he had a shadow of privacy. Despite the publicity surrounding the Glomar fiasco, despite the congressional hearings, secrecy reigned within the sub force and especially on hoard Sea wolf.
So he kept his diary hidden, from his commanders, from most of his crewmates. And in the end, he showed that despite the fires and the reactor scrams, he was just as impressed by his sub's exploits as Pike had been: "Found out what we do-the mission of ship-unbelievable-we are ON THE MOOR-finally-really gotta hand it to the USA-not as dumb as let on to be-the country still has balls."
13