Ten — Triumph And Crisis
Richard L. Haver could spin a tale and craft a briefing better than just about anyone in town. He was only thirty-three years old, one of many department heads at Naval Intelligence and a civilian at that, but he was also a prized protege i of Bobby Inman's, the man who had singlehandedly shielded the sub force from its one close encounter with congressional criticism. Haver had that same ability to mesmerize.
Admiral Stansfield Turner, the director of the CIA, knew that. So did Harold Brown, the secretary of Defense. That's why they had brought Haver with them on this spring day in 1978 to brief President Jimmy Carter in the White House Situation Room.
Turner made the introductions, while Haver looked around at the men assembled: the president, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, and White House Chief of Staff Hamilton Jordan. Vice President Walter Mondale was there as well, though he had just gotten back from a twelve-day trip to Southeast Asia and seemed to be nodding off. Haver wasn't worried.
He knew it was Carter's attention he had to hold and that Carter was a former nuclear engineer and a Rickover acolyte. He had been chosen for the nuclear submarine program in the early 1950s, but before the first nukes ever went out to sea, his father died and he was called home to run the family peanut farm. Still, Carter had never stopped viewing Rickover as a mentor. Indeed, the title of his campaign biography, Why Not the Best-, was taken from a phrase that Rickover used to grill him and other officers. As for Haver, he had been an intelligence officer, a spook who went out on Navy air reconnaissance flights during the Vietnam War. That's how he met Inman, who had overseen some of the Navy's wartime intelligence efforts. When Haver decided to resign his commission, it was Inman who had helped persuade him to become a civilian intelligence analyst rather than go to law school.
What Haver wanted to do now was bring Carter up to date on the Soviet nuclear threat and also lay the groundwork to win Carter's okay to begin planning a mission more daring than any that had been tried before. Naval Intelligence had learned that the Soviets were taking advantage of the 4,200-mile range of their new Delta ballistic missile subs, driving them out of reach of U.S. SOSUS nets below the Azores in the South Atlantic or holding the subs back in the Barents Sea. The subs in the Barents were being protected by surface ships and attack submarines-and they were just a shot across the Arctic from Washington, D.C., or any other target within an arc drawn from about South Carolina through Oklahoma to Oregon.
Haver assured Carter that intelligence networks and spy subs were working hard at collecting and analyzing the new information. Within Naval Intelligence, however, there was a raging debate about whether the Soviets' decision to hold missile subs hack in the Barents marked a true change in strategy or a momentary flux. Haver was among those who believed it likely that the Soviets were positioning to take a crucial nuclear edge away from the United States.
When the Yankee subs were the best the Soviet Union had, nearly every one sent within range of the United States had been in the line of fire of U.S. subs shadowing behind. If war had broken out, those subs could have sunk the Soviet boomers before they ever fired. Then, if both sides ever launched their land-based ICBMs, only the United States would have been left with a second-strike capability tucked away in the oceans. This was the edge the Navy had been preparing for ever since Whitey Mack first rode bronc on the Lapon. But the strategy relied on three things: that Soviet subs remained relatively noisy; that they never realized how often they were being followed; and that they continued to patrol in open seas where they could be trailed in the first place.
But when the Deltas were moved into the Barents, Haver and others started to seriously question some fundamental assumptions behind U.S. strategy. After all, practically since the cold war began, American planners had believed that the Soviet Navy was bent on challenging the United States on the high seas, that in a war Soviet attack subs would mainly try to sink U.S. ships resupplying Europe, just as the Germans had done in World War II. Now it seemed the Soviets might be doing a strategic about-face and, in the process, knocking over a cornerstone of U.S. nuclear strategy.
After giving a sense of these concerns, Haver reminded the president that the Navy had one other extraordinary way to keep tabs on the Soviets-the critical cable-tapping operation in the Sea of Okhotsk that Carter himself had approved just the year before. Then Haver went on to describe what Naval Intelligence was considering as a next, bold step.
What if the United States could tap cables in the Atlantic arena? What if a submarine could be sent to put a tap right in the Barents Sea, the very location of the Soviets' missile-sub bastions?
Halibut never could have done that, and neither could Seawolf. Both subs had been castoffs when they were given to the tapping operation, too old and too loud to sneak into these active waters. (As this briefing took place, Seawolf was out in the Pacific searching for missile fragments, looking for a chance to use a special retrieving claw that had been added to one of her camera-toting fish.) But the Navy finally had a boat that could do the job, a new sub just converted to hold deep-sea divers and the gear that could let spooks listen in on a new tap. She was the USS Parche (SSN-683), the sub that Inman and Vice Admiral Bob Long had pushed for after the Pike inquiry. She was a four-year-old Sturgeon attack sub, and she was quieter, faster, and much newer than any boat that had been given over to "special projects" before.[14]
Parche had new eavesdropping equipment that could support a modernized tap pod with far more recording capacity, and she was quiet enough to sneak right beneath the Soviets' powerful Northern Fleet to plant tap pods in the Barents.
As Haver talked, what had begun as a typical briefing turned into a dialogue, Navy vet to Navy vet. Carter began leaning so far forward in his chair that some of the men in the room began to wonder whether the president would wind up in Haver's lap. It was certainly clear that Carter was intrigued, and for now that was enough. Haver and his bosses weren't looking for formal approvals for the mission, not yet. They just needed to know that Carter was interested, that they could keep planning.
Getting this kind of early read was a good tactic in dealing with any president, but in Carter's case there was even more reason to move slowly, to sound him out. Despite his Navy background, Carter had been looking for ways to trim defense programs. He had spoken out against the new weapons systems being pushed by the Pentagon, and he was so forceful about the need to make peace with the Soviets that some in the military thought he was soft on communism.
Everyone in the room knew that sending Parche on such a mission, into crowded waters, carried far greater risk of detection and of antagonizing the Soviets than anything tried in the desolate Okhotsk. Parche would have to elude the dozens of Soviet warships and submarines that were constantly moving about the Barents. Not only that, but because any cable in the area probably ran alongshore, a geographical necessity, Parche would almost certainly have to plant the pod inside the Soviet's 12-mile territorial limit, and probably within the 3-mile-limit recognized internationally.
But Haver had invoked Carter's fascination more than his caution. Turner was nothing less than ecstatic when the president finally thanked them all for the briefing and asked to be kept informed. It seemed that Haver had not only sold Carter on a new mission but had probably guaranteed the success of the cable-tapping program for the next decade.
Still, as jubilant as everyone felt, there was one nagging concern that Haver hadn't mentioned to Carter. Haver couldn't help but feel that there was something eerie about the Soviets' shift in strategy and other recent moves. It was almost as if the Soviets had found their own way to read the Americans' minds. Only there wasn't enough evidence to be certain, no clear patterns, just glimmers within a series of curious changes in the way the Soviets were operating.
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