As Parche neared Alaska, Maurer began preparing to move through the narrow Bering Strait submerged. Here, the waters were only 150 feet deep and the going was hazardous. Indeed, in a few months the passage would be impossible without the help of an icebreaker. Navigators and the captain were shrouded by curtains as they tensely plotted Parche's 2-3-knot crawl.
Once through the strait, Parche had to navigate farther north through the Chukchi Sea. Here the water was just as shallow, and the ice didn't melt even in summer. From outer space, this and other seas surrounding the pole look like a kaleidoscope as temperature and salinity patterns alter the very color of the water mile by mile. Parche's sonar bounced off the layers much as it bounced off solid objects, leaving Maurer and his crew nearly blind, much like a plane flying through thick cloud cover.
The crew maneuvered Parche forward slowly, cursing as they tried to decipher sonar echoes, never entirely certain whether something that sounded as if it were directly ahead was at their depth or some feet above. There was no way to really tell, not until they passed closer, close enough to risk collision. But Parche wasn't totally helpless. The Navy had been sending at least one submarine a year up under the ice since the 1950s. A special lab had been created to study sea ice to try to make it easier to operate in the strange and difficult environment. And the entire Sturgeon class of subs had been made "ice-capable": given upward- and forward-looking sonar that could help avoid ramming into the ice, special buoyancy controls, and hull modifications that allowed the subs to break through thin ice for emergency surfacings.
During these early Arctic operations, the Navy discovered that sonar pings sounded an awful lot like the mating call of the area's ring-necked seals. When the seals heard the submarine ping-a sweet tone that sounded like a singer moving across octaves-they answered: one seal calling back to the submarine, the next seal answering that seal, and another seal answering the one before. Blasting the sea, the seals inspired walruses to join in with their bell-like barks. On the early transits, the din went on for hours, seals answering subs and other seals, walruses answering seals, and walruses answering one another. Now Parche was using sonar designed to avoid courtship with the local mammals.
The passage was noisy, nonetheless. Around the sub were chunks of ice that had broken off from large bergs farther north. Those chunks had a disturbing tendency to pack themselves against one another or against land, creating heavy pressure ridges that reached down deep into the sea. Parche could easily encounter an area with less than five feet of clearance from bottom. It was almost impossible to move through without scraping some ice, sending a screech through the hull, nails across the chalkboard amplified. The ice chunks were heavy enough to snap a submarine's screws and leave a boat helpless.
The crew also had to be on the lookout for larger bergs that often floated south, creating huge obstacles between Greenland and Canada as well as on the other side of the pole, between Greenland and Iceland. It was an iceberg that had stopped USS Nautilus on an attempt to cross under the North Pole in June 1958. (Nautilus made the Pole, and history, a few months later.)
When Parche finally hit deep water, she could move ahead without obstacles. This 1,500-mile swim beneath the North Pole itself would be easy-depths of 1,000 to 12,000 feet left plenty of room to maneuver beneath the most massive icebergs. After that, Parche again had to maneuver through a tapestry of marginal ice before finally breaking through to the Barents.
Now it was time for the crew to begin readying the fish to drag along the sea bottom in search of communications cables. Given the surrounding terrain and the location of Soviet bases, it made sense that any underwater telephone cable would run from Murmansk and along the coast of the Kola Peninsula, which pointed down from the Arctic, form ing the thumb of the glove-shaped piece of land that marked Sweden and Finland as its fingers. The cable would probably stretch about 250 miles east to the tip, before it took a 40-mile hop across what the Soviets called the throat of the White Sea and looped into the Severodvinsk shipyard.
It made little sense to lay a tap in that bit of the White Sea where boats moved continuously from the shipyard out to the Barents. Instead, Parche would look for the cable in an area where it might be a little easier for her to hover for a while and not be discovered, such as along the granite cliffs on the northernmost coast of the Kola in that 250-mile run after Murmansk. The search inevitably would bring Parche within the Soviets' I2-mile territorial limit, and probably even inside the .3-mile limit recognized by the United States.
As Parche searched, men monitored the video images captured by the fish, looking for that vague line in the sand that could be a communications cable. They found it just about where operation planners had suspected it would be, farther out than 12 miles at some points, but a lot closer in at others. It was clear that this cable had to run from Severodvinsk to the major bases of the Northern Fleet, and on into fleet headquarters near Murmansk.
Finally, Maurer picked a spot for the tap. In Okhotsk, the cable stretched across an entire sea, and Halibut had been able to plant that tap about 40 miles offshore. It is not clear exactly how far from the coast this tap site was, but it clearly was a lot closer in than the Okhotsk tap had been.
Nobody had to be told that the closer Parche moved in, the more she risked discovery. Sonar crews monitored the constant traffic above as Parche's divers began their work. Nothing but luck could keep the crew safe from a direct hit by a Soviet sonar ping. If that happened, there were 150 pounds of HBX explosives on hoard, just as there had been on Halibut and on Seawolf.
The spooks were crammed into Parche's now-locked torpedo room, their eavesdropping equipment sitting on racks designed to hold weapons. While Halibut had the Bat Cave, Parche had no more space than any other late-generation Sturgeon sub. In fact, to make room for the spooks, most of Parche's torpedoes had been ditched. Now she carried just four live warshots, the minimum number any attack sub was allowed to carry on a mission.
It would take the spooks at least two weeks to sift electronically through the hundreds of lines running through the cable and choose which lines to record-and at what times-over the next year. The process relied on educated guesses and luck. Certain channels would probably he best in the summer months when the ice cleared from the Barents and the Soviets conducted naval exercises. Missile tests tended to be seasonal as well. But lines connected directly to headquarters could be active and profitably tapped year-round.
Some of the lines were unencoded, but many of them were encrypted to some degree. The spooks hoped to choose lines that the NSA would have a decent chance of decoding later. It also helped that the tap had evolved over the years. It weighed several tons, but miniaturization of the electronics and advances in recording technology now provided a greater recording capacity and some room for error.[16]
As all this was going on, a steady stream of Soviet ships and submarines continued to fill Parche's sonar screens. The activity got the crew members to talking. One man whispered that Parche was "very, very near Murmansk" and "really up against the Soviet coast." One chief found a more colorful way of describing their position to a young seaman. "This is so close you could look through a periscope and see people's faces on the beach if you came to the surface."
As they sat there, some of the men began to realize that no one had ever leveled with them about the dangers of this operation. As one man put it, "Here you've got one hundred some-odd guys willing to die, and they don't even know they're truly in a situation where they might."
16
The CIA also adapted the miniaturized recording technology in the cable tap pods for land use and bribed a Russian construction worker to implant one against an important underground telephone cable in Moscow itself. Intelligence officials say this prized source of high-level communications was compromised in the mid-1980s by Aldrich Ames, the worst turncoat in CIA history.