Again Haver succeeded in drawing a president into a dialogue. In a question and answer session that went on for nearly 15 minutes with Bush and Watkins fielding questions also, Haver explained the conventional view of war on the high seas and the long-held assumption that the Soviets would probably turn to tactical, short-range nukes early in those battles. He added that such a move had seemed likely to set off a broader nuclear war.
Then he offered some of the conclusions that his team of analysts had reached-that the Soviets appeared to be turning away from the conventional strategy and dedicating the bulk of their ships, attack subs and planes to protecting their missile subs in safe bastions close to home.
From here, Haver went on to plug Lehman's aggressive plan to confront those forces in Soviet waters. When Reagan seemed satisfied, Haver began to pack up the projector as Weinberger stepped in to carefully explain to the president what his role in the process would be, how he needed to sign off on all the sensitive espionage operations in advance. Weinberger took his time, talking slowly and very deliberately. He wanted to make sure that Reagan appreciated what was being asked of him.
Weinberger needn't have worried. Reagan was already hooked. Nobody had told him any of this when he was merely governor of California, home to the nation's most crucial spy subs. He had come to Washington still holding onto a view of the Navy built from equal parts of World War II fact and of World War II myth, the image of heroic men facing off against Japanese ships, their torpedoes sinking the enemy, dodging depth charges as they went along. This was an image dear to Reagan, and he loved to talk about how he played a submarine captain in the 1958 film Hellcats of the Navy.[17]
Reagan had a favorite story about those days, and he told it nowalbeit with only the details fit for screen-in Reagan's version, he effortlessly echoed commands whispered by a Navy officer and, with cameras rolling, set one of the nation's subs steaming out of San Diego in a Pacific sunset.
As Bush and Baker began trying to hustle Reagan along, the president was still talking about his experiences on the Hellcats set and his admiration for the submariners he met there. This briefing had already gone on for 45 minutes, more than twice as long as it had been scheduled to run. Reagan, however, was in no rush. Turning to Haver, the president asked, "Where do you get guys like this?"
"Sir, they're just Americans," Haver answered in his best for-thegipper style.
On that note, Reagan finally seemed ready to leave. It was clear he wanted Haver to keep trying to puzzle out Soviet strategy and that he had given his tacit approval for the next round of submarine spying missions.
All this occurred as Seawolf was ready to go to sea again. For the first time, the Navy could send both special projects boats out at the same time, in different directions to different seas.
Before Parche could leave for her 1981 run, however, Commander Peter John Graef, her new captain, ordered what he thought would be a routine drug screening. The last thing he expected was to nail nearly 15 percent of his crew for marijuana use-twenty-two crew members, including three officers. There was no debate. They were off the boat, and replacements were rushed in.
This was definitely not what Reagan had in mind during the briefing when he had asked Rich Haver where the Navy found "these guys," these superheroes of the cold war. Although, in retrospect, Haver's answer seemed far less corny. They were "just Americans" after all.
Staffing these boats had never been easy. Navy recruiters went through bizarre contortions to keep their secret and at the same time find men who wouldn't mind trespassing in Soviet seas for the purpose of cabletapping. As one young submariner described it, the recruitment process was more like an interrogation. Men in leisure suits brought potential projects men into smoky rooms and began demanding to know: Did the recruit ever use drugs? Ever get in trouble with the law? The questions were peppered with promises that the government had ways of learning every dirty detail. "If you ever jacked off behind the barn, we will find out about it," one kid was told.
Parche wasn't unique in her personnel problems, and the drug bust had intelligence officials worried. Seawolf's crew was disintegrating under the mounting frustrations of serving on a broken-down and cursed boat. The pressure inspired some of her crew to lose themselves in a marijuana haze. Some even proclaimed their drug use openly and loudly, just to get off of the Seawolf. Then there were Seawolf's isolationists, who were readying for the day when they would take singular stands against communism in mountaintop homes transformed into forts. These men had taken to going out to the mud flats near the base to practice with their non-Navy-issue assault rifles, blasting apart cans and at least one truck. One man sent a live round into his television. 'The rest of the crew, leery, sweaty, and exhausted, just looked on at the dopers and the gun fanatics.
Such tensions remained as Seawolf finally headed out toward Okhotsk. By now, Michael C. Tiernan had been the CO through three years of overhaul and tests. This was to be the first time he commanded the boat through an actual operation. A Seawolf crew that had once compared his predecessor, Charles R. MacVean, to Captain James T. Kirk on the Starship Enterprise now nicknamed Tiernan "Milquetoast." The men had tried to take him out to the Horse and Cow to loosen him up, but they didn't think it had helped.
Tiernan, in fact, was only slightly more popular than his new executive officer, J. Ashton Dare, whom the men referred to as "Jashton." If the men found Tiernan aloof, they found Jashton downright irritating. His father was an admiral, and it seemed to the men that he wasn't going to let anyone forget that. Worse for Jashton, he had replaced a crew favorite, Robert S. Holbrook, an officer who could chastise a man in the morning and redeem himself later that night by taking him out for a beer. Holbrook also had been the crew's good-luck charm. He had already survived an 85-degree dive on the diesel sub USS Chopper (SS-342), saved only when an enlisted man thought to throw her into reverse, driving her hack up toward the surface. Thereafter, Holbrook always wore a brass belt buckle adorned with Chopper's image, certain that it made him unsinkable. He had his men just as convinced.
As far as they were concerned, Dare had neither the mythology nor the charm to redeem himself. He was their favorite target as they looked for ways to fight boredom. On one test run, some of the men stole Dare's mattress and flushed it through the garbage chute and out of the boat. The XO somehow missed the joke.
In fact, humor was more than a little strained on this boat full of men who felt that they were being sent to Soviet waters in the equivalent of a Model T. By the time ice began forming on Seawolf's deck plates, morale was at an all-time low.
Things only got worse on station. Tiernan directed his crew to plant the sub next to the Soviet cable. The plan was to let Seawolf sit secure on bottom, balancing her bulk on two ski-like legs that the crew had taken to calling skegs. The skegs were a gift of imagination and technology, a safety device designed after that first terrible storm that had torn Halibut from her anchors. But as Seawolf tried to land with those skegs now, she came down hard right on the Soviet cable.
There was every chance that the fall had interrupted Soviet communications or sent a shot of static through the line, and there was every chance that the Soviets would send surface ships, blasting sonar, or repair crews to cone and investigate. But there was no sign of a Soviet search. By the time the tapping operation was completed, Tiernan decided to go ahead and finish a secondary operation. Seawol f was going to move further into Okhotsk, and she was going on another search for Soviet missile fragments. But just as it seemed certain that the Americans were going to survive their mistake, they came under assault-not from the Soviets, but from the sea itself.
17
Reagan's tale was missing some rather pertinent facts. What actually happened was that he virtually brought the house down, though not by virtue of his acting. The crew, told to treat Reagan's orders as they would their captain's, accidentally overheard the actor practicing his lines, and they responded.
“Answer all bells,” he said, giving the code for get underway, practicing to get just the right inflection.
“All back full.”
“All ahead two-thirds.”
The submarine began to jerk in every direction, back, forward, stopped, forward, left. The bow lines began to stretch, then pull until the aging pier that had moored the sub snapped into pieces of cracked wood and rusted iron, just as the sub’s captain raced to the bridge, yelling, “All stop, for God's sake, all stop!”
“Starboard stop.”
“Starboard ahead standard.”
“Left full rudder.”