Although Makarov's use of the past tense may have been a bit premature, it certainly fit the Soviet perspective. After that flurry of activity off the American coast in 1986 and 1987, Soviet submarines had been pulled back home. On the U.S. side, however, it was business almost as usual. Spy subs had gotten more cautious. Improvements in sonar and the electronics-intercept gear meant they no longer had to go quite as close to Soviet subs or shore to capture intelligence. (Los Angeles subs weren't as maneuverable in tight spots anyway.) The pace of operations had not let up. For instance, Submarine Squadron 11 in San Diego alone sent eight of its ten nuclear attack submarines out on surveillance operations in 1988, keeping up with the rate set during the height of the cold war. The USS Salt Lake City (SSN-716) operated for nearly seven months in the northern Pacific, followed by the USS Portsmouth (SSN-707), the USS Pintado (SSN-672), the USS La Jolla (SSN-701), and others.
The pace of operations was fueled by signs that the Soviets had finally learned to build subs as powerful and, more important, nearly as silent as American subs. There was a colossal irony to all of this: just as the Soviets had finally learned to construct first-class submarines, they were running out of money to build and operate them. But that realization had yet to filter down through the ranks on either side.
And so, out on Mare Island the pace of special projects operations didn't let up much. Seawolf had been retired in 1987, and Parche had gone into overhaul so that she could be modified to handle a wider array of potential projects. She was cut in half to fit in a 100-foot section that would hold new sophisticated equipment for cable-tapping and gear to allow her to retrieve objects from the ocean floor as Seawolf had. The overhaul was scheduled to take several years, but even so, the United States continued cable-tapping without pause, having readied Parche's replacement, the Richard B. Russell, named after the senator whose name had once been synonymous with a wink and a nod and nearly blank-check acceptance of all intelligence operations.
From 1987 through 1990, the Russell collected one award for each trip to the Barents-one Presidential Unit Citation and three Navy Unit Commendations. Her missions went on as Reagan left office in early 1989 and Bush came in, as Bush and Gorbachev picked up where Reagan and Gorbachev had left off, and even after Bush wrote privately to Gorbachev offering to help the Soviets retrieve one of their submarines that had been lost in the Norwegian Sea.[22]
Later that year, Trost was invited to Leningrad, the honored guest of the Soviet Navy. On this trip, a month before the Berlin Wall crum bled, he was given a firsthand look at how rapidly Soviet submarine capabilities were dwindling. The Soviets were having trouble keeping its subs at sea, paying for maintenance and running enough operations to train its crews. Trost was stunned by the changes that had taken place since he last visited the Soviet Union in 1971, a time when he knew his room had been bugged and he and his cohorts followed, so overtly in fact, that the Navy men had stopped in their tracks to offer to tell their Soviet shadow where they were headed. Now there seemed to be no spies. Instead, there were frank discussions, admiral to admiral, about the difficulties of keeping a navy running, about the futility of nuclear warfare. Indeed, Trost got his first look at Soviet submarine construction and the problems facing Soviet commanders: they saw subs on which sometimes only the officers spoke Russian and conscripts from the republics were so ill trained that only the officers could manage much of the critical maintenance necessary to keep the boats at sea. But perhaps the most telling moment occurred when Trost and the top Soviet admiral, Vladimir N. Chernavin, began joking, or half-joking, that their fates were linked. If either side failed to maintain an adequate-size navy, the other would have a terrible time justifying his defense expenditures. The world was changing from beneath them almost as fast as East and West Berliners had torn down the Wall with hammers, rocks, and their bare hands.
By now, top State Department officials had begun to worry about anything that could undermine Gorbachev as he continued to move toward closer relations with the United States. Their concern fell on the Russell cable-tapping mission that was scheduled for when Gorbachev and Bush were to meet again. In the end, the timing of Russell's trip was changed.
But one changed mission was not necessarily enough. Some diplomatic officials worried that the intelligence community was adapting too slowly from its long-held views of the Soviet Union. There was no doubt that after forty years the nation's spies were reluctant to be deprived of their enemy. What would happen to the intelligence agencies when nobody cared about the measurements of weaponry, of force? What would happen in a world when the most crucial information came not from covert efforts but from the Cable News Network and its twenty-four-hour reports about the sweeping social changes?
That the submarine force faced these questions with concern and some resentment was evident when retired and current officers met at the annual convention of the Naval Submarine League in June 1990. Around the world, shards of the Berlin Wall were being sold as souvenirs, but within the convention halls at a Radisson Hotel outside Washington, D.C., it was certain that nobody would be crying out for a "peace dividend," not a single man would eye the submarine fleet with a scowl on his face, a calculator in hand, figuring the myriad social programs that could be funded even in one boat's stead. The specter of the bean counters, however, loomed large, even in their absence.
The man who was now secretary of the Navy, H. Lawrence Garrett III, stood before the assemblage and warned that "budget-cutters are sharpening their knives, even as we speak." He failed to mention that the sharpest knife was coming from General Colin Powell, who had succeeded Crowe as chairman of the joint Chiefs of Staff and had just announced that the military budget would probably have to he cut by 25 percent over the next several years. Garrett, taking a far harder line, went on to dismiss any effect that perestroika and glasnost might have on the game of submarine spying. "The logic of nuclear deterrence has not changed just because the Soviet leader routinely presses the flesh on Pennsylvania Avenue," he thundered.
Other speakers were more moderate but still called for prudence and skepticism when it came to the Soviet Union. William H. J. Manthorpe Jr., then deputy director of Naval Intelligence, posed the question that was quickly becoming the rallying cry of the submarine force: "What will be the intentions of the Soviet leadership of the future? Can we depend on those intentions being benign? The answer, of course, is: No, I would not bet my country's security on it."
Before long, though, something happened that convinced even the most hard-line skeptics that the Soviet Union was no longer the most likely candidate to drag the United States into a war. Almost as if he realized that there was room on center stage for a new villain, Saddam Hussein stepped forward from Iraq and overnight annexed Kuwait. The United States had a new reason to fight, and this time it stood shoulder to shoulder with the Soviet Union, issuing an unprecedented joint statement denouncing the "blatant transgression of basic norms of civilized conduct" and calling for an arms embargo against Iraq. Secretary of State James A. Baker III would later proclaim that this was "The Day the Cold War Ended."
22
The lost boat, the