Clinton has agreed to continue the limited surveillance operations off of Russia, and his approvals have resulted in a few lonely sentinels lurking off Vladivostok and Murmansk, at least at times when the Navy has reason to believe the Russians might be engaging in an exercise or testing new equipment. It also is with Clinton's nod that the special projects spy program has continued, although its focus has shifted away from Russia. Government officials say that one of the special projects subs-probably Russell in 1992-went back to the Barents to retrieve the tap pods after the Soviet Union collapsed. Russell went cable tapping in other parts of the world before she was retired in nlid-1993. That's when Parche came back from her long overhaul, earning two more Presidential Unit Citations, in 1993 and 1994, and a string of Navy Unit Commendations. All told, Parche has now won at least seven PUCs, by far the most of any ship in Navy his tory. Details of exactly where Parche is going now have been tightly held, even more so than any of her cold war efforts, but those awards never would have been given had Parche not continued to pioneer new and dangerous missions. She can still tap cables, and since her refit, she can also retrieve military hardware off the ocean floor.
The Navy, it is clear, is also determined to hold on to her. When the rash of post-cold war base closings rang the end of the Mare Island Naval Shipyard in 1994, Parche was moved to Bangor, Washington, where she is the only attack sub to moor at a major Trident missilesub base. In 1995, 1996, and 1997, public records show that Parche continued to win Navy Unit Commendations. And the Navy has pushed her special technology forward and could even be using unmanned drones to swim out from Parche and handle much of the tasks of cable-tapping without risking her crew's lives.
Her targets are easy to guess at and no doubt reflect the Navy's broader intelligence concerns. Iran took possession of its third Kilo in January 1997. The cover of the 1997 issue of Worldwide Submarine Challenges, a Naval Intelligence annual, pictures a Chinese submarine and crew. Inside is a running litany of nations that present a potential threat, including two Asian nations, China and North Korea. China not only used one of its Kilos in highly threatening exercises off Taiwan in 1996 but fired land missiles as warning shots, forcing Clinton to send U.S. aircraft carriers to ensure that no attack took place. The Chinese are also using Russian technology to develop their own fleet of modern nuclear missile subs, and they have been testing land-based ballistic missiles with ranges long enough to reach U.S. shores. Chinese test missiles fired into the oceans would be invaluable to the United States if they were retrieved. Finally, concerns about North Korea have escalated greatly. The country repeatedly has used diesel subs to try to infiltrate commandos into South Korea.
Parche is still out there, as are other attack submarines bent on spying. The program that began with the first chill of the cold war continues.
Epilogue
A sub commander and his wife once made a promise: when he was at sea, they would both look at the same star at the same time of night. She would never know when he could dare bring his sub to periscope depth, dare take a peek at the sky. L J So she faithfully sought out their star every night at the appointed hour, even though she realized that he was probably moving silently through the darkness of the ocean. She did that in the hope that at least once they would be gazing at their star together. She did that every night until he came home.
These two were among the lucky ones. The stress caused by long months at sea and the staunch secrecy that submariners were sworn to maintain tore many other couples apart. No final analysis of the submarine war can ignore the human costs. These men traded months, years, and more to become what was for decades the country's best defense against nuclear attack from the sea.
Submariners tracked Soviet missile submarines as well as anyone could, development by development and mile by mile. Only another sub could follow a Soviet boomer, hear just what clanked, see just how its crew operated, and learn just where it would he going should the order ever come to fire. This was all intelligence that grew over time, a few facts from each mission, some of it redundant, much of it cumulative. It was intelligence that had to he collected all over again each time the Soviets put out a new class of subs, each time they came up with a new tactic.
At their best, submarines did something more: they enabled the United States to get a glimpse inside the minds of Soviet military leaders. A U.S. captain in the midst of a trail could see himself in the decisions of a Soviet commander, just as he could see how the other man was so very different.
The special fleet of submarines equipped to tap cables made it possible to listen as Soviet naval headquarters detailed day-to-day frustrations, critiqued missions, and reacted to fears of an American nuclear strike. At a point in time when both superpowers could start nuclear war with a push of a button, this was a rare and crucial look at who the adversary really was.
Hunan agents, satellites, and spy planes, along with subs, all got very good at collecting information about Soviet hardware-what was being built, the technical specifications. It was much harder, however, to get a glimpse into the Soviet psyche. In the end, not even the cable taps could reveal much about what the top Soviet leadership thought or show the true political and economic crises building in a country so closed. Still, the taps were often the best gauges anyone had, even when what they did record was trapped underwater for months until a sub could be sent to retrieve their tapes.
The men who serviced those cables at the bottom of the Barents and Okhotsk knew they faced immense risk. The self-destruct charges they carried onboard were a grim reminder. Even men who often stood as rivals to Naval Intelligence, top officers at the CIA, acknowledge that cable-tapping was the most dangerous of any long-standing intelligence operation of the cold war. That aura of danger awarded the missions respect, just as it made them especially rare.
While satellites replaced many of the spy planes and made intelligence-gathering safer and more antiseptic, submarines continued to confront the Soviets directly. That not only set subs apart from any other intelligence collectors, but from the rest of the military. Submariners knew they were part of the only force that practiced not simply against allies in war games, but by meeting the enemy, day in and day out.
There was always a huge risk of a destabilizing incident, even the risk that a submarine might spark real battle. Occasionally some critics worried publicly that this could have happened each time a submarine was detected in Soviet waters, each time one risked retaliation, each time there was a collision. There is no question that some skippers went too far in their quest for the big score. But when the Navy and the intelligence agencies weighed the gains against the possibility of a violent response, they relied on one simple fact: the Soviets were sending out their spies as well. As Admiral James D. Watkins, the former chief of Naval Operations and secretary of Energy, put it: "The fact that you get caught periodically is historical. So what. You know everybody's in the game." He went on to say: "As long as we're doing it, which you might say in a way that does not clearly violate agreements that we made or international laws we subscribe to, it is a fair game. We should never apologize for it. We've got to get on with it. And if we don't do it, we are not doing our job."