Laird also added one other interesting historical note. Some critics have questioned whether Howard Hughes, the paranoid and reclusive billionaire, ever knew that his companies were involved in an effort to raise a sunken Soviet submarine. But, Laird said, "I remember talking to Howard Hughes about it too."
Main interviews: John P. Craven, former top submarine and Naval Intelligence officials, and torpedo experts who asked not to be identified.
Government documents, articles, and other sources: The safety concerns of former Scorpion crew member Dan Rogers were first disclosed, and are explored in more detail, in Stephen Johnson, "A Long and Deep Mystery: Scorpion Crewman Says Sub's '68 Sinking Was Preventable," Houston Chronicle, May 23, 1993. We also interviewed Rogers. Johnson's article includes the quote from the letter that Scorpion Machinist's Mate David Burton Stone wrote to his parents about the poor condition of the ship's equipment. Johnson was also extraordinarily generous in sharing many other aspects of his extensive research with us.
The Navy's difficulties in tracking Soviet subs in the Mediterranean Sea in the late 1960s are discussed in R. F. Cross Associates, Ltd., SeaBased Airborne Antisubmarine Warfare 1940–1977, vol. 2. More details of the collision between the USS George C. Marshall and the Soviet sub are in Appendix A. Retired Navy Commander Herbert E. Tibbets, the former skipper of the USS Cutlass, described in an interview the game of chicken involving the Scorpion and the Soviet destroyer.
The main concerns fueling the notion that Scorpion was destroyed by Soviet forces were disclosed in an article by Ed Offley: "Game of `Chicken' Led to Loss of Scorpion 25 Years Ago," that ran both in the New London Day, May 23, 1993; and as "Remembering the Scorpion-Evidence Points to an Underwater Dogfight as the Sub's Demise," in the Virginian-Pilot and Ledger-Star (Norfolk, Virginia), May 30, 1993. Offley quotes Jerry Hall, an enlisted man who worked as an aide at the Atlantic Fleet submarine command in 1968, as saying he heard talk among more senior officers that on its way home from the Med, Scorpion had been diverted to "brush off" a Soviet attack sub that was trying to trail a Polaris missile sub leaving the port at Rota, Spain. But our sources who had top Navy jobs flatly denied that in interviews. They acknowledged that Scorpion had been diverted, but they said its real mission-checking into the Soviets' baffling balloon activities-was much less provocative. And in recounting details of Scorpion's final radio communications, which indicated that it had collected a few photographs of the balloon activity and then cleared that area, these officials said there was no reason to suspect that it was engaged with any Soviet vessels when it sank.
In one recent article in the May 21, 1998 Seattle Post-Intelligencer titled "Navy Says Sinking of the Scorpion Was an Accident, Revelations Suggest a Darker Scenario," Offley suggested that Scorpion may still have been close to Soviet vessels when she sank. But no one who examined the wreckage found any evidence of an attack, and search teams hack in 1968 were told all Soviet vessels had been far from the scene.
The information that we attribute to "declassified Navy documents" at various points in the chapter comes from more than seventy pages that the Navy released to the Chicago Tribune and other news organizations under the Freedom of Information Act on October 25, 1993. The most important document was the final report of the findings of the Navy's court of inquiry that investigated the Scorpion disaster in 1968 and 1969. Citing cold war secrecy, the Navy did not make the report public at that time. Instead, the Navy and the Defense Department simply issued summaries in news releases, dated January 31, 1969, saying that the "certain cause" of Scorpion's loss could not be determined. The news releases-which are masterful examples of government obfuscation-did not disclose that the court of inquiry had concluded that the most likely cause of the Scorpion's loss was some type of torpedo accident; indeed, the releases included several misleading statements that made that possibility seem improbable. The Navy did not declassify the court of inquiry's report until 1984, when Ed Offley, then a reporter at the Norfolk papers, petitioned for the documents and wrote the first comprehensive story examining how the court had come to believe that a hot-running torpedo was the most likely culprit. That article, "Mystery of Sub's Sinking Unravels," was published on the front page of the Virginian-Pilot and the LedgerStar on December 16, 1984, and included the first interview with John Craven on his role in finding the Scorpion's wreckage. Christopher Drew also described the hot-running torpedo theory in "How Scorpion Killed Itself: Navy Discloses Sub Sunk by Own Torpedo 25 Years Ago," Chicago Tribune, October 26, 1993.
Our own reconstruction-and the disturbing new information about how torpedoes were being rushed out to the fleet despite rampant safety failures-is based largely on extensive interviews with John Craven and various torpedo experts and weapons engineers. Early in May 1998, we attempted several times to reach Rear Admiral Arthur Gralla who headed the Naval Ordnance Command when Scorpion was lost and to whom the safety engineer's alert about the torpedo battery failures was addressed. He was traveling abroad and did not return messages. He died a few weeks later.
The 1970 examination of the Trieste photos of Scorpion's wreckage was analyzed and written up in the Navy's "Evaluation of data and artifacts related to USS Scorpion (SSN-589)" prepared by the Scorpion advisory group and released in 1998. Among the people we called upon to help us evaluate that report were Ross E. Saxon, who dove down to the wreckage on Trieste; Robert S. Price, who re-analyzed the acoustic data after Craven retired; several submarine officers who served in Scorpion's era, and various weapons safety experts. The review of the work of the first Technical Advisory Group set up to help find Scorpion in 1968 under John Craven was also released in 1998, "The Scorpion Search 1968, An Analysis of the Operation for the CNO Technical Advisory Group (TAG)." The letter summarizing the Jason's findings was released in the same group of documents, "Scorpion Artifacts," January 14, 1987, signed by Peter M. Palermo.
Robert Price, research engineer at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory, which was at White Oak, Maryland, and separate from the Naval Ordnance command, says that when his team went back in 1969 or 1970 and examined the original acoustic data, their read on it was far different than Craven's. For one thing, Price and his team believed that the first sound that registered at the Canary Island's hydrophone was not the sound of an explosion of either a torpedo or the main battery that powered Scorpion. "The acoustic evidence we examined does not indicate why the sub went down," Price says, "All we know is that it wasn't a full-scale outside-the-hull type explosion which would be very loud."
Instead, he says, the first sound recorded was the implosion. The subsequent sounds that began 91 seconds later, he says, were likely caused by the tail of the submarine rattling around inside the auxilliary machine space after two sections had telescoped. Further, he says that a model submarine sent down in a one hundred foot tank began to spiral on the way to the bottom almost immediately, suggesting that there was no predicting the direction Scorpion would have fallen.
His data does not shed light on why Scorpion went down. He also does not know why Scorpion was found just where Craven had predicted, using his very different interpretation of the data. That, Price says, may have been coincidence, or luck.