The pulling hack of Soviet missile subs to the bastions was discussed in general terms in a number of articles in trade journals such as the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings and the Submarine Review during the I 980s. An excellent discussion of the initial differences in opinion among Navy leaders and analysts about what this Soviet move meant appeared in Gregory L. Vistica, Fall from Glory: The Men Who Sank the U.S. Navy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995). Vistica, a former reporter for the San Diego Union-Tribune who now works for Newsweek, set out to chronicle the Tailhook sex scandal and some of the problems with the Navy's leadership that seemed inevitably to lead to it. But he also delved into how Naval Intelligence formed its views of the Soviet threat, including the discussion about what to make of the satellite evidence in November 1980 that the Soviets might be building an aircraft carrier. Vistica's book also gave the first public description of the briefing on submarine spying that was given to President Ronald Reagan on Friday, March 6, 198 1. We also interviewed officials who attended that briefing, as well as crew members of the USS Besugo (SS-321)-the diesel submarine used in filming Hellcats of the Navy-who watched Reagan closely as he practiced barking out his orders and who saw the pier break.
Information about drug use among Seawolf and Parche crew members came from crewmen on those boats. Frederick H. Hartmann's book Naval Renaissance: The U.S. Navy in the 1980s (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1990), provides good background on how pervasive this problem once was in the Navy as a whole. He cited a Department of Defense drug-use survey in 1980 in which 47 percent of the respondents in the Navy and the Marines acknowledged using marijuana, compared to 40 percent in the Army and 20 percent in the Air Force. Only 2 percent of the Air Force respondents reported using cocaine, compared to 6 percent for the Army and i i percent for the Navy. Alarmed by these and other similar findings, Admiral Thomas B. Hayward, the chief of Naval Operations, released a videotape in December 1981 to be shown to every man and woman in the Navy. Hartmann recounts how in this message Hayward announced a new "pride and professionalism" program and delivered a stern warning to the people who were using drugs: "Not here, not on my watch, not in my division, not on my ship or in my squadron, not in my Navy." This program, enforced with huge numbers of random drug tests, sharply reduced the amount of illicit drug use in the Navy.
The dates of the missions by the Seawolf and the Parche are derived from official command and other histories for the ships found in Navy archives. Also helpful was the "cruise book"-an album of photographs, inside jokes, and crew rosters put together by Seawolf crew members and given to everyone who was on the 1981 mission. For information about the massive storm system that assaulted the Sea of Okhotsk and imperiled the Seawolf, see the Mariners Weather Log (published by the U.S. Department of Commerce/National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) 26, no. 2 (Spring 1982): 89; this volume gives the weather reports for October, November, and December 1981.
Main interviews: Former officials of U.S. intelligence agencies and former members of the crew of the USS Parche.
Government documents, articles, books, and other sources: After the cold war ended, the KGB placed a photograph of one of the two cabletap pods that it had recovered-along with some of the data-recording equipment that had been inside-on display in the Russian Ministry of Security's museum at the notorious Lubyanka Prison. On a visit there, our Russian researcher Alexander Mozgovoy was shown a small plate on the data-recording equipment that identified it as belonging to the U.S. government. Russian officials told Mozgovoy that the tap pods had been recovered about 60 kilometers, or roughly 38 miles, off of Kamchatka in the Sea of Okhotsk. They also said that one of the pods was clearly newer than the other and had more sophisticated recording equipment that made extensive use of microprocessing technology. The Russians confirmed that the devices were nuclear-powered and could work for about 125 days. Mozgovoy also obtained the picture of the tap pod that we have included with the photographs in this book.
Waldo K. Lyon helped us in interviews with the portion of this chapter that fell within his amazing area of expertise: the scientific properties of Arctic sea ice and their troubling implications for submarine warfare. Lyon fought tirelessly throughout the 1980s to try to persuade Navy officials to take more account of his views. Born in 1914, he had long operated with the energy and vigor of two men. He continued to work at the Arctic lab-and also was a national senior badminton champion-in his seventies. In his eighties, he was still fighting a 1997 order to raze the building that houses one of the few giant pools in the world where scientists can "grow" Arctic sea ice and conduct experiments. Lyon, who died in May 1998, wanted the lab mothballed intact so that study could he revived quickly should there be a war, and he found it hard to believe that the submarine force had not recognized the importance of saving the facility. He believed that the lesson from German tactics in World War II and the Soviets' shift to the ice proved that potential enemies will again use the almost impenetrable cover to attack U.S. targets on shore or at sea. He noted that even a simple diesel sub could easily hide in the ice and that, without further study, the United States would remain vulnerable.
Another good source on Lyon's early work (the first two or three decades of it) is The Reminiscences of Dr. Waldo K. Lvon, a 297-page oral history in the collection at the U.S. Naval Institute, Annapolis, Maryland.
The stunning scene when Admiral Rickover appealed to President Reagan to block Lehman's efforts to retire him is recounted in full detail in the introduction to John F. Lehman Jr., Command of the Seas: Building the 600-Ship Navy (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1988). Rickover's retaliation-putting up the picture of Benedict Arnold near John Lehman's-was recounted in Rockwell, The Rickover Effect, (p. 364).
Rickover was still an icon, but even some veteran submariners thought it was time for him to go-and that the demands of his reactor safety bureaucracy had gotten out of hand. In 1981, one sub captain, Commander Ed Linz, resigned his command of the USS Kamehameha (SSBN-642) to protest the management of the sub program. He said some officers had so little time to focus on seamanship skills that he feared a nuclear sub might run aground "due to total incompetence in basic navigation and ship handling, but the reactor-control division records would be perfect as it hit." Rickover died in July 1986.
Odyssey 82 was the name of a cruise hook put together by crew members on the Parche that year.
Admiral Watkins's quote on the Arctic ice as "a beautiful place to hide" for Soviet submarines was cited by Compton-Hall, Sub Versus Sub, p. 97. In a lengthy interview, Admiral Watkins also explained to us why he thought the U.S. sub force still could have countered the Soviets under the ice, as well as some of the moves he and others made to intimidate the Soviets psychologically. One of the most fascinating involved Watkins's decision to allow the U.S. Naval Institute-a private, nonprofit organization that works closely with the Navy-to publish the first edition of Tom Clancy's submarine novel The Hunt for Red October in 1984 even though some admirals believed it would enable the Soviets to learn more about U.S. submarine capabilities.