Watkins told us that about two-thirds of the technical information in Clancy's novel is on target and the rest is wrong, and that it typically overstates U.S. abilities. Rather than blocking publication of the book, or attempting to correct the misperceptions, when Clancy submitted his manuscript to the Navy for clearance, Watkins said he decided to let the book go forward as it was. "The Hunt for Red October did us a service," he said. "The Soviets kind of believed it, and we won the battle, and therefore it was a significant part of the noncostly deterrence of submarines."
Along the same lines, Watkins said that he was "sending a signal" to the Soviets by allowing detailed papers on the new forward U.S. maritime strategy to be published in the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings in 1986. While some in Congress questioned his move, he testified that the public declarations told the Soviets: "Don't risk either conflict or serious conventional war with the United States, because you are going to run into a hornets' nest and one of those is going to be at sea and you're not going to win that one." Publication of both the novel and the strategy, he added, demonstrated that "we had the resolve, we had the plan."
Another former official said the Navy also funded undersea expert Robert D. Ballard's search for the wreckage of the Titanic as part of this game of psychological warfare against the Soviets. Ballard found the Titanic in 1 985 and explored its wreckage with the mini-sub Alvin in 1986. This official said the Navy's aim in supporting Ballard's highly publicized missions was to show the Soviets that "we could find things underwater and look inside" so that they would think "we were not merely 10 feet tall but 20 feet tall." He said all these efforts to intimidate the Soviets-and make them think they could not compete with the United States-were encouraged by the late CIA Director William Casey.
Much of the information about the tumultuous year in U.S.-Soviet relations in 1983 comes from George Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State: The Memoirs of George P. Shultz (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1993). The sense of paranoia among Andropov and other KGB officials is vividly described in chapter 13 of Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story (New York: HarperCollins, 1990).
In explaining the importance of hiding a second-strike capability on submarines, Admiral Watkins also said: "The mission of the strategic deterrent at sea is not first strike. It is called war termination strategy. That's where it fits. So the first strike was the intercontinental ballistic missiles, obviously. The land-based missiles were the potential first strike and probably the most destabilizing of the elements of the deterrent.
"The maritime forces, while they were large in numbers of warheads, were there for the war termination strategy, which said: How do you win such a thing? Who wins? Well, we both know that nobody really wins. But who wins the battle is going to be largely a function of how much you have left after the first exchange. And while this is an insidious game, and I'm not trying to say I love the game, that's the reality of when you get into offensive weaponry on both sides as a strategic deterrent, as opposed to strategic defense."
Watkins also said he believed very strongly that the Soviets weren't going to launch a first strike. "We briefed the joint Chiefs, we briefed the president on what we thought we could do, why we thought we could do it, and I think we felt very comfortable, and I believe that that self-confidence was transmitted to the Russians in a variety of ways-by the strength of our resolve at our incidents-at-sea agreements, our discussions, by the maritime strategy publication itself, by their intelligence-gathering network on the sophistication and ability and capability of our submarine force, by a variety of publications and unclassified speculation and so forth, over a long time.
"Their intelligence sources were good, and we wanted them to know how self-confident we were. That's the role it plays. It's not a matter of charging up there and shooting up a lot of ballistic missile submarines as being the goal to prevent them from even launching first strike. No. That's not the way they would deploy their submarine force, and not the way that we would deploy ours.
"It was far deeper than that. These were the backup forces necessary to-you might say-undergird a nuclear exchange, and our job, of course, was to set up a deterrent that would make it unwise to do that, and we did it. And I believe it was one of the reasons that we were able to bring the Russians to their knees in the cold war. Because they could not win that battle, and therefore, why continue?"
Bob Woodward first described Admiral Butts's proposal to lay cables in the Barents and relay information from taps on Soviet lines in real time in Veiclass="underline" The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981–1987 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987). Veil also gives the best previously published description of how the Soviets found the taps in the Sea of Okhotsk and how the White House and the intelligence community sought to keep the Washington Post from publishing what it knew about the tap operations in 1986. But even though Veil outlines Butts's costly proposal, neither Woodward's stories in the Post nor his book say that the Navy already was tapping Soviet cables in the Barents.
The only public indications that the Navy was involved in tapping cables in the Barents have come in brief statements in three other books that also mention Butts's proposaclass="underline" Angelo Codevilla, a former Senate staff member who reviewed intelligence budgets from 1977 to 1985, notes in Informing Statecraft: Intelligence for a New Century (New York: Free Press, 1992) that the Sea of Okhotsk taps had been so valuable that "by the early 1980s the U.S. government had begun a multibillion-dollar project to make the flow simple and instantaneous. It involved tapping a Soviet undersea cable near the northwestern city of Murmansk with an American cable, buried under the sands of the Arctic Ocean's floor, and reaching all the way to Greenland. This intrusion into Soviet communications would have provided foolproof, timely warning of any Soviet decision to go to war." Still, Codevilla added that this idea eventually fell victim to "a classic bureaucratic coup de grace. Powerful factions within both CIA and NSA had opposed the directcable tap because it would have been expensive and would have taken money from current programs" (pp. 163–164). In Fall from Glory, Greg Vistica cites an unnamed defense source who said that the Navy had experimented with, and then abandoned, plans for an undersea plow that could "lay a cable from Greenland directly to the pods on the north coast of the Soviet Union, thus eliminating the submarine's work" (p. 72). And in The Universe Below, Bill Broad states that in addition to the Sea of Okhotsk, the cable tapping "feats were repeated" in the Barents. He cites an interview with Codevilla where he added that the cables to Greenland would have been made of fiber optics and would have been so long that they would have needed special devices to boost the signals. He also stated that the project-"a massive industrial undertaking on the seafloor, the likes of which had never before been attempted"-became the most expensive item in the intelligence budget before "the plug was pulled" (pp. 82–83). Before Blind Man's Bluff, nobody has ever written any more about how the Navy was tapping cables in the Barents, and nobody has identified Parche as the sub that laid the taps, or described how extensive and hazardous these operations were.
Two books give the full history of John Walker and his spy ring: John Barron, Breaking the Ring: The Bizarre Case of the Walker Family Spy Ring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987); and Pete Earley, Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring (New York: Bantam Books, 1988). John Lehman offers his ghoulish advice on what kind of punishment Walker should have received in Command of the Seas (pp. 133-34). Studeman's assessment of the damage that Walker did was included in an affidavit he wrote as part of the criminal case against Jerry Whitworth. It is on file in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, and a copy is included in Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, "Meeting the Espionage Challenge: A Review of United States Counterintelligence and Security Programs," September 23, 1986. The tale of Toshiba's treachery in selling the advanced propeller-milling equipment to the Soviets is well summarized in Ralph Kinney Bennett, "The Toshiba Scandaclass="underline" Anatomy of a Betrayal," Reader's Digest (December 1987). In the case of Ronald Pelton, we drew mainly on the coverage of his trial by Woodward, Patrick Tyler, Susan Schmidt, and Paul W. Valentine in the Washington Post and Stephen Engelberg and Philip Shenon in the New York Times. Rich Haver's appearance before the Senate Intelligence Committee and a summary of the contents of his report about the Soviets' discovery of the taps in Okhotsk were described to us by former government officials familiar with them.