Robert G. Williscroft
Operation Ivy Bells: A Novel of the Cold War
Disclaimer
Although this is a work of fiction, it is based upon real events and real people. The USS Halibut is real, and what she accomplished is real. The captain and crew members of Halibut, as depicted in this work, while mirroring many heroic submariners the author was privileged to serve with, are the products of the author's imagination. The other officers, sailors, and civilians as depicted in this work are compilations of individuals with whom the author served during his twenty-three-year career. The characteristics of individuals in the saturation dive team are a compilation of actual team members as personally known to the author, but none of the characters as depicted in this work is real. The places and incidents actually happened, for the most part, but to several teams over a span of years, in multiple locations, and the specific details are the products of the author's imagination. Except for several prominent individuals who appear by name doing things they would normally have done, although their recorded actions within this work are fictional, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Acknowledgements
Several people contributed to the creation of this book.
Obviously, I owe the saturation divers of the Test Operations Group a huge debt of gratitude, since they supplied the raw material from which I drew the profiles and personalities of the saturation dive team in this book. It was my greatest privilege to have served with them.
My friend Michele patiently listened to me read each chapter, stopping me when my arcane terminology got in the way of the story, and asking clarifying questions when I assumed too much background knowledge for my readers.
My son Jason made some cogent observations from his time as an Officer in the Navy. His personal experience helped me keep the details accurate.
Most significantly, my wonderful wife, Jill, whom I first met just a few years after the events in this book, and who finally consented to marry me nearly thirty years later, pored over each chapter with her discerning engineer's eye. She kept my timeline honest, and made sure that regular readers could understand fully what actually transpired during the course of Operation Ivy Bells.
Jill's daughter, Selena, and twin sons, Arthur and Robert, also read the manuscript, and provided their insights.
Ed Offley, who penned the Foreword, offered to proof the final manuscript. He gave me his insights based on three decades of reporting on, and writing about, the Navy and submarines. Ed's inputs made Operation Ivy Bells a much better read.
A tip of the hat to Gary McCluskey for supplying illustrations where nothing was otherwise available. Gary created these beautiful illustrations from my words and sketches. He also turned the cover from a sketch and several ideas into the breath-taking scene that graces the front of this book
It goes without saying that any remaining omissions, errors, and mistakes fall directly on my shoulders.
Robert G. Williscroft, PhD
Centennial, Colorado
September, 2014
Foreword
For nearly a half-century, one of the greatest sagas of the sea has remained an untold story — until now. At the height of the Cold War, a small and elite group of U.S. Navy nuclear submariners and deep-sea divers pulled off one of the most ambitions clandestine intelligence-gathering operations in history.
Using the converted nuclear submarine USS Halibut as an operating platform, a team of Navy divers, sometime in the early 1970s, was able to place a wiretapping pod around a Soviet military communications cable deep inside the Sea of Okhotsk. The pod successfully intercepted critical communications between the Soviet Pacific Fleet base at Petropavlovsk Kamchatskiy and other bases on the mainland including Vladivostok and Magadan. On a second mission, the team was able to deploy a massive six-ton, plutonium-powered replacement pod that sucked up Soviet communications for months at a time. Despite disclosure of that particular operation a decade later by a turncoat inside the National Security Agency, the diver-spies and their nuclear submarine brethren continued to carry out similar missions elsewhere well into the 1990s — and probably beyond.
Operation Ivy Bells, as the initial mission was called, comprised more than a feat of silent stealth beneath the waves. It was also an incredible accomplishment of a daring — and dangerous — submergence technique known as saturation diving. Navy deep-sea divers "pressed" down to depths of several hundred feet in a pressure chamber attached to the Halibut's hull, breathing an exotic gas mixture of helium (which replaced nitrogen that would become toxic to the human body at these depths) and a small amount of oxygen (since the normal amount of oxygen would also become toxic at these depths). They were able to operate at depths far beyond the maximum for ordinary deep-sea gear and scuba tanks. The intelligence they gathered played a major part in America's Cold War victory.
News reports since the Cold War ended have occasionally hinted at the barest outlines of Operation Ivy Bells and subsequent missions, but revealed few details of what it was actually like for a Navy diver to risk capture or death while planting a sensor pod or retrieving Soviet missile nosecone fragments literally under the feet of the Cold War adversary. In July 2000, Puget Soundings, a newsletter of the United States Submarine Veterans Bremerton Base, inadvertently let slip one new marker of just how important the sailors of USS Halibut — another spy sub, USS Seawolf, and later spy subs USS Parche, and USS Jimmy Carter — were to America's Cold War efforts. Two of the guest speakers at the Howard Johnson Motor Lodge in Bremerton, Washington, were former CIA Director Robert Gates, and world-famous techno-thriller novelist Tom Clancy. In remarks to the reunion of Parche sailors — the descendants two decades later of the Halibut team — Clancy stated, "The point of the (U.S. Navy's) lance killed the (Soviet) dragon … and you were the point of the lance." Gates went even further, praising the veterans for all their efforts, where "every mission (was) a life-and-death mission…. I know who you are and I know what you did, and I am honored to be here with you tonight."
Thanks to Robert Williscroft, those interested in Cold War history can now relive the missions of the Halibut and its dedicated crew as they undertook two daring operations to penetrate Soviet military communications and to retrieve vital physical evidence of the Soviet missile program. While this book is a novel, with composite characters and some events compiled from stories from former colleagues, it is far from a totally fictional account. As a young Navy officer, Williscroft served both as a nuclear submariner and later became involved as a saturation diver with the Navy's Submarine Development Group One, which carried out the daring spy missions deep inside Soviet waters. Much of Operation Ivy Bells comes from Williscroft's own experiences, or that of his close comrades.
You won't be able to put this book down!
Ed Offley
Panama City Beach, Florida
August, 2014