Spy Sub: A Top Secret Mission to the Bottom of the Pacific

by Roger C. Dunham

  On January 23, North Korean naval vessels attacked the spy ship USS Pueblo in international waters. Although the ship transmitted numerous radio calls for help during the 2½-hour attack, U.S. naval forces, located far to the south, were unable to provide assistance. An enlisted man was killed during the initial attack, as the commanding officer, Comdr. Lloyd M. Bucher, frantically struggled to clarify international law relating to "rights of retrieval" of the Pueblo's top secret equipment from the ocean floor while it was being jettisoned overboard. The North Koreans captured the Pueblo's crew of eighty-two men after they surrendered their ELINT (electronic intelligence) vessel.

  During the first half of that same year, the Israeli submarine Dakar sank in the Mediterranean, with a loss of sixty-nine men. The French submarine Minerve also sank in the Mediterranean, and another fifty-two men died. On 22 May, the USS Scorpion (SSN 589), while four hundred miles southwest of the Azores, suffered a "hot torpedo" disaster resulting from an explosion of the MK-37 device that became inadvertently "enabled" in her torpedo tube. The naval court of inquiry determined that, after the torpedo was ejected from the Scorpion, the fully armed weapon almost immediately struck the submarine at roughly amidships. The Scorpion dropped below her crush depth and sank in ten thousand feet of water. Ninety-nine American sailors died.

  Within three days of the loss of the Scorpion, the Soviet experimental nuclear submarine K-27 experienced a major accident, the details of which have never been fully revealed. Five servicemen on board the submarine were killed immediately, and the remaining crew members were hospitalized with serious injuries. Attempts were made to repair the submarine, but the damage was extensive and the vessel was finally scuttled, with its nuclear fuel still on board, near the island of Novaya Zemlya, east of the Barents Sea.

  Captain Harris was called to Washington, D.C., at about the time that the Hawaiian police pulled me over for having a cracked front windshield. It was just a tiny crack, I told the burly officers as they filled out the citation. It was minute, almost impossible to see. Besides, I added, there are so many people in Hawaii who drive cars with no front window.

  "You have a cracked window, sailor. You have to fix it," the larger policeman said, handing me the ticket.

  "But, officer," I pleaded, "I'm going to sea shortly, and we may be gone for a long time. Can I fix it when I get back?"

  "Ain't no big thing," the man said with classic Hawaiian non-chalance, "just stop by the local precinct and they'll clear you for your voyage." He smiled and added, "No problem, bruddah."

  As I drove around Honolulu and looked for the local precinct, Captain Harris was being interrogated by Admiral Rickover about the Viperfish's mission. Rickover had recently emerged victorious in his battle with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on the matter of developing a new class of submarine that later became known as the Los Angeles class. Now, however, Rickover was focusing his attention on the Viperfish.

  His questions to Captain Harris were specific and intense:

  What is the mission of the Viperfish?

  What is the submarine looking for?

  Who is in charge of the mission?

  Who allocated the money for the mission?

  As instructed by the directors of the Deep Submergence Office of the Pentagon, Harris deferred the first barrage of questions. Rickover asked more questions, and Harris deferred those. It was a "damned if you do/damned if you don't" situation for the captain; he could not disobey direct orders from the Pentagon, and he could not follow direct orders from the admiral. By the time Rickover finished his blasting and dismissed Harris from his office, the captain was on the long list of unfortunate individuals who had incurred the wrath of a man famous for a remarkably long memory, combined with a vindictive pattern of retribution.

  In the engine room of the Viperfish, a new chief petty officer, Gary Linaweaver, reported on board to take over Rossi's job as leader of the Reactor Control Division, a change all of us welcomed. Linaweaver was bright and savvy, a veteran of the Nautilus and Scamp, as well as the Polaris submarine Vallejo. He brought us a wide range of knowledge about nuclear reactor control systems and operations. Best of all, his jaw muscles didn't pulsate in a distracting manner when he talked to us, his biceps didn't throw the fear of God into anybody standing nearby, and he didn't look like he was ready to kill someone.

  The day before we were scheduled to leave Pearl Harbor, I discovered that somebody had painted over the large white "E" and "655" that had been prominent on the side of the Viperfish's sail.

  "Where's our 655?" I asked Kanen, as I walked across the brow and fired off the traditional two salutes to the colors and the top-side watch.

  "Painted over, gone," he said, simply.

  I studied the sail and discovered that a random pattern of dark gray camouflage paint also had been added to the black color over the sail and to the remainder of the superstructure.

  "We are becoming invisible," I commented as I climbed through the hatch leading to the control center.

  The stage was set for our departure. After nearly two years of preparation, we were ready to take the Viperfish to sea on a mission that still remained a complete mystery to almost the entire crew. There were no speeches by the captain or other officers about the days ahead-no rallying about a goal that must be reached or an objective that must be accomplished. The nukes were expected to keep the reactor systems on line for propulsion power and electricity. The men of the forward crew were expected to navigate and perform the standard submarine operations necessary for getting us safely there and back. The civilians in the hangar…well, nobody knew what the civilians in the hangar were going to do other than lower the Fish, look around the bottom of the ocean, and bring up the Fish when they were finished. At the time of departure, for all I knew, we were heading for the coast of Australia to study underwater reefs.

  Although I did not know it at the time, the mission of the Viperfish finally had become defined by a mysterious and unexpected disaster in waters far from the Hawaiian Islands. For the first time since I had reported on board the submarine, we were now on our way to search the bottom of the ocean for a specific top secret target that appeared to be extremely important to the United States. Our mission changed from one of establishing our capability of finding, undetected, any deep-sea target of choice to a defined and urgent mission of locating a specific target created by events and chosen by men far beyond the knowledge of the crew. This single fateful event in a distant ocean had transformed us from a vessel with remarkable capabilities to a submarine and a crew with a mission that would now take us into the deepest waters of the Pacific.

  We had prepared to leave Pearl Harbor, however, with spirits battered by the Vietnam War demonstrations and the turbulence across the country. As my parents had warned me, anybody wearing a uniform was viewed as a part of the Vietnam War. I had felt the resentments in the Berkeley bookstore, I had seen the obscene signs directed at me while I was in uniform, and I had watched young protesters throw garbage toward my car when they spotted my uniform.

  We strongly resented these demonstrations. An attack against our uniforms was viewed by us as an attack against our country, and the protesters, therefore, were a kind of enemy. Also, it seemed that the protesters were attempting to destroy the values that most of us felt were important and to move us toward eradication of our society's structure. The defense of that society was the very reason why most of us wore the uniform.

  The antimilitary sentiment created a mood of frustration that further shortened everybody's temper in the tight submarine quarters. We all had a sense of irritation and professional dissatisfaction because of society's widespread absence of approval. We knew little and could say nothing about our Special Project operation that might clarify the value of our work on the Viperfish, so nobody in the civilian world could understand why we would endanger our lives with a mission that couldn't possibly be more important than the war in Vietnam.

  We cast off our lines and p
ushed away from Pearl Harbor with the dejected feeling that we were serving an uncaring society. We also left with great caution, reinforced by the recent deaths of more than two hundred submariners around the world. Although we had received no official naval announcements about the multiple disasters, we knew that machinery had failed, submarine crews had possibly erred, and capable men had died. Even our involvement with a project that presumably had minimal potential for military conflict (although none of us was sure that this was the case) seemed to place us at considerable peril. We knew we were at risk just by the very nature of our work. The little wooden sign hanging in Captain Harris's stateroom-"O God, thy sea is so great and my boat is so small"-took on new and poignant meaning as we approached the great expanse of the Pacific Ocean.

  During the departure, I perched in front of the reactor control panel to scrutinize the various meters and watch for anything that could shut down the plant and stop our submarine dead in the water. I adjusted the reactor's control systems as we cleared Hammer Point, passed the Papa Hotel demarcation line, and powered across the surface of the ocean.

  In the cockpit of the sail, high above the Viperfish, Lieutenant Pintard was waiting for word from the captain. The large and jovial officer of the deck, studying the calm ocean in front of our bow, was on the lookout for any debris that could strike the tops of our periscopes during the submerging operation ahead. Captain Harris stood at his side and scanned the myriad of ships off the west coast of Oahu, while the two lookouts announced the various bearings and distances of the ships passing by. Behind the four men, the American flag flapped vigorously in the wind, the sound blending with the noises of churning ocean water and the distant rumbling sound of our propulsion system.

  "All ahead standard," Pintard ordered into the microphone under the rim of the cockpit. His voice carried down to the men at the diving station below and into the engine room's maneuvering area where we monitored the reactor and propulsion system. At the sound of the order, Marc Birken and Jim McGinn immediately began cranking their wheels toward the left to open the throttles.

  The whine of the turbines increased in intensity, and we all dutifully placed the black plastic sound guards over our ears to protect our hearing. From that moment on, if anybody in the engine room wanted to talk, he had to shout. For the most part, however, there was no conversation; we just sat in front of our panels and watched the maze of meters displaying the various conditions of the reactor and electrical systems throughout the boat.

  At the top of the sail, Captain Harris leaned over the side of the cockpit and studied the white wake that began to boil around and behind us as we answered the bell and increased our speed.

  "Ten seconds from the order and look at that!" he said, obviously impressed.

  "Nuclear power," Pintard said, reflecting on the obvious.

  "No clouds of black smoke, no delay."

  "Rickover would love it."

  "Let's take her down," the captain said. He stepped through the hatch and began the long climb down to the control center.

  "Aye, aye, sir," Pintard said as he and the two lookouts made a final scan of the horizon and the world around them.

  "Strike the colors and clear the bridge!" Pintard ordered.

  The two lookouts immediately lowered their binoculars, removed the American flag, and scrambled down the ladder. Following behind them, Pintard moved his large frame down the sixty-foot ladder with the knowledge that he would not see the sunlight again for at least two months.

  Inside the submarine, the captain watched the ocean ahead of us through the starboard periscope as the three men jumped off the ladder into the control room. One of the lookouts reached up to the lanyard attached to the hatch and vigorously pulled on it. With the resounding noise of steel against steel, the hatch slammed tightly against the pressure hull and closed off our last remaining opening to the outside world.

  "Control room hatch shut and dogged, sir!" the lookout hollered as he spun the wheel on the underside of the hatch.

  The chief of the boat, a short, sandy-haired man named Philip O'Dell, grabbed the microphone hanging near the diving station and announced, "Now, dive! Dive!"

  As the chief's voice echoed throughout the submarine, the lookouts eased into their cushioned seats and pushed forward on their airplane-like control wheels. The ballast control panel operator flipped switches across his panel to open valves and flood our external ballast tanks, thereby increasing the weight of the boat and sinking us down into the water. The Viperfish's bow dipped, and we assumed a 20-degree down-angle. The gentle rolling movement of the surface waves changed to the motionless sensation of losing contact with the rest of the world.

  "Like hanging in outer space," Svedlow commented from his seat next to me.

  "Inner space," Lieutenant Katz corrected him from his engineer's seat behind us. "At least we ain't going to be rolling any more, and nobody's going to get sick down here."

  We moved several hundred feet below the surface, not deep enough to worry about excessively increased ocean pressure but sufficiently deep to keep us below any surface ships. If we suddenly had to surface, collision with a moving ship was not likely. We would hear their engines and screws from several miles away and adjust our course accordingly.

  It was vastly more difficult to identify stationary objects on the surface, however, because we couldn't see them and we couldn't use our active sonar, which would give away our position to anybody listening. Our sonarmen, sitting in their "sonar shack" room near the control center, monitored the noises of various cruise liners passing above us. Undoubtedly, the ships were filled with vacationing tourists, admiring the approaching island of Oahu, who did not have a clue that a submarine holding 120 men was tracking them from below.

  Once we leveled out at running depth, Richard Daniels relieved me from the reactor control panel watch, and I was free to roam about the boat for the next eight hours. Because three qualified reactor operators were now on board, my life for the next two months would be composed of a seemingly endless number of twelve-hour segments, each consisting of four hours of watching the reactor control panel and eight hours of sleeping or wandering around the boat and wondering what to do next. During this entire time, we would remain submerged, as we waited for the Special Project team to gather whatever information the Fish could find and hoped that something good came of it all.

  We had come to accept that the captain and other officers would not tell us in what direction we were heading, where we were going, and what we were going to do when we got there. All of us knew we were going to be searching for something that was extremely secret. Surprisingly, nobody was much bothered by the fact that we were provided with no information. The crew, especially those in the engine room, were to remain almost entirely out of any tiny information loop that might exist. We did not need to know anything about the Special Project in order to do our jobs.

  Each man had his own regimen to counteract the boredom during his hours off watch. I had packed stacks of novels and correspondence courses in French and chemistry from the University of California into my bunk locker, and I planned to spend much of my free time reading or preparing lessons. The Viperfish also had about seventy-five full-length motion pictures stored in the dining area; after the evening meal, each movie was shown twice for the men off watch. Many of the movies were first-run features and were thoroughly entertaining, but many others had never reached the ticket-buying public and had subtitles accompanying strange stories that made little sense. Whether the movie was good or bad, we generated the usual continuous observations about everything, from the way an actress walked to the lines her lover whispered in tender moments of love. Nothing occurred in any movie that was too small or too trivial to deserve at least one comment from a member of the crew.

  On the second day out, one of the cooks discovered an old, dusty two-hour film reel showing landings of Regulus missiles. The Viperfish had previously fired Regulus missiles as her main purpose in life, an
d there was considerable interest in seeing the results of our boat's old missile days. Prior to the discovery of the movie, nobody on the boat was aware that the Navy ever landed missiles. We logically assumed that once the missile had been fired, it was simply destroyed on impact, along with the target. We all pulled up seats at the dining room "theater," turned out the lights, and hollered for the ancient film to roll.

  The entire movie was a repetition-the same thing, over and over. First, we saw the blue sky and an occasional palm tree or two waving in the breeze. Suddenly, two tiny specks appeared in the distance and approached the island at high speed. After a few seconds, we recognized a winged Regulus missile, with lowered wheels, closely followed by a Navy jet with a pilot struggling to control the Regulus with radio signals. The missile's engine was off as it maintained a high-speed glide in the direction of the runway.

  It was a silent movie, and there was no hint as to the source of either the missile or the jet. They both just came out of the sky, from specks to full size in about thirty seconds. No landmarks identified the island, which appeared to be a remote uninhabited coral reef. Throughout each sequence, the pilot of the jet endeavored to keep his slow-flying airplane from stalling, while he worked to bring the Regulus safely to the runway. We guessed it was a reclamation process of sorts, to salvage the Regulus missiles and perhaps to lower the cost of each test firing.

  As we silently watched, the first effort failed miserably. The missile, too far to the left of the runway, was aimed almost at the cameraman before it frantically moved to the other side in a manner that landed it straight into the trees. The next missile, controlled by another pilot, had a better chance. It appeared to be lined up correctly; however, just before its tiny wheels touched down, it began to waver and finally nosed into the asphalt in a spectacular crash that disassembled the thing all the way down the runway. The third missile touched down nicely, its wheels spinning furiously, and we all cheered just before it lifted back into the air and began bouncing wildly down to the end of the runway, where it crashed into the lava rocks. The fourth missile appeared briefly and then suddenly disappeared out of sight, presumably crashing into the ocean.