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Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage
By Sherry Sontag & Christopher Drew
Public Affairs, 1998
349 pages; $25.00
The Silent War: The Cold War Battle Beneath the Sea
By John Pina Craven
Simon & Schuster, 2001
304 pages; $26.00
Norman Polmar
THE COLD WAR WAS IN LARGE PART "fought" under water. U.S. and Soviet submarines trailed each other, strategic missile submarines stood ready to bombard the enemy's homeland, subs of both nations gathered intelligence, and a variety of undersea vehicles attempted to locate and retrieve weapons and other military equipment from the ocean floor.
Published in 1998, Blind Man's Bluff, by investigative journalists Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew, was a trailblazing volume. It addressed many U.S. Navy operations that had never before appeared in the open press and provided details of other operations that had not been fully explained.
One of these previously untold stories was the navy's proposal to recover components from the Soviet missile submarine K-129, which sank in the North Pacific in 1968, by designing a 20,000-foot-capability submersible called Deep Submergence Search Vehicle (DSSV). But the Central Intelligence Agency took over the project and decided to bring up the entire submarine-history's deepest salvage effort. The CIA project, which used the salvage ship Hughes Glomar Explorer, was able to retrieve only the forward portion of the sub. Although the DSSV was never built (a significant loss to U.S. military and scientific endeavors), the navy still played a major role in the operation, deploying a specially modified nuclear submarine, the Halibut, which spent weeks at sea towing underwater cameras to locate the wreckage.
Sontag and Drew also discuss at length "Operation Ivy Bells," during which U.S. subs tapped Soviet seafloor communication cables and forayed into Soviet coastal waters to gather intelligence. The descriptions of these operations are fascinating, including the Tom Clancy-style account of the Halibut's mission to "bug" the communications cable running along the ocean floor between Petropavlovsk and the Siberian mainland. As the sub was anchored near the ocean floor, with several divers in the water working on the recording device, a storm blew up. After hours in a precarious situation, the Halibut's two anchor cables broke:
"There was no way the officers and crew manning the diving...