The Galloping Ghost (36 page)

Similarly, Fluckey's pride in the original
Barb
drew Clarey's scorn whenever the rear admiral was not around. One day in Pearl Harbor the vice admiral was walking down a dock with an associate, not realizing Gene was trailing behind. He overhead Clarey say that he was sick and tired of hearing about the
Barb,
that he hoped never to hear about that boat again. “This totally surprised Gene,” recalled “Tuck” Weaver. Fluckey hoped the remark would not have repercussions for his career. But there were hints. Said Duncan of those years in Pearl Harbor, “Anything Gene wanted to change was something Chick had put in place. Gene couldn't win.”

In taking charge of the nuclear attack boats, the SSNs, Fluckey was unlike many predecessors in the way he met his responsibilities, even at great personal risk. Such was the case when he flew from Pearl Harbor to a Pacific Missile Range ship that was working with the
Plunger
to test the performance of the Navy's experimental SubRoc missile, a nuclear-tipped missile designed to be launched from a torpedo tube of a nuclear submarine.

From the test range ship, Fluckey and his entourage were lowered in a long boat for the crossing in heavy seas to the
Plunger
. Twenty-foot rollers prevented them from coming alongside, however. “I called over a megaphone to the submarine: ‘If we swim over, can you pick us up?'” the rear admiral later recounted. “They manned the sail bridge with lines and one at a time we swam over and they picked us up.”

Two days later, after the tests had been completed, Fluckey and his staff needed to get back to the mother ship. However, seas were still rough and again the long boat couldn't get near enough to the submarine to take on its passengers. Not to be dissuaded, the admiral got on the phone to the pilot of a helicopter hovering overhead. The group would dive into the ocean, where the aircraft would dangle a line to pick them up one at a time.

“I was the first one and I swam out about a hundred yards,” recalled the fifty-one-year-old commander.

To young submarine officers, the
Plunger
story contributed to the legend of Gene Fluckey, the “Galloping Ghost of the China Coast.” His reputation for valor and ingenuity preceded him wherever he went. Many young officers looked on him with great reverence, having studied his war patrols in classes at the academy. R. Michael Henzi, class of 1966, was one of them.

“I was attached to SubPac during my first class cruise in the summer of 1965,” he recalled.

Two weeks later Henzi was at the Pearl Harbor officers' club when he noticed Fluckey in the pool with his granddaughter Gail, who had flown in from Maryland for a visit. “The admiral was trying to teach his small granddaughter how to swim. I overheard him say to the little girl, ‘No, no. You
have to make yourself
positively
buoyant.' The instruction was spoken like a true submariner.”

The rear admiral's motto in his two-year command was “Think Deep.” He broadcast it everywhere he went. At the launch of the Polaris submarine
Mariano G. Vallejo
(USBN-658) on 23 October 1965 at the Mare Island naval shipyard in California, the commander referred to it in a welcoming address to the boat's officers and crew. “The noblest thing that you and your life-giving crew can do is to serve the cause of freedom well. You will come to understand our submarine force motto: ‘Think Deep.' Your deployment arena will be some 80 million square miles of ocean. Your survivability is assured, for no enemy can afford the size force, or even man such a force, to find you, as you intelligently rove the lonely dark abyss of the ocean in deepest secrecy.”

It was this certainty of invulnerability that convinced Fluckey nuclear war between the superpowers was improbable. In an address in San Diego to three hundred Navy League guests at a submarine anniversary celebration in June 1966, he minced no words. “I have no fear of a direct confrontation with the Russians. We will have no full-blown nuclear war because there will always be the avenging angel,
Polaris
.”

The growing war in Vietnam, however, was another matter. He warned that communism was on the move in Southeast Asia. Referring to demonstrations against President Lyndon Johnson because of a peacetime draft and continuing buildup of U.S. military forces in South Vietnam, he listed the consequences of a pullout. Thousands of South Vietnamese would be massacred. Communist aggression would spread throughout the world, weakening smaller nations no longer trusting American promises. A “pincer” move would be made against India and Pakistan. Finally, “China would become the colossus of the East. The few remaining democracies would soon have their backs to the wall against this preponderance of the earth's population and raw material. We would be fighting for our very survival.” He added, “I would like to know where the people who want us to withdraw would like us to dig in our new position—the Tijuana border? Vancouver? Niagara Falls?”

Fluckey drew a standing ovation.

Back in Hawaii, Admiral and Mrs. Fluckey attended a submarine officers' ball at the Kahala Hilton. The sub base and much of Hawaii awaited the arrival of the latest boomer, the USS
Kamehameha
(SSBN-642), named for Hawaii's most famous native king. Admiral Fluckey was relinquishing command the following morning to return to Washington. He and his wife entertained VIPs at a cocktail party in the presidential suite to say aloha to the many friends they had made. The suite was jammed to capacity with admirals, generals, colonels, captains, and civilians. Said one officer of the
crush of well-wishers, “It looks a little like a submarine.” Even the elevator was stuffed to capacity. Rear Adm. E. Alvey Wright, commanding officer of the shipyard, joked on the way up, “There's some pitch and yaw here!”

After returning to D.C., Gene Fluckey became director of naval intelligence for two years at a time when the Vietnam War was becoming a political quagmire and civil unrest was spreading at home. The admiral, the Navy's ultimate Cold Warrior, despised what he called “hippies, kooks, and peaceniks heavily aided, abetted, and tainted by the Communists.” When they demonstrated outside the Pentagon in the fall of 1967, he waded into their midst to argue his point of view to no avail. “I went home and washed my dogs. Incidentally, while I was there, two of the hippies got married in a bathtub—it was a double ring ceremony,” he later quipped in addressing the naval Reserve Intelligence Division in Atlanta, Georgia.

In that speech, Fluckey discussed the worldwide threat that Soviet naval power represented. “The Soviet naval war game is now a global fact of life. Wherever there is a demonstrably strategic sphere, wherever there is an obvious tactical area and another nation's reason for being there, there also is the Soviet navy.” Fluckey drew particular attention to Russian operations in the Mediterranean Sea. “In the past four years Soviet operations in the Mediterranean grew from sporadic and seasonal small-scale appearances to the continuous presence of some thirty-five to forty naval ships in recent months. This force now generally comprises four to six submarines, some fourteen surface combatant ships, and a dozen or so auxiliaries and support ships. . . . This naval strength has taken on the appearance of permanence. You no doubt have read of their increasing visits to certain Arab ports as well as their constant attempts to shadow or harass units of the Sixth Fleet.”

The cutting edge between East and West did appear to be the Mediterranean. For Gene Fluckey, that represented opportunity. He still sought to move up to vice admiral. The way seemed clear to do just that—by returning to Portugal as the first commander of NATO's expanded Iberian area Atlantic operations. But there was hidden risk for him as a target for assassination.

Developments in Europe and the Mediterranean were ominous when Admiral and Mrs. Fluckey arrived in Portugal in 1968 after an absence of fourteen
years. Mobile atomic missiles had been deployed in East and West Germany in an “I-dare-you” standoff between the Warsaw Pact and NATO. Soviet, Polish, East German, Bulgarian, and Hungarian troops had invaded Czechoslovakia to put down a separatist movement, and the Russian buildup of naval forces in the Mediterranean continued. The threat of a possible nuclear showdown between East and West seemed to be intensifying. NATO, reeling, issued a warning. “Clearly any Soviet intervention directly or indirectly affecting the situation in Europe or in the Mediterranean would create an international crisis with grave consequences,” announced alliance Secretary General Manlio Brosio of Italy.

Part of NATO's response to all these events was to initiate a separate, consolidated command called IBERLANT to guard the strategic Strait of Gibraltar and important Atlantic shipping lanes running north and south along the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa. Admiral Fluckey's objective was to unify British, Portuguese, and American forces in an oblong box extending from Portugal's northern border five hundred miles west into the Atlantic Ocean, then south to the Tropic of Cancer—410,000 square miles of ocean. Through this sector passed most of Western Europe's oil supply as well as commodities from South America, Africa, and Mediterranean nations. Washington-based newspaper columnist Holmes Alexander described the importance of the admiral's mission after a visit to Portugal. “The Soviet and the Warsaw Pact nations have us out-manned along most of the land-borders, have us outgunned in intercontinental missiles and have us checkmated with a politico-military maritime crunch inside the Mediterranean basin. But just west of Gibraltar, where the Atlantic begins, it's still anybody's ball game.” In response to questioning by Alexander, Fluckey replied, “There's been a change in NATO thinking. It was oriented toward the Iron Curtain but now it's swinging to the South Atlantic.”

The most overt sign of this was Portugal's decision to build and pay for a sprawling, two-story NATO headquarters to house Fluckey's command on the site of abandoned eighteenth-century Fort Gomes Freire, situated on a rocky prominence overlooking the Tagus River southwest of Lisbon near the river's confluence with the Atlantic. The headquarters was to be Portugal's contribution to NATO, and would include a cobweb of subterranean intelligence bunkers. In the meantime, a temporary operations center with a skeletal staff of fifteen Portuguese, British, and American officers had been established within a leased walled villa in Sintra, a storied borough twelve miles west of Lisbon on the Atlantic Ocean.

NATO could not have found a more beautiful setting than Sintra, a mountainous dreamscape of fairytale castles, sky-blue lakes where black
swans cavort, spectacular palaces and villas, incredible gardens, precipitous roads and lookouts, swirling mists, thick forests, and foliage, flowers and fauna of infinite variety long celebrated by poets and writers. Over the centuries a parade of conquerors—Romans, Spaniards, Moors, Lusitanians, and even a Norwegian king—had imbued Sintra with exotic architecture and art from Europe, Egypt, North Africa, and the Orient. Five extravagant palaces, a Moorish castle, and a peculiar monastery made entirely from cork and stone dominate the mountaintops. Flourishes of Italian glassware, Chinese screens, Austrian porcelain, marble fountains, blue Moorish tiles, and Gothic archways add to the enchantment.

The Fluckeys had discovered the beauty and gracious living of Sintra years earlier when Gene was naval attaché in Lisbon. To be back, to be in Sintra and standing in line to become a three-star vice admiral at the commissioning of COMIBERLANT's new headquarters would be a perfect capstone to his career—or so it seemed to Gene Fluckey at the time.

In Lisbon the Fluckeys were at the top of the social order and had renewed many friendships. They purchased a quinta (pronounced “queen ta”)—a small farmette—on the drier southwestern face of the Sintra Mountains just below Pena Palace, a lavish medieval castle governing the crest. The quinta with its gardens and woods was owned by a widow who had fallen on tough times and couldn't keep up with maintenance. The domicile was remote despite its location near the castle, a popular tourist attraction. With help from local craftsmen, Gene envisioned restoring the estate to its former glory.