Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew

BLIND MAN'S BLUFF

BLIND
MAN'S
BLUFF

SHERRY SONTAG

AND

CHRISTOPHER DREW

WITH ANNETTE LAWRENCE DREW

TO THE MEN WHO LIVED THESE TALES, AND ESPECIALLY TO THOSE WHO SHARED THEM WITH US.

"After all, submarining has always been a game of blind man's bluff. "

A top submarine admiral

Lyrics from "The Ballad of Whitey Mack," an ode to a submarine captain by Tommy Cox, submariner and spook

   There was something about Commander Charles R. MacVean that had a way of inspiring legend. It wasn't the way he looked: tall, a little chunky and in his late thirties already crowned by a thatch of thinning gray hair. It was his sense of humor and his humanity. This was a man who could stand beneath a hatch after being doused with a column of water, deadpan and still chewing his dripping pipe. This was also the man who had just led the nuclear attack submarine USS Seawolf on one of the most dangerous operations of the cold war. She had slipped inside a Soviet sea and eavesdropped on the enemy in a way most other subs could never dare. Now, finally home, MacVean was enjoying the chance to get some sleep.

The phone rang. MacVean snapped awake and checked the time, 2:00 A.M. The call was from Navy headquarters in Washington, D.C., and the voice on the other end of the line belonged to a somewhat embarrassed and confused Navy officer.

"There's a sailor from your ship at a bar called the Horse and Cow," he said, "and he's trying to call the president to tell him what a great job you did and how great you are. Could you go get him out of the phone booth?"

MacVean knew just where the Horse and Cow was, as did all of his men. This was the submariners' haunt in Vallejo, California, a darkened place decorated with pieces of just about every sub that ever steamed through the Pacific toward the Soviet Union, a place where men built themselves up for what they would face out at sea and where they celebrated survival when they made it home. The commander rousted his chief of the boat, and together they drove over to the spot isolated along a highway service road and pulled into a park ing lot that was more potholes than pavement. Sure enough, they found a somewhat inebriated member of Seawolfs crew, lodged in a phone booth, still trying to talk his way past a White House operator. MacVean got his man off the phone, then bought him a beer. MacVean was that kind of captain. Besides, he knew the guy deserved one. They all did.

This happened in the mid-1970s, but it could have occurred at almost any time during the cold war. MacVean and his men were, after all, part of an intelligence operation unlike any other in the annals of American history. For more than four decades, under the cover of classifications even higher than top-secret, the United States sent tens of thousands of men in cramped steel cylinders on spy missions off the rugged coasts of the Soviet Union. There, the job was to stay hidden, to gather information about the enemy's intentions and its abilities to wage war at sea. By their very nature, submarines were perfect for this task, designed to lurk nearly silent and unseen beneath the waves. They quickly became one of America's most crucial spy vehicles.

No other intelligence operation has embraced so many generations of a single military force, no other has consistently placed so many Americans at risk. As many as 140 men on each sub, several subs at a time, nearly every man who ever served on a U.S. attack submarine was sent to watch Soviet harbors and shipyards, monitor Soviet missile tests, or shadow Soviet subs. Several boats, such as Seawolf, were specially equipped to tap cables or retrieve pieces of Soviet weapons that had been fired in tests and had fallen to the bottom of the sea. No one was involved who didn't volunteer.

These submarine spies stood as lonely sentries on the frontlines of a war that was waged fiercely by both sides. Only in this war the most important weapons weren't torpedoes, but cameras, advanced sonar, and an array of complicated eavesdropping equipment. And while these men rode some of the most technologically daunting craft ever built, their goals were deceptively simple: "Know thy enemy," learn enough to forestall a surprise attack, to prevent at almost any cost a repeat of Pearl Harbor in a nuclear age.

In silence and stealth, but most importantly in secrecy, attack subs carried out as many as two thousand spy missions as they kept track of Soviet submarines. Most crucial was tracking the boomers-Soviet subs longer than football fields that carried up to twenty ballistic missiles. These missiles could launch up to ten nuclear warheads each, and a single missile sub could create a firestorm greater than the combined power of all the bombs dropped in World War II. That these arsenals were portable and hidden at sea made them much less vulnerable and much more dangerous than bombs designed to be sent on planes or launched from fixed spots on land.

There was only one good way to counter missiles carried on submarines, and that was with other subs. It was of little wonder then that learning about these missile subs and trailing them became the single biggest priority of the U.S. Navy. This was worth almost any risk, this was the reason submariners were sent out again and again. This is what motivated the decades-long game of "blind man's bluff." It was in this quest to track Soviet advances and Soviet subs that men traded their homes, the sun, and any illusion of privacy for the crowded, windowless craft and felt their way through the exotic ocean terrains that cover two-thirds of the globe. They traversed down to the Mediterranean, up to the icy hazards of the Arctic, and often straight into Soviet territorial waters. They lived with barely a view of the oceans and seas they traveled through, save for what they could glimpse through the glass of a periscope or imagine from electronic flickers playing upon sonar screens and oceans of static scratching through sonarmen's headsets.