Only a year before, her question would have been unthinkable, but improved relations and eased tensions between the two governments offered her promise of learning the truth. Looking into their eyes as if searching for an answer, she took a deep breath before she spoke. Her English was nearly perfect, with little dialect to reveal her origin within the vast reaches of the former Soviet Union.
“Could you tell me what has happened to my husband?” The simple question seemed to burn through the air with a raging intensity. Her tone reflected the strength of feelings contained for many years.
“Your husband?” the tallest officer said after a pause. He was polite and showed the proper degree of interest.
“He was the captain of a submarine,” she answered, her voice now carrying a trace of pride. “He was the commanding officer of the Soviet submarine PL-751, in the Pacific Ocean.”
“The PL-751?” another officer asked, his voice mildly curious.
“You people called it an Echo submarine. My husband and the PL-751 never returned to Vladivostok.”
Their expressions did not change, and they showed no indication of any knowledge about the matter placed before them. As each looked to another for an answer, the firm voice of the older man on the left answered for them all.
“I am sorry, but we do not know about this submarine or about your husband.”
Gazing across the room, the officer saw several tuxedoed men standing near the hors d’oeuvres table. He gestured with his drink in their direction.
“Perhaps if you speak to the American Consulate, they will be able to assist you.”
The officer noticed her eyes beginning to redden and a look of despair on her face. “I am truly sorry,” he repeated with genuine feeling as she turned and walked away.
IN MOSCOW ON THE COLD morning of 29 March 1966, the Twenty-Third Congress of the Soviet Communist Party convened at the Kremlin for the first time since the death of Nikita S. Khrushchev. In his inaugural speech before the five thousand delegates of the Communist Party’s supreme ratifying body, First Secretary Leonid I. Brezhnev called for world Communist unity as he acknowledged the rapidly deteriorating relations with the United States. He protested the “bloody war by the United States against the people of South Vietnam” and called upon the Soviet military forces to continue their achievements in science and technology.
The delegates reviewed the Soviet report on military power that underscored the increasing size of their armed forces, including the Red Navy’s impressive submarine fleet. They affirmed the strategy of maintaining 400 nuclear and conventional submarines in four major flotillas around the world, and they agreed to continue building their submarine fleet by 10 percent each year. The Pacific Fleet, second in size only to the massive Northern Fleet, contained 105 Soviet submarines. Many of these were of the lethal nuclear missile-carrying “E” (Echo) class that regularly patrolled the ocean waters east of Kamchatka Peninsula.
In contrast to this massive Soviet armada of submarine military power, the United States Navy possessed only 70 nuclear submarines; 41 of these vessels were designed to fire nuclear missiles and most of the others were fast-attack hunter/killer submarines. One of them, however, differed from all other submarines throughout the world.
In the spring of 1966 at the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard near Honolulu, Hawaii, civilian shipyard workers finished a year of intense refitting on board the nuclear submarine USS Viperfish (SSN 655). As the Twenty-Third Congress of the Soviet Communist Party adjourned its meeting on 8 April 1966, the U.S. Navy completed the process of gathering together a volunteer crew of 120 men to serve on board the Viperfish. This crew of submariners, civilian scientists, and nuclear systems operators began one of the most remarkable top secret military operations in the history of the United States.
The code name of this special mission was Operation Hammerclaw.
THERE WAS NO WAY for me to know that the nuclear submarine Viperfish was a spy ship when I received my orders to report for sea duty.
The terse sentences on the order sheet arrived on a miserable day, a New London kind of day. Freezing winter winds blasted across the Connecticut submarine base, and the driving rain brought torture to anyone who dared to go outside. The drab buildings of the civilian city across the gray Thames River looked like dirty blocks of clay stacked along the water’s edge. They seemed to fit perfectly with the dismal weather and the depressing area that must have been filled with people wanting to escape somewhere-anywhere. As a native Southern Californian who had just completed three years of submarine and nuclear reactor training, I not only craved a warmer world but I was also eager to begin the real work of running a reactor on a submarine at sea.
I had turned in my “dream sheet” weeks before. Created to give direction to the complex process of assigning personnel to duty stations, the dream sheet at least gives the illusion that the Navy tries to match each sailor’s desired location with the available slots throughout the world. I had “wished” for the USS Kamehameha, a Polaris submarine based in Guam and skippered by someone I had known before joining the Navy. The island of Guam appealed to me because of its warm water and proximity to Hawaii, in addition to the fact that it was as far away as I could get from the submarine base at New London.
I paced back and forth within the protective interior of the musty barracks and studied the printed sheet of orders before me. The words were tiny, and I found it remarkable that such small words contained information that defined my future for the next three years: “You will report to the commanding officer of the USS Viperfish SSN 655 at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.”
“The Viperfish?” I asked into the empty barracks. “What kind of a ship is the Viperfish?”
Studying the orders, I searched for any kind of clue to define the vessel. She was a fast-attack nuclear submarine; the SSN (submersible ship, nuclear) before her hull number 655 left no doubt about that. Clearly, however, the Polaris option was out. The Viperfish was in Hawaii, the land of beautiful women and the aloha spirit, the land of warmth and excellent surf, the land that-compared with New London-was close to heaven. I scanned the order sheet again for clues about the future mission of the submarine.
To my delight, my bespectacled machinist mate friend in submarine school, Jim McGinn, was also assigned to the Viperfish. Looking more like a scientist than a sailor with his wispy red hair and round glasses, Jim projected a deservedly scholarly image. He excitedly popped through the barracks door that afternoon, as he waved his orders, and asked me if I knew anything about this thing called the Viperfish.
“I heard we’re the only guys from our class to get this boat* It must be some kind of a fast-attack,” I said, offering my best educated guess. We had just completed hundreds of lectures in submarine school, and we knew there were two primary types of nuclear submarines. The majority were the SSNs, the sleek, high-performance fast-attack submarines that engaged in war games of seeking and tracking enemy submarines on the high seas. The others were the “boomers,” big, slow submarines, such as the Kamehameha, that functioned as submergible strategic ballistic missile launching platforms. Because the Viperfish did not carry the SSBN designation of a boomer, she had to be one of the Navy’s hot fast-attack submarines.
“But