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

women who used LSD. After failing to register as a narcotics violator, Dr. Timothy Leary, former Harvard University professor and founder of the LSD religious cult, was arrested by U.S. Customs officials while promoting his beliefs on the use of LSD. New York City's Bellevue Hospital reported the admission of more than 130 LSD users, many suffering from profound terror, uncontrolled violence, and attempted homicide or suicide. A member of California's Neuropsychiatric Institute informed the American College Health Association in Washington, D.C., that 30 percent of the students in certain high schools had become established users of LSD.

In the Soviet Union, in spite of the numerous problems of radiation, detection, and maintenance of operational capability, the eventual success of the Echo II SSGN testing program established the guided missile submarine in the position of a third order of battle (behind the ballistic missile SSBN Hotel class and the converted Golf and Zulu ballistic missile submarines). When the testing was concluded and the vessels were finally ready for duty, the Soviet crews prepared for prolonged voyages and the fulfillment of their missions in the Pacific Ocean.

Keiko flew back for a few days on Oahu before the Viperfish left for sea to begin the final deep-sea testing of the Fish and the Special Project system. Her father had reluctantly agreed to our marriage, scheduled for June 1968, and she told me of the disruptions on the campus at USC caused by the antiwar protesters, who were now burning their draft cards and yelling, 'Hell no, we won't go!'

The two of us had some quiet time together, and Keiko came to the pier with the relatives of the crew to watch us leave for our prolonged patrol. I was already depressed about our separation. For Keiko to watch me go, in many ways, intensified the ordeal of leaving her.

We cleared the Pearl Harbor channel, dropped deep below the surface, and proceeded to the waters off the west coast of the island of Hawaii. The men in the hangar space, working vigorously to prepare our system for its test, checked the tiny high-strength wires welded together to form the cable, measured various test signals provided by the Fish, and tried to make everything work properly. We slowed to all ahead one-third at a depth of three hundred feet and lowered the Fish toward the bottom, nearly fifteen thousand feet below.

We assumed the usual condition of seemingly motionless existence, our little world of men and machinery moving back and forth over the various peaks, valleys, and plateaus at the bottom of the ocean as we gathered data from the Fish. After a week of testing the system, we rolled the cable back onto the spool just before the sonar operator reported that his BQS-4 sonar system had detected a nearby surface craft.

'Hammerclaw! Hammerclaw!' the underwater telephone voice from the ship blasted into the control center. This was the call sign designated for the Viperfish.

Captain Harris grabbed the microphone near the control center and called back a response. He informed the ship that the submarine code-named Hammerclaw was, in fact, nearby. We eased up to periscope depth; the captain and Lt. Comdr. Duane Ryack, the executive officer (XO), raised the two periscopes, and we waited for the beginning of the choreographed action, created weeks in advance of our rendezvous.

The plan was quite simple. The surface ship would bring a target with a characteristic shape into our vicinity and prepare to drop it to the bottom near the island of Hawaii. Because the shape could give away the nature of our future mission, it was classified top secret and enclosed in a huge sealed box on the deck of the vessel. A crane on the ship would lower the box into the water. When the bottom of the box was pulled away, the mystery object would disappear into the depths before the ship's crew had a chance to see it. We would search the bottom of the ocean with our Fish after the ship departed the area and, hopefully, identify the object's location and appearance.

Perhaps the plan was too simple. We continued to cruise slowly at a depth of sixty-five feet, as Captain Harris and the XO watched the ship through our periscopes and called out her every move to us.

'They have raised the box off the side of the ship and it is now being lowered to the water,' Captain Harris called. He clicked the periscope to higher power and narrowed his eyes. 'The box is now in the water, the release is imminent.'

A few moments passed, and Commander Ryack called out from the port periscope, 'They have released the object and they are lifting the box off the water.'

One of the officers suddenly exclaimed, 'Oh, my God!' as the other shouted, 'I cannot believe this…the target is floating.'

They stared at each other as a voice from the ship's radiotelephone boomed into our control center.

'Now, Hammerclaw, Hammerclaw! There will be a delay in the dropping of the target. Repeat, delay.'

The problem was the density of the object. Whoever had prepared it had neglected to determine whether the density of the thing was greater than the density of the ocean water it was to displace. Unfortunately for the secrecy of the entire operation, the object was too light to sink. The shape that nobody was supposed to see was floating at the side of the ship while the crane operators, deckhands, and everybody else stared at it.

After the thing had been fully observed by everyone on the ship, her crew hauled it back to the deck and set about furiously wrapping it with heavy chains and even a couple of anchors for added weight. When the object was finally covered with enough junk to sink a battleship, they shoved the entire mess overboard and it immediately sank out of sight. We heard a sad 'Farewell to Hammerclaw' over our underwater telephone as the ship turned away and prepared to take on board a naval intelligence team, scrambled to the area on an intercept vessel to address the massive breach of security. The word later filtered down to us that every man on the ship was interrogated in an intensive debriefing process during the Navy's struggle to negate security leaks that could compromise our mission.

We lowered the Fish thousands of feet out of the Viperfish and began searching the bottom again. Locked in our motionless world once again, we stood watches, ate our meals, watched movies, occasionally showered, and wondered what the shape could be.

Several of the crew and I were sitting in the dining area when photographer Robbie Teague walked in with a handful of 8 x 10 glossy black-and-white photos and an excited but secretive expression on his face. All of us liked Robbie; he was a small fellow with a quiet and pleasant manner. He conscientiously worked to generate the highest-quality pictures that our equipment could produce.

'What do you have there, Robbie?' Sandy Gallivan asked, look- ing at the photographs.

'Interesting pictures?' I chimed in.

'Dirty pictures from Tijuana?' Birken asked, with raised eyebrows and a grin.

Robbie laid the pictures on the table and we all gathered around.

'We have found our target!' he said, his voice charged with excitement. 'The guys in the hangar are pretty excited.'

As we looked at the pictures, Gallivan asked the obvious question.

'These are great pictures, Robbie, but where's the target?'

Robbie looked surprised and then offended. 'It's right there!' He pointed at the corner of the nearest picture. 'It's right next to the anchor and chain you can see here in the corner!'

'All I see is an anchor and chain,' I said.

'And mud.' Birken added.

Robbie straightened his short frame and tried to look indignant.

'You know we can't show you the actual target, the skipper won't allow it. It's top secret!' he said. 'But, we found it!'

'Great!' Birken said as he turned to leave the area. 'I'm going to hit the rack.'

'Robbie, what are we looking for?' I asked.

He pointed at his pictures again. 'The shape, the target, the thing we just-'

'Not that, Robbie, what is the real thing? What are we getting ready for?'

He studied Marc and me for a moment, and finally answered, 'Everything is so goddamn secret that even I don't know what we're doing. And I'm part of the Special Project team. Okay, I know the shape, but I don't think this thing is the real target. I think our real target, whatever it is that we are going to be looking for out there, has yet to be defined.'

He glanced around us, ensuring that the room was empty, and his voice dropped to a whisper. 'Even the civilians in the hangar don't know, if you can believe that. Even the officers in the wardroom don't know. The captain and the XO are the only ones who have a clue and sometimes I wonder if even they know the whole story. My guess is that this is a project in evolution.'

The next day, we lost the Fish. Two days later, we lost our nuclear reactor.