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

was possibly the result of an explosion from hydrogen gas during battery charging operations, an explosion during the handling of missile fuel, or human error as the fatigued crew pushed themselves and their submarine beyond the limit.

The captain and crew immediately struggled to save their ship as she took on increasingly high-pressure water and slid deeper into the ocean toward her test depth. Within several seconds of the time when she roared past her maximum designed safe depth, the waters of the northwestern Pacific Ocean were filled with the popcorn noises of rupturing pipes and bulkheads as the PL-751 accelerated through her crush depth and delivered her entire crew to the bottom of the ocean, 19,200 feet beneath the surface.

The Soviet Union made no announcement to the world about the sinking of the PL-751, and the United States released no information about the sounds that had found their way into the SOSUS microphones at the bottom of the Pacific. During the next several days, American intelligence forces monitoring Soviet ship and aircraft movements recorded an unprecedented number of radio message intercepts originating from Petropavlovsk- Kamchatskiy on the Kamchatka Peninsula and Vladivostok. Also, during this time, satellite and other highly classified sensing systems recorded a dramatically increased number of Soviet naval and air search operations traversing the routes of U.S. task forces patrolling in the North Pacific.

The explosions, carrying up and down the thermoclines, continued to vibrate the hull of the Viperfish, but we tried to ignore the noises and the implications of their presence. Occurring at irregular intervals for several weeks, they disrupted our sleep, frazzled our nerves, and made everybody feel miserable. During this time, we relentlessly pursued our search of the ocean bottom. As the weeks stretched into a full month with no sign of success, morale plummeted even more. The most ominous sign of widespread discontent was the oppressive silence that began to emerge throughout the Viperfish as the Fish found nothing, the explosions continued, and our hope for success waned. When the crew was happy, everybody groused about everything; when the crew was depressed, silence prevailed. The Viperfish's crew was becoming silent.

As we roamed our search area, the civilians and Special Project crewmen debated the best way to scan the bottom of the ocean for our target without missing any areas. Some previous experience with towed devices, similar to the Fish, had been documented in the archives of U.S. search projects, such as that by the USS Mizar, the oceanographic research ship that had found a nuclear bomb off Spain, but there was almost no experience with a submarine towing miles of cable.

Is it best to move in a straight line back and forth across the search area, they wondered, with the potential of losing the 'lineup' during each complicated turnaround procedure? Should the submarine encircle a central point by starting with a huge circle that gradually becomes smaller and smaller? Maybe the circles should start at a central point and expand by ever- increasing diameters. Or would it be better to make equal-sized circles overlapping in a single direction that would result in a wide swath of searched ocean bottom, hopefully performing in such a manner as to rule out any missed areas.

There were no books on the subject and little information beyond the Mizar data. Most of us were vaguely aware of the Mizar's successful operations, which included finding the USS Thresher in 1964, but the Mizar was fundamentally different from the Viperfish: she was a surface craft. Searching the bottom of the ocean in a vessel heaving around on the surface is, in some ways, more of a challenge than it is in a submarine that remains at a fixed depth below the surface.

At least, in a submarine, depth control is usually possible to predict and maintain. Because it was essential for the Fish to remain a specific distance above the bottom of the ocean, in order to prevent its destruction by contact with terrain irregularities, precise submarine depth control was mandatory. Alternatively, if the Viperfish pulled the Fish too high above the bottom, its ability to 'see' anything below it would be compromised. As long as no emergencies developed that would require sudden changes in depth, a silent submarine was clearly the vessel best suited for a secret search of the ocean's bottom.

The speed of the vessel also dramatically affected the altitude of the Fish above the ocean floor; if the Viperfish inadvertently slowed for a few seconds, the Fish could easily sink and be destroyed against rocks or ridges. Cable length had a nearly immediate effect on the Fish's altitude, and careful control of the spool rotation was of top priority. Reactor power and turbogenerator power were essential to operation of the Special Project's computer system that analyzed information from the Fish. Finally, the Viperfish's buoyancy, depth, and direction, which were controlled by the ballast control operator, the planesmen, and the helmsmen, required close communication and teamwork.

Success, however, continued to be elusive. As time passed, we all became increasingly frustrated. We experimented with different methods of moving the boat, and we varied circular patterns and Fish elevations. Each new trial consumed days at a time and resulted in nothing.

After all of these failures, Robbie Teague brought a stack of stunningly clear 8x10 black-and-white photographs to the crew's dining area to show us life at twenty thousand feet below the surface, complements of the Fish. Bizarre bat-like structures stuck out from the bodies of some fish, and others had ornaments clinging to their faces. Other structures resembling slugs lay on the bottom; Robbie called them sea cucumbers. As we passed around the pictures, we expressed appropriate interest in the fauna, complimented Robbie's photography and the clarity of the images, and asked if the civilians had found the object of our search.

Robbie's smile faded. 'Not yet, but we're still looking.'

'Are we still circling, or have we started a new pattern? If we can't find it here, why can't we look somewhere else?' Richard Daniels asked, his voice sounding tense.

'Because this is where it's supposed to be,' Robbie said, almost inaudibly.

'Tell us what it is, and we'll become more enthusiastic. Is it a UFO?' Daniels asked.

'They don't have me in the loop. Can you understand that?'

'A nuclear warhead?'

'It's secret, guys, secret.'

'Nobody on the Viperfish knows what we're looking for?'

'Nope, nobody I know around here. I just develop the pictures, and-'

'Why is this thing so important?'

'It's classified, it-'

'Right, right, but if we can't find it, then where it's supposed to be doesn't mean much.'

'Okay,' Robbie said softly, 'you're right. However, if we keep looking, we do have a chance. And they tell me it's important.'

Robbie gathered his pictures in the silence that followed and, without another word, returned to the hangar compartment — his diplomatic mission of fostering Special Project enthusiasm a notable failure.

As we cruised around and around and back and forth and as morale continued to slide, a shocking event occurred one morning in the crew's dining area. We were all eating freshly cooked oatmeal, when one of the forward crew machinists violently spit the cereal all over the dining area table and jolted the men around him.

'Goddamn it all, where's the cook?' the man hollered as everybody began to examine their own cereal.

'Right here,' Marty Belmont said, looking concerned as he walked up to the table. 'What's the problem?'

Marty was a chubby, pleasant little fellow who worked as hard as anybody on the boat and did a good job. His work was especially important because the meals were almost the only variability in our day-to-day lives, and good food meant a happy, or at least a happier, crew. The budget for food on submarines exceeds that of any other branch of the Navy. Regularly taking advantage of that fact, Marty tried to make the food as tasty as possible.

'Marty, there's goddamn worms in the goddamn cereal!' the machinist hollered, spitting out more food. Immediately, every-body in the dining room, including myself, simultaneously blasted food from our mouths. The tables were covered with a layer of partially chewed cereal.

'Jesus Christ, Marty, don't you check for bugs in the food?' another man yelled.

'Did Robbie give you these animals from the bottom of the ocean?'

I spit out some more food and carefully examined the bowl cereal in front of me. Thousands of tiny white worms, crawling among the grains of warm cereal, exactly matched the color of oatmeal-a perfect camouflage, unnoticed by the rest of us. It occurred to several of us, as we groused and grumbled and generally felt miserable, that the cereal had actually tasted pretty good, a little meatier than usual perhaps, but the flavor was definitely unique.