toward the seafloor. If Aluminaut turned on its underwater lights, 1,500 candlepower of brightness would push into the gloom, allowing visibility of 100 feet.
Promotional artwork of the sub showed an otherworldly creature, armed with two grasping claws like a praying mantis, using high-powered lights to illuminate the ocean depths. Future applications for the new sub were enormous, according to press releases. It could cultivate undersea fish farms, dredge manganese modules from the seafloor, carry vacationers to underwater cities. “The Old Testament promises man ‘dominion over the sea,’” said one slick brochure. “The Aluminaut is the first step toward the realization of that prediction.”
Despite the heady propaganda, Aluminaut had limited prospects. During 1965, it completed diving trials and made demonstrations for scientists at the University of Miami and the Department of the Interior. Eventually it received a contract from the Navy Special Projects Office to test Doppler navigation equipment for submarine rescue. But with no other work on the horizon, the Aluminaut crew was eager to prove their worth, perhaps even more so than the Alvin group.
Despite his initial high hopes for Alvin and Aluminaut, Guest was quickly disillusioned. The admiral came from a different world than the submersibles. On his aircraft carriers, crack teams of young pilots flew the best equipment in the world. Guest expected both men and machines to perform at the top of their games. One can only imagine his thoughts when this odd-looking band of untested submersibles, bobbing in the waves like a pack of oversized bathtub toys, arrived off the coast of Spain. The subs were nothing like the high-performance jets streaking over Vietnam. They were delicate and temperamental. Even worse, each sub came with a ragtag crew of civilian operators and — in the case of Alvin — research scientists. Though many of the submersibles' crew members had served in the military, they had left that spit-and-polish world behind them. And the scientists had no use whatsoever for barking authority figures. Earl Hays wrote that Guest was “no great shakes.” The feeling was mutual.
When the subs finally arrived, Guest planned to have them investigate promising sonar contacts, but their limited navigation made that impossible, at least at first. Alvin used a crude and rather unreliable method to navigate, sending pings and voice messages to a surface ship via underwater telephone. On a good day, the system could direct Alvin to within 400 yards of a desired point.
When Alvin first arrived on scene, however, not even that primitive system was operating. The sub's underwater telephone worked erratically. Even worse, none of the surface ships on the scene could vector Alvin (or Aluminaut) below 2,000 feet. This situation would improve once the scientific support ship USNS Mizar arrived, housing gear that could navigate the submersibles with more accuracy. But all Guest knew at this stage of the game was that Alvin was basically blind. In addition, Alvin's mechanical arm had not yet arrived. Even if the sub somehow stumbled upon the missing bomb, she would have no way to attach a line, a transponder, or anything else.
In short, Admiral Guest had no idea what to do with the subs. At one point, he suggested they drop a large concrete clump in the center of the search area, tether Alvin to the clump with nylon line, and let the sub swim around in circles like a dog chained to a tree. The plan would have left Alvin hopelessly tangled, but Guest didn't understand the subs or the deep sea. “What did he ever have to do with deep-ocean technology? Almost nothing,” said John Craven of the Technical Advisory Group in Washington. “He expects another unit of the Navy to come in with bright, shining uniforms.” Guest got nothing of the sort. “He was very displeased with the equipment,” added Craven. “That I knew.”
10. Guest Charts a Course
In mid-February, Brad Mooney, the thirty-five-year-old Navy lieutenant who had helped search for the Thresher, arrived in Spain to join Admiral Guest's task force. Mooney reported to the USS
Boston, which had replaced Macdonough as the flagship, and tracked down Guest in the admiral's stateroom. The young lieutenant entered the room and took a good look at the admiral. Clearly exhausted and ill, Guest sat bundled in a blue flannel shirt and leather flight jacket, with a white scarf wrapped around his neck. Every so often, a medical corpsman bustled into the room, took the admiral's temperature, and tried to feed him medicine.
Guest had slept little since he had arrived on the scene. He now understood the enormity of the task before him. His determination had turned to despair, and he poured out his heart to Mooney. He told Mooney an odd story, one that stuck with the young man for decades. Two years earlier, said Guest, he had been in the Tonkin Gulf during a questionable exchange of fire between U.S. and Vietnamese boats. This incident had led, shortly thereafter, to the rapid escalation of the Vietnam War. Now, he said, someone in the Navy was out to get him. “They sent me here to fail,” he told Mooney. “I don't know anything about deep-ocean search and recovery. I'm an aviator.” Guest's remarks were curious. At the time of the Tonkin Gulf incident, Guest commanded an aircraft carrier, the USS Constellation, near the area. On August 2 and August 4, 1964, U.S. Navy destroyers in the gulf reported that Vietnamese torpedo boats had attacked them. Admiral Guest, as commanded, sent fighter planes to retaliate. Years later, evidence emerged that the August 4 attack most likely had not happened; sailors, confused by rain and radar ghosts, had mistakenly thought they were under fire. Guest, however, was barely involved with the initial incident, except for retaliating as ordered. And by February 1966, questions about Tonkin Gulf had not yet reached the public. According to the historian Edwin Moise, Guest's involvement was peripheral; no one could legitimately have blamed him for anything. Moise guesses that some in the Navy might have faulted him for not controlling the situation better, but this was hardly a major error.
Guest's stepson Doug Kingsbery also finds it unlikely that the Navy sent Admiral Guest to Palomares as punishment. The bomb search “was an extremely important mission at that time in the Cold War,” said Kingsbery. “I can't imagine that the president and the high military people would not have selected the best person available they thought could do the job.” Regardless of his exact role in the Gulf of Tonkin, Guest was deeply affected by his tour in Vietnam.
When he came home, his stepson Robert remembers him sleeping only two to four hours a night and smoking a carton of cigarettes a day. Faced with a seemingly impossible task in Palomares, it is not surprising that Guest grew despondent. It was not an easy assignment, even if he had not been set up to fail.
Brad Mooney listened to the admiral's story and did his best to cheer him up. He told Guest that few people in the world knew anything about finding lost objects in the deep ocean. Mooney had some experience from his time with the Thresher and the Trieste and also knew a bit about Alvin and Aluminaut. He promised Admiral Guest that he would do his best.
Soon afterward, Admiral Guest reported that Brad Mooney's arrival had been “like a ray of sunshine.” Finally he had someone who understood the deep ocean and knew what to do with these ridiculous submersibles. Red Moody was also impressed with the new lieutenant, even though their similar names caused confusion when read over the ship's crackling intercom. “When Brad came aboard, he was a mover and a shaker,” said Moody. “I just said, ‘Here's a guy who can get things done.’” When the accident happened, Mooney had orders to report to Pearl Harbor and then take command of a submarine. During the mission in Spain, the Navy twice attempted to send Lieutenant Mooney to his original duties. Both times, Admiral Guest arranged to keep him on.
With Red Moody overseeing the divers, Brad Mooney tackling the submersibles, and the rest of his team and gear in place, Guest hunkered down and made a plan. On February 17, 1966, he laid it out in a long letter to the chief of naval operations.
First, Guest reviewed the current situation, which was not stellar. The Decca navigation system, which was supposed to have been up and running twenty-four hours after it arrived, still wasn't fully functional. The Ocean Bottom Scanning Sonar was scanning hundreds of contacts but couldn't tell if any particular contact was a lost bomb or a school of fish. (The ships of Task Force 65 didn't help matters by regularly dumping their garbage overboard in the search area, adding paint cans, soup cans, and machine shop shavings to the sonar contacts.) Deep Jeep was useless and had been sent back to the United States.
