Skip to playerSkip to main contentSkip to footer
  • 6/8/2025
Oceanographer Robert Ballard pores over declassified Cold War documents to learn the fate of two sunken nuclear submarines.

Category

📺
TV
Transcript
00:00During the following program, look for NOVA's webmarkers which lead you to more information
00:05at our website.
00:09Sleek, black and rarely seen, submarines are the ultimate killing machine.
00:19Prowling the depths, their torpedoes can threaten any ship at sea, their missiles, any city
00:26on land.
00:30Until recently, almost nobody knew the hidden history of their tragedies and triumphs.
00:49For 40 years, sub-crews lived on the front lines of the Cold War.
00:54Day in, day out, they practiced launching the missiles that could unleash Armageddon.
01:00A single missile carrying submarine could rain down more destructive power than all the bombs
01:17used in World War II.
01:20As the United States struggled against the Soviets, it pushed submarine technology to its limits.
01:27Breakthroughs gave the West supremacy at sea.
01:30But missteps cost hundreds their lives.
01:37Even today, secrecy and rumor obscure what really took place.
01:44The world of operational submarines and the things that they did, it's like an iceberg.
01:51We know the very tip of it.
01:53And there's a huge nine-tenths down below that we know nothing about.
01:57They just don't like to talk about it.
02:01But recently declassified film and documents are lifting the veil on tragic and mysterious submarine
02:08accidents and on the high-risk spy missions that helped win the Cold War.
02:14These are the secrets of the Cold War subs.
02:28major funding for NOVA is provided by the Park Foundation, dedicated to education and quality television.
02:55This program is funded in part by Northwestern Mutual Life, which has been protecting families
03:03and businesses for generations.
03:05Have you heard from The Quiet Company?
03:08Northwestern Mutual Life.
03:10And by iOmega, makers of personal storage solutions for your computer.
03:16So you can create more, share more, save more, and do more of whatever it is you do.
03:22iOmega, because it's your stuff.
03:26And by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and viewers like you.
03:30As the Cold War heats up in the early 1950s, the growth of the Soviet Union's submarine fleet alarms American military analysts.
03:50At the height, they must have had 500 submarines in service.
03:56At the best, we have about 130 submarines in service, 150, some number like that.
04:01And the way that we make up for the lack of numbers is much better technology.
04:06We push the technology as hard as we can.
04:09American scientists' first great success is powering subs with nuclear reactors.
04:15Now, U.S. subs can stay under longer and range farther.
04:21Then, in the late 50s, they figure out how to fire ballistic missiles from subs.
04:26This gives the U.S. a huge advantage in the Cold War.
04:30A missile hidden in the deep ocean on a submarine is virtually unstoppable.
04:37But in short order, the Soviets are doing the same.
04:46The Navy responds with smaller, quieter, attack subs that contract the Russian missile boats
04:51around the world.
04:54The goal, should war break out, to destroy the Soviet subs before their missiles are launched.
05:04American submarines are state-of-the-art, the weapon of weapons throughout the Cold War.
05:10Mistakes at the cutting edge are deadly.
05:14Well, most people don't realize how truly dangerous the deep sea is.
05:19It's waiting there for you to make a mistake.
05:25When you make a deep dive, you can feel squeaks and moans.
05:29You can see things start to pop, water starts to come out.
05:33I mean, it's, you're right on the edge.
05:35And if you make the slightest mistake, when at the edge, it'll kill you.
05:41That was made painfully clear in 1963.
05:47The Navy's newest nuclear submarine, the Thresher, is launched at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard.
05:52The 278-foot craft is the first of a new class of attack subs, designed to operate deeper
05:57and more silently than previous undersea craft.
06:00The Thresher will have a crew of...
06:01The Thresher was the best of the best.
06:04It was this incredible piece of machinery that we put to seat.
06:07The first of a whole new class of submarines that were going to be super quiet and give
06:12us an enormous advantage over our communist foes.
06:15Now she, as we saw it anyway, and I was a little bit in at her beginning, she was really a leap forward.
06:22She was the killer shark.
06:24The first real killer.
06:26At the time, of course, I thought, couldn't get any better than this.
06:31We were going to be the big kids on the block from that time on.
06:36She had the first computerized fire control system in a submarine.
06:45She had this big sonar, which had incredible range.
06:49She could fire anti-submarine missiles, which were a new thing then.
06:53She was the most advanced submarine we had devised.
06:59When Thresher was introduced, we realized the significance of that moment.
07:06And we could only hope that our subs wouldn't be at too great a disadvantage.
07:16April 9th, 1963, Thresher heads to sea.
07:22Early the next morning, she begins a deep dive, as deep as she can go.
07:30It was near Corsair Canyon that they decided to make their dive.
07:34And they had a ship above the Skylark.
07:37They had an ASR.
07:39Now they call them rescue ships, but certainly not for nuclear submarines.
07:44But it was able to have a line of communication, so there was a dialogue going on.
07:50Everything goes smoothly until 9.13 a.m.
07:55That's when Skylark gets the first hint of a problem down below.
07:59Thresher reports, experiencing minor difficulties, have positive up angle,
08:04am attempting to blow, will keep you informed.
08:13Three minutes later, there's a second transmission, garbled and unintelligible.
08:20It's followed by a low-frequency rumble.
08:23Then, silence.
08:32On the surface, there's no sign of trouble.
08:37But as the minutes pass, fear takes hold.
08:42Will the 129 men on board Thresher ever see sunlight again?
08:53Skylark reports Thresher's continuing silence to fleet headquarters.
08:58It's the first tragedy to strike the nuclear subforce.
09:01It hits the tight-knit community hard.
09:05I immediately made an assumption that it had happened perhaps in shallow water.
09:10I jumped in the car, drove over to the development group headquarters, went in to offer what help I could give.
09:27And they just said it was too deep.
09:32They just lost 100 good friends.
09:41It's beginning to sink in.
09:44It's still difficult to believe.
09:49Ray McCool had left Thresher just moments before her departure because of a family emergency.
09:56In my mind, it was impossible to lose a ship as fabulous as that.
10:04I couldn't think of any reason why she was lost or why she went down.
10:14129 men gone.
10:16All that machinery gone.
10:18All this cutting edge, the beginning of this new wave of technology gone.
10:23We don't have any idea what went wrong.
10:28The very first thing they had to do was to find it.
10:31They had to understand as well as they could what went wrong.
10:35They had to do the forensics.
10:36They had to do the detective work.
10:38And they couldn't even find the submarine.
10:40And that went on month after month after month.
10:46The Navy even brings a car out and studies how it sinks to the bottom, hoping to discover some clue to the location of Thresher's remains.
10:59Remote cameras and sonar sounders are tirelessly dragged over the sea floor.
11:05And the Navy's only deep diving vessel, the bathyscaphe Trieste, spends as much time searching the bottom as her crew can stand.
11:17Finally, after six months of searching, Trieste discovers what's left of the Thresher.
11:23The sub imploded with such force, nothing remains but scrap metal.
11:33Meanwhile, a Navy court of inquiry is making discoveries of its own.
11:40Thresher's maintenance records show that 14% of the joints in the piping that moves high-pressure seawater through the boat had failed ultrasonic inspection.
11:51Hundreds of other joints had never been tested, even though pipe joints of this type on other subs had failed, causing serious flooding.
12:01At the depth Thresher was at when she was lost, failure in a six-inch pipe would dump a hundred thousand pounds of water per minute into the ship.
12:12Thresher's last telephone transmission gave the court vital clues as it painstakingly reconstructed what had most likely happened.
12:20A failure in an engine room pipe floods the compartment and blows enough fuses to force a reactor shutdown.
12:29On battery power alone, Thresher does not have enough power to reach the surface.
12:35Now, normally, when you're at depth like that, you drive your way out of problems.
12:43You just bow up and you just apply power and you drive yourself up to your safer depths and get yourself out of trouble.
12:52As a last resort, they blow compressed air into the ballast tanks to displace water and gain buoyancy.
13:00But Thresher's ballast system is an old design, from the days when submarines couldn't dive this deep.
13:07And it couldn't get enough buoyancy.
13:11Remember, it's taking on water, so it's getting heavier, and then it's just going to go up, sort of stall out, and then just slip back.
13:20As Thresher sinks below 1,500 feet, her hull can no longer withstand the crushing pressure of the sea.
13:30And once you go below crush depth, which isn't far away, then Mother Nature does it.
13:43The pressure just, you know, crushes that submarine, goes off like a bomb.
13:50Scattered fragments of twisted metal are all that remain of Thresher, the greatest submarine of her day.
14:17This footage was shot in the 1980s by Bob Ballard as part of a classified Navy effort to survey the debris.
14:25His cover story was his search for the Titanic.
14:32Coming in on the Thresher for the first time, it was eerie.
14:40It was very much like going to a battlefield or going to Pearl Harbor.
14:49Something horrible happened here, and a lot of people died.
14:53And you've sensed that.
14:55129 men.
15:01Casualties of the Cold War.
15:04The Navy Court of Inquiry concludes that in trying to rush Thresher's exciting new technologies to sea,
15:12the Navy made mistakes in design and construction.
15:16The Navy vows it will never happen again.
15:19But five years later, in the spring of 1968, tragedy strikes once more.
15:30This time, to a submarine headed home from the Mediterranean.
15:34The nuclear attack submarine USS Scorpion, SSN 589, has been reported overdue at Norfolk.
15:51The submarine was scheduled to return to Norfolk at 1 p.m. today at the conclusion of a routine extended training operation.
16:00An all-out air surface and subsurface search is currently underway in the entire Atlantic Command.
16:10Scorpion, with her crew of 99 officers and men, had simply vanished in the vastness of the Atlantic.
16:30Among the searchers is a submariner who had transferred off the Scorpion just months before.
16:39I think deep inside that I knew it was futile.
16:43I think they really knew that there was no purpose in it.
16:48We had, we had found out, you know, how long it had been since their, their last communication.
16:53And, uh, just, figured something had to have happened.
16:59I don't, you know.
17:01Yeah, yeah, hope, hope springs eternal, right?
17:05Oh, give me a minute, will you?
17:13After ten days, the Navy declares the boat and all hands lost and presumed dead.
17:21It isn't until months after Scorpion's memorial service that the remains of the submarine are found.
17:27When they are, the Navy assures the public there's no evidence of hostile action.
17:33But the Navy will say no more.
17:35Whatever conclusions it reaches about the accident are classified.
17:46Scorpion lies 10,000 feet below the surface of the Atlantic.
17:50Bob Ballard uses this mini-sub to photograph the boat's remains in the mid-1980s.
18:01Unlike Thresher, Scorpion remains largely intact.
18:05She must have been partially flooded before she reached crush depth.
18:12This was Scorpion's tower or sail.
18:15It was ripped completely off the boat.
18:18The extreme water pressure broke off the entire tail end of the sub
18:24and rammed it into the section in front of it, like a collapsing telescope.
18:32None of these images are released until 1993.
18:36That's when the Navy finally begins declassifying information about Scorpion.
18:41Starting in the 1960s, the US military built a massive underwater network of microphones
18:50used to detect Russian fleet movements and nuclear tests.
18:54These microphones were the key to locating Scorpion's remains.
18:58I think in all, in the course of the Cold War, we spent about 17 billion dollars.
19:03I mean, we're not talking small change.
19:05Big money to wire the world's oceans with these microphones.
19:11They had the whole ocean wired for sound.
19:13It's really kind of a cool thing.
19:15Technicians were trained to interpret squiggly lines like these
19:19as the distinct sounds of ships, whales, undersea volcanoes, and submarines.
19:30An unexplained underwater explosion is found by a team of specialists headed by Navy scientist John Craven.
19:38The Canary Island record showed a blip on the record which might or might not have been associated with Scorpion,
19:46and then showed a period of 91 seconds of silence,
19:51and then a series of about 17 events that could have been the implosion of various compartments associated with the submarine.
20:01When the same pattern is found on recordings from two microphones in the ocean off Newfoundland, 3,000 miles away,
20:10it's possible to triangulate where the explosions occurred.
20:14But if they happened on Scorpion, there's a new mystery to solve.
20:21What we expected was that if the submarine were moving on a track,
20:26that the first sound would occur at this point,
20:29and that the next sound would come ahead of this point, heading more home toward Norfolk,
20:35and the third sound would come this way, heading more toward Norfolk, and so on and so forth.
20:41But we discovered to our shock and surprise that the sounds were going in the wrong direction,
20:48as though the submarine had turned around and was heading back toward the Mediterranean.
20:55That Scorpion turned around? And if so, why?
21:00The Navy has a possible explanation, but keeps it secret for 25 years.
21:06Finally, in 1993, the Navy releases its findings.
21:12The most likely scenario, the Navy believes,
21:17begins when stray electrical current activates an onboard torpedo.
21:23The captain orders an immediate 180-degree turn,
21:27which he expects will trigger a safety mechanism and disarm the torpedo.
21:31Then the crew ejects the torpedo.
21:36But it doesn't disarm.
21:40The torpedo begins to search for a target.
21:44If no one else is around,
21:46and that torpedo begins to search and acquire,
21:48it's going to acquire you.
21:50They probably knew what was happening because they would have heard it coming,
21:55and they were a bit faster than the torpedo, so they would have had a chance,
22:01and I would imagine that they tried to outrun it.
22:03But this scenario does not satisfy everyone.
22:21As a young Navy lieutenant, Ross Saxon examined the Scorpion wreckage in the Bathyscaphe Trieste.
22:29Now, I dove on the Scorpion, and I didn't see any evidence whatsoever that a torpedo sunk that ship.
22:37There wasn't anything on the hull structure that we could see that would suggest that.
22:42The shutter doors were shut on all the bow tubes.
22:47The submarine was broken up because of its trip to the bottom.
22:50But there wasn't any evidence that a torpedo sunk it.
22:54Dan Rogers doesn't believe the torpedo story either.
22:59He transferred off Scorpion just before her final voyage,
23:03because he believed inadequate maintenance made the submarine unsafe.
23:09I really didn't want to be there.
23:11I was really that concerned about the condition of that boat,
23:14and especially the material condition of the boat.
23:17Eventually, Rogers shared his doubts with Steve Johnson,
23:21an investigative reporter for the Houston Chronicle.
23:24Johnson found letters from other crew members that showed they, too,
23:29were concerned about the mechanical condition of the sub.
23:34He tracked down Ross Saxon, whose doubts about the torpedo theory encouraged him to keep digging.
23:39Then, after years of effort, he unearthed the critical piece of Scorpion's past.
23:47I obtained several thousand pages related to the Scorpion's maintenance history from the Atlantic submarine fleet.
23:55I had sent out half a dozen requests under the Freedom of Information Act,
23:59and it just so happens they found these documents that they thought had been destroyed.
24:02Buried amid thousands of pages was the day-by-day history of how the Scorpion was selected in a secret program
24:11that drastically reduced the maintenance that it would have ordinarily received.
24:15To save time, the Navy had cut back on Scorpion's last overhaul.
24:24Scorpion was in the shipyard eight months, though an average overhaul took 24.
24:30They spent just three million dollars, a fraction of the norm.
24:34The torpedo theory seems to be extremely convenient for the U.S. Navy because it tends to detract from any other theory,
24:45and also it tends to remove any kind of responsibility from the U.S. Navy itself from any maintenance problems
24:51that may have contributed to the actual loss of the submarine.
24:55Yet another clue in the Scorpion mystery has been uncovered by journalists Chris Drew and Sherry Sontag.
25:02Their research has revealed another disturbing Navy secret.
25:08When the Navy released its version of events that the Scorpion had been killed by one of its own torpedoes,
25:14I was working at the Chicago Tribune.
25:16This was a huge front-page story.
25:18As it turned out, one man who read it had been an engineer at a torpedo testing lab,
25:24and he remembered that they'd had all sorts of safety problems with the torpedoes.
25:28Now that it wasn't classified anymore, he wrote to John Craven to ask him how much of the
25:36conclusion that a torpedo was at fault had been based on all these safety problems they were having.
25:43Craven was floored.
25:45Craven had led the scientific investigation into the Scorpion mystery,
25:49yet he had never been told of torpedo problems.
25:53In fact, naval ordinance had insisted the explosion of a torpedo on board was impossible.
26:00Craven shared this letter with Sontag and Drew, who immediately started digging into the story.
26:07They learned that in tests, the battery that powered the Mark 37 torpedo had occasionally overheated and caught fire.
26:14Engineers who had worked at this torpedo test facility in Keyport, Washington,
26:19said they had warned the fleet about a possible on-board explosion big enough to sink a submarine.
26:25From the moment the lab began to test these components,
26:28they warned naval ordinance that the batteries represented a huge danger.
26:32They said that there was no margin for error.
26:35They said that they could too easily partially activate and catch fire.
26:40Naval ordinance ignored them.
26:41We spoke to a lot of people who were no longer in contact with one another,
26:47who were there during the fires when the alert was made and everything else.
26:51We're very confident.
26:53We're not, we don't, we can't tell you that this is exactly what happened to Scorpion,
26:57but we can tell you this danger very definitely existed.
27:02Perhaps it was an exploding torpedo that took Scorpion down.
27:06Perhaps it was the failure of equipment that didn't get the attention it required.
27:10With no survivors, we'll never know for sure.
27:16But following the disaster, the Navy abandoned its reduced maintenance experiment
27:22and redesigned the Mark 37 torpedo.
27:24The U.S. Navy never lost another nuclear submarine.
27:37The Russians, on the other hand, struggling to match America's superior technology,
27:41lost at least seven submarines.
27:50Each Soviet tragedy represented a potential intelligence gold mine for the West.
27:55Submarines are little cities, and in these little military cities were all the highest state secrets of the Soviet government.
28:09Right there.
28:10Little concentrated capsules on it, right there.
28:13Down on the ocean floor, waiting for us to come and pick it over.
28:19You know, I mean, there was no more priceless intelligence than that in the Cold War.
28:25And there it was.
28:27The problem is retrieving these secrets.
28:33The bathyscafs and remotely controlled camera sleds of the late 60s and early 70s
28:38are pretty much limited to taking pictures.
28:41In one sense, that's a source of reassurance for both sides.
28:45When things are thrown to the bottom of the sea, there is a reasonable presumption that they will stay there.
28:52The notion that anyone has the capacity to go to the bottom of the ocean and pick things up is quite fantastic.
29:03Who would think of such a thing?
29:05We Americans, of course, would think of such a thing.
29:07In 1974, Louisiana-born Wayne Collier, exhausted after four years of undercover work, quit the Justice Department.
29:20He went to work recruiting crewmen for an offshore mining venture.
29:25Two months into his new job, he found out who he was really working for.
29:30We entered one floor, went up, went into an insurance office, a secret staircase up to another floor.
29:37And with my prior background with agent work, I thought, what's happening here? What's going on?
29:44He says, you are employed by the Central Intelligence Agency.
29:48And I immediately thought, oh, not again.
29:50I mean, I wanted to leave government work.
29:54I had a marriage that was on the rocks because of my four years, and I thought this is going to ruin everything for me.
30:00But I didn't say anything about my personal problems.
30:03And he said, what I'm going to tell you may be shocking, may be alarming.
30:07But you involved with an operation to steal a Russian submarine.
30:12And I thought, well, I've heard a lot of things, but this is unbelievable.
30:16It's just, I got to hear more about this.
30:19This amazing story began on the 23rd of February, 1968.
30:28We received an order, and the sub left its base in the northwest Pacific and began a very long journey to its patrol area.
30:46The sub is called K-129.
30:53It's carrying three nuclear missiles.
30:56Somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, it disappears.
30:59What could have happened to this submarine?
31:08It was a mystery.
31:09A mystery the U.S. Navy couldn't solve.
31:16But thanks to its underwater microphones, the Navy did know where the submarine with its missiles, torpedoes, and code books now lay.
31:2517,000 feet beneath the surface of the Pacific, 17,000 feet beneath the surface of the Pacific.
31:30Now, how much is the prize worth?
31:36Well, I ask you, how much would you be willing to pay to get a full, fully armed Soviet submarine on operational station aimed at the United States with the weapons targeted on our cities?
31:52It seems to me that's worth an awful lot of money, and we spend a lot of money, sure.
31:59Richard Nixon has just been elected for his first term, and money for fighting communism is not a problem.
32:06Within months, he orders the CIA to get to work on the nation's largest covert operation since the Manhattan Project.
32:14Security is a major concern.
32:17Detection could precipitate an international crisis.
32:20You're obviously dealing with very sensitive relationships when you get into stealing another country's submarine.
32:31Two challenges are paramount.
32:34First, there is no known technology that can do the job.
32:38And second, the whole operation has to be kept hidden from both the Soviets and the American public.
32:45That requires finding a great cover story.
32:48And lo and behold, we found this wonderful example in Howard Hughes, who was secretive by nature.
32:57He'd been associated with sort of far-out ideas in the past with the snow goose and some other things, that nature.
33:04So he's absolutely perfect.
33:06And he agreed to be the cover.
33:08Hughes announces to the world he's going to build a magnificent ship that will collect the mineral riches lying on the ocean floor.
33:17It was an extremely plausible thing for a rich techno-eccentric like Hughes to want to go out and mine the deep, you know, with a vacuum cleaner that could just sweep up all these manganese nodules.
33:33Even Nova gets swept up in the excitement and does an entire show on ocean mining.
33:39Corporations the world over, fearing they will be left out, begin building their own ships.
33:45It's a perfect cover for the centerpiece of the CIA's operation.
33:54Hughes calls his ship the Glomar Explorer.
33:57Everything about the ship is custom-built.
34:06After all, no one has ever attempted to lift a sub from the floor of the deep ocean.
34:12The Glomar Explorer has two engines and multiple thrusters, so she can hold her position in high winds and seas.
34:19The middle of the ship is a single, giant room with a floor that retracts, allowing access to the ocean below.
34:29Three hundred sixty-foot steel pipes will be strung together to lower a huge claw down to the Soviet sub.
34:38Together, claw, pipe, and flooded sub will weigh 15 million pounds.
34:49The men who sign on as crew for the Glomar Explorer are fully aware of the risks they face,
34:56which range from being boarded by the Soviets to being contaminated with radioactivity.
35:02In the end, Wayne Collier is not among them, but his younger brother Bill signs on as a member of the B crew.
35:10It was specifically set up that A crew would do the recovery step, and then we would have a crew change,
35:18and then B crew would be responsible for the disassembly.
35:22And that's actually how it worked out.
35:25This account is based largely on Bill Collier's personal experiences and conversations he had with other members of the crew.
35:35The Glomar Explorer arrives at her destination in early July.
35:39It takes two days to lower the claw, nearly the size of a football field, to the seafloor three miles below.
35:51After what feels like an eternity, the cameras on the giant claw reveal the Soviet sub.
35:58It appears intact, except the rear engine compartment has broken off.
36:02A nuclear missile is visible in one of the tubes.
36:10The operators of the claw cautiously maneuver in for the grab.
36:14But when they close the claw, its arms strike hard on the bottom.
36:19Unwilling to lose the time it would take to check for damage, they try again.
36:23The tension is high as the long, slow lift begins.
36:44Almost halfway up, three of the arms on the giant claw give way.
36:51K129 slips.
36:53And a nuclear missile glides slowly, almost gracefully, out of its silo.
37:07It will be traveling 80 miles per hour when it hits the ocean floor.
37:13Before it does, K129 breaks apart.
37:18The minutes tick by slowly.
37:21There is no nuclear explosion.
37:23Only a 38-foot section makes it to Glomar Explorer's giant recovery room.
37:31There are no code books or missiles.
37:35There are body parts.
37:38During the disassembly, we would find fingers, pieces of scalp, bones, but everybody looked at it quite solemnly and protected as that.
37:53On board the Glomar, the CIA holds a funeral service for the Russian dead.
38:00This footage, given to Boris Yeltsin in 1993, is the CIA's only official acknowledgement that the operation ever happened.
38:11And we commit their bodies to the sea.
38:16And we commit their bodies to the sea.
38:17As Glomar heads home, plans are made to return the following summer.
38:19As Glomar heads home, plans are made to return the following summer.
38:30Before that can happen, the press discovers the true mission of Howard Hughes' mining ship.
38:39Without the cover of secrecy, the fabulous technology of the Glomar is worthless to the CIA.
38:47The world's most sophisticated ocean mining vessel spends the next 25 years in the Navy's mothball fleet.
38:59The investment made in this single operation speaks volumes about how threatening Soviet subs were to the West.
39:07But in the end, it wasn't big operations like this that provided the most valuable intelligence.
39:13That was gathered by American submarines themselves.
39:21Every American submarine, at one time or another, was engaged in spying.
39:27I would be sent out for two months with an operation order, giving me a large piece of territory in a very hot spot, and basically with instructions to find out what I could.
39:45This could mean listening to Soviet fleet radio transmissions, or watching and photographing Soviet naval exercises.
39:53It could mean getting close enough to a Soviet missile sub to record in detail all the noises it makes.
40:01Those distinctive sounds enabled American sonar technicians not only to find an enemy submarine, but often to identify the specific boat.
40:19When they sent their submarines out on patrol, we would try to latch on, follow them, make sure we knew what their patterns were.
40:29Sometimes the situations can get a little bit tense.
40:33You were trying very carefully to avoid having the tables turned on you, having a submarine that you were trailing suddenly turn around and head right back at you.
40:45American submarine commanders called that particular maneuver Crazy Ivan.
40:51Without any warning, a Soviet submarine would just make a huge loop and come roaring back at a high speed.
41:01And if you were behind it, watch out.
41:05Most American submarines don't turn tail and run when that happens.
41:09They just sit there, let Ivan swing on by, you know, and say phew.
41:15Even as recently as the early 90s, these cat-and-mouse games have resulted in undersea collisions.
41:23That's how the commander of this Russian sub explained the dent that sent him home for repairs.
41:29His colleagues, like Captain Igor Kurdin, think it's lucky anyone made it home alive.
41:35A few meters to the side, he would have hit the missile bay.
41:42Everyone would have been dead instantly.
41:47It could have been a huge explosion, nuclear warheads destroyed.
41:52It could have been an awful catastrophe, worse than Chernobyl.
41:59There were other potential risks as well.
42:03On one occasion, while observing Soviet naval exercises, Dan Rogers' sub found itself in the path of a Soviet torpedo.
42:12We were just sitting around collecting telemetric data.
42:15In other words, listening.
42:17Learning what we could of their operation and what they were doing.
42:21Sonarmen reported, con sonar, there's a torpedo in the water.
42:31And I looked over at the other two watchstanders.
42:36And I thought I was scared.
42:38I don't feel like I looked like they did, but I thought I was scared.
42:42Those guys looked like ghosts.
42:49The only choice was to try and outrun the Soviet torpedo.
42:55There isn't another damn thing you can do once you get past that point.
42:59Except...
43:00Ride the boat.
43:05In this case, that was enough.
43:14Sub commanders like Whitey Mack knew the risks of getting in close.
43:19They also knew the rewards.
43:22In 1969, Mack slipped in behind the newest Soviet missile sub
43:28and followed its every move for 47 straight days.
43:33Every 90 minutes he changed course.
43:35It was not 89 minutes or 91 minutes.
43:37It was exactly 90 minutes.
43:39And that's the longest I've slept for the whole time.
43:44He'd go up, we'd come up, he'd come down, we'd go down.
43:47Sometimes we got pretty deep.
43:49We just did the merry old dance, you know,
43:51the two 6,000 ton ships circling each other.
43:56I think that probably the most important things that we came back were
43:59that we had an idea of where he was operating,
44:03the method of his operations.
44:05We think we had a better handle on the range of his tactical missiles.
44:12We could actually separate the different officers of the deck.
44:16We knew which guy had the deck just the way he handled the ship,
44:19the way things ran.
44:20You learn a lot about it.
44:21You know, when you live next door to somebody,
44:23you learn a lot about them.
44:24And we did.
44:25And we brought a lot of information back.
44:27This business of, oh, surveillance against the Russians
44:31and finding out what they were doing,
44:34it was just like cowboys and Indians.
44:36And latterly, as it got more sophisticated,
44:38it was a bit more like three-dimensional chess.
44:41But with that added spur to it,
44:43knowing that somebody might be nudging up your backside any minute
44:47and really being quite nasty about it.
44:49Sometimes, spying on the other side led submarines into places
44:57they weren't supposed to be,
44:59a fact both sides, to this day, officially deny.
45:04Our submarine diesel and nuclear never, never entered American territorial waters.
45:17We had a strict order not to come closer than 50 miles.
45:22The orders were quite clear.
45:24Thou shalt not trespass.
45:26And were those orders ever trespassed themselves?
45:31Oh, I can't answer that question.
45:34I can't possibly.
45:36You might get somebody in the United States Navy to answer it.
45:39I don't know.
45:40I can't.
45:41I should just leave it.
45:42Thou shalt not trespass if I was you.
45:44And if somebody wants to give a nudge and a wink,
45:46well, that's up to them.
45:48Look, in the 60s, I was training with the SEALs.
45:53I was in the Navy.
45:55I was training with the SEALs.
45:57And some of my colleagues had been in the sewers of Hanoi,
46:02delivered by my sons.
46:05They'd swam up the sewers.
46:07So, can you get real close or you can get real close?
46:20In fact, specially equipped American submarines like the USS Halibut
46:25repeatedly violated Soviet territorial waters.
46:29They were drawn there by the presence of underwater military communications cables.
46:36The Soviet military naively sent a lot of its military information through cables
46:42that loped around through the relatively shallow waters around its periphery.
46:48And because it was down there and supposedly unreachable and out of sight and out of mind,
46:53they put all kinds of communications on there that were unencrypted.
47:01For much of the Cold War, spy subs placed and retrieved recording devices
47:06on military cables off Russia's northern and eastern coasts.
47:10Much of the cost of developing the equipment that made this possible was hidden
47:21in the Navy's program to develop deep sea rescue submarines, called DSRVs.
47:28Anybody who served on submarines had heard about deep submergence rescue vehicles
47:33and knew from the start that they were fiction.
47:35They had to be.
47:36Unless you went down on an undersea mountain or on the continental shelf,
47:39you were going to go down and go below a crush death
47:42and there would be nobody left to rescue.
47:44But it provided the perfect cover story
47:47to create a whole other set of technology that was used for spying.
47:52That's where the money went. That's where the energy went.
47:56Some believe the rescue subs themselves were occasionally recruited for espionage.
48:02The DSRVs, as we know, took a long time to be built,
48:08they were Cadillacs that had every incredible bell and whistle
48:13that the Navy and its contractors could come up with,
48:17and they went deep.
48:20They were able to do all kinds of stuff,
48:22and probably many things we don't know anything about.
48:26The scientists and engineers behind the DSRVs and spy subs like Halibut
48:31were challenged by Ronald Reagan's defense planners to go after even more.
48:37They wanted live news online, live at five.
48:42They wanted to know what was happening as it happened.
48:45If you can get a line onto one of his lines without his knowing it,
48:54you've got him.
48:56You've simply got him.
48:59And there's no substitute for that.
49:02You simply know everything he knows.
49:05You are inside his circle of decision.
49:08You are...
49:11In fact, you have a seat at his table.
49:14The plan was to use specially designed submarines
49:18to bury a listening device in the seabed
49:21underneath the main Soviet communications cable of the Russian Northern Fleet.
49:26They could lift up their cable and inspect it.
49:29It would be clean as a whistle.
49:32They would lay it down again.
49:33They would lay it right back down on the...
49:36on our listening device.
49:40From this tap, you'd run a cable off over 1,200 miles of the seabed to Greenland,
49:47where that information would then be uplinked to a satellite
49:50and downlinked to Washington.
49:52And you'd be listening to, you know, the Northern Fleet activity as it happened.
49:57And the Northern Fleet would be involved in any World War III scenario.
50:02So you would, in effect, have, you know, advance notice for Armageddon.
50:06This involved the development of massive amounts of new technology
50:10and, of course, the expenditure of massive amounts of money.
50:13The whole thing would have come to about $3 billion.
50:16Cheap.
50:19For the results that were envisaged, this was going to be cheap.
50:26It was the highest priority and the biggest budget item
50:31in the intelligence budget in the late Reagan administration.
50:34You know, they spent about a billion dollars on it.
50:36And then, poof, it all went away.
50:39Because one guy, Pelton.
50:42Ronald Pelton was an analyst working for the National Security Agency,
50:48who was convicted of spying for the KGB.
50:52The online tap was one of the operations he compromised.
50:57The Soviet Union relied heavily on well-placed spies like Pelton.
51:02Given the closed nature of Soviet society,
51:05this approach to gathering military secrets
51:07was far less productive for the West.
51:10What we did have was technology.
51:20And we used the technological advantage that we had
51:25to get the intelligence that we desperately needed.
51:30One third, one third, sir.
51:32Off to the deck.
51:33Brick the ship for old to be quiet.
51:36Brick the ship for old to be quiet.
51:37And that was important.
51:38That gave us a lot of confidence.
51:40Brick the ship for old to be quiet.
51:42It made us probably a lot calmer than we would have been otherwise,
51:46probably a lot less paranoid than we would have been.
51:48If you look at the Cold War under the sea,
51:50just about everything about it was dangerous.
51:52There was risk in going down in a submarine to begin with.
51:55There was certainly risk in taking a submarine
51:57right up to the Soviet port
51:59or right behind a Soviet missile boat.
52:01There was certainly risk in pushing the technology
52:03as quickly as they were doing.
52:05And often that risk didn't pay off.
52:08Often it did, however.
52:09And in the end, they didn't provoke the Soviets
52:13and start a war.
52:14In the end, they were able, through most of the Cold War,
52:17to keep track of the Soviet missile boats,
52:19which is exactly what they set out to do,
52:21to prevent that nuclear Pearl Harbor.
52:24They actually did a pretty good job.
52:26They were the weapon of weapons of the Cold War.
52:32And now, almost a decade after the end of that tense struggle,
52:36they still patrol the world's oceans.
52:39Their numbers, however, have been drastically reduced.
52:44And their 21st century role is a matter of debate,
52:48both in and out of the Navy.
52:51The job the submarine does will change.
52:55But the constant that's very valuable to have this American thing
52:59that goes out somewhere, stays there,
53:02that they don't know about, that will remain.
53:05Whatever roles the submarine fulfills in the years to come,
53:11cutting edge technology will inevitably be part of the picture.
53:16And when that new technology is taken to the depths of the sea,
53:20there will be danger.
53:22Lives will depend on what has been learned from the past.
53:28Navy subs have a new mission, exploring everything from Roman shipwrecks to the Arctic ice cap.
53:56NOVA's website takes you there at www.pbs.org.
54:03NOVA's website is available.
54:09www.pbs.org.
54:14Great places to come.
54:18To order this show for $19.95, plus shipping and handling,
54:24And, to learn more about how science can solve the mysteries of our world, ask about our
54:32many other NOVA videos.
54:40NOVA is a production of WGBH Boston.
54:49Major funding for NOVA is provided by the Park Foundation, dedicated to education and quality
54:56television.
54:59And by iOmega, makers of the ZipDrive and 100 megabyte ZipDiscs, proudly bringing you the
55:04opportunity to learn new things and the space to store them in your own personal library.
55:10iOmega, because it's your stuff.
55:16This program is funded in part by Northwestern Mutual Life, which has been protecting families
55:21and businesses for generations.
55:24Have you heard from The Quiet Company?
55:27Northwestern Mutual Life.
55:29And by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and viewers like you.
55:43What is science?
55:48Sure, it's theorems and principles, hypotheses and data.
55:52But really, science is just an explanation of why things are the way they are.
55:57In other words, science is a really good story.
56:02Doctors say he's a walking miracle and a mystery.
56:06Understanding him may unlock the secret to surviving AIDS.
56:09A NOVA mini-series hits you where you live.
56:12When you travel, every time you get in your car, fasten your seat belt for escape.
56:19Because accidents happen.
56:21Down in the abyss, there are these giant underwater volcanoes spewing scalding water and acid,
56:27and bizarre creatures are everywhere.
56:30NOVA.
56:31It's living, breathing proof that turning your mind on at the end of the day
56:34is actually more rejuvenating than turning it off.
56:37A new season of Mind-Altering TV, coming soon!