The High Secret, Best Chilly Warfare Naval Espionage Mission

If ever there was an final weapon of struggle, it must be the nuclear submarine. For greater than 60 years, ballistic missile-armed submarines have prowled the world’s oceans, able to unleash nuclear armageddon at a second’s discover. In the meantime, quick assault boats monitor and stalk the missile-armed ‘boomers’, the 2 rivals locked in a shadowy recreation of cat-and-mouse deep beneath the waves. However whereas nuclear deterrence is the fashionable submarine’s most well-known mission, it’s removed from the one one. All through the Chilly Warfare and into the current day, these vessels have served because the eyes and ears of the Navy, utilizing stealth and guile to carry out covert reconnaissance of enemy shores. And maybe probably the most daring and profitable such feat of naval espionage passed off within the early Nineteen Seventies, when a U.S. Navy submarine snuck right into a Soviet naval base to faucet an underwater communications cable. That is the extraordinary story of Operation Ivy Bells.

Our story begins within the late Sixties on the Petropavlovsk Naval Base on the west coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula, house of the Soviet – and right now Russian – Pacific nuclear submarine fleet. To attach the bottom to the Pacific naval headquarters at Vladivostok – and the remainder of the Soviet navy communications community – the Soviets laid a submarine cable greater than 1500 kilometres throughout the ocean of Okhotsk. From a safety standpoint this was a sensible determination, for not like radio site visitors, communications couldn’t be intercepted with out gaining bodily entry to the cable. And with the realm closely defended by acoustic sensors, mines, and common naval patrols, this was extremely unlikely.

Or so the Soviets thought, for on the opposite facet of the Pacific, one man was planning on doing simply that: Captain James F. Bradley Jr., chief of the extremely secret undersea warfare division of the U.S. Workplace of Naval Intelligence. If, Bradley reasoned, the ocean of Okhotsk might be infiltrated and the Petropavlovsk-Vladivostok cable discovered and tapped, it will yield a bonanza of helpful intelligence on Soviet naval operations within the Pacific. However methods to perform such a daring mission? Fortunately, the U.S. Navy had the right software at its disposal: the U.S.S. Halibut.

Laid down in 1957, the Halibut began out as a diesel-electric submarine however was transformed to nuclear energy midway by means of development. Shortly after her commissioning in 1960, she grew to become the primary submarine in historical past to launch a guided missile. Nonetheless, not like the later submarines Halibut was designed to launch the SSM-N-8 Regulus, a jet-powered, nuclear-armed cruise missile. 5 Regulus Is – or two of the later Regulus IIs – had been saved in a particular, 27-metre-long cylindrical hangar constructed into the Halibut’s ahead hull, and had been extracted and deployed onto her deck by automated hydraulic gear. Sadly, missiles might solely be launched whereas the submarine was surfaced, making her extremely susceptible to detection and assault.

By 1965, Regulus-armed vessels had been rendered out of date by the extra superior George Washington-class ballistic missile submarines, and Halibut was as an alternative modified to be used in “Underwater Engineering” – a euphemism for covert intelligence gathering. The now-empty Regulus missile hangar grew to become the nerve centre of the vessel, housing a state-of-the-art Sperry UNIVAC 1224 and the Intelligence personnel who would function it. This area grew to become generally known as the “Bat Cave”. The pc was linked to an intensive suite of sensors, together with remotely-operated autos or ROVs and a particular sled or “fish” that might be towed behind the submarine and scan the seafloor with sonar and cameras. Halibut was fitted with skids referred to as “sea maintaining legs” or “skegs”, bigger anchors, and position-keeping thrusters so she might relaxation on the seafloor or hover simply above it whereas deploying the ROV or divers. Funds for these modifications had been secretly drawn from the Deep Submergence Rescue Automobile or DSRV mission, and in 1971 a torpedo-shaped machine formally designated a DSRV crew coach was hooked up to Halibut’s aft deck. In actuality, this construction was really a pressurized habitat for the newly-developed strategy of saturation diving.

When a diver stays underwater for lengthy durations of time, nitrogen from the air they breathe turns into dissolved of their tissues. In the event that they then floor too rapidly, this nitrogen can bubble out of resolution, resulting in the dreaded decompression illness or the bends – and for extra on this, please try our earlier video Why is it Referred to as The Bends When There’s No Bending, and the Most Ugly Accident. The usual resolution to this drawback for divers to floor slowly, permitting the nitrogen to be slowly and safely expelled from their our bodies. Nonetheless, when working at nice depths, this course of can take hours; and if a diver should make a number of dives over a given time interval, the time spent decompressing turns into impractical, and a number of decompressions expose the diver to pointless threat of the bends. Within the late Fifties, nonetheless, Captain George F. Bond, a U.S. Naval Doctor, got here up with a intelligent resolution. After a sure period of time spent working at depth, a diver’s physique turns into saturated with nitrogen, such that regardless of how for much longer they continue to be underwater, their complete decompression time stays the identical. Thus, if the diver may be stored at this similar strain all through their working shift, they solely must decompress as soon as on the finish, maximizing productiveness and minimizing the chance of decompression illness. In 1964, Bond examined his theories by constructing SEALAB I, a pressurized “habitat” sunk 59 metres beneath the floor off the coast of Bermuda. For 11 days, 4 divers lived aboard the habitat, venturing out to conduct scientific experiments and consider the operate of the diving gear. This was adopted by SEALAB II in 1965 and SEALAB III in 1969, each of which demonstrated the practicality and utility of the saturation diving method. Right this moment, saturation diving is used extensively within the offshore oil and fuel business – and to seek out out simply how harmful this system may be, please try our earlier video The Most Ugly Dying Possible: the Byford Dolphin Accident.

The refitted Halibut’s first clandestine mission was to seek out and {photograph} the wreck of the Soviet Golf II-class submarine Okay-129, which had sunk with all fingers 2,890 kilometres northwest of Hawaii on March 8, 1968 This mission was a part of the bigger Mission Azorian, whereby the CIA constructed a particular ship referred to as the Glomar Explorer to grab Okay-129 off the ocean ground. The quilt story for the mission was that Glomar Explorer was constructed by eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes to mine manganese nodules off the ocean ground – a scheme loopy sufficient to be believable. Extremely, in July 1974, Glomar Explorer succeeded in recovering the ahead part of Okay-129 from a depth of 4.9 km – however that could be a story for a unique video.

In October 1971, Halibut sailed from Hawaii on a covert mission to seek out and faucet the submarine cable between Petropavlovsk and Vladivostok, code-named Operation Ivy Bells. Whereas discovering a single 12-centrimetre-wide cable in 1000’s of sq. kilometres of ocean ought to have been an insurmountable job, Captain Bradley, the architect of the mission, had give you a laughably easy resolution. Having grown up in St. Louis Missouri, Bradley remembered seeing indicators alongside the Mississippi River studying CABLE CROSSING – DO NOT ANCHOR. There should, he reasoned, be related indicators round Petropavlovsk to forestall native transport from snagging and damaging the cable. And certainly, shortly after arriving within the Sea of Okhotsk, the crew of the Halibut noticed such an indication on the shoreline and rapidly positioned the cable in 120 metres of water. Working from their pressurized habitat on Halibut’s aft deck, U.S. Navy saturation divers fitted the cable with a particular signal-interception pod developed by the NSA and Bell Phone Laboratories. 6 metres lengthy, the pod didn’t penetrate the cable however gathered indicators remotely by means of electromagnetic induction. The machine might file as much as eight weeks price of indicators and was designed to robotically drop off if the Soviets raised the cable for normal upkeep.

Halibut’s major mission was so secret that few of her crew had been conscious of it. As an alternative, they believed they had been despatched to gather wreckage of Soviet SS-N-12 Sandbox anti-ship missiles test-fired over the Sea of Okhotsk. The truth is, this cowl mission was really efficiently carried out, with sufficient particles being collected for the missile to be absolutely reverse-engineered and evaluated for weaknesses.

With the faucet efficiently put in, Halibut slipped out of Soviet waters and returned to Hawaii. Each month thereafter, Halibut and different submarines together with USS Seawolf, USS Parche, and USS Richard B. Russell returned to Petropavlovsk to recuperate and substitute the recording tapes. To the Navy and the NSA’s delight, the primary intercepts revealed that the Soviets had been so assured within the safety of the cable that just about all communications despatched over it had been unencrypted – yielding a treasure trove of intelligence. Buoyed by this success, in 1973 the Navy put in a extra subtle surveillance machine, which was powered by a plutonium-fuelled Radioisotope Thermal Generator or RTG, might file 12 communications channels without delay, and will file as much as a yr’s price of information. And 5 years later, one other faucet was efficiently positioned on the cable connecting the Severdovinsk naval base to the Soviet Northern Fleet headquarters in Murmansk.

However this intelligence windfall got here to an abrupt finish in 1981 when a U.S. spy satellite tv for pc noticed a small fleet of Russian ships gathered over the precise location of the recording machine. Alarmed at this growth, the Navy dispatched the U.S.S Parche to recuperate the subsequent set of tapes. However when the submarine reached the location, they found that the faucet had been eliminated. Operation Ivy Bells was over. However the mission’s downfall was not the results of superior Soviet spy craft; relatively, it had been betrayed from inside. In January 1980, a 44-year-old former NSA analyst named Ronald W. Pelton walked into the Soviet Embassy in Washington D.C. and provided to promote the KGB every little thing he knew. On the time, Pelton was $65,000 in debt, had simply filed for private chapter, and had only some hundred {dollars} left in his checking account. Along with Ivy Bells, Pelton disclosed the main points of a minimum of seven different NSA operations, counting on his wonderful reminiscence as an alternative of bodily paperwork. For his companies, he acquired simply $35,500 – not even sufficient to cowl his money owed. Then, in July 1985, Vitaly Yurchenko, a KGB Colonel and Pelton’s preliminary contact, defected to the USA and offered data which finally led to Pelton’s arrest. The next yr, Pelton was convicted of espionage and sentenced to a few consecutive life sentences in jail – the place he finally died of pure causes on September 6, 2022. Fortunately, Pelton was not conscious of the Severdovinsk-Murmansk cable faucet, which remained in place till the top of the Chilly Warfare in 1991.

Operation Ivy Bells stays one of many biggest and most ingenious intelligence coups of the Chilly Warfare – a minimum of, that we all know of. Given what number of covert operations stay labeled to at the present time, who is aware of what different daring exploits the “Silent Service” carried out throughout probably the most harmful interval in human historical past?

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