The surface of the Gulf of Hammamet, Tunisia, was dead calm as the Dutch submarine Tijgerhaai slowly cruised at periscope depth. A short distance from the lurking sub lay a Soviet Mirka-class corvette. While the Tijgerhaai's Periviz camera zoomed in on the corvette's superstructure, inside the boat's control room Lieutenant Robin Snouck Hurgronje studied the camera's video screen. Not much was happening. After noticing some rusty spots on the ship's hull, he saw some sailors leaning on her railing, smoking cigarettes. Then it happened. One of the Soviet sailors slowly pointed directly at the periscope camera. At him!
The year, Snouck Hurgronje recalls, was 1982. He is now a retired captain living in Wieringerwaard, the Netherlands, not far from Den Helder, the home base of the Royal Netherlands Navy. "You understand," he explains, "that we had to make an emergency dive. We didn't know how those Russians would react, you see. If they had attacked us they could easily have reported it as an exercise. They could have said that we shouldn't have been cruising around there secretly."
In the early 1980s, one of the frostiest periods of the Cold War, Snouck Hurgronje served in the Tijgerhaai and went on to command the submarine Zwaardvis. Despite arms-limitation conferences and hotlines between the White House and the Kremlin, East and West distrusted each other deeply. Spying seemed the only way to prevent a surprise attack. The work was done by satellites, airplanes, and secret agents—and by submarines like the Tijgerhaai and Zwaardvis.
Submariners Open Up
Nearly 20 years have passed since the Berlin Wall fell, and the Dutch Submarine Service, the Onderzeedienst, has opened its archives, but only slightly. Operational details that could reveal anything about present-day missions in the Persian Gulf or the Indian Ocean are still strictly classified. Fortunately, the Dutch Ministry of Defense seems to have relaxed its strict ban on submarine crew members discussing their work.
"In those days we weren't even allowed to tell our wives what we did," says Berrie Monster, a retired commander of the submarine Potvis. "The crew members themselves were usually not even told where they were going," adds Snouck Hurgronje. Will Falkmann, an electrician on many submarines during the Cold War, says he knew they were sailing north if it got colder, and he knew they were sailing south if got warmer.
But being allowed to talk is not the same as wanting to talk. The practice of keeping silent about Cold War missions with names such as Faceless Fable, Candid Carnival, and Giddy Golfer is equally strong in most of the retired submariners. Snouck Hurgronje, however, is willing to share his experiences. He served in the Onderzeedienst for almost 20 years and often spent three consecutive months at sea and beneath its surface. His life is still dominated by the ocean. After his retirement, he skippered the three-masted clipper Stad Amsterdam for several years, and he still enjoys sailing.
Spying in the Mediterranean
If you say submarines and Cold War one immediately conjures images of cat-and-mouse chases in ice-cold enemy waters, thanks to books like Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October. That image, however, is not entirely correct—at least as far as the cold waters go. Dutch submarines worked mainly in the Mediterranean Sea with a half-dozen diesel-electric boats.
Although most people would not know it, the Mediterranean was of great strategic importance to Eastern Europe. "We assumed that Soviet ships would try to get to the Atlantic Ocean in the case of a third world war in order to attack transatlantic routes," says Snouck Hurgronje. "They would have done that via the northern Atlantic Ocean and the Baltic Sea but also via the Strait of Gibraltar."
The strait would have been hard to transit. Moreover, the SOVMEDRON, as the Soviet Union's Mediterranean fleet was known in NATO jargon, had few naval bases in the region. "The Arab nations were not very sympathetic towards the Soviet Union," Snouck Hurgronje points out. "However, they did allow the Russians to have anchorages on the edges of their territorial waters."
These improvised anchorages were located all over the Mediterranean—in the Tunisian Gulf of Hammamet; off S
lum, Egypt; and even near the Greek island K thira. "The Russians just parked loads of [ships] there: technical workshops, tankers, supply vessels, hospital ships," Snouck Hurgronje recalls. "And the operational units would drop in there every now and again. It was our job to spy on them there."The reason Dutch submarines were used in the Mediterranean was the same reason they patrol these days in the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf. The 217- to 260-foot diesel boats are much better equipped to move secretively in the shallow waters there than the large nuclear-powered submarines of their NATO partners.
It was crucial that the Soviets did not know the locations of the Dutch submarines. All friendly sub movements were therefore coordinated by the commander of Task Force 69, an American officer at NATO's Allied Forces Southern Europe headquarters in Naples, Italy. "We didn't want NATO ships or helicopters chasing our own submarines by mistake," Snouck Hurgronje adds. If that happened, "the Russians would find out that there was a submarine in the vicinity that didn't belong to them. Our position would have been compromised."
Ultra Quiet
On some days there would be 70 Soviet vessels, including surface warships and submarines, at any one anchorage. On board one of the submerged subs, "the first task would be to identify these ships," the former Dutch skipper says. The boat would go to ultra quiet state; all but essential machinery would be turned off and anything else capable of making noise would be secured. The submarine would glide along underwater in the direction of the anchorage using passive sonar to navigate toward the noise of moving chains, engines, screw turns, or any other sounds emanating from the target ship. On display screens inside the boat, the commander could see when she had neared the Soviet vessel. The periscope would then quickly be elevated, and the cameras would start rolling.
At the same time, Dutch crewmen would use the passive sonar to make acoustic fingerprints of the Soviet vessels—especially the submarines. That way they could even learn to recognize the sound of a particular sub opening her torpedo hatches. By listening in, they could learn how long it took a torpedo to leave its tube and what a "fish" sounded like as it pinged away, looking for an enemy target. The Dutch also listened on underwater telephone to communications between Soviet ships.
Falkmann recalls that the early Dutch sub missions, conducted before the boats had been equipped with appropriate surveillance electronics, were "quite amateurish. . . . We would just buy a simple scanner at a dumpshop [surplus store] and adapt it so that we could intercept Russian radio communication. We only needed a single antenna. It received all frequencies: VHF, UHF, etc."
Taking photographs and filming was not that easy, according to Falkmann. "We borrowed cameras from the Americans," he says. "Periviz, they were called, and they had to be fixed onto our periscope. At first, the camera would turn left if you pressed the
right' button."Apart from the quality of the technical gear, the quality of the crew members was very important. "We commanders would fight over the best sonar men," Snouck Hurgronje asserts. Anything they traced, however trivial it may have seemed, could be of importance. Visual sightings were also extremely valuable. "Once, we saw a Soviet commander leave his submarine, Tango-class, and with all his decorations be delivered by sloop to a Krivak-class cruiser," the captain recalls. Possible conclusion: The Tango would be around for a while and the Krivak was an important ship. In case of war, the Krivak would be the first ship attacked.
There was always the chance of being spotted, and while the Soviets would not immediately open fire, accidents could happen. Snouck Hurgronje recalls:
Once we were chasing an Echo-class sub for hours. It was preparing to dive. Suddenly she went down, and we immediately lost track. We really had no idea where she had gone or what she was planning to do. That was a dangerous situation. We went into ultra quiet state; we turned off all equipment except for the sonar. We sent most of the crew to bed so as to save oxygen. We stayed there, motionless, for 32 hours. We never spotted or heard the Echo again.
Under Water, Looking Up
One of the hardest and most dangerous ways for the submariners to find out more about the Cold War foe's fleet was the so-called underwater look-viewing the underhull of Soviet ships through periscopes. Invisibly roaming around under a ship can only be done during the day and in clear waters, and anchor chains can pose problems. Taking an underwater look was, however, routine for the Dutch submariners.
The Soviet hulls were of interest to intelligence services because they were the ideal location for hatches from which minisubmarines or frogmen could exit. Vice Admiral Nico Buis, who later rose to be director of the Dutch domestic intelligence service, became well known within the submarine service because he once discovered such a hatch. The number of propeller blades could also reveal a lot about the capacities of the enemy submarines.
When he commanded the Potvis, Monster tried to take an underwater look at a Soviet AGI (intelligence-gathering ship) disguised as a fishing trawler off Northern Ireland. "The AGI usually lay in shallow water," he recalls. "That had a reason: Those guys just didn't want anyone spying on them from underneath. Now and again the AGI would sail off to watch a passing American
boomer' on her way from the Scottish base of Faslane to her patrol station in the Atlantic. It was my job to creep under the AGI at that point. We succeeded once, but the water was so murky that we couldn't see anything on the pictures later."The water in the Mediterranean, on the other hand, was usually clear. When taking an underwater look there, Captain Snouck Hurgronje recalls, "You had to know beforehand precisely where the ship that you were looking for lay. Keeping at the right depth was essential, and the periscope had to be low enough under the hold to actually see something."
In 1991, two years after the Berlin Wall came down, the Warsaw Pact was annulled and the Soviet Union collapsed, effectively ending the Cold War. A military attaché in Turkey at the time, Snouck Hurgronje was able to get an up-close look at his former prey. "I remember seeing a Russian Kilo-class submarine from the inside," he says. "I thought: Was this really what we were afraid of all that time?"
Of course, at the time he could not talk much about his spy missions. He did, however, make one exception. "As attach
, I discovered that my Russian colleague-attach had been commander of a supply ship that we had followed for days," the captain recalls. "We talked about it and realized that he hadn't been aware of our presence at all. So we drank a glass of vodka to that."