How many spy subs does the U.S. Navy have?” The question, from a Soviet captain 1st rank, took me by surprise. After brief hesitation, I replied, “All U.S. attack submarines have an intelligence collection role.” This wasn't the answer he wanted. He then opened the copy of Jane’s Fighting Ships on the table of my Moscow hotel suite. The book stated that the USS Halibut (SSN-587)
is employed in experimental work. . . . The Navy has stated that the Halibut and the earlier Seawolf [SSN-5T 5] have been designated as “mother” submarines for the deep submergence research vehicle programme and initially are being modified to accommodate vehicle test simulators. Reportedly, the Halibut has been fitted with a ducted bow thruster to permit precise control and manoeuvering.[1]
I was chagrined. At the time, June 1972, I was editor of the U.S. sections of Jane’s, fully responsible for one-third of that reference book. Further, I recently had spent four years with the Northrop Corp., working for the Navy’s Deep Submergence Systems Project. Although we had worked with the “mother” submarine concept, I had no knowledge that the Halibut or the Seawolf were involved in submarine rescue efforts, and I had accepted the Navy’s statement on the role of the two boats.
With my security clearance at that time I had limited access to the Navy’s deep-ocean search and recovery programs. I assumed that after I left the program in 1970 the Navy had developed “test simulators” that could be carried by the Halibut and Seawolf.
Also, I felt a certain fondness for the Halibut—the only nuclear-propelled missile submarine to be completed in the aborted Regulus program. (More had been planned.) She was the first nuclear-propelled submarine I had been aboard. During the fall of 1961, I had had an extensive tour, from the massive missile hangar in the bow (accommodating two Regulus II or five Regulus I missiles) to the stern torpedo tubes, including the engineering spaces.
Over time I learned a little more about the "experimental work" of the Halibut and the Seawolf. In an operation code named Ivy Bells, U.S. Navy submarines had tapped into the seafloor communications cable running from the Soviet submarine base of Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula to the Siberian coast. The intercept pod or “bug” had been placed on the seafloor cable by the Halibut. Periodically, she—or after 1976, her replacement. the extensively modified Parche (SSN-683)—had entered the area stealthily to service the recording devices in the pod.
In 1981, U.S. reconnaissance satellites sighted Soviet salvage ships moored directly over the pod. That was the end of that U.S. bugging operation.2
The story of how the spy sub operation was discovered by the Soviets was revealed to the public in 1985, when agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested Ronald W. Pelton, a long-time employee of the National Security Agency. Pelton had been identified by Vitaly Yurchenko, a KGB officer who “temporarily" defected to the United States.3 Pelton walked in to the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C., in 1980, offering to sell National Security Agency secrets. Among the U.S. spy operations he blew was Ivy Bells. (Pelton was sentenced to life imprisonment. The Soviets paid him an estimated $35,000 during his five years of spying.)
The Halibut also carried out another highly classified spy operation. On 8 March 1968, the Soviet ballistic missile submarine K-129 (also designated PL-574) suffered an internal explosion and sank in water 16,000 feet deep some 750 nautical miles northeast of Oahu.4 The submarine’s destruction was recorded by the Navy’s seafloor sound surveillance system (SOSUS).
The conventional story is that after the Golf sinking was detected by SOSUS, the Navy’s ocean research ship Mizar (T-AGOR-11) went to the site to search for the wreckage with a variety of deep- ocean sensors and cameras. The Mizar had been a key participant in the location of the remains of the sunken U.S. submarines Thresher (SSN-593) and Scorpion (SSN-589), the French submarine Eurydice, and the U.S. hydrogen bomb dropped into the sea off Palomares, Spain, following the collision of a B-52 strategic bomber and a tanker aircraft.
A new story emerged earlier this year, however, reporting that the remains of the K-129 actually were found by the Halibut. Shortly after the loss of the Soviet submarine, the Halibut began carrying out special trials off Pearl Harbor, towing an underwater camera at the end of a cable lowered through the bottom of the submerged submarine. After practice (and losing a camera) in Hawaiian waters, she sailed to the site of the K-129's remains. How she, with great difficulty, located the sunken submarine was revealed by Roger C. Dunham, at the time an enlisted reactor operator in the Halibut.5
At least one can surmise that Dunham was in the Halibut. His somewhat confusing account of being in a “spy sub” is about the USS Viperfish, using towed cameras to locate the remains of a Soviet cruise missile submarine, the PL-751.6' But his description of his Viperfish—and the photos in the book— clearly identify the submarine he served in as the Halibut.
His account of service in the submarine provides rich detail of the monotonous Halibut operations—“trawling” with her towed camera “fish” at the end of a 20,000-foot cable for weeks at a time, in the hope of locating the wreckage of the Soviet missile submarine:
. . . our ability to function as a seagoing submarine in matters of military defense was highly limited with the expensive Fish trailing several miles below us. We could not quickly change course, we could not speed up or slow down, and we were unable to change our depth abruptly without destroying the search pattern or damaging the Fish.
.... Even though the Fish was nearly twenty thousand feet below us, it had to be carefully pulled by its cable so that it would remain only a few feet off the ocean floor. The entire operation was extremely delicate, and its success depended on our moving slowly, systematically, and deliberately at all times/
Finally, shortly before the Halibut had to return to the West Coast for refueling of her reactor, success! The remains of the K-129 were located and photographed for subsequent salvage efforts by the Hughes Glomar Explorer, a built-for-the-purpose recovery ship operated by the Central Intelligence Agency.
The Halibut served in her highly classified role until being decommissioned in 1976. At that time, the Parche, a Sturgeon (SSN-637)-class submarine completed two years earlier, replaced the Halibut. The Parche transferred from the Atlantic to the Pacific in October 1976 and entered the Mare Island Naval Shipyard in Vallejo, California, for modification to a spy sub. She was refueled and more extensively modified at Mare Island from January 1987 to May 1991. These later modifications included the addition of a 100-foot section forward of the sail, to accommodate special search-and-recovery equipment. The latter is reported to include a claw-like device that can be lowered by cable to recover satellites and other equipment from the ocean floor.8
In her new configuration, the Parche displaces 7,800 tons submerged. She is manned by 22 officers and 157 enlisted personnel. The submarine retains some combat capabilities. Details of the Parche’s operations are classified, but special operations have earned the submarine five Presidential Unit Citations and three Navy Unit Citations.
Less is known about the activities of the spy sub Seawolf. The world’s second nuclear-propelled submarine, she was completed in 1957 with an S2G liquid-sodium reactor. That plant was not successful, and it was replaced with a duplicate of the S2W pressurized- water reactor plant of the Nautilus (SSN-571) in 1958-1960.
After operations in the Atlantic, in November 1970 the Seawolf shifted to the Pacific, being home ported at Mare Island, where the Halibut and later the Parche were based. From January 1970 to June 1973, the Seawolf was converted at Mare Island to a special projects platform.9
The rebuilt Seawolf operated until March 1987, when she, too, was laid up, apparently leaving the Parche as the U.S. Navy’s only dedicated “spy sub.”
Intelligence collection remains an important role for other U.S. and foreign submarines. Despite the advent of satellites and other systems for intelligence collection, certain intelligence can be acquired best—or perhaps even exclusively—by submarines. And some ocean-engineering activities, especially those of a clandestine nature, require specialized “spy subs.”
1 Jane's Fighting Ships, 1971-72 (London: Sampson Low Marston, 1971). p. 418.
2 The author saw one of the Ivy Bells recording devices on display in 1992 in Moscow at the Lubyanka complex, long the headquarters of the principal Soviet intelligence/security agency.
3 Three months after he defected to the United States, Yurchenko returned to the Soviet Union. He had been the KGB security officer for the Soviet Embassy in Washington from 1975 to 1980.
4 This was a Golf (Project 629) submarine, carrying two underwater-launched S-N-5 ballistic missiles; the submarine had diesel-electric propulsion. All 98 men on board were lost. The K designation was the submarine's name and PL her hull designation.
5 Roger Dunham, Spy Sub (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press. 1996).
6 There was never a Viperfish in the U.S. Navy; the submarine Viper (SS-10) was in service from 1907 to 1922.
7 Dunham, pp. 154-55.
8 The Parche's new role and configuration were extensively described in Ed Offley, "Secret Navy sub finds new home at Bangor base," Seattle Post-Intelligencer (23 November 1994), p. 1. The Parche characteristics are provided in The Ships and Aircraft of the U.S. Fleet, 16th ed. (Annapolis, MD: Naval institute Press, 1996), pp. 73-74. See also, "Welcome Aboard" pamphlet of the Parche (n.d.).
9 With the closing of Mare Island in 1994, the Parche shifted her home port to Bangor, Washington.