The following is presented in conjunction with the seventh annual Western Naval History Association Symposium, being held on board the USS Midway Museum in San Diego, California, on Saturday and Sunday, 1–2 February 2025, where the author will present his theories. The opinions expressed here are the personal views of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Naval History magazine.
The loss of the Skipjack-class nuclear attack submarine USS Scorpion (SSN-589) remains to many an unresolved mystery more than 56 years after it sank, with all hands, on 22 May 1968. But a closer look at the event suggests a different description: that it is one of the more closely guarded secrets of the Cold War.
This is a focused review of the critical 18-day period immediately following the sinking, and eight key events that occurred during that span. It includes the sinking itself; the Scorpion’s failure to reach Norfolk as scheduled on Monday 27 May; the formal declaration of “Event SUBMISS” at 1500 EDT that day; the frantic eight-day open-ocean search that ended on 4 June with the Navy’s announcement both submarine and crew were presumed lost; and the opening of the Court of Inquiry into the incident the following day. In addition, it includes evidence to suggest the wreckage was not, as the Navy declared, discovered five months later on 28 October, but in early June—less than a week after the Navy pronounced the Scorpion was presumed lost.
Background
The official U.S. Navy position, then and now, is that the Scorpion most likely sank due to an unspecified mechanical malfunction that caused the 252-foot-long submarine to plunge below its crush depth, about 1,300 feet below the surface. In late January 1969, the Navy announced that a formal Court of Inquiry into the loss had concluded, after months of hearings in 1968, that “the certain cause of the loss of Scorpion cannot be ascertained from any evidence now available (italics added).”1
The pronouncement papered over a sharp disagreement between the seven-member court and admirals higher up the Navy chain of command, a dispute that itself was buried under Top Secret classification for 30 years after the incident.
The court’s “Findings of Fact, Opinions and Conclusions,” declassified in 1993, revealed that the panel had actually concluded—based on hard acoustic evidence and photographs of damage to the hull—that the most likely cause of the sinking had been “an explosion of large charge weight external to the pressure hull.”
Testimony from several Atlantic Fleet officials had denied the nearby presence of any Soviet submarines at the time of the sinking, and the Court latched on to an explanation for the loss that it deemed most likely given the available evidence: a mishap involving one of the Scorpion’s own conventionally armed Mark 37 torpedoes. The panel constructed a scenario “consistent with the level of [the crew’s] training, operating procedures and previous practices:
“A Mark 37 torpedo in a tube in fully ready position, without propeller guard, starts a ‘hot run’ due to inadvertent activation of the battery.
“The ship begins a [180-degree] turn to attempt shutdown of the propulsion motor by means of the anti-circular run device.
“Acting on impulse, and perhaps influenced by successful ejection of a Mark 37 exercise shot which was running hot in the tube in December 1967, the torpedo was released from the tube, became fully armed, and sought its nearest target, Scorpion.”2
The court politely rebuffed Vice Admiral Arnold F. Schade, commander of the Atlantic Submarine Force, who had put forward a quite different explanation for the loss. In Finding of Fact 43, the Court stated:
“The Commander, Submarine Forces, U.S. Atlantic Fleet has postulated that Scorpion was lost as a result of a flooding type casualty which originated at a depth of [deleted] feet or less; that for undetermined reasons the flooding caused the ship to sink near or beyond the hull designed collapse depth; that the Engine Room telescoped into or around the Auxiliary Machinery Space at a depth of around [deleted] feet, and that this was the initial acoustic event.”3
In its Opinions section, the court disagreed with Admiral Schade:
“While the sequence of events postulated by the Commander, Submarine Forces, U.S. Atlantic Fleet is considered possible, the weight of evidence leads to the conclusion that such a sequence of events was not probable."4
But Admiral Schade, Atlantic Fleet Commander Admiral Ephraim P. Holmes, and Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Thomas H. Moorer would have the last word.
Under standard procedures set out by the Judge Advocate General of the Navy, the Court of Inquiry sent its massive report up the chain of command for formal endorsements that either accepted, modified, or rejected the findings. The key conclusion was immediately challenged.
In his first endorsement of the Scorpion report, Admiral Holmes arbitrarily rejected the court’s conclusion that the best evidence showed that an explosion of “large charge weight external to the pressure hull” had sunk the submarine. Holmes first summarized the Court’s findings:
“The Court of Inquiry developed a scenario related to the acoustic events which concludes that the USS Scorpion was steaming at a depth of 250 feet or less at which time flooding most probably occurred as the result of an unknown casualty in the area of the Operations Compartment or Torpedo Room. … The Court concluded further that the casualty was most probably due to causes other than the implosion of a major compartment. This opinion is presumably based on the fact that visible structural damage to the submarine is more probably associated with an explosion rather than an implosion. [Italics added.]”5
Then Holmes stuck in the knife. He wrote:
“Although this explanation of the cause of the loss of the USS Scorpion is relatively well documented, it is not the only explanation of the manner in which the submarine could have been lost. This fact is apparent in the differences of opinion expressed by highly qualified expert witnesses who appeared before the Court. Therefore, the Commander in Chief, U.S. Atlantic Fleet, while not an expert in many of the areas which were considered by the Court, is of the opinion that the conclusions of the Court concerning the most probable cause of the loss of the USS Scorpion, although logical, cannot be confirmed, and therefore, the cause of the loss cannot be definitely ascertained. [Italics added.]”6
This one paragraph sufficed to bury the court’s controversial conclusion. But the Navy’s top admiral went a step further. When Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Thomas H. Moorer forwarded the Court of Inquiry report to the Secretary of the Navy 10 months later, there was no mention at all of an explosion or runaway torpedo:
“The Chief of Naval Operations concurs with the Court’s opinion that the certain cause of the loss of Scorpion is not ascertainable from any evidence now available. Based on the evidence available, and the recommendation of CINCLANTFLT [Admiral Holmes], total commitment to any of the scenarios contained in the record is not warranted.”7
In 1971, a formal OPNAV memorandum went even further than Holmes or Moorer, flatly stating: “The cause of the loss of USS Scorpion has not been established.”8
The official Navy account of the loss of the Scorpion has steadily unraveled in the decades that passed.
Despite the gradual declassification of thousands of pages of former Secret and Top Secret documents since the early 1980s, a small but vital part of the archive remains classified, obscuring a definitive picture of the Scorpion’s fate. But some former Navy personnel with firsthand knowledge of the Navy’s handling of the incident have stepped forward to allege that the sinking was no accident. Rather, they state, it stemmed from a hostile encounter with a Soviet submarine. They further propose that the loss was recognized in near-real time by the innermost circle of the operations and communications sections at Atlantic Submarine Force headquarters.
Five decades ago, while Americans watched the televised Watergate scandal hearings, then-Senator Howard Baker (R-TN) posed a critical question: “What did the President know, and when did he know it?” My long research into the Scorpion has followed a parallel track, seeking answers to the question, “What did the Navy—in particular, the Atlantic Submarine Force—know about the Scorpion, and when did they know it?”
Here are some of the answers that I found.
The Official Scorpion Narrative
I’ve identified eight significant events that occurred within the two-week period from 22 May through June 9, 1968.
Event 1: The Sinking
Despite the many conflicting accounts of the Scorpion loss—official and researched—all agree on one documented fact: At 1844 GMT (1344 Quebec/EDT in Norfolk) on Wednesday, 22 May 1968, the Scorpion suffered a massive explosion and sank some 400 nautical miles west-southwest of the Azores. Its shattered hull plunged 10,100 feet to the Atlantic seabed, breaking in two pieces upon impact, with its dorsal-fin-shaped sail torn off and its reactor vessel thrown free of the hull.
All 99 crewmen on board perished. Eighteen hours earlier, Atlantic Submarine Force communications had received an encrypted message that officials said gave the submarine’s position as 029:19N 027:37W. It was the last communication ever transmitted by the Scorpion.9
According to the Scorpion Court of Inquiry, multiple Navy reports, press coverage, and senior Atlantic Submarine Force officials, the sinking went undetected and completely unnoticed for the next five days.
Event 2: Arrival Time Released
On Friday, 24 May, Commander, Submarine Force Atlantic (COMSUBLANT) officials declassified and released the Scorpion’s scheduled arrival time as 1300 EDT on Monday, 27 May. That announcement alerted family members when they could go down to the destroyer-submarine piers off Hampton Boulevard to welcome their sailors home from the submarine’s three-month Mediterranean deployment.
It was later revealed that the Scorpion had originally been scheduled to return to Norfolk on Friday, 24 May, but soon after the submarine had entered the Atlantic via the Straits of Gibraltar on 17 May, Admiral Schade had diverted it some 1,200 miles to the southwest on a surveillance mission against a group of Soviet warships operating near the Canary Islands. This mission pushed the arrival date back to Monday, 27 May.10
Event 3: Scorpion Fails to Arrive
On 27 May, several dozen family members gathered at the foot of Pier 22, sitting in their cars or huddling under umbrellas as they endured a howling nor’easter that raged across Hampton Roads. As the hours slowly ticked by, all seemed normal. Astern of the submarine tender USS Orion (AS-18) moored at Pier 22, a harbor tug loitered in the distance, and line-handlers stood on the pier waiting patiently for the dark silhouette of the Scorpion to emerge from the blur of low clouds and sheets of rain.11
But unknown to the crew families, concern began growing in the Submarine Squadron 6 offices aboard the Orion shortly before 12 noon. The customary procedure was that when the Scorpion surfaced off the Virginia Capes, Commander Francis A. Slattery would contact the squadron over the harbor circuit to confirm the Scorpion was heading up-channel. No message arrived.
“Up to 11 a.m., we weren’t too concerned,” said retired Captain James C. Bellah, the Orion’s skipper, who was acting commander of Submarine Squadron 6 that day. “We got no indication there was any problem with that submarine at all.” But when Bellah telephoned COMSUBLANT headquarters at 1240 to tell them that the Scorpion had failed to radio in, communications officials launched what was described as an “intense” effort to contact Slattery by radio. They heard nothing.12
Event 4: SUBMISS Declared
It wasn’t until the 1300 arrival time had passed with no sign of the submarine that COMSUB-LANT officials began to panic. At 1415, the duty officer at Anti-submarine Warfare Forces Atlantic (COMASWFORLANT) received a call from his counterpart at COMSUBLANT requesting that they launch a pair of patrol aircraft to search the area of the Scorpion’s approach track immediately offshore.
At 1500, the Atlantic Submarine Force formally issued “Event SUBMISS,” the formal missing submarine alert. This galvanized ships and aircraft squadrons all along the East Coast to prepare for what would become the largest U.S. naval operation since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. By nightfall, the first of what would be 55 ships and submarines, and three dozen long-range patrol aircraft, were heading out into the storm-tossed Atlantic to hunt for the missing Scorpion.13
Event 5: COMSUBLANT’s Whereabouts
By his own account, Admiral Schade was one of the last to hear of the Scorpion’s failure to reach port. He and three staff members had flown out of Norfolk early that morning to Groton, Connecticut, where they boarded the newly commissioned nuclear attack submarine USS Pargo (SSN-650) for a daylong check ride.
Schade later said it was 1625 EDT when the submarine’s radio gang decrypted the SUBMISS alert message. He ordered Pargo skipper Commander Steven A. White to head at full speed for the transit lanes off the Virginia Capes. Schade would remain on board the submarine until Tuesday morning, 28 May, before returning to his headquarters to direct the open-ocean search operation.14
That Monday afternoon, the SUBMISS alert message rocketed up the chain of command to the Pentagon, and within the hour White House aides had notified President Lyndon B. Johnson, “We may have lost a submarine with 90 men aboard going into Norfolk.”15
CBS broke the news bulletin revealing the search for the missing Scorpion at 1800 that evening.
Event 6: CNO Offers Hope to Families
As the shocked and numb Scorpion families went home to wait for any news of their missing loved ones, Admiral Moorer offered words of hope later that Monday evening:
“The weather is very, very bad out there,” the CNO told a group of Pentagon reporters, adding that turbulence and lightning might have prevented Slattery from establishing radio contact. “But the weather may abate, the [Scorpion] may well have been held back and she could proceed into port.”
Event 7: A Long, Unsuccessful Search
After several days, Admiral Schade ordered many of the search ships to return to port or continue on their original assignments. A task force under Rear Admiral Lawrence G. Bernard, one of Schade’s two submarine flotilla commanders, was ordered to conduct a fine-grain search down the Scorpion’s projected course track. Five surface warships steamed in line abreast, covering a 48-mile-wide corridor, with five submarines following behind 12 hours later. After a 2,500-mile trek, the task force reached the Scorpion’s last known position at 29:19N 027:37W, about 400 nautical miles south-southwest of the Azores. Bernard’s weeklong hunt ended at 1605 on Tuesday, 4 June, without locating a single piece of debris associated with the submarine. At that hour, Admiral Moorer declared the Scorpion and its crew as “presumed lost.”16
Event 8: Court of Inquiry
The following morning, Wednesday, 5 June, the Court of Inquiry convened at Norfolk to search for answers. Its president, retired Vice Admiral Bernard L. “Count” Austin, was no stranger to the process. Five years earlier, he had led a Court of Inquiry that probed the sinking of the USS Thresher (SSN-593) during a post-overhaul test dive in April 1963.
The first witness was Vice Admiral Schade. In sworn testimony, COMSUBLANT told the Court that the Scorpion had been operating under strict radio silence on its homeward trek after transmitting the 22 May position report.
Asked by the court’s lead counsel if it were normal for COMSUBLANT not to have heard from the Scorpion during the five days between the sinking and its failure to arrive on 27 May, Schade replied: “That is correct.”
Q. Is this normal?
A. It is quite common practice. As you know, our Polaris [missile] submarines go out in 60-day patrols and never broadcast except in most extraordinary circumstances. And frequently, our submarines are sent out in exercises which eliminate any requirement for reporting.”
Schade also alluded to his command’s occasional use of check reports, where under some circumstances, submarines at sea would be directed to transmit a brief “burst” message at a preset interval. For example, if the USS Ray (SSN-653) were ordered to send a check report message every 48 hours, the decrypted text would read “Check 48, submarine Ray.” The admiral continued:
A. It is only normal to expect check reports . . . when submarines are operating in the local [training] areas when the exercise ground rules so apply.
During the rest of the two months of testimony from 76 witnesses and subject experts, the Court of Inquiry consistently heard one theme: the shocking failure of the Scorpion to reach port on 27 May, 1968, was the first time anyone knew or suspected that anything was wrong.
Rear Admiral Charles D. Nace, a senior member of the Court of Inquiry, said years later that the Scorpion’s loss remained “one of the greatest sea mysteries of our age.”17
That narrative went unchallenged for the next 15 years. Then two of the most unlikely sources—Admiral Schade himself, and Admiral Moorer, in separate interviews—contradicted the official Navy narrative, including their own public remarks.
Piercing the Curtain of Secrecy
My Scorpion research found that accounts of the eight pivotal events cited above were infused with false or misleading information that seemed intended to portray the sinking as a “sea mystery.”
In separate on-the-record interviews in April 1983, Schade and Moorer inadvertently provided a glimpse of what had really happened at the outset of the crisis. More than three decades later, two eyewitnesses who were serving at COMSUBLANT communications when the Scorpion went down flatly stated that a Soviet submarine had sunk it.
Journalism, like history, is sometimes the plaything of chance. In the case of the Scorpion, it began with a telephone interview with Admiral Schade on 21 April 1983 to discuss his role in the incident for a feature article I was preparing for The Virginian Pilot and The Ledger Star commemorating the 15th anniversary of the loss. I had earlier read through the newspapers’ thick pile of clippings, which gave no inkling that there had been anything about the loss. In fact, that possibility had not occurred to me at all. Rather, the 1968 articles echoed the official narrative of an unexplained failure to reach port that took everyone by surprise—on to the Court of Inquiry’s conclusion that “no certain cause” could be established for the sinking.
I suggested to Admiral Schade that instead of a back-and-forth Q&A, he simply recount his personal experience from the time he had first heard something was wrong. What came next was a surprise. Instead of reciting the official narrative, Schade told me what had really happened.
This is what the retired submarine admiral said:
* Schade recalled that he was at sea on another COMSUBLANT attack submarine out of Norfolk when, in the early morning hours of Thursday, 23 May, he received word the Scorpion had failed to transmit a check report message the day before. The submarine also failed to respond to a message directing it to contact headquarters.
* Within several hours, concern mounted over the Scorpion to the degree that Schade contacted his superior, Atlantic Fleet Commander Admiral Holmes, to request that he—Schade—get the authority to launch a highly classified search for the submarine using several destroyer squadrons and long-range patrol aircraft, as well as available submarines. Asked when he had made this request to his superior, Schade said, “As soon as we were concerned that she had not checked in.” Holmes agreed to the request.
* Pressed to clarify that he was not belatedly confusing this with the large-scale search sparked by the SUBMISS alert on 27 May, Schade explained:
“All I know is that long before she was due in Norfolk [on Monday, 27 May], we had organized a search effort. We had two squadrons of destroyers, a lot of anti-submarine search planes operating out of Norfolk, the Azores and other areas, and we had ships in the Atlantic that were in transit between the [Mediterranean] and the U.S. Some were diverted, some were told to come over to the track which we presupposed the Scorpion would be on. They searched up and down that [track]. This went on for quite some time before until it was quite obvious that she was long overdue arriving in Norfolk.”
* In a second interview in 1986, Schade again stated that the classified search had occurred in “the week of the 20th” of May—and not on or after the following Monday when the public SUBMISS alarm went off.
After processing this revelation, I sought out a second confirming source. I contacted retired Admiral Moorer at his Washington, D.C. office, and interviewed him a week later.
Moorer did not recall as many details of the Scorpion incident, but confirmed a critical revelation by Schade while sharing an unexpected insight of his own: The former CNO said he was informed of COMSUBLANT’s failure to make radio contact with Slattery after the failed check report during his daily staff meeting at the Navy’s flag plot on Thursday, 23 May—the morning after the sinking. There was no uncertainty about the submarine’s fate. “Within twenty-four hours” of the missed check report, he said, “the conclusion was made that she was lost.”
While Schade and Moorer insisted that nothing sinister had happened to the Scorpion, the significance of what the two admirals shared in those two interviews cannot be understated, particularly when one takes a closer look at the official chronology of events between 22 May and 5 June, 1968, as well as what the two admirals and other Navy officials publicly said and did between those dates. Reconsider the eight key events:
The sinking
This did not pass unnoticed by COMSUBLANT as was conveyed in news coverage of the sudden response five days later, on 27 May, culminating with the SUBMISS alert. Rather, within several hours of the failed check report, Schade’s headquarters alerted him at sea of the concern, and he immediately contacted Atlantic Fleet Commander-in-Chief Admiral Holmes for permission to mount a Top Secret search for the submarine. Within hours, word reached Admiral Moorer at his morning CNO briefing in the Pentagon, as the pre-27 May hunt for Scorpion got underway.
An even more stark account of the Scorpion’s final mission to spy on Soviet warships emerged 15 years after Schade and Moorer revealed the pre-27 May search. Retired Vice Admiral Phillip A. Beshany, who in 1968 was the two-star Director of Submarine Warfare at the Pentagon, confirmed that Navy officials were worried about the Scorpion even before it sank. In a 1997 interview, Beshany said: “There was a lot of classified material relating to the Soviet [warship] group. In fact, there was some concern that the Scorpion might have been trailed and sunk by them. . . . There was some activity on the airwaves that aroused peoples’ concerns that they were aware of the presence of Scorpion . . . speculation that they might have detected her, trailed her and decided they would just eliminate her.”18
Event 2: Arrival Time Released
With knowledge of the Scorpion’s loss restricted to a handful of senior officers at COMSUBLANT, Schade’s staff on Friday, 24 May, acted as if nothing was amiss. The command declassified and released the submarine’s scheduled arrival time for 1300 hours on Monday, 27 May. In fact, this was the day after, Admiral Moorer later said, “the conclusion was made that she was lost.” Families of the crew later said the announcement prompted them to begin planning for their homecoming welcome at Pier 22 three days later.
Event 3: Scorpion Fails to Arrive
The public, news media, most of the Norfolk naval community, and all but a handful of COMSUBLANT officials were kept in the dark about the secret knowledge of the 22 May sinking. Subsequent Court of Inquiry testimony by Submarine Squadron 6 and Submarine Division 62 officers confirmed Captain Bellah’s comment that there was no concern over the Scorpion until mid-day on 27 May.
Worse, it now appears unavoidable that the families of the Scorpion’s crew were deliberately made unwitting accomplices in a fictional narrative with the announcement on 24 May that the submarine would arrive at 1300 on 27 May. Their agonizing wait in a howling storm was a central piece of the story.
Retired Rear Admiral Robert R. Fountain, who had detached as the Scorpion’s executive officer several months before the submarine left on its final deployment, said in a 1986 interview: “I’m horrified that they let the dependents to come down [to the pier] at the time the submarine was supposed to come in. It bothers me a great deal.” He explained that each submarine had a “telephone tree” network where updates on routine events such as a delayed arrival time could be quickly passed down to family members.19
Event 4: SUBMISS Declared
When the formal “Event SUBMISS” message rocketed around the Navy, triggering the highly publicized and ultimately unsuccessful hunt for the missing submarine, any COMSUBLANT and senior Navy admirals aware of its true fate silent during the five days that had passed between the 22 May sinking and the formal alert. To this day, the Navy refuses to confirm or deny the existence of a Top Secret pre-27 May search.
Event 5: COMSUBLANT’s Whereabouts
Fully aware that the Scorpion was lost after the four-day classified search he commanded with the approval of both Admiral Holmes at Atlantic Fleet headquarters and Admiral Moorer at the Pentagon, and obviously aware that a major crisis was about to explode, Schade did not choose to be in his office that Monday afternoon when the submarine failed to arrive on schedule. Instead, early that morning of 27 May, he boarded a small Navy aircraft with three staff aides and flew up to Groton to board the Pargo for a prescheduled check ride. This movement placed him far from the scene that would unfold in Norfolk some eight hours later, and further reinforced the impression of a sudden, unexpected emergency. How “close hold” was the knowledge of the 22 May sinking? Two of the three aides on that flight—Schade’s flag secretary and flag yeoman—later recalled that on 27 May they had had no knowledge of the Scorpion’s loss five days earlier.20
Event 6: CNO Offers Hope to Families
One of the few easily obtainable video clips of the Scorpion incident found on the internet today shows Admiral Moorer late in the evening of 27 May offering hope to the families while speaking to the Pentagon press corps: “The weather out there is very, very bad out there,” Moorer said. He added that the turbulence and lightning might have prevented Slattery from establishing radio contact. “But the weather may abate, the [Scorpion] may well have been held back and she could proceed into port.”
Yet Moorer’s own account in his on-the-record interview in 1983—that he and other officials by Thursday, May 23 had concluded four days earlier “that she was lost”—suggests that he knew he was only giving the families false hope.
Event 7: A Long, Unsuccessful Search
While this effort can be characterized as a legitimate attempt to confirm the location of the missing submarine, the fact that it was depicted in isolation—ignoring a Top Secret hunt that went on for four days before 27 May—further suggests the Navy might have been crafting a fictional narrative to overwrite the true sequence of events.
Event 8: Court of Inquiry
Schade’s sworn testimony that the Scorpion was operating under strict radio silence during the five-day period spanning 22-27 May contradicted the account he gave in his April 1983 interview. Further, two eyewitnesses to the events at COMSUBLANT headquarters later confirmed that the submarine was on a 24-hour check report schedule, and its failure to transmit on 22 May triggered an immediate emergency response inside the heavily guarded building, as will be detailed below.
Throughout the summer of 1968, the Court of Inquiry interviewed 76 witnesses covering all aspects of the Scorpion’s history, maintenance records, technical systems, operating procedures, weapons and personnel. According to three members of the seven-member panel, none of the testimony or evidence submitted made a single mention of the Top Secret pre-27 May search effort: “As you report [in Scorpion Down],” retired Captain Dean Horn wrote me in 2007, “none of your information on the [pre-27 May] search was presented to the Court, and that is enough to raise an enormous flag and question mark. I hope the full truth will be known someday.”21
The Secret Discovery
Even as the Court of Inquiry into the Scorpion loss convened on 5 June, the search for the submarine was entering a new phase. At the end of the open-ocean search on 4 June, seven oceanographic research and support ships were already heading for the eastern Atlantic some 400 nautical miles southwest of the Azores.
The official narrative is that a team of Navy scientists analyzing underwater sounds from the Scorpion sinking calculated an estimated location of the wreckage. Using state-of-the art underwater sensors, the searchers found the submarine on 28 October 1968 after an arduous five-month search.
This scientific hunt began just hours after SUBMISS on 27 May. A team of experts led by Dr. John P. Craven, director of the Navy’s Deep Submergence Systems Project, went searching for any hydrophone networks in the Atlantic that might have recorded the sinking. Two networks – one near Newfoundland and a second at the Canary Islands, revealed a sequence of 19 hydro-acoustic signals lasting 91 seconds that appeared to be the “train wreck” sounds as the Scorpion sank. By Thursday, 30 May, the scientists had identified a 12-by-12-mile area about 400 miles south-southwest of the Azores where the two hydrophone arrays had generated a cross-bearing of the sounds.22
The key vessel in this focused search was the civilian-crewed USNS Mizar, a 266-foot oceanographic research vessel. Five years earlier, the Mizar had found the remains of the USS Thresher, and in 1966 it had played a key role in locating an Air Force hydrogen bomb lost in the Mediterranean after a mid-air collision. Its daunting challenge was to find the wreck of the Scorpion lying on the seabed two miles down. The Mizar arrived at the search site and began the long hunt on Monday, 10 June.23
To locate the Scorpion, the Mizar each day lowered a 1,400-pound steel sled that trailed at the end of a three-mile cable, gliding along some 30 feet above the seabed. Every 30 seconds, a command from the ship triggered a pair of electronic strobe lights, illuminating and capturing a 100-foot-wide swath of the ocean floor with a 35 mm film camera using an ultrawide 9.8-mm lens.
Every evening, the crew would haul in the three-mile cable and sled, remove and process the film, and make a positive image copy. Then, some poor team member would spend the night staring through a magnifying viewer at each of about 1,400 35-mm frames looking for the image of the Scorpion’s hull.24
It was a daunting challenge.
Admiral Schade himself would warn that the search might take a long time. Speaking to a chapter of the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA) in Groton on 27 June, Schade cautioned, “I can’t impress on you enough the magnitude of the job we have been pursuing, When Thresher went down [on 10 April 1963], she was escorted by a submarine rescue vessel [USS Skylark] that knew her exact position. It still took us two summers to locate her hull. Now we are faced with and pursuing a search [with] no clues where that search might begin.”25
Six days after the Mizar’s arrival in the search area, Craven’s team on 16 June recalculated the acoustic data and shifted the estimated position of the wreckage (the center of the search square) six miles to the west to 32:53:06N 033:11:30W and identified it as “Point Oscar,” the starting point for the underwater search. Two more adjustments would follow by 22 June, further complicating the effort.
“It was,” Craven said, “like looking through a soda straw for a lost contact lens in your front yard at midnight—in the rain.”
Over the course of the next five months, the Mizar made a total of 80 sweeps of the search area, averaging about 70 miles each time. The sled camera caught more than 200,000 images. The vast majority showed the empty seabed. On run No. 74, the sled’s magnetometer signaled the presence of significant amounts of steel. The next day on Monday, 28 October, the images from Run No. 75 revealed the submarine’s bow section.26
Admiral Moorer, the Chief of Naval Operations, later hailed the discovery. “Location of the Scorpion, six months after her loss, in over 11,000 feet of water, was a momentous oceanographic accomplishment,” he said. “It represented a major milestone towards achieving our goals in deep-ocean search.”27
In late 1993, two former crewmen of the submarine rescue ship USS Petrel (ARS-14) challenged the official account of the Mizar’s 28 October discovery, alleging the Scorpion had actually been found in early June. This accusation seemed far-fetched.
The Petrel was one of a half-dozen ships involved in the focused search in the “area of special interest.” Both former sailors categorically insisted they had seen underwater images of the Scorpion while visiting a friend on the Mizar when both ships were in port in the Azores at the end of June. Although their service records confirmed both were on board during the Scorpion search, and several Navy documents confirmed both the Mizar and Petrel were in port at Terceira from 30 June to 3 July, the allegation remained far from confirmed.
Then in 2006, three former sailors from the USS Compass Island (AG-153), another search ship, claimed that their vessel had found the submarine first, in early June.
The Compass Island was one of COMSUBLANT’s lesser-known support vessels, formally designated an experimental navigation ship. It served as a platform to test and refine the inertial navigation systems used by the Polaris submarines to pinpoint their locations at sea without relying on any external navigation aids. This was essential for ensuring the accuracy of their 16 ballistic missiles.
For the Scorpion search, the former crewmen said, the Compass Island had a different tool: a sophisticated underwater mapping sonar system that could create a detailed topographical chart of the seabed. The three ex-crewmen said the Scorpion was detected by this system sometime in early June. Still, without hard, independent documentation, these sailors’ allegations could be dismissed.28
But three unclassified, unrelated pieces of information I found in a small mountain of routine paperwork put into question the late October search and discovery by the Mizar. They were:
* The precise latitude-longitude of the Scorpion wreckage, declassified 30 years after the sinking in 1998, given as 32:54N 033:09W;
* A speech by Admiral Schade in late June 1968, which confirmed the ex-sailors’ account that the Compass Island had a bottom-mapping sonar capable of imaging the wreckage; and
* The Compass Island’s quartermaster deck logs during its operation in the search area in June 1968.
The Scorpion location: The U.S. Atlantic Fleet command history for 1968-69 was declassified from Secret in 1998. On Page 104 of the 146-page annual review, it listed the loss of the Scorpion and for the first time pinpointed the submarine’s location. That information had been redacted from all prior documents released by the Navy.
Separately, the exact latitude-longitude position of “Point Oscar,” the initial estimate of the Scorpion position from the acoustic signals, was declassified in a 1993 Navy message to be at 32:53:06N 033:11:30W. The two positions were 3 nautical miles apart, a significant gap considering the Mizar sled camera could record only 100 feet of seabed in each photograph.
The Compass Island’s mapping sonar
The three veterans who served on the ship—one of whom was unacquainted with the other two—provided identical accounts of a special bottom-scanning sonar system on their ship that they said actually located the Scorpion. Admiral Schade himself, in speech to an NDIA chapter on 27 June 1968, detailed the capabilities of this gear, called the Sonar Array Sounding System, or SASS. It employed a multiple-beam array of 61 sonar transponders in the ship’s giant sonar dome that bounced sonar pulses down to the ocean floor, processed the return echoes, and created a continuous contour map of the seabed as the ship traveled on its intended track. So Schade affirmed the assertion the former Compass Island crewmen had made. Later research allowed me to calculate that the system could continuously map a 2-mile-wide swath of the seabed at a depth of 10,100 feet—significantly more than the Mizar’s 100-foot camera range.
In his speech, Schade waxed eloquent on the capabilities of the SASS system. Noting its “very fine bottom charting capability,” Schade said SASS “therefore may be able to spot unusual irregularities on the ocean floor such as a submarine hull.”29
The Compass Island deck logs
The COMSUBLANT ship logs contained in each day’s entry provide the precise latitude-longitude position of the ship at 0800, 1200 and 2000 hours. The Compass Island took part in the Scorpion search during 7-14 June, and a second phase during 16-21 June. One course track for the ship produced a stunning visual confirmation when I added the locations of the Scorpion, Point Oscar, and the SASS imaging swath:
It occurred on 9 June, 1968.
Between 1200 and 0200 on that Sunday, the Compass Island steamed a southwesterly track in the search area, running over the location of the Scorpion—lying well within the SASS swath—around 1700.
This was just two days after the ship began its own search operation; only five days after the Scorpion was declared “presumed lost;” seven days before Dr. John Craven’s team on 16 June even transmitted the latitude-longitude location of Point Oscar—their best estimate of where the submarine would be found—to the Mizar. And this was one day before the Mizar arrived on the scene on 10 June and launched its towed sled for the first time.
In short, COMSUBLANT must have known the exact location of the sunken submarine even before the searchers arrived on scene.
Eyewitnesses to the Secret Crisis
Across more than 25 years of researching and writing about the Scorpion, one critical element remained elusive: a detailed account of what occurred within Atlantic Submarine Force headquarters in the immediate aftermath of the sinking on 22 May 1968.30
But in 2010, two former members of the Communications Watch Center on duty the day the Scorpion sank broke their long silence. Radiomen 2nd Class Mike Hannon and Ken Larbes worked alternating shifts at COMSUBLANT’s message center in the spring of 1968. They were eyewitnesses to what took place in that closely guarded building on 22 May and in the hours and days after the sinking.
Hannon was on duty during the 1600-2400 evening shift on Wednesday, 22 May. During that period, he was expecting the Scorpion’s scheduled check report (“Check 24, submarine Scorpion”). It never arrived. At the end of his eight-hour watch, a concerned Hannon brought it to the attention of his watch supervisor, and his incoming relief, Ken Larbes. He then returned to his barracks down the street to sleep, since he was scheduled to relieve Larbes at 0800 the following morning.
Hannon, a qualified submariner who had served on the USS Triton (SSN-586) prior to joining COMSUBLANT in 1967, knew there were several reasons why a submarine might miss sending a check report: The weather might be too rough to transmit the message, or a radio component or mast might be temporarily down. Occasionally, the radio gang simply forgot.
But the communications staff that week were aware of another aspect of the Scorpion’s current situation that did have them worried. They knew of the submarine’s diversion down to the Canary Islands to spy on a Soviet naval formation that included several surface warships, several hydrographic research vessels, and at least one nuclear submarine.31
(It is still impossible to state whether Commander Slattery carried out the surveillance mission, or whether he reported any confrontation with the Soviets. His final message to Norfolk remains classified Top Secret.)
The veterans’ account of happened next at the COMSUBLANT message center indicates that 12 hours earlier, something far from routine had taken place in the eastern Atlantic. According to Hannon and Larbes, the quiet of the overnight watch ended abruptly several hours after midnight, when a number of senior COMSUBLANT officers suddenly barged into the message center, loudly speaking and arguing over the Scorpion’s status.
“I had never seen a captain or an admiral come into that place in the two and one-half years I worked there,” Larbes recalled. “Now we had captains and admirals running around wanting more information [about the Scorpion]. It was so crazy – they even suspended all of the saluting and all that.”
When Hannon arrived back at the message center shortly before 0800 on Thursday morning, 23 May, he found the workspace still full of senior officers, including a two-star Marine general. They were clogging the narrow aisles between the desks and tables with crypto machines. The room was full of cigarette smoke, and Hannon had difficulty performing his daily routine because of the nonstop telephone calls, arguments, and heated conversations.
But seemingly secure in a workspace where everything was classified Top Secret, the officers made no attempt to conceal their conversations from the duty radiomen, Hannon and Larbes said. Based on what they overheard, when the senior officers arrived at the message center after midnight, they already knew the Scorpion’s fate.
“There were officers openly discussing the fact that they believed the Scorpion had been sunk,” Hannon said. The sinking had been tracked by the then-Top-Secret Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS), a network of underwater acoustic sensors used to monitor and track submarines and surface ships.
“SOSUS did hear the explosion,” Hannon said. He and Larbes said they also overheard this: “A Soviet submarine was tracked leaving the area at a high rate of speed.”
The loss of the Scorpion was both a professional and deeply personal blow to Hannon, one of only a small number of African-American sailors in the Submarine Service at that time. His best friend and mentor, Steward’s Mate 1st Class Joe Cross—a decorated World War II veteran—was among the 99 sailors lost with the submarine.
In the days and weeks that followed, Hannon said he became confused, then furious, as he watched the Navy hide the truth about the sinking, beginning with COMSUBLANT’s release on 24 May of the Scorpion’s scheduled 1300 arrival on Monday, 27 May, some five days after it sank. On the morning of the day that its disappearance could no longer be hidden, Hannon said he drove over to the destroyer-submarine piers and was devastated to see the families of the crew braving the nor’easter for the return of loved ones who were already gone.
“That sight has haunted me for more than 50 years,” Hannon said in 2017.
1.U.S. Navy news release, Jan. 30, 1969.
2. Record of Proceedings of a Court of Inquiry Convened by Commander-in-Chief, United States Atlantic Fleet to Inquire into the Loss of USS Scorpion (SSN-589), hereafter “Court of Inquiry”) Supplemental Hearings, Vol. 4, Opinion No. 12, 255;
3. Court of Inquiry, Supplemental Report, Finding of Fact 43, 249.
4. Court of Inquiry, Supplemental Report, Opinion 16, 255.
5. Court of Inquiry. Admiral Holmes’ First Endorsement was still deemed so sensitive that when the Navy released the document in 1993, the italicized text was redacted on the grounds it was still classified Top Secret. The full text was declassified and released five years later in 1998.
6. CINCLANTFLT First Endorsement of Scorpion Court of Inquiry Report, released in 1993 and 1998.
7. CNO Third Endorsement of Scorpion Court of Inquiry Report, released in 1993 and 1998.
8. “Memorandum for the Chief of Naval Operations,” 16 February 1971, declassified from Secret.
9. The location of the Scorpion was released by Navy officials in 1968; the text of Slattery’s last message remains classified Top Secret.
10. Ed Offley, Scorpion Down, (New York, NT: Basic Books, 2007): 3.
11. “Patience Turned to Alarm,” The Virginian-Pilot, 29 May 1968; “Ordeal of Hope and Fear,” The Ledger-Star, 29 May 1968.
12. Captain J.C. Bellah interview, 9 January 1988.
13. Offley, Scorpion: 8-9.
14. Vice Admiral Arnold F. Schade interview, 27 April 1983.
15. “President’s Daily Diary,” of 27 May 1968, Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, released 7 October 1983.
16. Rear Admiral Lawrence G. Bernard, Commander Submarine Flotilla 6, “Report of Search Operations for USS Scorpion (SSN-589) During Period 271915Z May1968 to 052000Z June 1968.”
17. Rear Admiral Charles D. Nace, Commander Submarine Flotilla 2, in a letter to the author on June 29, 1998.
18. Rear Admiral Philip A. Beshany, former Director of Submarine Warfare, interview on Dec. 9, 1997.
19. Rear Admiral Robert R. Fountain interview on Nov. 6, 1986.
20. The three COMSUBLANT staffers accompanying Schade were Plans Officer Captain Allison Maynard, Flag Secretary Commander Jack Kleinfelter, and Flag Yeoman Senior Chief Jerry Hall. Both Kleinfelter and Hall said they were totally in the dark about the Scorpion. Maynard could not be reached for comment.
21. The other two Court of Inquiry members who said they had received no information about the pre-27 May search were Rear Admiral Charles D. Nace and then-Captain Harold G. Rich.
22. Dr. John Craven interview, 29 November 1984.
23. Report of the Scorpion Technical Advisory Group (TAG), 9 November 1969, declassified from Secret: 10.
24. Chester L. Buchanan, “Strange Devices that Found the Sunken Sub Scorpion,” Popular Science, April 1969.
25. Schade speech to NDIA, 27 June, 1968.
26. TAG Report: 84.
27. “Red Tip on Scorpion Denied,” The Virginian-Pilot, 2 April 1969.
28. Interviews with former Petrel crewmen Craig Nelson and Greg Platte in March 1996; interviews with former Compass Island crewmen Bill d’Emelio, Hugh Beemner and Bill Sebold in September-October 2006
29. Schade speech to NDIA, 27 June 1968.
30. Mike Hannon interviews in 2010 and 2017; Larbes interview in 2010.
31. Schade April 1983 interview.
