Based on newly declassified information and existing evidence, a former CIA intelligence officer theorizes on how we lost the submarine Scorpion and why many of her crew came to call her the USS Scrapiron.
At around midnight on 16 May 1968, the USS Scorpion (SSN-589) slipped quietly through the Strait of Gibraltar and paused just long enough off the choppy breakwaters of Rota, Spain, to rendezvous with a Navy ship and offload two crewmen and several messages. A high-performance nuclear-propelled attack submarine with 99 men on board, the Scorpion was on her way home to Norfolk, Virginia, after three months of operations in the Mediterranean with the Sixth Fleet and NATO.
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