Blind Man's Bluff - History Channel Documentary

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if you lived before our time who would you be what if you could choose from a thousand yesterdays when the past was today and the moon took your breath away who would you be Howard Oh living every generation before us remembering generations to come the history Jim where the past comes alive in the 20th century's two world wars submarines were instruments of Terror but in the long cold war that followed they became an indispensable part of high-stakes espionage the full extent of underwater spying was largely unknown until a recent bestseller blind man's bluff revealed the stories behind the perilous missions meant to gather intelligence our program is based on that book and the secrets it exposed for the first time join us now as the History Channel presents blind man's bluff [Music] they call them steel sharks mysterious powerful and deadly submarines stalk the seas they are among the most sophisticated killing machines ever created and the most vulnerable eight thousand ton ships designed to sink 400 foot windowless tubes whose thin walls are all that separate the crew inside from the oceans unforgiving depths the men of America's sub force are all there by choice Navy sailors willing to sacrifice sunlight to be part of an elite undersea brotherhood a military Corps so shrouded in secrecy it's known as the silent service [Applause] welcome to the horse and cow where the silent service comes to make noise for more than 30 years America's submarine errs have been blowing off steam at this California bar the horse and cow you can do anything you want and nobody would say that long as you didn't set the place on fire it's 9:00 a.m. on an April Friday in 2000 and these sailors have converged on the cow to celebrate an anniversary the hundredth year of submarines in the Navy [Music] for the first half of that history subs were used mostly as weapons of war but in the wake of World War two they became the tools of a trade as delicate as it was dangerous spying what submarines were able to gather through much of the Cold War did not lend itself to speculation or argument it was cold hard fact if these operations had been compromised if they had been discovered the chances of them all being killed were very high and so the missions and the people that led the missions were regarded as extraordinarily courageous submarines with a super-secret front line of the Cold War playing an undersea game of hide and seek whose stakes were nothing less than the fate of the world I knew that at any moment I could receive an order to launch my missiles on the targets in the United States of America the Russians have publicly said that they believe we maintain submarines off their coast near continuously from the mid 50s to the early 90s nearly 40 years and I'll just say maybe the Russians aren't wrong maybe they're right there's no other force in our entire defense establishment that contributed as much as the submarine force to the collapse of the Soviet Union for decades these submarine errs could not talk about what they did not to journalists not to friends not even to their own wives and children but in 1998 the publication of the book blind man's bluff brought their secrets to light now as the Cold War sinks deeper into history the extraordinary saga of American submarine espionage has finally begun to surface August 1949 the American submarine casinos slips out of its pier in Portsmouth England and into the North Atlantic the 78 man crew think they're heading off to play war games with their sister sub tusk but the presence of a stranger on board a radio man named Harris red Austin hints that their mission is more than just an exercise Austin the crew will soon learn is a spook a Navy spy trained to intercept Soviet military transmissions our Navy had always been haunted by what happened at Pearl Harbor and as we got into the Cold War in the nuclear age our Navy was determined that it was never going to be taken by surprise again we were afraid that the Soviets would figure out had to build an a-bomb and had to put them on missiles and launch them from submarines and because of that we took the USS Cochino and we sent her out to monitor the Soviet coast to see if they were indeed testing rudimentary missiles Cochino is practically invisible as it sneaks to within 150 miles of the russian naval base at Murmansk this is one of the first submarine spy operations of the Cold War and it's about to go horribly wrong Thursday morning August 25th just off the northern tip of Norway Cochino has been patrolling the area for four days allowing red Austin to scan for Soviet signals but he picks up nothing of value and now Cochino has to rejoin its sister sub tusk for training exercises that's when the trouble begins Charles Cushman was a junior officer on Cochino I had just gotten off watch and had turned in and was awakened by a very loud explosion one of the massive batteries that power the ship while it runs underwater has caught fire and set off a series of small blasts with several men injured and toxic gases pouring into the hull captain Rafael benítez has no choice but to surface the sub and order his crew to evacuate they're greeted topside by 16 foot waves and 40 degree water [Music] casinos cook Joe Morgan is one of the last men to reach the deck instantly he's swept into the icy water wave broke over and just carried me off in a short time I lost sight of the ship completely and I can remember my fervent prayer to the day then that I didn't mind dying and I didn't want to die here Morgan is drifting in and out of consciousness when he's finally rescued when they pulled me out of the drink I was about Vitus cold as you can get and still be [Music] by this time Cochino has alerted its sistership tusks by semaphore to the chaos on board but captain Benitez knows he needs a way of telling tusk just how desperate the situation has become that his crew might need to abandon ship casinos youngest officer John Shelton and a sonar expert named Robert Philo agree to be the messengers piloting a life raft through the churning waves when the life raft got along side of the tusk another wave picked it up and put John Shelton on deck and crushed Philo alongside they hold the ship tusk crewman Norman Walker immediately jumps into the water to rescue Philo I wrap my legs around him they finally got both of us aboard that's when the big wave come over and took 12 of our guys over the side with the cables stanchions and everything they just cleaned the whole deck off Robert Philo and six of tusks crewmen died in the frigid Arctic waters back on Cochino the crew has no idea of the tragedy that's taken place aboard their sister ship they've been topside now for more than 12 hours buffeted by the wind and the waves being as cold as it was and miserable as you were up there that you were the times lost a desire to live Cochino is going down and the captain of tusk Robert Worthington knows it left with a final dangerous option he maneuvers his Saab alongside its crippled counterpart was a miracle when these two ships come together because with these two arpita's in both ships you know we're live we broke out a folding gangway we had and we gave them the end of it and we held on the other end when everything would get straight and level just for a minute they dropped the gang board and as many as could would run across the last man to reach tusks just before the plank slips off and shatters his casinos captain Rafael benítez and Bonita stands on the bridge and he watches as Cochino - just six below the waves [Music] with 156 men crammed together inside Tusk heads off to the nearest port the mood was very solemn when we got aboard the Tusk it lost six people and plus a fact they had seven people they had rescued they were a tired crew both both crews were tired dusk pulls into hammerfest Norway where the wounded are dropped off and taken to a hospital the others are given a choice they can either be flown back to base in New London Connecticut or make the long trip home aboard tusk every man chooses to stay with his comrades by the time tusk made it back to the States the sinking of Cochino had become international news the Soviets accused America of conducting suspicious training exercises near Murmansk but even though Kachinas pioneering spy mission had ended in failure the fears that inspired it proved well-founded just nine days after Cochino went down american reconnaissance planes picked up evidence that the USSR had exploded its first atomic bomb the world had entered a frightening new age its future hinged on who had the upper hand under the sea [Music] by the mid 1950s atomic anxiety was a fact of everyday life first you would duck and then you cover and very tightly you cover the back of your neck with your faith with the world split by a tense nuclear standoff every detail was darkened by the shadow of Armageddon there was a paranoia in America we thought you know the Russians are coming the Russians are coming what the public didn't know was that all the while it was the US whose submarines were secretly patrolling the enemy's Shores by now the Navy had come to see the enormous potential of undersea espionage if you want to learn the tactics of a foreign Navy the best way to do it is to get as close to it as possible and observe him listen to him in a submarine is a perfect vehicle for that these spy missions brought back vital intelligence on the strategy and technology of the Soviet fleet they also brought the superpowers to the brink of confrontation as both sides wrestled for control of the world's most strategically valuable real estate its oceans [Music] July 29th 1957 the USS gudgeon sets sail from Yokosuka Japan its mission to get as close as possible to the Russian Navy base at Vladivostok and eavesdrop on the Soviets Pacific Fleet only a select few of the 77 men on board know the details of this classified operation but with several spooks along for the ride communications technician John Goldman can sense something big is brewing so we knew we were gonna be spying but we didn't know that we were gonna go inside Soviet waters as an enlisted man though gudgeon was one of the Navy's newest boats life on board any diesel-powered sub was hardly luxurious for up to two months nearly 80 men would crowd into a cramped steel tube packed with food and supplies if we went on long trip for example we loaded aboard a lot of canned goods in cases in passageways and walked on them but we literally ate our way down so we could stand up straight bunks were constantly damp showers were few and far between and the air wreaked of what Submariner is called Eau de diesel there are stories of men's wives just not not letting him in the door till they stripped off their clothes because it was so foul life and diesel sub was tough these men were just another breed [Music] there were some perks to serving on a diesel sub some arena's got the best food in the military as well as they're picked of Hollywood movies it's 5 o'clock in the afternoon on August 19 1957 and several of gudgeons off-duty crew members are enjoying one of these pictures throughout the day gudgeon has been hiding just off the Russian Coast recording the movements of the Soviet Navy and monitoring its communications gudgeons mission is to learn everything it can about the enemy's fleet the state of its technology the sounds it ships make and most urgently if it's submarines have been armed with ballistic missiles silent and nearly invisible gudgeon is the most advanced stealth weapon in the Navy's arsenal but like old diesel subs it still has one crucial vulnerability every 12 hours it must surface to replenish its air and recharge its batteries if it can't surface the sub will run out of power and the crew will run out of oxygen the idea is you'd stay there for 12 hours you'd listen you'd watch then you two'll out about 30 miles out to sea then you'd make all the racket you had to as you vintage your boat and recharge your batteries dodging is just about to head away from Russian waters when suddenly it's alarms begin to sound sending the crew scrambling to their battle stations Soviet surface ships have spotted it and now they're giving chase captain Norman Busby Zack immediately takes the sub deep hoping to escape but it's too late the Soviets have gudgeon hemmed in but every time we would try to creep out a little bit they would let us know by dropping a few hand grenades on us and we'd have to stop the men aboard knew that at any moment the Soviets could send out a full-size depth charge they all knew that guys did not come home from World War two because of full-sized Edge's after several hours gudgeons batteries begin running dangerously low lights are dimmed to save power crewmen are ordered to their bunks to conserve oxygen the air grows thick with poisonous fumes some of the guys were starting to cough some were actually feeling ill it was cold it was very very quiet on the boat and you could see the air you could taste it with as many as 8 Soviet ships prowling the waters above the siege continues for 12 hours then 24 finally after two full days captain Bozak has no choice but to give the order to surface I heard them said we got to get air into the boat and as we got a periscope up we found one of the Russian ships coming directly at us with the collision alarm sounding gudgeon dives again before it can take in any more air still trapped Bozak realizes he's out of moves he gives the order to surface once more but not before preparing his men for the worst I heard the captain say we're going to go up they try to come aboard the boat we're going to sink it the spooks on board begin packing documents and film into waited pouches to be ejected into the Sea of Japan their first command is to make sure no source of military secrets falls into Soviet hands and that includes the spooks themselves the intelligence guys had been given what I understand the cyanide pills until basically to take the pills if they were going to be captured those guys were pretty ashen-faced they thought they were dead as gudgeon breaks the surface her crew braces for a violent and possibly deadly confrontation they're met instead by a brief mocking message the Soviet sent us a signal that said thank you for the sonar exercises we'll score she out of the area we were spying on them they were spying on us and I think everybody just said let's leave it at that that night the man of Gajan celebrated their survival with a feast of steak and beer but back in Washington Navy brass were not impressed Gajan had become an embarrassment the first American submarine to be surfaced by the Soviets it was an episode of Cold War brinksmanship that would stay secret for the next thirty years they forced us to do what they wanted us to do so it was absolutely a victory for them in response a commander of America's Atlantic Fleet Admiral Gerald Wright offered an incentive for his men to even the score a case of Jack Daniels whiskey to the first crew to surface a Soviet sub Ted Davis was captain of the USS grenadiers at the time so the word got out that this proclamation existed in a large frame outside of Admiral Wright's office and immediately we said well this is a challenge Davis and his crew got their shot at the prize in May 1959 [Music] training off the coast of Iceland they came across the Soviet diesel sub aided by an American spy plane grenadiers chased its prey trapping it beneath the waves for nine hours and at 12:30 that night sonar hollered he's surfacing he's surfacing he's surfacing there he was on the surface loud and clear while the spy planes circled above snapping surveillance photos like this one the men of grenadiers claimed their reward and we sent our message out and said have surface Soviet submarine requests Jack Daniels report aboard immediately their achievement was worth far more than a case of whiskey as it turned out they had surfaced a brand new Zulu class sub the first Soviet submarine converted to carry missiles the Navy now knew the Soviets had matched their ability to launch a strike from the safety of the Seas it is everything we're afraid of the Soviets have now shown us that they can actually engineer Pearl Harbor in a nuclear age the need to keep track of Russian missile subs raised the stakes of undersea espionage but by now it was clear that diesel boats were simply too vulnerable too limited by their need to resurface to succeed at such risky work the future of submarine spying belonged to the nukes nuclear-powered subs that were quieter faster and could stay submerged longer than anything that had come before yet as the Navy would soon discover not even these were safe from the dangers of the deep Barbara Lake is a widow of the Cold War On February 15th 1968 she said goodbye to her husband Vernon as he set out from Norfolk Virginia aboard the USS scorpion they left the day after Valentine's Day the only thing he was upset about was the fact that that he was going to be gone for three months and he wouldn't be with me and and wouldn't be with the baby scorpion was part of the Navy's growing arsenal of nuclear-powered submarines the most advanced in the world but its failure to return to Norfolk as scheduled would mark the beginning of a mystery that shadows the Navy and haunts Barbara Lake to this day for years I would wake up in the middle of the night and I would think that I was smelling that musty smell of a submariner clothes after they had been out to sea and I would think I'm talking to my husband everything is okay and I would wake up and realize life is different [Music] America's nuclear Navy was born on January 21st 1954 with the launch of the world's first atomic powered submarine the USS Nautilus it's captain flashes a momentous message underway on nuclear power and as the Nautilus sails out to see history sails with her Nautilus was the brainchild of a naval engineer named Hyman rickover a Polish Jewish immigrant whose brilliance as a scientist was matched only by his genius as a bureaucrat Nautilus his purpose was to prove nuclear power so the Navy Department and Admiral rickover could get more nuclear submarines built the strategy worked nuclear subs quickly became the mainstays of the American fleet unlike the diesels which had to surface every 12 hours to take in air and recharge their batteries the nukes were perfect for under seas buying their reactors supplied them with unlimited power allowing them to stay silently submerged for months at a time that completely changed the complexion of submarine I mean it was like going from World War one SPAD fighter planes to the modern jet fighter life on board one of Rickover's boats was by submarine standards at least luxurious quarters were less cramped than on a diesel sub and the nukes could manufacture their own fresh air and clean water it's different than day/night the nukes you know that's like living in a Waldorf Astoria Hyman rickover understood that Americans were suspicious of atomic power everything under the shield is radioactive one nuclear accident could torpedo the whole program arrogant hot-tempered and ambitious rickover recognized that his own power depended on the safety of his subs he was strictly a procedure man if you did step five before you did step four in a procedure and things didn't work out you know heads were gonna roll by the late 50s the Soviet Navy was building its own nuclear fleet but it sacrificed safety in the rush to get more and more subs to see a series of horrific nuclear accidents resulted some of their submarines were so bad that when one had a nuclear accident it was redubbed the Hiroshima and wasn't taken out of service until three accidents later nuclear accidents cost the Soviets at least 500 men over the course of the Cold War a safety record former Soviet officials are only now beginning to acknowledge a possibility of the biggest number of nuclear accidents took place in the early days of nuclear technology they called what tension was so high that occasionally we would have to go out to sea knowing that the submarines haven't finished they repair but there was no choice but if America's nuclear Navy was far safer than Russia's the dangers of submarining itself knew no national boundaries on April 10th 1963 the nuclear sub USS Thresher went down during a test dive off Boston the cause of the accident was a terrifyingly swift chain of events but started with a simple broken pipe and ended with the sub violently imploding crushed by the pressure of the ocean depths 129 men died aboard thresher the deadliest American submarine disaster of the Cold War in response Hyman rickover vowed the US would never lose another nuclear submarine the Navy launched a far-reaching upgrade of its undersea safety standards retrofitting subs with new ballast systems and super-strong welds but the escalation of the war in Vietnam diverted resources from submarine maintenance when the USS scorpion left base in February 1968 it was one of four subs in the Atlantic Fleet that had still not been overhauled while her husband Vernon was at sea aboard scorpion Barbara Lake passed the time at home taking care of their one-year-old baby girl Holly Barbara was thrilled when the occasional letter would arrive he was growing a moustache he wrote and exercising more but his letters also said morale on board was low the ship was suffering mechanical problems and marijuana use had become an issue the crew was already anxious to get home when in mid April scorpion was ordered into the North Atlantic to spy on suspicious Soviet activity near the Straits of Gibraltar Russian surface ships had been launching mysterious balloons the Navy feared might contain electronic sensors scorpions job was to find out exactly what the Soviets were doing the submarine lurked in the area for several days taking photographs but learning little on May 21st 1968 scorpions crew radioed that they were finally heading home after nearly a hundred days at sea [Music] at 1:00 p.m. on May 27th Barbara Lake stood waiting with other families for scorpions scheduled arrival in Norfolk my aunt had sent me money so I would have a new dress to wear to meet him at the dock and we stood just looking out to sea waiting to see the conning tower and the hours went on and there was no counting tower the Navy really didn't think the Scorpion was lost I mean it wasn't a joke they were playing on the families they simply thought there was some communication issue and as the day wore on in the rain fell and the scorpion didn't arrive but there was little hope scorpions last radio contact had been a week before this meant the sub had disappeared somewhere between the Azores a chain of islands off Portugal and Norfolk a vast area of the mid-atlantic even if scorpion could be found it was almost certainly trapped beneath the waves too deep for its crew to be rescued after 10 days the Navy called off the search for survivors on June 5th the 99 men aboard scorpion were declared legally dead in Norfolk Barbara Lake brought her daughter down to the ocean's edge to bid farewell to the father she would never know and let our daughter put her hand in the water and I also touched the water and let it wash over my hand and I said if this if this is the last part of you then this this is goodbye and if you are still alive in there somewhere then this is good luck come home soon the loss of scorpion remains a mystery even today in 1993 the Navy Declassified this videotape of scorpions wreckage which was found five months after its disappearance in 11,000 feet of water 400 miles southwest of the a source as haunting as the images were they offered no answers in the shadow of uncertainty and the Navy's long silence rumors and conspiracy theories have flourished barber lake believes the public has never been told the full story of scorpion what is so important to keep undercover for this many years not to let all the families know what happened to their loved ones what could be so important one persistent whisper is that scorpion was sunk by a Russian torpedo a scenario the US Navy has long rejected and former Soviet officials strenuously deny its ayat Association no of course it was not true I can guarantee it was not true documents released in 1993 revealed for the first time the Navy's leading theory that scorpion was sunk by one of the subs own torpedoes according to this theory scorpions crew was forced to eject a torpedo that had activated the torpedo then doubled back in the water and blew up the sub itself but evidence uncovered recently by the authors of blind man's bluff suggests a different scenario that a torpedo may well have exploded while still on board triggered by a single flawed piece of equipment turns out that the torpedo batteries that make the torpedo shoot through the water had been blowing up right and left in this testing lab in key Port Washington and just before the scorpion was lost the lab had basically issued a recall notice the authors believe this notice may have been intentionally suppressed in the wake of scorpions disappearance it was never given to the people they were asked to figure out what had happened to scorpion in fact we think maybe one or two people who saw just deep-sixed it John Craven the Navy scientist who located scorpions wreckage in 1968 concedes that the Navy may have been aware of the flawed torpedo batteries but he argues the urgent demands of the Cold War made it an acceptable risk to keep the sub at sea she was out on a mission and we didn't have any reason to believe that the batteries were going to fail while she was on that mission do you want to call up and break it the mission down which is important to national security in order to come back for a possible flaw that probably isn't going to take place there's a great quote naval regulations are written in blood meaning that when there is a problem or a disaster or catastrophe the Navy goes back and rewrites its rules and regulations to prevent that in the future since scorpion the US Navy hasn't lost another nuclear submarine even as it's undertaken some of the riskiest and most remarkable undersea spy missions ever conceived for 11 years from 1967 to 1978 Tommy Cox was a spook with a silent service his job was to translate and interpret Soviet communications but he also brought another skill on board [Music] the wide Atlantic I usually find a spot where they didn't mind if I played someplace where I wouldn't keep people away and that was usually the torpedo room the songs were my expression of events aboard submarines that were significant to me one of those submarines was the USS leap on skippered by a maverick captain named whitey Mac in 1969 Mac led lay pond and Tommy Cox on one of the most daring and dramatic underwater episodes of the Cold War a remarkable seven week chase that rewrote the rules of submarines buying well the story is about captain Mac deniz do they powered fast attack SSN 661 a second boat tonight and after we've dog down the Hat holy pons lady [Music] by the late 1960s the US Navy had developed two types of nuclear submarine each with its own mission first there were the ballistic missile subs known as boomers every boomer carried 16 nuclear missiles each one contained greater explosive power than all the conventional bombs dropped by the u.s. in World War two combined boomers guaranteed America's ability to respond to a Soviet first strike their missiles could take out targets from as far away as 1,200 miles their crews trained for Armageddon you get a radio message that tells you to go ahead and spin up your missiles and prepare to launch that's when it really sunk in is this the real thing or not and if this is the real thing what's left of my home the majority of the American sub force consisted of fast attack or hunter-killer subs the job of the fast attacks was to take out the Russian boomers before they could launch a first strike the bottom line of the whole Cold War under the sea was to keep track of each other's missile submarines the only way to keep track of where the Soviet missile subs were was to send out our submarines to try to find him Russian fast attacks had the same mission if but would not kiss a unit of America our submarines hit a task to find strategic American subs in the territory where they patrolled and to keep watching them as long as possible to be able to find whether they're going to start firing missiles or not the Soviets had almost 400 submarines three times as many as the US Soviet subs do deeper and went faster but America's were far quieter a decisive advantage that allowed them to find and follow the Russians without being discovered it would be like listening to a Cadillac go by and then listening to a Model T Ford and they were literally that noise we were able to detect them at ranges that exceeded their ability to detect us and we're thus able to maintain a trail at a comfortable distance without endangering our own ship in we yes they did have this advantage we Celia but our engineers and designers worked like helped to catch up by 1969 the Soviets had almost done just that launching a new nearly silent class of missile submarine ironically called the Yankee unless American subs could learn how to trail the Yankee America's undersea advantage would disappear for Navy brass it was a nightmare for whitey Mack and the crew of late on it was a challenge here was a brand new class of submarine Russian snoring 24 missiles we didn't know what their operating area we didn't know how how they conducted their operations we knew nothing about him so it was important that we start learning real fast September 1969 whitey Mack leads lay pond out of its port at Norfolk among his hand-picked 119 man crew is a machinist named Donald Duck a spook named Jesse James and a dozen guitarists including Tommy Cox Mack himself is a larger-than-life character at six foot six 240 pounds he has to stoop just to get around his sub on September 16th Mack learns that the Navy's underwater listening system an ocean wide sonar net known as SOSUS as detected a Yankee heading into the Barents Sea lay pond tries to follow the Soviets up finding and losing it several times over the next few days and finally we just projected what we thought he would go and fortunately we got to the Yankee is so quiet late on can only hear it if it stays within 3,000 yards wrong move can lead to detection perhaps even a collision but Mac isn't about to turn away he orders his men to stay with the Soviet sub a tactic he calls the close in trail simply put lay pawn is going to tailgate the Yankee we had to stay fairly close because Yankee was pretty quiet and he did this with a margin of safety by depth separation Yankee up here and we were down here for hours then days then weeks over thousands of miles lay pon tracks its prey whitey Mac stays in the control room the whole time grabbing 15-minute cat naps still standing on his feet you got a ship that's over 8,000 tons and another ship that's over 4800 tons operating within a mile of each other you want to be alert it was really important that that we would know exactly what he's doing all the time remarkably all they have to go on is sound people are always amazed when we tell them this that the submarine is blind when it's submerged this is not Captain Nemo's submarine with the glass viewing windows the only sensor that allows you to know the environment around you is sonar over time lai pons sonar men master the Yankees acoustic characteristics the noises it makes as it goes through its daily routines we could hear him when he is going up and down the halls creek and we could hear that noise as the whole is creaking we could tell and he's changing depth they come to know the Yankees so completely they can tell which crew man is at the helm they can even hear when one of the Soviets has gone to the bathroom all the while Leigh pons spooks are gathering information that will make the Yankee an easy mark for American fast attacks in the future every piece of data from how the Yankee dumps its trash to the sounds its propellers make helps paint a fuller picture of this new Soviet weapon one of the primary bits of intelligence was exactly where this ship was operating we thought that it would be much closer to us sure but it wasn't it's a frightening revelation what it means is that the Yankees nuclear missiles can strike a u.s. city from a distance of 1,300 miles nearly twice as far as the Navy previously thought word of lay ponds secret chase soon reaches the White House where President Richard Nixon is updated on its progress but when someone leaks the story to the New York Times it doesn't take long for the Yankee itself to get the news used to come to periscope depth every night at midnight and he get his broadcast from Moscow he came down after that one and he went beserk for 24 hours I mean he just went all over one of the Yankees maneuvers is what American submarine is called a crazy Ivan when the Soviets think they're being trailed they suddenly reverse course and head full speed back towards the enemy problem as it came where I'm back at there was somebody behind them they risked a collision every time so it was the ultimate game of chicken eventually the Yankee resumes its routine convinced it's not being followed when it's patrol is complete it heads for home and so does Leigh pond yt Mack and his crew have found the Soviets silent new sub and followed it for an astonishing 47 days in the process they've reasserted American superiority under the seas as Leigh Pond makes her way back to Norfolk the Navy issues in order to every submarine in the Atlantic get out of the way Whitey's coming through [Music] nobody else can handle this big Amazon and we won't be back till we shot right here Whitey's got the deck end this Whitey's got the deck [Music] yt max set the standard for what would become the main mission of America's fast attack fleet to find and follows Soviet missile subs it was a dangerous game for both sides the slightest miscalculation could send a pair of submarines hurtling toward each other with no way to slam on the brakes according to Admiral Valerie Alexan who investigated submarine accidents for the Soviet Navy undersea collisions became an almost annual occurrence during the Cold War we should use a unit Saturday between 1967 and 1993 they were all together 20 collisions between Russian and American submarines every collision was a potential nuclear catastrophe any of them could have ignited a superpower of confrontation one of the worst occurred in 1970 in the North Pacific when a 6,000 tons Soviet sub slammed down on the USS Tao tog Mike Mays was a sonar technician on Tao tog I'm telling the chief you know I said why are awful close and he says take your headset off I said we mean take rads that off pull the headset off you could hear him through the hall I said we are awful and shortly thereafter impacted Tao tog survived but as it left the scene its crew thought they heard the sickening sound of the Russian sub ripping apart it wasn't until 30 years later and the publication of blind man's bluff that they learned the truth the Soviets had survived as well other Russian subs were not as fortunate over the course of the Cold War the Soviets would lose for submarines though none due to a collision ironically the search for one of them would spawn some of the greatest triumphs of American undersea espionage and one of its most embarrassing failures [Music] it was a massive ship for a fantastic scheme Glomar Explorer built by eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes to mine minerals from the ocean floor or at least that's what the public was told the true purpose of Glomar Explorer was even more far-fetched a CIA plot to steal a Russian submarine from the bottom of the sea one of the most expensive covert operations of the Cold War would wind up a very public fiasco but it wasn't until the publication of blind man's bluff in 1998 that the events leading up to it became known the secret story of halibut the Navy's first specially equipped spiced up [Music] halibut was hardly one of the Navy's proudest submarines the ship was old it's slow its noisy its ugly you wouldn't want to been got into any trouble on halibut because you didn't have the speed of the stealth to getaway designed to fire missiles from the surface halibut had a 22 foot wide hatch that opened into its bizarre humpback hull it was this unusual feature that inspired John Craven to save it from the scrapyard in 1964 the 30 year old Craven was a scientist involved in naval intelligence his job was to dream up new ways of doing undersea espionage the first program that we started out with I can now say was a program in general to recover Hardware of significance from any place on the ocean sea floor without being detected in the process of recovering that Hardware as soon as he saw halibut Craven realized it was perfect for the job it's large missile hatch would allow men and equipment to enter and exit the sub while the sub was still under water over the next few years the Batcave as the crew called it would be refitted with 70 million dollars worth of cutting-edge spy gear including a pair of remote operated deep-sea submersibles nicknamed fish these fish were not little like denizens of the sea swimming around they had strobe lights for eyes sonar whiskers cameras they were going to be designed to dangle as far as three miles down and scan the ocean bottom funding for all this new equipment was secretly transferred from other Navy programs not even Congress knew the details of Cravens special project but it would soon prove worth every penny in April 1968 a Soviet ballistic missile submarine disappeared in the Pacific the sub was known as k-129 an American sonar data indicated the Soviets were searching for it in the wrong place Captain James Bradley the man in charge of the Navy's super-secret undersea spy program realized that if the US could find it first it would be sitting on an intelligence goldmine but how could the Navy locate a lost Soviet submarine without the Soviets knowing they were looking for it the answer Bradley hoped was halibut that summer halibut was ordered into the North Pacific to find and photograph k-129 for the first time in history an undersea search would be launched from beneath the waves without the need for a surface ship this was one of the most secretive things that our government ever did during the Cold War the crew didn't even know what the mission was so I think that tells you that we considered it pretty secret hexie was top secret with Cravens fish dangling three miles below halibut began trolling for signs of the Soviet sub spent a lot of long days and nights up there back and forth and back and forth finally one day this one crew member comes running into the captain and he says captain captain you wouldn't believe what we found halibuts fish had found k-129 over the next several days it would take more than 20,000 pictures of the Soviet sub all of which remained classified to this day when halibut returned to base at Pearl Harbor Naval Intelligence officers were waiting at the dock to take the photographs back to Washington the pictures went almost immediately to the National Security Agency for their evaluation and in no time flat mr. Kissinger and the Nixon administration have an opportunity to look at them all of a sudden it became a finding of great significance up to now the business of undersea espionage had mostly been left to defense intelligence but when the CIA director Richard Helms saw these photographs and more importantly saw how interested President Nixon was they immediately jumped in and started to try to muscle the Navy out to take control of this effort and they say well we could outdo halibut she got 20,000 pictures we'll get the whole submarine Navy scientist John Craven thought the CIA's idea was crazy even if they could somehow lift the sub off the seafloor it would almost surely disintegrate in the process but the CIA won out with the approval of President Nixon and the cover provided by his friend Howard Hughes Glomar Explorer was born the ship took two years to build and cost hundreds of millions of dollars it was as long as two football fields and weighed 50,000 tons yet the mission of Glomar Explorer remained hidden in plain sight to lift k-129 from the bottom of the ocean it was a dangerously provocative act the CIA was trying to steal the tomb of 100 Soviet submarine errs if Moscow learned the truth the fallout could push the superpowers to the brink of World War 3 I was both risky and expensive it was an enormous operation and the amazing thing is how secret it was kept this was not only secret it was top secret then on top of that it was code word and then on top of that you had to prove a need-to-know in the summer of 1974 Glomar Explorer headed out to the spot where halibut had found k-129 1,700 miles northwest of Hawaii Soviet spy boats dismissed the unusual vessel as an oil exploration rig delicious to eat no one expected that they could try to raise the k-129 because at the time it was considered impossible to raise a submarine from such a depth what the Soviets didn't know was that hidden within blue Mars vast empty interior was an enormous steel claw which could descend more than three miles in early July blue Mars crews slowly began lower the claw which they nicknamed Clementine twice it jammed into the ocean floor 17,000 feet below the surface on the third try clementines steel fingers wrapped around the 5000 tons up slowly the claw raised its prey six feet every minute after 14 hours it was still two miles from the surface then suddenly Clementine began to buckle under the stress the sub dangled briefly before tearing into the bulk of k-129 fell back to the ocean floor this time forever in the end Glomar Explorer would only recover about 10% of the submarine along with the remains of six Soviet sailors lo Mars crew conducted a solemn Russian funeral which they filmed in case the USSR ever found out about their mission [Music] the CIA hope to send Glomar Explorer out for a second try the following summer but before that could happen the press discovered that Howard Hughes colossal ship was not what it seemed in February 1975 the secret purpose of Glomar Explorer suddenly became front-page news the response from the Kremlin was surprising the Soviet government made a statement that all our bolts were at their home ports and that the Soviet Union didn't lose one of their bolts instead of reacting with outraged Moscow refused to even acknowledge that one of its subs had gone down the reason the Soviet government had never told its own people about the sinking of k-129 soon after the story of Glomar Explorer broke Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev began sending the White House back-channel messages that said in effect if you let this drop so will we it was a deal President Gerald Ford was happy to accept but in post-watergate Washington a skeptical Congress was not about to ignore a CIA plot to steal a Soviet sub in March 1975 the House Select Committee on Intelligence opened hearings on Glomar Explorer that was one of the bigger boondoggles I've ever seen that was half a billion dollars to get some tiny pieces of an obsolete Russian submarine which they brought into the committee room as if they were carrying chunks of the Holy Grail the trail from Glomar Explorer eventually led Pikes committee to the Navy's undersea espionage program Pike quickly discovered that the risks submarine errs were taking were far more dangerous than anything he could have imagined from the aggressive trailing that had already led to several collisions with Russian subs to the falsifying of patrol reports to keep these activities from being discovered they were rewarded for taking risks well it's alright if you're taking risks for yourself but they were taking risks involving the United States of America but in the end Pike's Committee decided to go easy on the Navy the reason the most secret and successful submarine spy operation of the Cold War a wiretapping job that was a long way from Watergate August 1979 the American spies sub-par Chi passes beneath the Golden Gate Bridge and heads into the Pacific only a few of the 140 men on board even know where they're going but they all know what will happen if they get caught they were carrying self-destruct charges they were told that if they were discovered they weren't coming home several months later and five thousand miles from San Francisco it's business as usual off the port of Murmansk on the Barents Sea fishing trawlers dot the harbour while the ships of Russia's northern fleet move in and out of bass they have no idea that just 500 feet below them divers from the USS party are carrying out the most daring and dangerous undersea espionage operation of the Cold War tapping the phone cables of the Soviet Navy it's one in a series of missions so secret that to this day Navy officials refuse to acknowledge its existence I can not confirm or deny any specific activity but suffice it to say that intelligence was obtained that gave us a very very accurate clear and unambiguous continuing insight into their military planning [Music] it was late 1970 and the Navy's top undersea spy Captain James Bradley who was trying to solve a puzzle he'd been studying a map of the Sea of Okhotsk on Russia's Pacific coast on one side was the Soviet Navy's submarine base at Petropavlovsk on the other was its Pacific headquarters at Vladivostok Bradley believed the two had to be linked by phone lines that stretched across the bottom of the sea and the idea was that if we could sneak in there with submarines and divers and get the messages passing through those cables that we could really learn their most innermost secrets but even if Bradley's hunch were correct even if Soviet lines were lying on the ocean floor the puzzle remained how do you find a 5-inch cable in the middle of a six hundred thousand square miles si sitting in his Pentagon office Bradley began thinking back to the summers he spent as a child on a Mississippi River suddenly he remembered the warning signs he used to see along the bank cable crossing do not anchor now those signs are there to keep some idiot and a pleasure boat from snagging a phone and utility cable in the showers and Bradley looks up is I snap open and he realizes if we have those idiots the Soviets did too with the approval of President Nixon Bradley ordered the Navy's top spy sub halibut to head for the Sea of Okhotsk its mission bordered on the Surreal to find a sign that might not exist marking a cable that might not exist that would be the easy part the hard part would only begin if halibut actually located the cable hidden inside a compartment perched on a subs hull was a decompression chamber like this one while the sub descended divers would wait inside the chamber acclimating themselves to the increased pressure of the ocean depths that system gamers capability of putting men out on the seafloor at depths at least a 600 feet and maybe maybe even deeper and once you get that capability you now have the capability of men doing jobs on the on the seafloor and one of those jobs obviously is tapping a Soviet cable halibut reached the Sea of Okhotsk in November 1971 it took less than two weeks of scanning the Soviet coast to prove that James Bradley's hunch had been right on the money there sticking out of the desolate shoreline was a sign in Russian that read do not anchor cable here the cable bradley had long imagined was running right along the ocean floor with the sub sitting just above the seabed halibuts divers climbed out of their decompression chamber and into the icy deep unique individuals no fear even get me out of a submarine and four hundred feet of water in the middle of the ocean no way the divers gingerly moved a small specially constructed tap into position on top of the Soviet cable the tap worked by magnetic induction which meant the divers didn't have to risk breaking into the line to record the signals running through it a temporary wire linking the tap to the sub allowed the spooks on board to listen in and up through the wire into hell becomes pure military gold I mean they're hearing the Soviets own assessments of success and failure for the first time the United States had found a way to penetrate a hardwired phone line and record Soviet military communications as they happened when halibut returned to California a month later National Security Administration officials whisked the tapes away from the sub even before the crew could disembark they just had a short recording time but they managed to get enough to show that it could be done halibut was soon heading back to the sea of a Kosc this time to install a much larger tap the crew called it the Beast it was 20 feet long weighed six tons and took four divers to maneuver into position once the tap was in place it could be left to record weeks of Soviet transmissions they could learn where they were sending their missile subs what kind of shape their missile subs were in which ones were having problems we could get right inside their thinking right inside their minds over time halibut would be joined by two other spy subs sea wolf and par Chi in 1979 barchi successfully completed the riskiest of their missions tapping the line running under Russia's Northern Fleet in the Barents Sea it's all the while that they were out there working you could hear Soviet warships passing overhead Bob Ellen wood was a spook on this and for other cable tapping missions until now no crew member has ever acknowledged on camera the existence of these operations which went by the code name Ivy bells that was a list of specific targets that in various locations that we were to go attempt to tap and we did Ellen wood recalls eavesdropping on Soviet conversations many of which were unencoded as with anybody on telephone communication they have a tendency to be a lot more open especially if they think of it's a secure line sometimes it was good sometimes it wasn't worth listening to other times it was funny they even get to hear we get one young man trying to practice wing his girlfriend in English suddenly they're hearing who the adversary is they're meeting the enemy here to ear with one side deaf to the transaction by the late 1970s they were leaving taps large enough to record up to a year of Soviet communications at a time divers from another sub would then return to collect and replace the top secret tapes sometimes they'd come back with dinner giant crabs plucked from a sea floor on one occasion they also left behind a gift for the next crew the divers on one side actually buried a cow skull right down with the tap pod so they could scare the next group of divers that came over but if cable tapping became more frequent it never became routine Ivy bells remained the most dangerous submarine espionage operation of the Cold War every cable tapping mission required the personal approval of the President the men involved knew full well the stakes of what they were doing and the consequences if they were caught expect the fit would have been scuttled and self-destruct charges would have been used to destroy the vessel sometimes they question you know should we be doing this should we be sneaking into a Soviet Sea are we going to create the war that we're trying to prevent but in the end the intelligence that was coming through was so crucial we almost had no choice but to keep going the tapping of Soviet cables continued for more than a decade but in the early 1980s this man would give it all away the secret of IV bells would be sold to the Soviet Union for $35,000 throughout the 1970s and into the 80s American subs continued to successfully tap Soviet undersea phone cables then during a mission in 1981 a storm in the sea of accost slammed the USS sea wolf down on top of the Soviet cable sea wolf survived but Navy officials feared the impact might have briefly broken the line compromising one of the most secret submarine spy operations of the Cold War indeed soon afterwards Soviet ships not only found the cable tap they lifted it right out of the ocean and brought it ashore this photograph the only image of a cable tap publicly available was taken by the Russian military they didn't have to look hard to figure out who had planted the device nebith nebith or all transistors and other parts were stamped made in the USA just shouted prophecy of the United States government America it was the first year of Ronald Reagan's presidency and the Cold War was heating up now the Soviets had caught America red-handed running spy operations in what the Kremlin considered territorial waters but the Soviets stayed quiet about their explosive find as it turned out they had a secret to protect as well it wasn't Sea Wolf that had blown the cable taps cover it was a spy one of two Americans whose treachery nearly cost their country its advantage under the sea I regard these as two of the most reasonable action in history the United States of America the fact that we were able to continue at all there's only doing the skill and the bravery and the intrepid action on the part of our submarines [Music] in January 1980 the Soviet embassy in Washington received the following phone call the caller turned out to be Ronald Pelton a 38 year old former employee of the National Security Agency a shadowy Clearing House for America's most sensitive communications intelligence Pelton simply made himself available to be interrogated and spoke the problem is that mr. Pelton is one of those rare individuals with a near photographic memory over the next five years Pelton would spill some of the NSA's most vital secrets in return for just $35,000 one of those secrets was the existence of the American cable tap in the Sea of Okhotsk I gave up five years of my life for that mission probably a marriage I put a lot of hard work into it and you know you just don't want something like that go away when you've worked so hard at it just because some Turkey needed Alec's little extra cash Pelton was arrested in November 1985 hard on the heels of another shocking discovery the existence of a spy ring so devastating it could well have given the Soviets a decisive edge in a nuclear showdown this man Alexander Sokolov is a former KGB agent he has never before been interviewed about his role in handling the longest-running and most lucrative spy ring of the Cold War in 1967 so Koloff was officially a diplomat working in Washington but he was really a spy he received a visit that October from an American Submariner and communications expert named John Walker jr. the unofficial password stolen with real when he walked into the embassy he looked substandard chips you the show did cold he needed money with Gingka he offered bluntly to pass some information for money where once was a geek Walker met with the Soviets again a month later this time he was bearing top secret treasure a list of codes that allowed the Soviets to unscramble messages sent from US Navy headquarters to the Atlantic Fleet he himself knew very little but what he did was hand the Russians the keys to our communications he gave them the ability to decrypt something like a million Navy Operational messages and that was just the beginning stationed at the Naval Base in Norfolk Virginia Walker had access to a steady stream of technical manuals classified reports and other top-secret information which he continued to pass along to the Soviets after retiring from the Navy in 1976 Walker recruited others to keep the flow of Secrets coming his best friend a navy communications specialist named Jerry Whitworth his brother Arthur who worked for a defense contractor even his own son Michael an enlisted man on the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz these secrets reshaped Soviet naval planning in the Atlantic his former co-workers information and did affect the decisions that were made by the Soviet government each division it was so valuable that the Soviet military sometimes was amazed that they were receiving it through the Walker spy ring the Soviets learned what the US had known for years that their submarines were too noisy to easily trail in response they pulled their fleet closer to home and began hiding their missile subs in the icy maze of the Arctic where they would be almost impossible to track it was a strategic shift that sent shockwaves through the Pentagon the closest point between the US and the Soviet Union was really up over the North Pole if you could hide yourselves there you could launch before anybody could ever get you by the late 70s a small group of Navy analysts among them Richard haver began to suspect that the Soviets knew more than they should but their concerns were brushed aside no Admiral wanted to believe there could be a spy I guess one of the failures of my life was not to be able to tell that story effectively enough believably enough with enough detail to prompt the sort of counterintelligence investigation that was necessary to find John Walker it wasn't until May 1985 after Barbara Walker turned her husband in to the FBI that the Walker spy ring was finally broken by then John Walker Jr had been passing secrets to the Soviets for an incredible 18 years for just over a million dollars he had nearly destroyed America's undersea advantage I can say that he was a like gold car for Soviet intelligence Walker was a catastrophe he was a disaster John Walker may be the single most damaging traitor in recent American history in October 1985 Walker pleaded guilty to espionage charges and was sentenced to life in prison the betrayal of the man they called Johnny Walker red was especially bitter to his fellow Submariner we were angered by the fact that one of our own through pure greed sold the keys to the kingdom and put our ships and our sailors in harm's way together John Walker jr. and Ronald Pelton left America's sub force dangerously exposed during some of the darkest days of the Cold War but there were still plenty of Secrets they didn't have access to while Pelton had given up the cable tap in the Sea of Okhotsk his clearance was limited neither he nor the Soviets had any idea that the USS party had placed a similar tap on phone lines stretched across the barren sea in November 1983 this tap captured intelligence so valuable one Navy official called it the crown jewels at the time NATO was conducting one of the most provocative military exercises of the Cold War codenamed Abel Archer it was designed to simulate the start of a nuclear conflict in Europe the Soviets already convinced that the u.s. was planning a first strike briefly went on nuclear alert the whole time the tapes in the cable tamp were rolling recording the movements of Russia's Northern Fleet what the tapes revealed was that American intelligence had been dead wrong about where and how the Soviets plan to disperse their forces in time of war the Soviets top priority it turned out was to protect their own missile subs they weren't preparing to launch a first strike from the sea after all I think that the intelligence we got out of some of these intercepts calmed us down some they weren't trying to take over the world they were trying to protect their own bloody country we were a much bigger threat to them from their point of view than they were to us it was reassuring news and it helped pave the way for the superpowers to pull back from the edge of Armageddon yet all during the thaw that followed it was still business as usual beneath the waves in late 1986 the USS party was on a cable tapping mission in the Barents Sea when a hastily arranged summit between President Ronald Reagan and Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev was convened in Reykjavik Iceland word came to party stop do not penetrate Soviets and territorial waters and in fact she was waiting just outside Soviet waters the entire time Reagan and Gorbachev were up talking the minute Reagan set foot on Air Force one party gets the word go ahead go in finish your mission during a 1988 meeting at the Pentagon the chief commander of the Soviet armed forces marshals Sergei arome off' acknowledged that America still held the edge in the Cold War under the sea they turned rains as you he said you in your submarines you're the problem quite quite vehemently so it was clearly he was frustrated by the fact he could not keep track of our submarines he knew they were there he knew we kept track of their submarines and he couldn't counter them still there was no way to foresee the extraordinary changes just around the corner well I'd love to be able to say that we all and the Reagan administration saw the end coming but I for one did not when I left the government I left in the confident prediction that the Cold War would be around for a long long time instead with stunning swiftness the superpower standoff that had divided the world for so long simply evaporated in 1989 the Berlin Wall fell and along with it the Iron Curtain two years later on Christmas Day 1991 the Soviet Union ceased to exist after four decades the West had won the Cold War and by then it was clear that the US had prevailed in the battle beneath the waves less than a year after the disintegration of the Soviet Union in October 1992 a CIA director visited the Kremlin for the first time Robert Gates knew his historic mission demanded a dramatic gesture somebody had mentioned to me that there was a videotape that had been made on the Glomar Explorer when the Soviet golf class submarine was raised of the funeral services for the Soviet sailors who whose remains were found the film had been shot in 1974 during one of the most audacious espionage operations of the Cold War now Robert Gates presented it to Russian president Boris Yeltsin as a symbol of reconciliation and when I when I gave it to him and described it and he watched it tears came into his eyes it Illustrated that you know this this is it's over the Cold War is over and let's move on to the future a decade later the Cold War seems a distant memory but the steel sharks of the US Navy are as active as ever at its peak in the 1980s America's submarine force numbered 139 ships many of these have since been decommissioned the fleet is now down to 74 18 boomers and 56 fast attacks it's a much smaller force but also more versatile submarines to the post Cold War are reinventing themselves they've gone from warships to spy ships to a combination with the two it's August of 2000 and the 134 men crew of the USS Montpelier is on a training run off Fort Lauderdale Florida today they're simulating one of the most important missions of the fast attacks new hybrid roll the stealth missile salvos known as strike warfare our ship carries 12 vertical launch Tomahawk missiles and we also carry tomahawks in our torpedo room so we can execute a 16 missile salvo is called upon should we decide to exert that option we can move in position covertly we can be there before the president has shown his cards if he wants to launch a strike that's a complete surprise from close in the submarine forces the platform of choice commence launch all stations commence launched new technology continues to transform America's undersea arsenal soon even the periscope will become a thing of the past replaced by a digital optical mast that provides a video picture clearer than what the human eye can see through today's periscopes but with hot spots popping up all over the globe the main mission of America's fast attack fleet remains what is known as ISR intelligence surveillance and connaissance it's a common misconception that now the Cold War has ended we're out of that business when frankly we're doing more of that than we ever have before American subs are currently stalking the seas off Asia monitoring the waters of the Middle East and patrolling drug smuggling routes in the Atlantic and Caribbean and as long as Russia maintains one of the largest navies in the world as long as the bear still swims US officials like to say American submarines will continue to keep an eye on Russia's fleet on August 12th 2002 American subs were lurking nearby as Russian forces took part in extensive naval exercises in the Barents Sea at around 8 a.m. American sonar reportedly picked up a pair of explosions the death throes it turned out of the Russian nuclear sub Kursk 118 men died aboard Kursk a tragedy that riveted world attention on the plight of the once mighty Soviet Navy outside of Murmansk Russian nuclear submarines sit mostly idle there is little money from Moscow for training or maintenance a potential environmental catastrophe looms here a lot of spent reactors rotting the barren sea there's an enormous Lee expensive cleanup that is gonna have to happen for 40 years American submarine errs shadowed their Soviet counterparts what they did could have started World War 3 what they learned helped prevent it no military force in the Cold War knew the enemy so intimately or shared such kinship with the men they were trained to destroy remember in a world where you can't tell your wives or your children or your parents what you're doing the people you have the most in common with are the people on the other side I've never talked to American submariner who didn't respect his Soviet or Russian counterpart he knew they both share the same experience of taking a ship to sea in a big ugly ocean where it could crush him like a like an eggshell any time it wanted to if he made a mistake here at the International submarino's Convention held in st. Petersburg Russia in June of 2008 one-time foes swap stories like longtime friends I just want to say if there's any possibility of ex warriors patching things up it would be Submariner I think I really believe that for organizer Igor curtain the convention is a way of getting past the propaganda of the Cold War years in Padua there was never any hostility towards American submarine errs we can better perhaps call it rivalry [Music] at the naval Cathedral in st. Petersburg the Church of st. Nicholas the submarine errs gather for a special service paying tribute to their fallen comrades memorials commemorate Soviet and American submarine errs who died during the Cold War it's a solemn testament to the Brotherhood the silent service breeds these men shared different sides of a story that is only now starting to be told the 1998 publication of blind man's bluff has begun to bring this remarkable history to light but those in the know say there is still much to be revealed I do believe that the whole story is significantly more revealing than what's been put out there thus far I think when the public sees it all they'll realize they were extraordinarily well served for 40 years the rest of the story remains classified for now in the meantime blind man's bluff has become a surrogate way from many submarines to share their secrets the extraordinary experiences they've kept hidden from their wives their children their best friends for so many years man after man comes up to us to say thank you thank you so much and it's not even that they were looking for outside credit it's just the relief of finally being able to discuss what was for many of them the very best moments of the very worst moments of their lives no I just say why don't you just read that book blind man's bluff I know quite a few other submarino's that have bought a lot of copies and without comment just said them to relatives and said read it and this will explain a lot our middle daughter when she read it called and said you know mom if I didn't love and admire my dad as much as I do after I read this I really would admire my dad it's been a catharsis for many of us and it's brought our family together during that period of time I did the most important thing I'll ever do in my life for the most people and then to be able to contribute to something that was so important to our nation it's a real honor the Navy's official reaction to the book blind man's bluff was a simple no comment many individual sailors are also reluctant to talk about their Cold War missions many signed documents swearing them to secrecy for 80 years effectively a lifetime ban since they were already in their twenties but unofficially nearly everyone involved in underwater espionage from former enlisted men to top Navy brass seem grateful that their heroics are now out in the open for the History Channel I'm Roger Mudd thanks for watching there's a story about a friend of mine who made a patrol of us one time we can't mention his name hardly we just call him tango Charlie and nobody cared to ask him why it's rumored he was a master spy now the captain didn't brief the crew hell we're out at sea a day or two they didn't tell us too much then he just handed us a pen and made a sign on the dotted line so we wouldn't talk about old mastermind now tell me if you have ever seen a secret captain a submarine [Music] [Applause] [Music]

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Channel: FR2ON6H2CKNGTVM1D3OG

Views: 1,768,220

Rating: 4.5800509 out of 5

Keywords: Will Lyman, Sherry Sontag, Arts and Entertainment Network, A&E, History Channel, Submarines, Submarine, Espionage, Documentary, Book, Submarine documentary, Cold War, Cold war espionage, Submarine espionage, nuclear submarine, US military documentary, US navy documentary, Navy Espionage, Navy intelligence, spy submarine

Id: qGGSJEp0cXA

Channel Id: undefined

Length: 95min 32sec (5732 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 01 2017

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