Lost At Sea -- Details Emerge About Soviet Sub That Burned, Sank

Five hundred feet deep in the Norwegian Sea, 250 miles north of Norway, alarm bells began ringing in the Soviet submarine Komsomolets as it spied on the U.S. submarine fleet. Fire had broken out in the stern, in the seventh compartment. And the killer sub, whose torpedoes were armed with nuclear warheads, was in grave danger.

``I jumped out of my cot, pulled on my pants and ran to the central control room,'' recalls Capt. First Rank Boris Kolyada. There, an officer was feverishly calling on the intercom:

``Seventh, seventh,'' the officer shouted. But there was no answer from the seaman on duty.

Though the high-tech ``Mike'' class vessel managed to surface, flames spread rapidly forward to other compartments. For hours, crewmen fought the blaze, smoke and poisonous gases while waiting for someone to answer their SOS. But when the sub went down for the last time, its commander and others remained trapped on board.

Rare disaster

The sinking of a sub is a relatively rare event. The U.S. has lost but two submarines in 25 years, the Soviets five. Because subs are stealthy military vessels, their operations obviously are secret, and detailed accounts of sinkings are scarce.

But thanks to glasnost, this case is different. Admirals have been giving interviews on Soviet TV. Soviet military journals - Naval Digest and Red Star - have printed analyses of the accident, which occurred April 7, 1989. The Soviet press, including Pravda and Izvestia, has printed excerpts from the ship's log and interviews with survivors who have vivid stories to tell. It is all quite astonishing to U.S. intelligence officials.

Rear Adm. Thomas Brooks, the chief of U.S. naval intelligence, said recently, ``Glasnost has provided us with insights . . . on the Soviets on which we (using intelligence methods) would have spent millions of dollars and countless years.'' The Komsomolets disaster is an example, he said. ``No matter how good our various (intelligence) systems were, we probably never could have collected the information the Soviets have made public.''

Memories of Chernobyl

The Soviets may have been especially candid in order to avoid criticism of the sort leveled at them when their nuclear power plant at Chernobyl spread radiation over Europe in April 1986. The Komsomolets (the name roughly means Young Communist) was powered by a nuclear reactor, and it carried two nuclear weapons, which remain on the ocean floor today.

The Komsomolets, coincidentally, was launched in 1984, the year ``Red October'' first put out to sea in the Tom Clancy thriller and current film about the exploits of a Soviet sub commanded by Sean Connery. Built and based near Murmansk, on Russia's north coast, Komsomolets was a prototype, with a novel titanium hull that allowed it to dive to 3,000 feet, three times deeper than conventional steel-hulled subs. Advanced as it was, it was as vulnerable as any sub might be to fire. Its nuclear reactor produced steam that drove turbines with gears that spun a propeller. The sub was crammed with a volatile mix of hydraulic fluid, lubricants and electronics, its systems operating under extreme pressures and at high temperatures.

Fire on a sub is extraordinarily hard to put out. In an enclosed space, oxygen is rapidly depleted, displaced by smoke and toxic fumes. So it quickly becomes hard to breathe, hard to see, hard to find the source of fire and to quench flames. Hydraulic fluid burns at such high temperatures that any metal nearby will sear flesh.

By the morning of April 7, the Komsomolets had been at sea tracking U.S. subs for 39 days. Everything was going smoothly until a short circuit sparked a fire in compartment seven, where Seaman Nadari Bukhnikashvili was standing watch.

11:02 a.m. - As the automatic alarm sounds, officers, including the sub's commander, Capt. First Rank Yevgeniy Vanin, scramble to the control room. There, instruments show the temperature in compartment seven soaring past 160 degrees Fahrenheit.

``Commander, let us turn on LOK in the seventh,'' a crewman says.

Cmdr. Vanin hesitates. If he orders the injection of LOK (a form of Freon gas), it might snuff out the fire by depriving it of oxygen. But in doing so, it would also asphyxiate the young seaman, if he is still alive. Vanin assumes the worst, since the young man hasn't responded to calls. He issues the order: ``Turn on the LOK.''

In the sixth compartment, Warrant Officer Vladimir Kolotilin turns a valve, releasing gas into the adjacent compartment. But it does no good. The crew doesn't realize it, but a high-pressure air pipe in seven has ruptured and is feeding oxygen to the flames. Seven is a veritable blast furnace, with temperatures heading toward 1,000 degrees.

Spurting flames

The intense fire burns through cable openings in the bulkhead and enters the sixth compartment. Kolotilin, still there, calls on the intercom to the control center: ``I see smoke seepage.''

Then his voice rises to a shout: ``Central, ejection of hydraulics from under the right turbine generator!'' The hydraulic fluid ignites. He screams into the intercom: ``It is spurting like a flame thrower . . . !'' Within seconds, Kolotilin is dead.

A surge of power sweeps through the boat's deranged electrical system, sparking new fires in wiring and instrument panels here and there throughout the vessel.

``There was fire everywhere,'' Lt. Anatoliy Tretyakov would recall later. ``Cables and panels were on fire in battle stations. We saw them explode, and the guys began ripping them out with their bare hands to try to stop the flames somehow.''

11:16 a.m. - The Komsomolets surfaces on a choppy sea, and immediately begins sending encoded SOS signals to the Soviet military communications network. By 11:45, three messages have been sent. By 12:10, just after noon, eight messages. Not one has been answered.

Meanwhile, in Moscow, the Soviet Union's top naval officer, Fleet Adm. Vladimir Chernavin is summoned from a meeting with the defense minister. The admiral takes a call from navy headquarters. An SOS was received at 11:41, he is told, but the signal was so distorted - by weather or electrical disturbances on the sub - that it is impossible to make out the vessel's identity and location, and thus impossible to reply.

``Something had gone wrong,'' the admiral says. ``But where?''

Rushing back to his office, he monitors the situation from the phone in his car. He learns that ``at 12:19, a clear signal was received,'' he says. ``All immediately became clear - the kind of ship, its location, and that there was a fire.''

12:20 p.m. - The Soviets begin trying to determine whether fishing vessels are close enough to be dispatched to the sub - a bit of research that takes nearly an hour and turns out to be a fatal delay. A Soviet patrol plane is ordered to head for the Komsomolets. And a virtual flotilla of Soviet navy ships - a submarine-rescue vessel, an ocean-going tug and the fast cruiser Kirov - head out of the naval base near Murmansk. To direct rescue operations, the deputy commander of the northern fleet flies by helicopter to the Kirov. But the sub is nearly 500 miles from Murmansk. It will be roughly 13 hours before even the speedy Kirov, going 33 knots, can get there.

Meanwhile, in the maze of wiring, plumbing and whirring motors that are the innards of the Komsomolets, crewmen are fighting thick smoke and intense heat. ``The metal became red-hot, (so) we were wrapping our hands in towels, putting out the fires and carrying comrades out who sustained burns,'' a warrant officer recalls.

Breathing bad air

To avoid smoke, crewmen put on masks connected by long flexible hoses to compressed-air pipes running through the sub. They don't realize at first that the pipe has been breached in compartment seven. Compressed air leaving the compartment is contaminated. The men unwittingly are breathing carbon monoxide from their masks and keeling over.

The ship's doctor, Leonid Zayets, rips off his mask and sends an assistant to check out the compressed air. He reports back: ``The concentration of carbon monoxide is lethal.''

Men overcome by the poisonous, odorless gas are carried up to the deck for fresh air, but two die right away.

Using portable oxygen masks, crewmen begin to fight the fire now raging in compartments four, five, six and seven. A rescue team crawls into compartment four and pulls two men out alive, then makes a ghastly discovery in the swirling smoke of compartment five. A ball of fire has burst through, trapping seven crewmen and igniting their clothes. Though they beat out the flames with their hands, men have grievous burns: An officer's rubber oxygen mask has melted to his face. Two men in the compartment who had tapped into the bad compressed air are unconscious.

Two dead

Yelling for help and choking on smoke, the rescue team begins to drag the burned and asphyxiated men to the deck. There, Zayets and an assistant try to revive the two who have passed out, but neither mouth-to-mouth resuscitation nor a shot of adrenaline to the heart does any good. The men are dead.

The rescue team tries to enter compartment six, but the fire is too intense. Cmdr. Vanin decides to let it burn itself out there and in seven.

2:40 p.m. - Nearly four hours after the fire began, crewmen who have been below are given a rest on deck. Blankets, warm clothes and lunch are brought up. By this time the Soviet patrol plane has reached the Komsomolets and is circling, helping to relay messages. The plane radios that Russian fishing vessels, the closest ships, are rushing to the rescue. Huddled on deck, the exhausted crewmen, several badly burned, get some rest, but the worst is yet to come.

Snow flurries begin, a choppy sea gives way to four-foot waves, and a gale blows up. In heavy seas, the fishing vessels, lumbering to the rescue at a mere 10 knots, stand no chance of reaching the Komsomolets in time to save all the remaining crewmen. They will be lucky to get there by 6 o'clock.

3:23 p.m. - Fire continues to rage; the temperature reading on the bulkhead next to compartment six exceeds 200 degrees, according to the ship's log.

4:24 p.m. - Explosions that may involve pressurized oxygen tanks rock compartments six and seven.

4:42 p.m. - The fire has burned through seals in the hull. And now, as the conflagration begins to die down and the pressure drops in six and seven, lots of water is gushing in. Suddenly, the Komsomolets settles - stern down, bow up. The log quotes Vanim's order: ``Prepare to evacuate; collect all classified materials.''

Standing on the bridge, he asks if everyone is topside. Several men are still below, he is told, including one who is gathering up classified documents. The commander goes down to get them.

Men on the bow, meanwhile, are trying to inflate two big life rafts. The first is blown overboard by a gust of wind and is upside down in the icy water. Men jump into the water, swim to the raft and clamber onto it. It is a 25-man raft, and about 50 men are trying to climb aboard.

Closing the hatch

The sub settles further, and waves hit the bridge. Warrant Officer Aleksandr Kopeyka, the last man there, sees no sign of Cmdr. Vanin or the others below. If the sub goes down with the hatch open, they will drown.

``What should I do?'' the warrant officer shouts.

An officer on the raft shouts back: ``Close the hatch, they can survive in the escape capsule.''

Russian subs, unlike any others in the world, have a capsule built into the bridge; if a sub is disabled underwater, at least some men can climb into it, seal the hatch, release it from the sub and rise to the surface.

Kopeyka slams down the hatch cover. Moments later, the Komsomolets upends itself, with its bow sticking up ``like a cigarette,'' as a survivor describes it. And it slips stern-first into the sea. A steering plane protruding from the bow strikes and kills a swimming crewman.

Six men are still on the submarine. Five, including Cmdr. Vanin and Warrant Officer Victor Slyusarenko, hasten into the escape capsule and seal the hatch. But where's the sixth man?

Losing Ispenkov

They hear a knock. ``It's Ispenkov, he's still alive, open the hatch on the double,'' Cmdr. Vanin orders. But ``a terrible cracking sound'' resounds, recalls Slyusarenko. The bulkheads are collapsing, and water is rushing in. There's no time to open the hatch, no time to save Anatoliy Ispenkov, a captain third rank.

The Komsomolets continues its plunge - to 300 feet, 700, 1,000, according to the depth gauge in the capsule. But the scale goes only to 1,300, so the needle stops at that point, while the sub continues its descent. Desperately, the five men try to free the escape capsule.

``We applied enough force to bend a steel wrench, but the (release) mechanism wouldn't budge,'' Slyusarenko recalls. ``We're going to be crushed,'' someone exclaimed.

Then, boom, an explosion. And somehow the capsule is knocked free, to shoot to the surface. As the capsule bobs up from the sea, internal pressure blows the hatch off, and blows out one of the men, who is killed. Slyusarenko, himself flung through the opening, manages to swim to the raft. This is fortunate for him, because the capsule fills with water and disappears into the waves, carrying Cmdr. Vanin and the two remaining crewmen to their deaths, and to the sea floor 5,000 feet down.

The other raft

As the sub is going down, the crew is trying to inflate the second life raft, which is tethered to the sub. It is dragged beneath the waves, only to break free and then resurface, but too far away for the exhausted crew to swim to. The circling patrol drops small rafts, but they miss the mark, so about 50 men must try to save themselves on a raft built for 25, in 36 degree water.

5:08 p.m. - The sub has gone down. On the upside-down raft, battered by wind and waves and half submerged because of overcrowding, men huddle in water up to their chests. Others, in the sea, cling to ropes off to the side of the raft.

Zayets has made it to the raft. ``When we found ourselves in the water,'' he recalls, ``I knew that we had 15 to 20 minutes'' before men would begin dying of hypothermia. And it doesn't take long before some lose sensation in their legs, their trunks, their arms, their hands. They can no longer grasp the ropes. ``Hold on with your teeth,'' Zayets yells. Some do.

But burned, exhausted and half frozen submariners begin letting go.

In the critical hour before real help arrives, more than two dozen Komsomolets crewmen die in the water.

About 6:20 p.m. - A fishing boat finally arrives and drops two motorboats into the sea to begin picking men up. Twenty-nine are plucked up alive, although two of them later die of shock. Other fishing vessels arrive, then the cruiser Kirov. Survivors are transferred to the Kirov.

In the wake: controversy

Of the 69 men aboard the Komsomolets, the disaster took the lives of 42, making this one of the worst submarine accidents in history.

The sinking caused great controversy in the Soviet Union, where journalists have suggested that the navy sought no help from Norway because it didn't want knowledge of its secret, prototype submarine to fall into the hands of NATO. Norway is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Norwegians say they could have helped had they been informed early enough. Actually, Norway was monitoring Soviet military radio and knew that a plane had been dispatched to look for a sub. But the Norwegians thought at first it was just a practice rescue. So says Brig. Gen. Gullow Gjeseth, who speaks for the Norwegian Defense Department in Oslo. In midafternoon the Norwegians did dispatch their own patrol plane to take a look. Only after 5 p.m. did the Norwegian pilot spot a life raft and see bodies and debris in the water. At that point Norway realized how serious the situation was, Gjeseth says. And by then it was too late to send help.

Olav Soenderland, chief of the joint military-civilian rescue center for North Norway, says that a Norwegian Air force rescue helicopter on alert at Banak could have reached the sub in two hours or three. It could have picked up as many as 20 men and flown them to Norway's Bear Island, about 119 miles away. A Norwegian coast guard vessel south of Bear Island also could have reached the sub in about two hours. If the Soviets had asked for help at 1 p.m., help might have arrived by 3 or 4. In plenty of time to save the day, in other words.

Nothing more to say

Soviet officials declined a request for interviews in connection with this story. What they know has already appeared in Soviet publications, they say. In a recent issue of Soviet Naval Digest, navy officials deny they botched the rescue. Norwegian help wasn't requested, they say, because the sub wasn't expected to be finished off. Rear Adm. L.L. Belyshev, the deputy head of navy shipbuilding, says that ``up to the last minutes, no one had lost confidence that they would succeed in saving the submarine.''

Soviet officials nevertheless admit that the disaster did bring to the surface certain problems. According to a preliminary report by O.D. Baklanov, a Soviet official heading an inquiry into the sinking, specialists discovered that faults in the prototype sub's electrical and hydraulic systems contributed to the fire and need to be fixed. Rescue services - performed in concert by the navy, merchant marine and the fishing fleets - need to be integrated and speeded up.

The Soviets have been especially energetic in spreading the word that the reactor was shut down before the sub plunged to the bottom - and that its nuclear torpedoes weren't cocked, can't go off and pose no threat today.

The question remains: Will the hulk of the Komsomolets be recovered? Never has such a boat been raised from so great a depth. But it is possible that pieces of the sub will be retrieved. The Soviets have already taken pictures with their underwater cameras of what is left of the Komsomolets. They are studying what to do next, they say.

They might be spurred to action by fears that the U.S. Navy will try to retrieve all or part of the sub, a conceivable sunken treasure of information for U.S. intelligence. A precedent exists to justify Soviet paranoia: Nearly 20 years ago, the U.S. retrieved a Soviet diesel boat that had sunk in the Pacific. The Russians may yet booby-trap their sub to keep others away. To be sure that nobody makes a quick grab for the Komsomolets, a Soviet ship - bobbing in the Norwegian Sea - continues to stand constant guard.

-- Reprinted with permission of the Wall Street Journal, copyright 1990 Dow Jones & Co. Inc. All rights reserved.

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THE SINKING OF THE SOVIET ATTACK SUBMARINE KOMSOMOLETS:;

The markings of a Soviet sub disaster;

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Forty-two crewmen died when a Soviet ``Mike'' class nuclear submarine caught fire and sank off the coast of Norway.;

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Friday April 7, 1989;

11:02 a.m. (Moscow Time);

Submarine catches fire 100 nautical miles southwest of Bear Island.;

4:42 p.m. Sub starts sinking in 4500 feet of water.;

5:00 p.m. Norwegian plane observes at least two dead.;

10 p.m. CNN breaks news, citing a Pentagon source.;

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Saturday April 8, 1989;

7 a.m. Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev informs U.S. British and Norwegian governments in a phone call.;

12 noon Soviet news agency TASS informs Soviet public.;

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THE SOVIETS' ONLY ``MIKE''-CLASS SUBMARINE, LAUNCHED IN 1983;

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Crew: 69 (42 died in accident);

Length: 360 feet;

Width: 39 feet;

Weight: 9,800 metric tons;

Speed: 38 knots;

Armament: SSN-21 missiles, range about 5,000 miles - 64 mines - Torpedoes;

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U.S. AND SOVIET SUB SINKINGS;

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YEAR Submarine Name Location Fatalities;

1963 U.S.S. Thresher 100 miles east of Cape Cod 129;

1968 Soviet Golf class 750 miles northwest of Hawaii unknown;

1968 U.S.S. Scorpion 400 miles southwest of the 99;

Azores;

1970 Soviet November class 300 miles northwest of Spain unknown;

1983 Soviet Charlie class near the Kamchatka Peninsula 90 estimated;

1986 Soviet Yankee class 600 miles northeast of Bermuda unknown;

1989 Soviet Mike class 250 miles north of Norway 42;

``Komsomolets'';

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SOURCES: Norwegian Ministry of Defence, Jane's Fighting Ships, SvD