How Spy Sub Grabbed Soviet Missiles -- Book Reveals U.S. Recovery Of Nuclear Warheads

WASHINGTON - On the evening of March 8, 1968, a Russian submarine with three nuclear missiles was heading for a holding pattern northwest of Hawaii. If ordered, the boat, code-named K129, would have unleashed 2.4 megatons of devastation on the U.S. Navy base at Pearl Harbor.

But on that night, without enough time even to broadcast a distress call, K129 sank in almost 20,000 feet of the Pacific Ocean. All 97 sailors aboard perished.

Now, 28 years later, it has been disclosed that a top-secret U.S. submarine, the Halibut, found the Russian boat six months later and recovered its three missiles, Soviet code books and an encryption machine.

Working unseen while submerged 300 feet, the Halibut hovered over the Russian wreck lying on the ocean floor 19,700 feet below.

Current and former senior Navy officials say the Halibut used photographs and cables with claws to retrieve from K129 its three Serb 5 ballistic missiles and their nuclear warheads - a gold mine, say Defense Intelligence Agency analysts.

Even more important, however, was the recovery of Soviet naval code books and the machine used to encode and decode the movements of the Kremlin's nuclear subs.

"It was an intelligence coup," said John Craven, the retired chief scientist for the U.S. Navy who supervised the construction and operations of the Halibut.

Halibut's mission enabled U.S. military planners to read Soviet submarine messages for six years and counter Kremlin strategic missile submarine deployments with U.S. anti-submarine warfare vessels.

"It definitely improved our ASW (anti-submarine warfare) operations," said one senior Navy official. "Not every submarine in every case, but it gave us an important advantage."

New details of the Halibut's little-known 1968 mission are disclosed in "Spy Sub - A Top Secret Mission to the Bottom of the Pacific," published by the Naval Institute Press. Author Roger Dunham was the nuclear reactor operator aboard the Halibut, a former cruise-missile submarine rigged for covert operations. Dunham used false names for the crew members and identifies the boat as the Viperfish, but Navy officials confirmed that his book deals with the Halibut's mission.

`We heard a bang'

Dunham recounts the moment when the Halibut's photographer, using a powerful strobe light to photograph the ocean floor, was stunned to see the Soviet boat.

"The main section of the submarine, lying on its side, showed up in stark relief from the surrounding mud," Dunham wrote.

"The submarine's numbers had been painted over, and the superstructure appeared to have buckled from the stresses of its final descent."

Former CIA Director William Colby said the Russian boat's death throes were detected by a U.S. Air Force underwater network listening for nuclear explosions.

"We heard a bang," Colby said in an interview before his death in May.

On March 18, 1968, once the Air Force's seismic sensors had the time and general location of the K129 explosion, other hydrophones were checked to produce a map intersection that pinpointed the K129, known to the U.S. Navy by its NATO designation, Golf II.

Claws dropped from sub's belly

Navy sources said the Halibut crew, using claws dropped by cable from the boat's belly, winched up the missiles, warheads and code equipment. The painstaking process, directed by Capt. Charles Moore, took almost three weeks, Navy sources said. A second effort in 1974 by the Central Intelligence Agency to recover K129, however, quickly became public when the recovery ship was spotted and the media got hold of the story. The Glomar Explorer attempted to hoist to the surface the entire hull of K129. But most of the hull was lost when a giant recovery claw broke.

A 100-foot front section of K129, containing two nuclear-tipped torpedoes and the bodies of six Russian sailors, was pulled aboard the Glomar Explorer. CIA officials and Lockheed Corp. workers on the Glomar conducted a solemn burial at sea, which was filmed by the CIA.