`Blind Man's Bluff' Dives Deeply Into Sub Spy Missions

------------------------------- "Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage" by Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew, with Annette Lawrence Drew Public Affairs, $25 -------------------------------

"Blind Man's Bluff" bills itself as the "untold" story of American submarine espionage. But unlike many books with "untold" labels, this one lives up to its billing.

About 30 years ago, during the height of the Cold War, an American naval intelligence officer, Capt. James E. Bradley, came up with the idea of tapping the Soviet Union's underwater telephone lines leading to naval bases in the Okhotsk and White seas, and recording the conversations.

Those risky missions, undertaken (for a worthwhile purpose) by the special duty submarines USS Halibut, Seawolf and Parche, constitute the core of this exciting book by Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew.

It is a tribute to the security arrangements of the Navy and government intelligence agencies that the mission has been kept secret for so long. And the success of the mission is a tribute to the scientists and technicians ("spooks" in Navy parlance) who devised it, and to the Navy divers who risked their lives by leaving the sub to place the taps and retrieve the recordings.

The undertaking was eventually compromised by an informer. However, the missions never were confronted with an ambush by an alerted Soviet navy.

The book also covers "Project Jennifer," the attempt to rescue a Soviet submarine that sank in the Pacific Ocean.

Several U.S. government intelligence agencies (but not the Navy) had a special ship built to retrieve the sub. The ship, Glomar Explorer, seized the sub by its hull in a gigantic mechanical claw and was hoisting it to the surface when the sub broke into pieces. The claw managed to hold only a small portion of the hull, which failed to yield the mother lode of technical information that had been hoped for.

The Navy had argued against this attempt, suggesting a less ambitious plan it felt had a better chance to recover data, equipment and communications codes and cyphers.

The book also extensively reviews the development of submarine tactics under polar ice and - quite unusual - the attitudes of both submarine officers and enlisted personnel toward espionage missions. These attitudes varied from unbridled "gung ho!" enthusiasm to reluctance and, in at least one case, refusal by a petty officer to sail on an intelligence-gathering operation.

A chapter deals with how the close pursuit of Soviet submarines led to a number of collisions and to other operational mishaps at sea.

"Blind Man's Bluff" covers many other aspects of submarine life and the peculiarities of intelligence activities during and after the Cold War.

This book is based on data from a number of sources, almost none of them official. The Navy has refused to comment on its content, claiming the necessity for continued secrecy.