SCORPION DOWN—Sunk by the Soviets, Buried by the Pentagon: The Untold Story of the USS Scorpion, by Ed Offley.
FULL REVIEW (Over 2000 words) by Robert David Steele, USMC (Ret), USNA D Skipper (less Celestial)
This book is one of the finest examples of investigative journalism carried out over decades as the world changed.
It is a superb example of two great crimes that government commits "in our name":
High Crime #1 Engage in outrageously arrogant and reckless operations under the cover of secrecy, doing things that are neither necessary nor wise, "because we can."
High Crime #2: Lie to families whose loved ones are lost to a combination of enemy action (which normally confers specific honors and death benefits) and reckless misbehavior by a handful of top political, intelligence, and naval professionals.
This book was recommended to me by a retired Navy Captain (O-6) familiar with the true story. As a retired Marine Corps infantry officer I would not normally have picked this book, nor was I aware of its strong intelligence content, but it made the cut in part because I am increasingly furious about the stupidity, cost, and unprofessionalism of our military and intelligence flag officers, such as General Mike Hayden, who has, on the record, violated the Constitution twice (warrantless wiretapping, rendition and torture) and off the record, is joining Dick Cheney as a war criminal and pioneer of global illegal "best practices" that have made us less safe while costing us accountability, legitimacy, and morality in the eyes of all others.
The author is gifted. He inspires tears by page eight. It is not possible to appreciate the enormity of both the crimes committed and the dots connected without reading this book word for word to the very end.
Here are a few highlights:
1) A handful of top Navy Admirals including the Chief of Naval Operations, authorized lunatic missions whose danger was probably not properly briefed to the political "leaders" and their advisors. From the 1960's, US submariners on a constant war footing engaged in constant aggressive tactics against the Soviet Navy, tactics that routinely violated the Soviet three-mile ocean sovereignty limit, and led to a "number of collisions, groundings, and other mishaps (that) reached an alarming rate.
2) Decades of reckless arrogant misbehavior were concealed from the US public, the US Congress, the US media, and most (98%) of the chain of command from President down to fully-cleared seamen.
3) The US Navy, not the Soviet Navy, refused year after year to include submarines in the bi-lateral Incidents at Sea agreement.
3) In the early 1970's "double reporting" became a US Navy standard for all "special intelligence " (signals and illegal direct access) operations, with all "incidents" being reported twice: first in a fabricated version having no relation to the truth; and second, a truthful version. Both classified, the lies went to the chain of command, the truth went to no more than 3-5 especially privy flag officers and one Navy Captain responsible for the intersection of naval operations and intelligence operations at sea.
4) This book is a superb integration of investigative journalism; persistence over decades, a full leaving of both contextual history and intimate insights into the lives and methods and materials that made up the US Navy as it transitioned from diesel submarines that could shoot torpedoes, to nuclear submarines that could both fire strategic nuclear missiles and engage the Soviet Navy tactically and often secretly, to the point of putting a periscope with a high-resolution camera within inches of the bottom of Soviet ships. As the author himself says, it took the end of the Cold War, combined with additional Navy declassification of files under persistent Freedom of Information demands, and the emergence of the personal computer and the World Wide Web, to break this story open. The latter is especially important. Once the author was able to have a story posted on the web, it reached thousands whose life had touched the USS Scorpion, and many of them stepped forward with details that the US Navy could not suppress nor contradict.
5) The handful of Admirals privy to the truth knew five days before the USS Scorpion was "executed" by a Soviet torpedo, in deliberate and preplanned revenge for the loss of the Soviet submarine K-129, whose death, very likely at US hands but by accident from reckless intimacy rather than a fired torpedo, changed the submarine war from cold to hot. They knew of the reckless tracking of the USS Scorpion, and did nothing to save it. The demonstrated a reckless disregard for the safety of the crew of the USS Scorpion (as well as a reckless disregard for the international law of the sea)
6) The handful of Admirals who realized their mistakes lost a sub to enemy action moved immediately to conceal all evidence of their criminal disregard, and sent the Naval Investigative Service all over the world to immediately confiscate for destruction all acoustic and message traffic records of the death of the USS Scorpion. One full copy survived and was played to a SOSUS (undersea acoustic surveillance system,) class in 1982 (this fact was finally revealed to the author in 1999; in 2007 the chief of training at the time, a senior non-commissioned officer in retirement, confirmed his role in keeping and playing the tape that documented a Soviet fleet all over the USS Scorpion, a torpedo kill of the USS Scorpion, and 91 seconds later, a deep crush complete destruction of the USS Scorpion.
7) The author discovered that while all documents and physical evidence could be destroyed or subverted by lies, humans with honor could, over time, be engaged, and it was human admissions by one Admiral and one Captain, both long retired, that broke this story into full detail.
Here are some other tid-bits that really made this book a compelling useful read:
1) President Johnson personally presided over the cover-up at the same time that he presided over the cover-ups on the John F. Kennedy assassination, and the USS Pueblo capture.
2) The fake search & rescue operations mounted by the US Navy were the largest fleet deployment since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
3) Acoustic data from 1300 miles away *nailed* the truth that was kept from the families, the Navy at large, Congress, and the public.
4) The USS Scorpion represented a "quantum leap" ahead in propulsion and capability, was a known spy ship known to be constantly deployed into Soviet waters and against Soviet ships in international waters.
5) The author first realized the magnitude of the US Navy and US Government cover-up on 17 December 1984, when a former Navy enlisted man who has served in top secret senior staff positions and was now a newspaper colleague, told him directly that based on his personal past, the USS Scorpion had been killed by a Russian torpedo, not a mishap.
6) Despite massive Top Secret Codeword restraints, the crews had common sense and would brief each other when turning over missions, the incoming crew walking to the end of the pier with the outgoing crew, having a seaman to seaman informal "turnover brief." I liked this for its contrast of bottom-up common sense with top-down idiocy.
7) The author provides an excellent leavening of contextual history together with a solid look at the people, materials, and methods that went with undersea covert espionage operations.
7a) Submarine warfare, alone among all forms of military operations, was on a constant war footing that embraced both unconventional personalities, and a "no holds barred" disregard for international laws, normal peacetime operating protocols, and in my view, plain common sense.
7b) During the Cuban Missile Crisis, the US Navy learned the wrong lesson. They thought they "won" by imposing an illegal blockade on Cuba. They did not realize until decades later that not only did the Soviet Union have tactical nuclear anti-ship missiles on the ground in Cuba, but also nuclear torpedoes on Soviet submarines in Cuban water. This book does not include, but I recall it from another work, the fact that a Soviet submarine commander directly disobeyed an order to fire a torpedo at a US vessel in his undersea sights, and it was this one human decision that allowed the crisis to begin winding down.
7c) It was the Cuban Missile Crisis that earned the Soviet Navy virtually unlimited funding and approval of very aggressive programs to create a counter-Navy to the US Navy. I am struck over all of my reading (not just the books I have reviewed at Amazon, but especially those) by how often the US as a rogue nation, the US military as a unilateral force, and the US Intelligence Community as a completely unaccountable and unsupervised covert force, have literally created what we all call "blowback." We, the USA, created the conditions of confrontation and instability all over the world, most recently with the Bush-Cheney regime's misbehavior and idiotic foreign non-policies (we love 42 of the 44 dictators) taking us from 75 failed states in 2005 to 177 failed states in 2007--states that produce the ten high-level threats to humanity that do not recognize borders.
7d) The Soviet Navy (and more recently the Chinese Navy) was driven by our aggression and our demonstration of the art of the possible, to achieve what we ourselves arrogantly thought was our right: the ability to come up directly behind and underneath a US nuclear carrier, with impunity and without being detected. Search for <Chinese Irregular Warfare 2.0 oss.net> for my one-page memorandum on how the Chinese have won the final war "game," and are also winning the Peace Game that we have not even recognized is being played.
8) JFK and Johnson approved so much funding for so many submarines that the US Navy went from having a submarine service manned by crews with 2-5 tours behind them, to officers and crews with ZERO tours behind them.
9) Context for the combat death of the USS Scorpion:
9a) Occurred eleven weeks after the death of the K-129, the Soviets convinced that submarine was lost to hostile US action (not necessarily a torpedo, but almost certainly an unprovoked collision that the US covered up).
9b) At the same time, USS Pueblo was captured, a B52 went down in Greenland with four thermo-nuclear weapons, inspiring anti-US riots across Europe, 2 other submarines disappears (an Israeli submarine and a French submarine), China threatened the Soviet Union, and the US--this is a big one--interfered aggressively with Soviet search for K-129, leaving the Soviet Navy and the Soviet Government in a RAGE OF CERTAINTY THAT RUSSIAN BLOOD WAS ON US HANDS.
9c) USS Scorpion went to sea in a state of reduced readiness from a combination of unfixed non-nuclear operating system problems, and low morale among the crew for having lost a break between cruises and been rescheduled back to sea to substitute for a submarine unable to sail (and very probably, unable to sail because of damage caused by a collision with a Russian vessel, then concealed as a "grounding").
9d) Operational readiness further reduced by violent seas that led to a barge collision and possible damage to the submarine in high seas.
9e) Personnel readiness reduced by a combination of liberty port cancellations, local refusal to allow pier-side docking of a nuclear submarine, and the crumminess of the ports where crews could only go with armed escorts due to the riots against US B-52 nuclear incident.
9f) As part of its cover-up, one I must finally label as both immoral and illegal, the US Navy exiled--drove out of Norfolk-- all but one of the families whose men died at sea under combat conditions. I just shake my head in sadness.
9g) The Six Day War launched by Israel opened multiple Arab and African ports and airfields to Soviets, to the point they could reasonably be expected to contain the US Navy in the Mediterranean.
9h) Death by these circumstances occurs in milliseconds, painlessly.
10) The USS Scorpion was tracked and put to death by a Soviet fleet with the full prior knowledge of a handful of US Admirals who allowed the Scorpion and its crew to continue in harm’s way without regard for laws, casualties, costs, or consequences.
And now, the best for last, from a reviewer who is both an intelligence professional, and deeply read in the intelligence literature: the author has connected three big dots: the irresponsible aggressive operations of the US Navy and the USS Scorpion (following orders) leading to the loss of the USS Scorpion; the treason of the Walker naval family spy ring that delivered key lists of top US codes to the Soviets; and the Soviet capture of the USS Pueblo in order to obtain the actual cryptography machines needed to leverage the key lists.
I put this extraordinary book down with three thoughts:
1) We need political leadership committed to waging peace and eschewing illegal sources and methods that cost too much, not only financially, but morally.
2) The USS Scorpion was executed covertly, and US naval and political leadership accepted that execution as being within reasonable bounds within the covert war that waged most dangerously and uniquely, in "the silent service," the submarine service.
3) We desperately need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to examine both the "fifty year wound" we ourselves have imposed on the Earth and on Humanity everywhere; and the betrayal of the public trust that this book captures so able at the tactical secret level.
The author provides a super glossary, chronology of sources as they became available over three decades, and first-rate footnotes. This is an extraordinary book in every possible way. While it inspires in me the deepest feelings of dread, controlled rage, and a sense of helpless dishonor, it also leaves me feeling that Margaret Wheatley, Howard Sinn and others, are correct: if we each become a beacon of information sharing and sense-making, our collective intelligence should ultimately allow us to restore the honor, integrity, accountability, and goodness of American the Beautiful. This book is EXTRAORDINARY. An achievement of Nobel Prize proportions. See the other books for a larger context that reinforces the moral, legal, and operational principles that this author has investigated and articulated in a manner that leaves me with both deep despair and deep hope.
See also (ten negatives, as allowed in Abbreviated Review at Amazon):
The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic
Web of Deceit: The History of Western complicity in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush
The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America
Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions
What We Say Goes: Conversations on U.S. Power in a Changing World
Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq
Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin
The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past
See also (ten positives, herewith only):
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity
The World Cafe: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter
The leadership of civilization building: Administrative and civilization theory, symbolic dialogue, and citizen skills for the 21st century
How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas
Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World
Building a Knowledge-Driven Organization
The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political--Citizen's Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism, Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Corruption
Earth Intelligence will publish edited works on Collective, Peace, and Commercial Intelligence in 2008.
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