Wiretapping for Fun and Profit

In Brief

When the U.S. Navy came up with really quiet nuclear subs, it loaded them with missiles, fed the sailors saltpeter and eggs, and chilled out in the Atlantic. Nothing exciting. That is, until a low-level captain decided it would be fun to sneak out to Soviet waters and place a wiretap on the phone lines that snuck across a desolate and often frozen sea. Of course, there was a snag: nobody knew for sure the lines existed, or how to find them even if they were there. Did that stop the sub from going out there anyway? Of course not!

Party On

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James Bradley of the United States Navy was up late one night in 1970 looking at maps of the then-Soviet Union; he looked at the faraway, hidden nuclear submarine port the Soviets had stationed across the mainland on the far side of the Sea of Okhotsk. He got to thinking that Moscow communicated with the base by telephone, since radio was easily overheard, and mobile telephones were too.

You could intercept mobile phone calls, even in the 70s. The U.S. Embassy in Moscow had great honking antennas on it and had already heard Brezhnev bitching about his head colds or Politburo members swapping stories about their favorite prostitutes. However, it never caught wind of anything useful, like information about military maneuvers or missile range capability. Nobody was so dumb as to discuss such things on a car phone; that was what telephone cables were for. Even ones stashed under water, crossing seas, hiding, seemingly impossible to find.

Finding a Needle in a Wet, Goopy Haystack

Bradley had grown up in the bustling burg of St. Louis, Missouri, a town with a musical named after it and home of the 1904 world's fair, not to mention a deplorably hot climate in the summer. His mom dragged him aboard a ship during those summers, where he had the pleasurable company of mosquitoes and foulmouthed sailors. Curiously, he saw many riverside signs saying "Cable Crossing: Do Not Anchor".

Thinking about these signs, Bradley jumped up with a start and proceeded to spend all of his time convincing the Navy that not only would the Soviets have a phone line to their sub base, but, having drunken backwoods hick fishermen like every other country, that they would also have those signs. Not only that, but he bet an American sub could squeeze itself into a sea which the Soviets would clearly consider sovereign territory, find the cable, and wiretap it.

Unfortunately, he couldn't have picked a worse time. Bradley was only a captain, and he figured that any attempt to go through the usual channels would provoke questioning sure to kill the project. He was asking the Navy to assume that a five-inch-thick cable lay beneath the waters of this sea, to utilize early 1970s diving technology to find it, and then use 1970s electrical technology to try to wiretap it. Crazy. Not just crazy, but foolhardy. Nuclear subs had a long history of colliding, mostly because they were so stealthy.[1] Indeed, Blind Man's Bluff, by Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew, lists 19 such collisions, mostly between U.S. and Soviet subs, between 1960 and 1993. We here at History House are amused at the prospect of a four-thousand ton vessel banging into another, with two sets of crews numbering in the hundreds flinging across the hold, dishes and cups spilling contents, nukes rattling, interrupting the clandestine embraces of lonely sailors. And after all that mayhem, we're even more amused by the two things speeding off in opposite directions, like schoolchildren caught kissing behind the bushes.

Nixon Capitalizes on Winning Personality

Amusing or no, however, the prospect of dinging a Soviet sub so close to a submarine port was definitely real, and getting caught so close to Soviet soil would be no diplomatic picnic. Nixon was about to make himself look really good with the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, and for American subs to be mucking about on Soviet territory at this crucial juncture would be ill-advised at best. Indeed, there had been three U.S.-Soviet sub collisions in 1969, one of them in Soviet waters mere days before Nixon and Kissinger headed out to Helsinki for a series of arms talks. The head of the Soviet Navy dispatched a bunch of ships to the site in the Barents sea, hoping to find the crushed hull of a sub down there so that the Soviets would have an ace up their sleeve during negotiations. They didn't find anything, but there was palpable tension following the string of incidents.

So, rather than deal with spooked Navy admirals, Captain Bradley went straight to the horse's mouth: Henry Kissinger. He wrangled a meeting, and, despite Nixon having gone on TV recently to announce that talks had resumed thanks to efforts made by a certain swell president, Kissinger told him to go for it and sneak American subs into Soviet waters for espionage purposes.[2] The famed diplomat had a habit of underhanded deals nobody else heard about; while in Pakistan he faked a two-day stomach flu to go on a brief junket to China in 1971.

So the U.S.S. Halibut was outfitted with helium tanks for deep diving, and an inductive wiretap built that they could install without cutting the line they weren't even sure was there or they could find, and saddled up to go.

Hello Sailor!

The evening before nuclear submarine departures in San Francisco usually involved a fair amount of debauchery. There was drinking and fighting and vomiting and a little of the business with the ladies. At a particular bar called the Horse and Cow, before the night was over every sailor in the place was naked, showing off the twin propellers he had tattooed on his buttcheeks. Some of the bolder ones would insert a rolled-up wad of newspaper in the spot between the propellers and light it, racing around the room, maniacally cackling, following a tradition dubbed "the dance of the flaming asshole". Also present was Snorkel Patty, a woman of epic stature described as the "Mae West-Mary Magdalene of the submarine set," and the lonely no doubt sought comfort in her arms that night.

The next morning they set out for three months, with few people on board knowing where they were going. A small team looked out onto the shores of the Okhotsk for a full week, hoping to spy "Do Not Anchor: Cable Here" signs in Russian. Once they'd found one they spent more time with video cameras searching for the cable buried in the Soviet silt. Navy divers went down with rarely-tested helium tanks, and fended off giant crabs as they dug in the muck, pulling up the five-inch cable. As if that weren't bad enough, the diving suits were outfitted with extra, unwieldy tubing so hot water could be pumped through them like a radiator in order to ensure the divers wouldn't die of hypothermia, or at least not notice when they pissed themselves when they saw one of those crabs.

They placed the tap, recorded a few minutes to see if it would work, picked it up, and left. The original tap was a small three feet long, and could record a few phone lines of the scores hiding in the cable for a short time. It was designed to clamp onto the line, record a game of scrabble, and then get removed and stashed inside. It was used only on that one mostly renegade mission to prove recording was possible. The plan was to go back with a bigger tap that could record for a whole year.

A Little More Unwieldy Than Tin Cans and String

This new one, built by Bell Labs, was nuke-powered, twenty feet long, weighed six tons, and could record dozens of lines for months at a time. With this operation, not only did divers in radiator suits have to think about manhandling a twelve thousand pound tape recorder in swelling sea currents and freezing temperatures,[3] but the Navy had to wonder if it was wise to leave an obviously U.S.-made piece of wiretapping equipment untended in Soviet waters for months at a stretch. Being caught lurking about with a sub is one thing, leaving a Cadillac-sized lump of coal in the Soviet stocking was completely different.

Feeling Pretty Confident

Bracing for the worst, the U.S. Navy went so far as to prepare itself to argue, should they be discovered, that the wiretap was actually legal under U.S. law. We're sure that the Soviets would have felt much better knowing that these shenanigans under their waters weren't violating the search and seizure amendment of the U.S. Constitution (number 4, for those playing at home).

Given the touchiness of the mission, the Navy also installed three self-destruct charges in the sub itself. If the poo hit the fan the charges would go off and sink the sub with 120 guys inside, while Uncle Sam was presumably supposed to shrug and draw circles in the dirt with his foot.

Looks Like We're Going Anyway

Thus strengthened with a healthy ignorance of international law, the Halibut schlepped back to the Sea of Okhotsk and put this enormous wiretap on the Soviet cable in the fall of 1972. For the first time the spies actually had their fingers in something useful: this wiretap could monitor dozens of lines individually and pick out some useful stuff, unlike the dinky first one. After the crew hooked it up in an astonishingly facile manner, the sub captain listened to the two Soviets talking about something in Russian and laughed his ass off. He sent some divers back out to fetch one of those giant crabs (no mean task in and of itself), which the sub's chef cooked up. Here at History House, we'd be afraid to eat giant crabs plucked from Soviet waters next to a nuke sub base, but hey, we're wet blankets.

The Spoils of Victory

The National Security Agency got ahold of the tapes after the sub took a break from other duties and went back to get a few months of recordings. The NSA managed to isolate 20 separate phone lines in the cable, and separate all of them into simple, uncoded Russian.[4] There were a few lines they could use: the U.S. Navy learned about Soviet training missions, in which Soviet subs were being sent monitor U.S. activity and lots of other official business. It was tempting enough stuff to go back a few more times in 1974 and 1975.

Of course, there was the insane pride one superpower must have enjoyed in physically wiretapping another's phone lines by trolling for cable a few paltry miles offshore, having found it by looking for "Do Not Anchor Here" signs. To be sure, during those times, the U.S. was taken down a few notches by its insistence on colliding with Soviet subs while hiding in waters where it didn't belong.

That, and they felt a little silly when practically all the clandestinely-taped phone calls turned out to be young Soviet sailors calling their mothers or practicing their English for their girlfriends.

Footnotes

1. This is not to imply that idiocy had no role to play here.
2. While the exchange at this meeting was relatively mundane, Sontag couldn't help herself from making fun of Kissinger's thick German accent by spelling "Well" as "Vell", and using this spelling three times in a short paragraph. Childish, we scoff.
3. Large portions of the Okhotsk freeze during the winter, despite it being made of saltwater. Check it out at this map of ice cover.
4. Not surprisingly, the Soviets did not encode phone lines between two points of home soil.

Bibliography

1. Henry Kissinger. Diplomacy. Touchstone, 1994.
2. Sontag, Sherry and Drew, Christopher. Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage. PublicAffairs, 1998.

 
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