Soviet submarine K-129 (1960): Difference between revisions

K-129 was a Project 629 (NATO reporting name Golf-II) diesel-powered submarine of the Soviet Pacific Fleet, one of six Project 629 strategic ballistic missile submarines attached to the 15th Submarine Squadron based at Rybachiy Naval Base, Kamchatka, commanded by Rear Admiral Rudolf A. Golosov. In January 1968, the 15th Submarine Squadron was part of the 29th Ballistic Missile Division at Rybachiy, commanded by Admiral Viktor A. Dygalo. K-129 was commanded by Captain First Rank V.I. Kobzar and carried identity number 574.

After having successfully completed two 70-day ballistic-missile combat patrols in 1967, K-129 was tasked with her third patrol to commence Feb. 24th, 1968 with an expected completion date of May 5th 1968. Upon departure Feb. 24th, K-129 reached deep water, conducted its test dive, returned to the surface to report by radio that all was well, and proceeded on patrol. No further communication was ever received from K-129, despite normal radio check-ins expected when the submarine crossed the 180th longitude and when it arrived at its patrol area.

By mid-March, Soviet naval authorities at Kamchatka became concerned that K-129 had missed not one but two consecutive radio check-ins. First, K-129 was instructed by normal fleet broadcast to break radio silence and contact headquarters; later and more urgent communications all went unanswered. By the third week of March, Soviet naval headquarters declared the submarine "missing", and organized a massive air, surface and sub-surface search and rescue effort into the North Pacific from Kamchatka and Vladivostok.

The highly unusual Soviet surge deployment into the Pacific was correctly analyzed by U.S. intelligence as probably in reaction to a submarine loss. U.S. SOSUS Naval Facilities (NAVFACs) in the North Pacific were alerted and requested to review recent acoustic records to identify any possible associated signal. Several SOSUS arrays recorded a possibly related event on May 8, 1968, and upon examination produced sufficient triangulation by lines-of-bearing to provide the U.S. Navy with a locus for the probable wreck site. One source characterized the acoustic signal as "an isolated, single sound of an explosion or implosion, 'a good-sized bang'." The acoustic event is claimed to have originated either from near 40 N, 180 longitude, or from the vicinity of latitude 24 N, 163 W (Sewell Theory).

Soviet search efforts, lacking the equivalent of the U.S. SOSUS system, proved unable to locate K-129, and eventually Soviet naval activity in the North Pacific returned to normal. K-129 was declared lost with all hands.

With the aid of SOSUS triangulation, American intelligence resources would later locate the K-129 wreck, photograph it in-situ at its 16,000 foot depth, and (several years later) partially salvage it.

Discovery and Salvage - Project Jennifer

In 1969, the wreck of K-129 was pin-pointed by the USS Halibut (SSGN-587) northwest of Oahu, at an approximate depth of 16,000 feet. The wreck was surveyed in detail by the Halibut (reportedly with over 20,000 close-up photos), and later also possibly by Trieste II. With a unique opportunity to snatch a Soviet nuclear missile without the knowledge of the Soviet Union, the K-129 wreck came to the attention of U.S. national authorities. After consideration by the Secretary of Defense and the White House, the President authorized a salvage attempt. To ensure the salvage attempt remained "black" (i.e. clandestine and secret), the CIA rather than the Navy was tasked to conduct the operation. Hughes Glomar Explorer was designed and built under CIA contract, solely for the purpose of conducting a clandestine salvage of K-129. Under the cover name Operation Jennifer, this project would be one of the most expensive and deepest secrets of the Cold War.

According to an official account, in 1974 the Glomar Explorer was able to lift the wreck of K-129, but as it was raised, the claw suffered a catastrophic failure resulting in the hull breaking into three pieces with the center and stern sections falling back to the ocean floor, and the missiles falling out of their tubes. Thus, the missiles, one torpedo room, and the engine room were lost. What exactly was retrieved in the section that was successfully recovered is highly classified, but the Soviets assume that the United States recovered torpedoes with nuclear warheads, operations manuals, codebooks and coding machines. Another source (unofficial) states that the U.S. recovered sections 1 and 2 of the bow which contained two nuclear torpedoes, as well as conventional torpedoes.

The United States announced that in the section they recovered were the bodies of six men. Due to radioactive contamination, the bodies were buried at sea in a steel chamber on September 4, 1974 with full military honors about 90 miles southwest of Hawaii. The videotape of that ceremony was given to Russia by U.S. Director of Central Intelligence, Robert Gates, when he visited Moscow in October 1992. The relatives of the crew members were not shown the video until many years later.

Specific Location

The location of the wreck remains an official secret of the United States intelligence services.

While not a location, in response to Russian efforts to ascertain whether K-129 had been lost due to damage resulting from a collision with a U.S. submarine, an official U.S. statement by Ambassador Malcolm Toon to a Russian delegation during a meeting in the Kremlin in August 1993 related:

"At my request, U.S. naval intelligence searched the logs of all U.S. subs that were active in 1968. As a result, our director of naval intelligence has concluded that no U.S. sub was within 300 nautical miles of your sub when it sank."

Explaining the Disaster

The official Soviet Navy hypothesis is that K-129, while operating in snorkel mode, slipped below its operating depth. Such an event, combined with a mechanical failure or improper crew reaction, can cause flooding sufficient to sink the ship..

This account, however, has not been accepted by many, and three alternative theories have been advanced to explain the loss of K-129:

1. A hydrogen explosion in the batteries while charging;
2. A collision with USS Swordfish (SSN-579);
3. Violence due to K-129 violating normal operating procedures and/or departing from authorized operating areas.

At least the official account, and the first theory, can be the consequence of a report that as many as 40 of the complement of 98 were new to the submarine for this deployment.

Hydrogen Explosion

Lead-acid batteries vent explosive hydrogen gas during the charging process. If not properly vented, that gas could have accumulated into an explosive concentration. Still, submariners have understood this risk -- and had procedures to mitigate it -- for nearly a century.

Concerning the hydrogen explosion theory, Dr. John P. Craven, former chief scientist of the US Navy's Special Projects Office and former head of the DSSP and DSRV programs, commented:

"I have never seen or heard of a submarine disaster that was not accompanied by the notion that the battery blew up and started it all. [...] Naive investigators, examining the damage in salvaged battery compartments, invariably blame the sinking on battery explosions until they learn that any fully charged battery suddenly exposed to seawater will explode. It is an inevitable effect of a sinking and almost never a cause."

Collision with USS Swordfish

The collision theory is the unofficial opinion of many Soviet Navy officials, and is officially denied by the United States Navy. According to U.S. Navy sources, Swordfish put into Yokosuka, Japan shortly after the disappearance of K-129, and received emergency repairs to a bent periscope, reportedly caused by ice impacted during surfacing while conducting classified operations in the Sea of Japan,. The theory that Swordfish's periscope caused damage to K-129's pressure hull in a collision during a trailing mission is contra-indicated, as the K-129's pressure hull was far too sturdy to be ripped open by the much weaker sail area and periscope of USS Swordfish. The Russian unofficial and highly emotional theory that Swordfish fatally damaged the K-129 by collision is not substantiated by mechanical study or reconstruction. However, Swordfish's logs for the period remain highly classified (apparently due to security concerning its operations in the Sea of Japan at the time), and Russian calls for full disclosure remain unsatisfied.

A news release in 2000 related to the sinking of K-129 stated:

"As recently as [1999], Russian government officials complained that Washington was covering up its involvement. One accused the Americans of acting like a "criminal that had been caught and now claimed that guilt must be proved," according to the notes of a U.S. participant in a November 1999 meeting on the topic."

K-129 Off-Course? Out of Area?

According to Dr. John P. Craven, K-129 was detected at latitude 40 north, which was far south of her expected patrol area. Dr. Craven, former chief scientist of the US Navy's Special Projects Office and former head of the DSSP and DSRV programs, commented that this fact alone implied a high probability that K-129 was a rogue:

"When [K-129] passed [longitude] 180, it should have been farther north, at a latitude of 45 degrees, or more than three hundred miles away. If that was a navigational mistake it would be an error of historic proportions. Thus if the sub were not somewhere in the vicinity of where the Soviets supposed it to be, there would be a high probability, if not a certainty, that the submarine was a rogue, off on its own, in grave disobedience of its orders."

Craven does not explain why he eliminated the possibility that K-129 was proceeding to a newly assigned and officially approved patrol area, and instead why he concluded that K-129 was exhibiting behavior indicating abnormal or criminal behavior for a Soviet strategic missile submarine.

Craven also noted, in a strangely worded statement:

"While the Russian submarine was presumed to be at sea, an oceanographic ship of the University of Hawaii was conducting research in the oceanic waters off Hawaii's Leeward Islands. The researchers discovered a large slick on the surface of the ocean, collected a sample, and found that it was highly radioactive. They reported this to George Woolard, the director of the Hawaii Institute of Geophysical Research."

Craven does not reconcile a sinking location at 40 N latitude with an oil slick hundreds of miles south of that latitude, nor does he reconcile the date/time of the sinking, with date/time of the recovery of radioactive oil by the oceanographic research ship.

Conspiracy Theory - Unauthorized Missile Launch?

In 2005, the book Red Star Rogue: The Untold Story of a Soviet Submarine's Nuclear Strike Attempt on the U.S., by former American submariner Kenneth Sewell in collaboration with journalist Clint Richmond, claimed that K-129 ventured much further south, some 300 miles northwest of Oahu on 7 March 1968 positioning to launch one of her three ballistic missiles in a rogue attack on Pearl Harbor. This theory has been criticized as a speculative conspiracy theory by the head of the contemporary history branch of the U.S. Naval Historical Center.

Sewell posits that the sinking was caused by the explosion of one of the ballistic missiles while being readied for launch. While such an event could have been due to a failure in the liquid-fuel system, Craven (2001, p.218) postulates that it was due to a failsafe mechanism intended to prevent an unauthorized launch. An explosion of a ballistic missile in its tube could be consistent with Blind Man's Bluff's claim of "a hole blown nearly ten feet wide just behind the Golf's conning tower" (Sontag et al.). i.e. at the location of missile tube #1.

Administrative Inconsistancies

Russian President Boris Yeltsin posthumously awarded the Order of Valor to 98 sailors who died aboard the K-129. Some have pointed to this level of manning as anomalous, because the normal complement of a diesel-electric Golf-class Russian submarine was about 83. Boosting total submarine complement by almost 20% might tax the logistical capabilities of the submarine (reducing patrol length), and could potentially hamper the operations of the boat. No explanation for this level of submarine manning has been provided by the Russian Navy. However, it should be noted that the unique real-world environment of a deployed strategic asset, such as a ballistic missile submarine or a U.S. aircraft carrier, nearly always attracts riders to study personnel, equipment and systems while deployed. Such riders are a normal consequence of such U.S. deployments and it is not unreasonable to expect the Soviet Navy to behave similarly.

Additionally according to Rear Admiral (ret) Y.A. Krivoruchko, former commander of the 15th Submarine Squadron at Kamchatka:

"A full list of the crew, signed and stamped by the division commander, had never [before departure] been made ... And it did not occur [was not noticed] until twelve days after K-129 was pronounced missing. From the point of view of the military regulations, it is not just negligence, it is a crime. The submarine did not go for training or target practice. It was a combat patrol in the times of the Cold War."

Sewell's Theory on Project Jennifer

Red Star Rogue makes the claim that Project Jennifer recovered virtually all of K-129 from the ocean floor. Sewell says that the hull breaking during raising and the missile falling out is a CIA cover story , and in fact Despite an elaborate cover-up and the eventual claim that Project Jennifer had been a failure, most of K-129 and the remains of the crew were, in fact, raised from the bottom of the Pacific and brought into the Glomar Explorer.

Craven suggests that Project Jennifer's real goal was not the nuclear weapons or the coding systems at all; rather, the project sought to determine exactly what K-129 was doing at 40N/180 "where she did not belong". Such information could be (and supposedly was) utilized within Henry Kissinger's foreign policy of "Deterrance Through Uncertainty", in order to "raise an unanswerable question in Brezhnev's mind about his command and control of his armed forces".

Mutual Agreement - Some Connection Between K-129 and the Loss of USS Scorpion

Retired United States Navy Captain Peter Huchthausen, former naval attaché in Moscow, had a brief conversation in 1987 with Soviet admirals concerning K-129. Huchthausen states that Admiral Peter Navojtsev told him, "Captain, you are very young and inexperienced, but you will learn that there were some matters that both nations have agreed to not discuss, and one of these is the reasons we lost K-129." In 1995, when Huchthausen began work on a book about the Soviet underwater fleet, he interviewed Admiral Victor Dygalo, who stated that the true history of K-129 has not been revealed because of the informal agreement between the two countries' senior naval commands. The purpose of that secrecy, he alleged, is to stop any further research into the losses of USS Scorpion (SSN-589) and K-129. Huchthausen states that Dygalo told him to "overlook this matter, and hope that the time will come when the truth will be told to the families of the victims."

Continuing Secrecy and Official Objections to Full Disclosure

Perhaps most telling in there being much more to Project Jennifer than is known today are the inconsistencies in the positions the US government has taken on the project, and the documentary evidence of it. On the one hand the K-129 recovery has been stated to have been a failure, supposedly only recovering a small amount of insignificant parts of the submarine. However, on the other hand the CIA argued in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that the project had to be kept secret because any official acknowledgment of involvement by U.S. Government agencies would disclose the nature and purpose of the program. To this day the files, photographs, videotapes, and other documentary evidence remain closed to the public, indicating that within these documents describing an outdated submarine sunk almost 40 years ago still remains information that the US government deems operationally valuable, and/or necessitating protection of persons still living today.

An interesting indicator as to why the secrecy remains in place is the submarine's bell that was presented to a Russia delegation by Ambassador Malcolm Toon in August 1993. This bell had been permanently attached to the middle of the conning tower of the K-129, immediately to the front of the missile tubes. Since it is not a part that would release on its own, and it was attached to one of the most sturdy structural sections of the boat, and that its attachment would be difficult to undo using remote technology at a depth of 16,000 feet, it strongly suggests that in addition to the bow of the submarine, also the critical and valuable midsection of the submarine was recovered by Project Jennifer.

Bibliography

• Craven, John (2001). "The Hunt for Red September: A Tale of Two Submarines". The Silent War: The Cold War Battle Beneath the Sea. New York: Simon & Schuster. pp. 198–222. ISBN 0-684-87213-7.
• Sontag, Sherry; Drew, Christopher; Drew, Annette Lawrence (1998). Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage. Harper. ISBN 0-06-103004-X.
• Sewell, Kenneth (2005). Red Star Rogue: The untold story of a Soviet submarine's nuclear strike attempt on the U.S. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-7432-6112-7.
• Polmar, Norman (2004). Cold War Submarines: The Design and Construction of U.S. and Soviet Submarines. Dulles: Potomac Books. ISBN 978-1-57488-594-1.
• Podvig, Pavel (2001). Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-16202-4.