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Underwater hide-and-seek
Article with photographs.
http://www.hs.fi/english/article/Underw ... 5226965202
Deeper sections of the Baltic in the Archipelago Sea offer an excellent hideout for foreign navy submarines
By Tommi Nieminen
The Finnish Navy's Rauma-class fast attack craft Porvoo picks up a Helsingin Sanomat journalist and photographer from a small jetty tucked away in Lappohja, not far from Hanko.
It feels a little strange, to be honest, that this compact Navy warship is able to use a little marina like this. Just next door there are a couple of dozen small boats on a sandy beach, still face down in their winter hibernation. The freighter Metallica is tied up at the quay attached to the local steelworks at Koverhar.
The master of the FAC Porvoo Captain-Lieutenant Ville Suominen follows my gaze towards the moored cargo vessel and makes a crack about having overheard radio traffic between the Metallica and another freighter with a rock-inspired name.
Then he shows me over the missile ship under his charge, currently on a week-long patrol along the coast of the Gulf of Finland. The 23-man crew are made up primarily of permanent members of the Finnish Navy, and not conscripts.
"We are still in Finnish waters here", explains Suominen, when we are out at sea off the Hankoniemi peninsula. "It's about six nautical miles [11 km] to international waters from here."
The holiest of holies in the missile craft is the control centre below decks, from where the vessel can monitor traffic in the Gulf using radar and sonar measurements.
Three crew members sit at the display screens, headphones wedged over their ears.
It is a slight surprise to see on the back wall of the cramped space a photo portrait of Marshal Carl Gustav Emil Mannerheim. Wartime Commander-in-Chief he might have been, but Mannerheim was very much a cavalry man, who seldom got his feet wet.
In the normally gentle swell of the Baltic, people are happily taking their booze cruises on the ferries from Helsinki to Travemünde, from Tallinn to Gdansk, and from Uumaja up in the Gulf of Bothnia down to Copenhagen. The alcohol flows free, on the Bottlic Sea.
But under the surface, everything is very different.
It is the realm of fish, wrecks, plankton, and right now around 30 submarines.
Beneath the waves it is easier to hear things than to see them. To some extent, what is happening down there is anybody's guess.
The golden age for submarines in the Baltic was in the 1980s, when the countries of the Warsaw Pact bloc alone had around a hundred of them in service.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, so did the numbers of subs operating in the Baltic. For a while, people thought their time had come and gone.
But now submarines are back in vogue. Russia aspires to control its Baltic mercantile routes from St. Petersburg to Western Europe and to keep access open to the exclave of Kaliningrad, a useful ice-free port now sandwiched between new EU members Poland and Lithuania.
For this reason the country is building at least five new Lada-class diesel-electric submarines. The first of them, the 72-metre St Petersburg, was launched in 2004.
For now, Germany is the Baltic region's top dog underwater. It has 12 submarines, some of which are in service in the Baltic. Sweden has five modern subs. Poland has five rather older ones, stationed in Gdansk.
The three Baltic States do not have their own submarine fleets, but if the need arises they can call on help from their NATO partners in Poland and Germany.
Finland does not have any submarines of her own, although there would no longer be anything - save the steepling costs - to prevent it.
According to the 1947 Paris Peace Treaty, Finland was prohibited from having submarines, but when the Soviet Union came crashing down the Finns declared unilaterally that the military restrictions imposed by the Treaty were no longer valid.
Is it possible that others in the region are taking advantage of Finland's lack of an underwater naval arm? Are they making clandestine visits into Finnish territorial waters?
Frequently, submarines just sit on the bottom of the sea, keeping quiet, keeping their ears open.
For intelligence gathering and for surveillance of the movements of other submarines, they are are a more efficient tool than surface vessels.
"They can be down there motionless, engines practically shut down, for several days. It is an ideal state for a sub] and the island of Utö, in the outer islands south-west from Turku, there are any number of ideal hideout spots in deeper-water locations.
On the other hand, there is little sense in submarines going exactly where they are expected to go.
"We have reported quite openly on our suspected sub sightings, but there has not been one absolutely open-and-shut case", says Lillqvist.
There are a number of submarine bases along the Baltic coast: the Poles keep their vessels in Gdansk, the Russians in Kaliningrad and St. Petersburg. The German submarines are stationed in Eckernförde in the Bay of Kiel, while the Swedes base theirs in Karlskrona.
Sometimes a British or Dutch submarine can slip through the Kattegat into the Baltic basin.
There may also be some top-secret smaller installations along the Baltic coastline about which little or nothing is known. The Swedes, for instance, also use midget submarines.
"They are even more secret. According to public record there are not many of them, but it is not something people talk about", says Lillqvist.
Because the Baltic is a shallow sea (the average depth is only 55 metres, and the maximum recorded depth is less than 500 metres), for the most part the submarines used here are coastal vessels of around 55-70 metres in length.
"When the Cold War came to an end it looked as if there was no future for submarines. But they haven't gone away anywhere in the years since then", says Lillqvist.
And what about the other submarine countries in the Baltic, are they going to increase the size of their underwater fleets like the Russians are?
Sweden? "I don't believe they have any such decisions on the table", Lillqvist replies.
Poland? "No decisions."
Germany? "The Germans are planning to get two new large Type 212A-class subs."
The Baltic Sea is a difficult area for submarine-hunting. "The sea-bed topography is uneven. There are a lot of blind-spot areas where a submarine can hide and remain undetected", comments Lillqvist.
He opens up a chart and points to depth readings in the Gulf of Finland: the numbers range from less than ten metres to 110 metres.
This is enough to allow the passage of a sub - and quite a sizable one, too - since coastal submarines generally require a depth of "a good 40 metres", but they can operate in shallower water than this.
It is a relatively common sight on the narrow international sea lanes of the Gulf of Finland to see Russian submarines travelling openly on the surface.
Only they are Russian-built subs and not ones belonging to the Russian Navy. They have been assembled at the giant shipyard in St. Petersburg and are destined for export to India or China. Sea trials are routinely carried out in the Gulf.
"When they are on the surface they are ships like any other. They have lights fore and aft and all", says Lillqvist.
The conditions for the crews on the Baltic fleet submarines are nothing much to write home about. The quarters are cramped in the extreme, since the whole idea is to make the vessels as compact as possible.
"One way of saving space is to use the ‘warm-bunk' principle - in other words, two crew members share the same bunk. One is at work while the other is off-duty", explains Lillqvist.
On the Helsinki island of Isosaari, off-limits to civilians as a restricted military area, is a coastal artillery battery and a fixed maritime surveillance station, in a cavern blasted from the bedrock.
The underwater monitoring at the station keeps tabs on sub-surface sounds day and night. A network of passive sonar hydrophones - sound-to-electricity transducers that pick up and transmit ambient noise - has been set up on the bed of the Gulf of Finland, and the signals it captures are transmitted back to the station on Isosaari.
"The locations of the hydrophone sensors are understandably not for public consumption, as they can each monitor only a relatively limited area. And they can be moved around as necessary", says Lillqvist.
Hydrophones have certainly been installed alongside the major maritime arteries and offshore from the country's harbours. If, for instance, the Russians were to know of the precise locations of the devices, it would be easy for their submarines to move around out of reach of listening ears.
Suspicious sounds that are picked up in Finnish territorial waters are examined at the Navy's research establishments in Espoo and Turku. And if the technicians in Espoo suspect that the noises might be coming from a submarine, the Navy are sent to intercept the intruder.
In the control room of the FAC Porvoo, three operators watch the goings-on in the Gulf of Finland from their display monitors.
"A awful lot of cargo traffic heading east towards St. Petersburg", says Captain-Lieutenant Suominen. "The traffic in and out of there has grown practically exponentially in recent years."
And it is precisely to safeguard this mercantile traffic that Russia is upgrading its submarine fleet.
The Porvoo cruises past a rocky islet, Långskär by name. Out in the international channel a cargo vessel can be seen making its way westwards. One of the officers on board the missile ship scans the horizon through binoculars, but there are no submarines or periscopes to be seen.
The last time a suspected submarine was sought off the coast of Helsinki was in August 2006, but thus far Finland has not once managed to bag a sub from its waters to the point where the vessel type and its flag could be determined.
"Last year we trained in sub-hunting with a submarine from the Swedish Navy. It is not an easy business", admits Suominen.
A crackling sound over the tannoy system reports to the bridge of the warship that the Porvoo is going to battle stations.
The ship's master Ville Suominen orders his men into place for the routine drill - the control centre, the engine room, the anti-aircraft missile launcher, and the ASW mortars. A towed array sonar device is lowered into the water off the stern, with the intention of capturing the hydroacoustic pattern emanating from a possible submarine.
"The problem is that the submarine can hear the sounds of our sonar and will take steps to avoid detection", explains Suominen.
Three men sit hunched in the control room with headphones glued to their ears. Since this is a combat drill, some of the crew are up on deck ready to launch anti-submarine grenades into the deep.
But the Gulf of Finland is as quiet as the grave.
"The first times out looking for a submarine are really, really difficult. Things get a little easier when you gradually learn to understand the way a submarine thinks", says Suominen.
A sub goes where nobody would expect it to go. When the crew of a submarine understand that the vessel may have been spotted or compromised, the reaction is to make rapid turns and short bursts of acceleration, in an attempt to shake off the hunters. Or alternatively, to dive deeper, in order to reduce the chance of signals being picked up by sonar.
It is only on rare occasions that a submarine will actually come close to the surface and raise its periscope, for then it runs the risk of being discovered.
Captain-Lieutenant Suominen, have ever seen with your own eyes a submarine in Finnish waters?
Have you ever got a fleeting glimpse of a periscope?
Have you ever even seen one as a blip on the radar screen?
"If there were information about a violation of our territorial waters, then I would not be divulging it to you", replies Suominen politely but firmly.
It is perfectly clear that mid-ranking serving officers are not in a position to talk about politically sensitive matters. But do not the Finns have a right to hear openly about it, in the case that a warship of a foreign power intrudes into our waters?
Just like in 2004 and 2005, when Russian aircraft strayed into Finnish airspace over the Gulf of Finland on at least 11 occasions. Finally the Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen was obliged to admit that the government had hushed the matter up.
"Fortunately I don't have to think about such things and come up with an answer", says Suominen, and he remains tight-lipped.
The newly-appointed Defence Minister Jyri Häkämies (National Coalition Party) does not want to comment on the subject of submarines. His predecessor in the job, the Centre Party's Seppo Kääriäinen, says that after the airspace violations of 2005 the government changed its policy on discussing such matters in a "noticeably more transparent" direction.
"At that point, it was decided that incontrovertible frontier violations would be made public. And this cannot be limited only to airspace violations", notes Kääriäinen.
As recently as the 1980s and 1990s, the publication of details on such violations was sparing in the extreme, or as Kääriäinen puts it, "a matter of discretion".
In Soviet times they occurred more often than than they do today.
The former Commander of the Archipelago Sea Area Coast Guard Raimo Tiilikainen recalls that in the 1980s in particular there were cases where submarines were detected, but it was not possible to determine any details of the vessels or their origin. In other words, the Navy or Coast Guard never actually found out whose subs they were, but it would be odd if it had been anything other than a Swedish or Russian vessel.
"There were some observations of periscopes on the surface, up as far north as the Gulf of Bothnia. The policy back then was not to go public over unsubstantiated or uncertain claims of incursions. Generally the observations went unreported", Tiilikainen says.
Perhaps it might have been better to report them. For there has been no shortage of submarine blunders in and under the Baltic.
In April 1963, a Soviet nuclear submarine collided with a Finnish-registered freighter, the M/S Finnclipper, in the Denmark Straits (see earlier article from April 2007).
After the collision, which took place in thick fog, the captain of the Soviet sub and an interpreter came aboard the Finnish vessel - and they were not best pleased, according to Jaakko Varimaa, who was 2nd Officer on the Finnclipper at the time.
Though damaged, both vessels were able to continue on their way, and not a word was breathed in public about the affair for the next 44 years.
But this incident pales alongside the most famous case, from 1981, which was a mishap that DID cross the international news threshold. Well, it had to, really.
In October of that year, U-137 - an elderly Whiskey-class submarine belonging to the Soviet Navy - hit an underwater rock and ran aground only a few kilometres off the large Swedish naval base of Karlskrona.
The vessel was stuck there for several days in the glare of publicity, and a flotilla of Soviet warships and tugs eventually took it away.
In 1992 the submarine's master Capt. Anatoli Mihailovich Gushchin revealed that the vessel had been carrying nuclear-tipped torpedoes.
Gushchin also reported that when the vessel returned to base in the Soviet Union after the accident, he got a severe roasting: "I would not want even my worst.enemy to have to undergo what I went through then", he commented in 1992. Unfortunately he did not elaborate on the subject, but it is believed he was reduced in rank, though he kept his naval commission.
There have been foreign submarines in Finnish waters, too. In June 1982 a submarine was detected to the west of the Ã…land Islands. Warning grenades were dropped into the deep, after which the sub cut and ran into international waters.
In August 1991, the Finnish Navy made a confirmed observation of a submarine off the coast at Porkkala. When the crew noticed that they had been spotted, the vessel fled.
Just a couple of months later, there was another confirmed detection of a submerged submarine not far from Hanko. This was quite possibly a Russian sub that had been despatched to monitor a Finnish naval exercise at the time.
The list goes on. There was a "probable" sonar hit on a submarine in November 1995. In August 2001, there were two searches inside a week following unusual sonar observations in the Porvoo and Emäsalo areas east of the capital. Once again, a naval exercise was in progress at the time.
In April 2004 there was the mysterious case of the blip on the radar of the Eckerö lines car-ferry Roslagen, travelling between the Åland Islands and Sweden. And not just a blip: crew on the bridge of the Roslagen claimed to have seen two conning tower masts protruding above the surface, not far away. The ferry took abrupt evasive action, and whatever it was down there beat a hasty retreat.
The most recent published incident took place in August last year, when suspicious sound sources were picked up by the monitoring centre on Isosaari. The missile ship Rauma and the Coast Guard patrol vessel Merikarhu were ordered into action, but the submarine - if that is what it was - had already vanished. And no wonder. Chasing a submarine with the Navy's surface vessels is a fairly thankless task.
The Baltic Sea is of pivotal importance to modern-day Russia, since it offers the country's only direct sea route to the markets of Western Europe.
"Securing the maritime links between St. Petersburg and Kaliningrad, safeguarding its commercial and military interests in the Baltic", lists Janne Helin, a Russian expert at the Ministry of Defence, when he is probed on Russia's objectives.
But Helin cannot or will not say whether Russia is spying on Finland from submarines off the coast.
"That sort of information is kept within the Defence Forces, and it is classified and not for the public domain. What one can say, nevertheless, is that Russia - just like other countries with Baltic Sea coastlines - carries on intelligence operations", comments Helin obliquely.
Then there are also the eager-beaver rearmament types, a group of their very own.
In March, Alpo Juntunen, a researcher at the National Defence College, resurrected the idea that Finland should have her own submarines.
He argued that only with a submersible naval arm would it be possible to provide an effective response and deterrent to submarines from other countries.
Juntunen himself admitted, however, that the price tag of at least EUR 200 million meant that such an investment was out of the question at present.
It is both a blessing and a curse that our Baltic Sea is no deeper than its 55-metre average depth.
The curse is that a shallow sea - and one with poor circulation - is more easily polluted than a deep ocean. But the blessing is that for reasons of space, there can be little by way of really big submarine traffic.
For all that, the catastrophe that occurred in the Barents Sea in August 2000 - when the Russian nuclear-powered submarine Kursk took all 118 of its crew to the bottom, could recur in the Baltic - at least in principle.
In July 2003, a Russian Navy officer named Ivan Dygalo implied that the Russians might have used submarines with nuclear propulsion units in their naval exercises in the Baltic.
News like that is unsettling.
It would be a confidence-building move towards the neighbours if there were not one single Russian reactor chugging away beneath the surface of our common sea.
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 29.4.2007
Article with photographs.
http://www.hs.fi/english/article/Underw ... 5226965202
Deeper sections of the Baltic in the Archipelago Sea offer an excellent hideout for foreign navy submarines
By Tommi Nieminen
The Finnish Navy's Rauma-class fast attack craft Porvoo picks up a Helsingin Sanomat journalist and photographer from a small jetty tucked away in Lappohja, not far from Hanko.
It feels a little strange, to be honest, that this compact Navy warship is able to use a little marina like this. Just next door there are a couple of dozen small boats on a sandy beach, still face down in their winter hibernation. The freighter Metallica is tied up at the quay attached to the local steelworks at Koverhar.
The master of the FAC Porvoo Captain-Lieutenant Ville Suominen follows my gaze towards the moored cargo vessel and makes a crack about having overheard radio traffic between the Metallica and another freighter with a rock-inspired name.
Then he shows me over the missile ship under his charge, currently on a week-long patrol along the coast of the Gulf of Finland. The 23-man crew are made up primarily of permanent members of the Finnish Navy, and not conscripts.
"We are still in Finnish waters here", explains Suominen, when we are out at sea off the Hankoniemi peninsula. "It's about six nautical miles [11 km] to international waters from here."
The holiest of holies in the missile craft is the control centre below decks, from where the vessel can monitor traffic in the Gulf using radar and sonar measurements.
Three crew members sit at the display screens, headphones wedged over their ears.
It is a slight surprise to see on the back wall of the cramped space a photo portrait of Marshal Carl Gustav Emil Mannerheim. Wartime Commander-in-Chief he might have been, but Mannerheim was very much a cavalry man, who seldom got his feet wet.
In the normally gentle swell of the Baltic, people are happily taking their booze cruises on the ferries from Helsinki to Travemünde, from Tallinn to Gdansk, and from Uumaja up in the Gulf of Bothnia down to Copenhagen. The alcohol flows free, on the Bottlic Sea.
But under the surface, everything is very different.
It is the realm of fish, wrecks, plankton, and right now around 30 submarines.
Beneath the waves it is easier to hear things than to see them. To some extent, what is happening down there is anybody's guess.
The golden age for submarines in the Baltic was in the 1980s, when the countries of the Warsaw Pact bloc alone had around a hundred of them in service.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, so did the numbers of subs operating in the Baltic. For a while, people thought their time had come and gone.
But now submarines are back in vogue. Russia aspires to control its Baltic mercantile routes from St. Petersburg to Western Europe and to keep access open to the exclave of Kaliningrad, a useful ice-free port now sandwiched between new EU members Poland and Lithuania.
For this reason the country is building at least five new Lada-class diesel-electric submarines. The first of them, the 72-metre St Petersburg, was launched in 2004.
For now, Germany is the Baltic region's top dog underwater. It has 12 submarines, some of which are in service in the Baltic. Sweden has five modern subs. Poland has five rather older ones, stationed in Gdansk.
The three Baltic States do not have their own submarine fleets, but if the need arises they can call on help from their NATO partners in Poland and Germany.
Finland does not have any submarines of her own, although there would no longer be anything - save the steepling costs - to prevent it.
According to the 1947 Paris Peace Treaty, Finland was prohibited from having submarines, but when the Soviet Union came crashing down the Finns declared unilaterally that the military restrictions imposed by the Treaty were no longer valid.
Is it possible that others in the region are taking advantage of Finland's lack of an underwater naval arm? Are they making clandestine visits into Finnish territorial waters?
Frequently, submarines just sit on the bottom of the sea, keeping quiet, keeping their ears open.
For intelligence gathering and for surveillance of the movements of other submarines, they are are a more efficient tool than surface vessels.
"They can be down there motionless, engines practically shut down, for several days. It is an ideal state for a sub] and the island of Utö, in the outer islands south-west from Turku, there are any number of ideal hideout spots in deeper-water locations.
On the other hand, there is little sense in submarines going exactly where they are expected to go.
"We have reported quite openly on our suspected sub sightings, but there has not been one absolutely open-and-shut case", says Lillqvist.
There are a number of submarine bases along the Baltic coast: the Poles keep their vessels in Gdansk, the Russians in Kaliningrad and St. Petersburg. The German submarines are stationed in Eckernförde in the Bay of Kiel, while the Swedes base theirs in Karlskrona.
Sometimes a British or Dutch submarine can slip through the Kattegat into the Baltic basin.
There may also be some top-secret smaller installations along the Baltic coastline about which little or nothing is known. The Swedes, for instance, also use midget submarines.
"They are even more secret. According to public record there are not many of them, but it is not something people talk about", says Lillqvist.
Because the Baltic is a shallow sea (the average depth is only 55 metres, and the maximum recorded depth is less than 500 metres), for the most part the submarines used here are coastal vessels of around 55-70 metres in length.
"When the Cold War came to an end it looked as if there was no future for submarines. But they haven't gone away anywhere in the years since then", says Lillqvist.
And what about the other submarine countries in the Baltic, are they going to increase the size of their underwater fleets like the Russians are?
Sweden? "I don't believe they have any such decisions on the table", Lillqvist replies.
Poland? "No decisions."
Germany? "The Germans are planning to get two new large Type 212A-class subs."
The Baltic Sea is a difficult area for submarine-hunting. "The sea-bed topography is uneven. There are a lot of blind-spot areas where a submarine can hide and remain undetected", comments Lillqvist.
He opens up a chart and points to depth readings in the Gulf of Finland: the numbers range from less than ten metres to 110 metres.
This is enough to allow the passage of a sub - and quite a sizable one, too - since coastal submarines generally require a depth of "a good 40 metres", but they can operate in shallower water than this.
It is a relatively common sight on the narrow international sea lanes of the Gulf of Finland to see Russian submarines travelling openly on the surface.
Only they are Russian-built subs and not ones belonging to the Russian Navy. They have been assembled at the giant shipyard in St. Petersburg and are destined for export to India or China. Sea trials are routinely carried out in the Gulf.
"When they are on the surface they are ships like any other. They have lights fore and aft and all", says Lillqvist.
The conditions for the crews on the Baltic fleet submarines are nothing much to write home about. The quarters are cramped in the extreme, since the whole idea is to make the vessels as compact as possible.
"One way of saving space is to use the ‘warm-bunk' principle - in other words, two crew members share the same bunk. One is at work while the other is off-duty", explains Lillqvist.
On the Helsinki island of Isosaari, off-limits to civilians as a restricted military area, is a coastal artillery battery and a fixed maritime surveillance station, in a cavern blasted from the bedrock.
The underwater monitoring at the station keeps tabs on sub-surface sounds day and night. A network of passive sonar hydrophones - sound-to-electricity transducers that pick up and transmit ambient noise - has been set up on the bed of the Gulf of Finland, and the signals it captures are transmitted back to the station on Isosaari.
"The locations of the hydrophone sensors are understandably not for public consumption, as they can each monitor only a relatively limited area. And they can be moved around as necessary", says Lillqvist.
Hydrophones have certainly been installed alongside the major maritime arteries and offshore from the country's harbours. If, for instance, the Russians were to know of the precise locations of the devices, it would be easy for their submarines to move around out of reach of listening ears.
Suspicious sounds that are picked up in Finnish territorial waters are examined at the Navy's research establishments in Espoo and Turku. And if the technicians in Espoo suspect that the noises might be coming from a submarine, the Navy are sent to intercept the intruder.
In the control room of the FAC Porvoo, three operators watch the goings-on in the Gulf of Finland from their display monitors.
"A awful lot of cargo traffic heading east towards St. Petersburg", says Captain-Lieutenant Suominen. "The traffic in and out of there has grown practically exponentially in recent years."
And it is precisely to safeguard this mercantile traffic that Russia is upgrading its submarine fleet.
The Porvoo cruises past a rocky islet, Långskär by name. Out in the international channel a cargo vessel can be seen making its way westwards. One of the officers on board the missile ship scans the horizon through binoculars, but there are no submarines or periscopes to be seen.
The last time a suspected submarine was sought off the coast of Helsinki was in August 2006, but thus far Finland has not once managed to bag a sub from its waters to the point where the vessel type and its flag could be determined.
"Last year we trained in sub-hunting with a submarine from the Swedish Navy. It is not an easy business", admits Suominen.
A crackling sound over the tannoy system reports to the bridge of the warship that the Porvoo is going to battle stations.
The ship's master Ville Suominen orders his men into place for the routine drill - the control centre, the engine room, the anti-aircraft missile launcher, and the ASW mortars. A towed array sonar device is lowered into the water off the stern, with the intention of capturing the hydroacoustic pattern emanating from a possible submarine.
"The problem is that the submarine can hear the sounds of our sonar and will take steps to avoid detection", explains Suominen.
Three men sit hunched in the control room with headphones glued to their ears. Since this is a combat drill, some of the crew are up on deck ready to launch anti-submarine grenades into the deep.
But the Gulf of Finland is as quiet as the grave.
"The first times out looking for a submarine are really, really difficult. Things get a little easier when you gradually learn to understand the way a submarine thinks", says Suominen.
A sub goes where nobody would expect it to go. When the crew of a submarine understand that the vessel may have been spotted or compromised, the reaction is to make rapid turns and short bursts of acceleration, in an attempt to shake off the hunters. Or alternatively, to dive deeper, in order to reduce the chance of signals being picked up by sonar.
It is only on rare occasions that a submarine will actually come close to the surface and raise its periscope, for then it runs the risk of being discovered.
Captain-Lieutenant Suominen, have ever seen with your own eyes a submarine in Finnish waters?
Have you ever got a fleeting glimpse of a periscope?
Have you ever even seen one as a blip on the radar screen?
"If there were information about a violation of our territorial waters, then I would not be divulging it to you", replies Suominen politely but firmly.
It is perfectly clear that mid-ranking serving officers are not in a position to talk about politically sensitive matters. But do not the Finns have a right to hear openly about it, in the case that a warship of a foreign power intrudes into our waters?
Just like in 2004 and 2005, when Russian aircraft strayed into Finnish airspace over the Gulf of Finland on at least 11 occasions. Finally the Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen was obliged to admit that the government had hushed the matter up.
"Fortunately I don't have to think about such things and come up with an answer", says Suominen, and he remains tight-lipped.
The newly-appointed Defence Minister Jyri Häkämies (National Coalition Party) does not want to comment on the subject of submarines. His predecessor in the job, the Centre Party's Seppo Kääriäinen, says that after the airspace violations of 2005 the government changed its policy on discussing such matters in a "noticeably more transparent" direction.
"At that point, it was decided that incontrovertible frontier violations would be made public. And this cannot be limited only to airspace violations", notes Kääriäinen.
As recently as the 1980s and 1990s, the publication of details on such violations was sparing in the extreme, or as Kääriäinen puts it, "a matter of discretion".
In Soviet times they occurred more often than than they do today.
The former Commander of the Archipelago Sea Area Coast Guard Raimo Tiilikainen recalls that in the 1980s in particular there were cases where submarines were detected, but it was not possible to determine any details of the vessels or their origin. In other words, the Navy or Coast Guard never actually found out whose subs they were, but it would be odd if it had been anything other than a Swedish or Russian vessel.
"There were some observations of periscopes on the surface, up as far north as the Gulf of Bothnia. The policy back then was not to go public over unsubstantiated or uncertain claims of incursions. Generally the observations went unreported", Tiilikainen says.
Perhaps it might have been better to report them. For there has been no shortage of submarine blunders in and under the Baltic.
In April 1963, a Soviet nuclear submarine collided with a Finnish-registered freighter, the M/S Finnclipper, in the Denmark Straits (see earlier article from April 2007).
After the collision, which took place in thick fog, the captain of the Soviet sub and an interpreter came aboard the Finnish vessel - and they were not best pleased, according to Jaakko Varimaa, who was 2nd Officer on the Finnclipper at the time.
Though damaged, both vessels were able to continue on their way, and not a word was breathed in public about the affair for the next 44 years.
But this incident pales alongside the most famous case, from 1981, which was a mishap that DID cross the international news threshold. Well, it had to, really.
In October of that year, U-137 - an elderly Whiskey-class submarine belonging to the Soviet Navy - hit an underwater rock and ran aground only a few kilometres off the large Swedish naval base of Karlskrona.
The vessel was stuck there for several days in the glare of publicity, and a flotilla of Soviet warships and tugs eventually took it away.
In 1992 the submarine's master Capt. Anatoli Mihailovich Gushchin revealed that the vessel had been carrying nuclear-tipped torpedoes.
Gushchin also reported that when the vessel returned to base in the Soviet Union after the accident, he got a severe roasting: "I would not want even my worst.enemy to have to undergo what I went through then", he commented in 1992. Unfortunately he did not elaborate on the subject, but it is believed he was reduced in rank, though he kept his naval commission.
There have been foreign submarines in Finnish waters, too. In June 1982 a submarine was detected to the west of the Ã…land Islands. Warning grenades were dropped into the deep, after which the sub cut and ran into international waters.
In August 1991, the Finnish Navy made a confirmed observation of a submarine off the coast at Porkkala. When the crew noticed that they had been spotted, the vessel fled.
Just a couple of months later, there was another confirmed detection of a submerged submarine not far from Hanko. This was quite possibly a Russian sub that had been despatched to monitor a Finnish naval exercise at the time.
The list goes on. There was a "probable" sonar hit on a submarine in November 1995. In August 2001, there were two searches inside a week following unusual sonar observations in the Porvoo and Emäsalo areas east of the capital. Once again, a naval exercise was in progress at the time.
In April 2004 there was the mysterious case of the blip on the radar of the Eckerö lines car-ferry Roslagen, travelling between the Åland Islands and Sweden. And not just a blip: crew on the bridge of the Roslagen claimed to have seen two conning tower masts protruding above the surface, not far away. The ferry took abrupt evasive action, and whatever it was down there beat a hasty retreat.
The most recent published incident took place in August last year, when suspicious sound sources were picked up by the monitoring centre on Isosaari. The missile ship Rauma and the Coast Guard patrol vessel Merikarhu were ordered into action, but the submarine - if that is what it was - had already vanished. And no wonder. Chasing a submarine with the Navy's surface vessels is a fairly thankless task.
The Baltic Sea is of pivotal importance to modern-day Russia, since it offers the country's only direct sea route to the markets of Western Europe.
"Securing the maritime links between St. Petersburg and Kaliningrad, safeguarding its commercial and military interests in the Baltic", lists Janne Helin, a Russian expert at the Ministry of Defence, when he is probed on Russia's objectives.
But Helin cannot or will not say whether Russia is spying on Finland from submarines off the coast.
"That sort of information is kept within the Defence Forces, and it is classified and not for the public domain. What one can say, nevertheless, is that Russia - just like other countries with Baltic Sea coastlines - carries on intelligence operations", comments Helin obliquely.
Then there are also the eager-beaver rearmament types, a group of their very own.
In March, Alpo Juntunen, a researcher at the National Defence College, resurrected the idea that Finland should have her own submarines.
He argued that only with a submersible naval arm would it be possible to provide an effective response and deterrent to submarines from other countries.
Juntunen himself admitted, however, that the price tag of at least EUR 200 million meant that such an investment was out of the question at present.
It is both a blessing and a curse that our Baltic Sea is no deeper than its 55-metre average depth.
The curse is that a shallow sea - and one with poor circulation - is more easily polluted than a deep ocean. But the blessing is that for reasons of space, there can be little by way of really big submarine traffic.
For all that, the catastrophe that occurred in the Barents Sea in August 2000 - when the Russian nuclear-powered submarine Kursk took all 118 of its crew to the bottom, could recur in the Baltic - at least in principle.
In July 2003, a Russian Navy officer named Ivan Dygalo implied that the Russians might have used submarines with nuclear propulsion units in their naval exercises in the Baltic.
News like that is unsettling.
It would be a confidence-building move towards the neighbours if there were not one single Russian reactor chugging away beneath the surface of our common sea.
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 29.4.2007