New book about USS Scorpion sinking coverup

[u-5075]

Local author exposes Cold War cover-up
May 7, 2007
By David Angier


Tom Needham / The News Herald
Ed Offley holds his recently published book, Scorpion Down, which examines the sinking of the USS Scorpion in May 1968.
Twenty-five years ago, Ed Offley stumbled into a story that ultimately could rewrite the way history views the Cold War.

The USS Scorpion nuclear submarine sank in the Mediterranean Sea in May 1968 with the loss of all 99 men on board. For decades, the sinking was considered to be one of the great unsolved naval mysteries of all time.

On May 27, 1968, the Scorpion failed to arrive in port at Norfolk, Va., at its scheduled time. The Pentagon immediately launched a massive search operation, which concluded a week later with the presumption that the submarine was lost with all hands.

“When I tripped over the topic 15 years later that’s what I thought,” Offley, a Panama City Beach resident and News Herald reporter, said Thursday. “At that time, it was an all but forgotten story about 99 sailors that had died mysteriously.”

The Scorpion’s wreckage was found months later in the Mediterranean Sea. A board of inquiry reviewed available information and concluded that it didn’t know what caused the sinking.

In 1983, Offley was preparing an anniversary retrospective of the Scorpion for the Norfolk Ledger Star when he lined up an interview with retired Vice Adm. Arnold Schade, who gave him his first clue that this was a much bigger story.

“I set up this telephone interview and I went into it with not a suspicion,” Offley said. “Because I believed it was an accident, I wasn’t trying to trip him up into telling me a lie. It was very nonconfrontational. He warmed up to me and walked me through this horrible week that happened in May 1968.”

But during the interview, Schade let on that the search for the Scorpion was under way five days before the official search began. Five days before the government set in motion a very public search, a very private one had been on for some time.

Before Offley wrote his retrospective, he got confirmation of Schade’s account and broke that in his story.

A year later, after gaining access to declassified documents, Offley broke another story saying the Scorpion was sunk by its own malfunctioning torpedo.

“We published this major story and I was feeling pretty good about myself,” he said. “The next day, the newspaper’s production supervisor came up to me with this malicious grin on his face. He told me it was a great story, but too bad I got the wrong cause for the sinking.”

The production manager was in his second career at that point, after spending 20 years in the Navy. In 1968 he was the admiral’s flag yeoman with access to all the top-secret documents at that time.

“He told me the Russians sank the Scorpion,” Offley said. The sinking was in retaliation, Offley said, for a mid-sea collision between U.S. and Soviet subs that resulted in the sinking of a Russian submarine.

Offley wasn’t able to confirm that for another 14 years. He’d always thought he would put this information together for a book and was meticulous in keeping his records. Last year, a publisher agreed to the project and Offley spent nine months writing the book.

He didn’t have the final piece in place, however, until February, when he got confirmation of the most significant evidence of the sinking so far. Since the 1950s, Offley learned, the government has had underwater tracking stations set up around the world. The technicians who monitor these recordings not only can distinguish submarine sounds, but pinpoint the exact submarine they’re listening to.

The Scorpion’s last minutes were recorded and Offley got access to two people who had analyzed the recordings. They told him the recordings showed an underwater confrontation between the Scorpion and a Soviet sub that ended with the Russians firing a torpedo. For five minutes, the Scorpion dodged the torpedo, but couldn’t escape.

Offley said the government can, and probably will, refute his findings.

“I don’t care. I don’t care,” he said. “I have dozens of sailors — people who were there for key moments in that story — and supportive proof that makes up a counter narrative that I am more confident in as the truth than the ‘we don’t know what happened’ that is the official government position

[gerwalk]

http://www.subcommittee.com/forum/icon_eek.gif http://www.subcommittee.com/forum/icon_eek.gif

Now, that's something

<The USS Scorpion nuclear submarine sank in the Mediterranean Sea>

Now, that's something new to me. .. I beleive she sank in the Atlantic, southwest of the Azores.

The rest is old folklore. Hope the author can present some hard evidence aside from a-sailor-told-me kind of stories.

[davietait]

There was a National Geographic

There was a National Geographic tv program about her loss on several years ago after they had released the photo's of whats left of her. The hot run torpedo theory is the only one they thought possible due to shape of the explosion damage matching known test shots of the USN Torpedo in service aboard the Scorpion. She was tracked going to speed and going in the opposite direction to her homeward course by the SOSUS net.

The theory is that when the torpedo hot run they tried a fast 360' transit which was supposed to make the torpedo's guidance system shut down but didn't. They then decided to fire the torpedo and go to full power to try and outrun it but unfortunately they didn't make it.

They used the original SOSUS tapes from the official inquiry along with all the bearing lines from 2 or 3 listening stations which corroberated her position. Originally put down to a submarine exercise they didn't realise the significance until the Scorpion was reported overdue.

All of this is from memory and the program was shown on UK Satellite tv several years ago.

As someone that has lost over 20 good friends to the sea over the years ( i'm an ex-commercial fisherman ) my thoughts go out to the families of any of those still on eternal patrol.

[u-5075]

Expert torpedoes book on USS

Expert torpedoes book on USS Scorpion

A Honolulu marine scientist calls a book about the sinking of the USS Scorpion "wrong and irresponsible"
By Gregg K. Kakesako
gkakesako@starbulletin.com
Honolulu marine scientist John P. Craven, who has long been associated with top-secret Cold War spy missions, says a new book attributing the 1968 loss of a nuclear attack submarine in the Atlantic Ocean to a torpedo launched by a Soviet sub is "wrong and irresponsible."


Officially, the Navy has described the loss as an accident caused by mechanical failure, but journalist Ed Offley calls it an act of war.

The Scorpion, a Skipjack-class nuclear submarine, had been in service for only eight years when it became the last sub lost by the Navy.

In his 482-page book, "Scorpion Down: Sunk by the Soviets, Buried by the Pentagon: The Untold Story of the USS Scorpion," Offley maintains that the USS Scorpion and its crew of 99 submariners were lost May 22, 1968, during an undersea battle in the Atlantic with a Soviet sub.

Offley, who has been investigating this incident for more than 20 years, believes there is a connection between the loss of the Scorpion and the sinking of the Soviet Golf-II-class submarine K-129 two months earlier in the Pacific Ocean north of Hawaii. He believes the Soviets blamed that loss on overaggressive U.S. anti-submarine warfare efforts.

Offley discounts the official Navy Court of Inquiry findings 39 years ago that an internal mishap or mechanical failure caused the sinking of the 252-foot Scorpion. Over the years, theories on the sinking have included that it was struck by one of its own torpedoes that was inadvertently activated and launched, or that a fire in the torpedo room caused one of the projectiles to explode.

The book's premise is that the 3,000-ton Scorpion was shadowing a Soviet formation that included an Echo-II-class attack submarine when it was attacked and sunk.

Offley maintains that Moscow was aware of the Scorpion's surveillance mission because of information turned over to the Soviets by Navy radioman John A. Walker, who sold the secret communications codes.

Offley also contends that underwater sound recordings from sound surveillance system sensors heard by two sailors depicted "an underwater dogfight" between the Scorpion and a Soviet submarine.

But Craven, an 82-year-old Kahala resident, rejects Offley's premise, describing it as "absolutely and completely wrong."


"I do not know where he came up with that idea and published it," said Craven. "It's just speculation that the Scorpion was sunk by a Russian torpedo."

Craven, who is now chief scientist for the Common Heritage Corp., said the details behind the sinking and the search for the Scorpion are still classified, which opens the entire operation to speculation.

"The problem here is that very few people are cleared for the intelligence programs that we have in which we are able to find out what the Soviets know about this situation. I am cleared for those programs, but I am not allowed to say what I found out about those programs.

"All I can say is what I found out from those programs is that this is irresponsible speculation.

"There is no way the Soviets would have engaged in this kind of activity."

Craven also rejected Offley's theory that the sinking of the Scorpion was linked to the loss of the Soviet submarine K-129, pointing to the possibility that even identification of that submarine might be erroneous.

"There are very few people who know the details of that (Soviet) submarine," Craven added, "and the reason for that is because all of the material we collected on that submarine was immediately classified and no one was allowed to see except for the very, very high level of the government.

"So there is no information that is available to people like Offley that could offer the slightest clue as to what happened to whatever you call that thing."

In May 1968, Craven was chairman of the Navy's Deep Submergence Systems Project, whose activities included top-secret programs involving development of deep-diving manned submersibles and intelligence operations to find and retrieve objects on the ocean floor, Offley wrote.

Craven heard a news bulletin on Memorial Day that the Scorpion was overdue and drove directly to the Pentagon, where he was directed by three Navy admirals to conduct a survey to see if there had been any underwater recordings that might have caught sounds of the Scorpion sinking. He discovered that an oceanographic research station in the Canary Islands had a recording made on May 22 of what Craven described as "massive initial pulse of sound, then silence for 91 seconds," then "a train wreck cascade of smaller sound impulses."

Two other sound recordings were later found that led searchers to an area in the eastern Atlantic Ocean. The wreckage was eventually found 400 miles southwest of the Azores in 10,000 feet.

Craven, in an 1984 interview with Offley, said his Navy team of submarine experts concluded that a torpedo warhead accident onboard the Scorpion was the culprit. That theory was advanced in the 1999 book "Blind Man's Bluff."

As for the sinking of the Russian submarine K-129, Offley said the Soviet submarine was on patrol in an area 750 miles northwest of Oahu, its arsenal of nuclear ballistic missiles targeted on Pearl Harbor and other island military bases, when it went missing. In the 2005 book "Red Star Rogue: The Untold Story of a Soviet Submarine Nuclear Strike Attempt on the U.S." the authors maintain the Scorpion was sunk in retaliation for the sinking of K-129. The authors believe that Soviet sub sunk after colliding with the U.S. sub USS Swordfish.

Offley and others have maintained Craven and his deep-water experts were involved in a mission to explore and recover the Soviet wreckage. Past accounts have attributed the 1974 recovery mission to a Central Intelligence Agency charter ship, the Glomar Explorer, which reportedly raised parts of the Soviet sub's hull, containing several nuclear-tipped torpedoes and the remains of eight crewmen.

[tom dougherty]

Scorpion Book

I started reading the Offley book on the Scorpion. It is so loaded with mistakes in the areas which are on the historical record, one wonders deeply about the accuracy of the "off the record" material.

Some examples:

1. Pg. 60: Admiral Chester L. Nimitz (no, Chester W. Nimitz)

2. P. 60: Rickover enticed two shipyards (Electric Boat & Portsmouth) to design the Nautilus & Seawolf. No, EB designed both when Portsmouth turned him down for Seawolf.

3.) P. 60 USS Seawolf (SSN572), no she was SSN575. On page 173, he lists USS Halibut as SSN 575; no, she was SSGN 587.

4.) p. 63. The boats that dominated undersea naval operations from 1945 until 1954-The American Tang class. The Tangs were initially failures due to the rotary diesels, and only a handful (6) were built. The dominant US submarine of that period was the GUPPY fleet submarine.

5.) p. 63 Designers at Electric Boat...quickly produced a pint-sized diesel powered experimental submarine named the USS Albacore (AGSS 569). No, Albacore was built at Portsmouth NSY.

6.) the diagram on Pg. 65 has the label Control Room pointing towards the Officer's quarters (it's easy to find the Control Room; it is the next compartment back, where the periscopes are!!).

OK, they may seem like minor nitpicks, but it undermines the credibility of the rest of the material, which can't be readily checked.

A few comments on the K-129 from the above post:

As for the sinking of the Russian submarine K-129, Offley said the Soviet submarine was on patrol in an area 750 miles northwest of Oahu, its arsenal of nuclear ballistic missiles targeted on Pearl Harbor and other island military bases, when it went missing.

The K-129 wreck was at 40.06 N lat by 179.57 long. That is some 1800 miles from Hawaii; north of Midway Island.

[i]In the 2005 book "Red Star Rogue]

Why did Swordfish travel all the way to Japan if it was damaged by a collision? Why not head for the far more secure port of Pearl Harbor? Swordfish had minor sail damage & made a WestPac deployment later that year.

Offley and others have maintained Craven and his deep-water experts were involved in a mission to explore and recover the Soviet wreckage. Past accounts have attributed the 1974 recovery mission to a Central Intelligence Agency charter ship, the Glomar Explorer, which reportedly raised parts of the Soviet sub's hull, containing several nuclear-tipped torpedoes and the remains of eight crewmen.

It was the CIA, operating with support from Global Marine, Lockheed Sea Systems, Honeywell and others who attempted to recover the forward part of the K-129. Part broke away during the lift due to a series of malfunctions and damage to the Capture Vehicle during the capture process of the forward hull section. Only the forward 38 feet of the bow was recovered. There were six sailor's bodies recovered, three of which were identified.