The Russians Are Coming! The Silent War

contains strong language

Throughout the 1970s and '80s,

the nuclear balance between East and West was constantly shifting...

and the front line of the Cold war was now hidden beneath the ocean.

Oh, my God!

All hell broke loose.

They were having a major antisubmarine warfare exercise and we were the target!

This was a war of espionage and intimidation,

a constant struggle to gain technological advantage.

Submariners from three navies, American, Soviet and British,

played a deadly game of hide-and-seek.

He was always known in the trade as the Prince of Darkness,

because he was so difficult to detect.

Soviet submarines were now more sophisticated than ever...

..bigger... faster and more luxurious.

The Soviets were also developing the ability to launch nuclear missiles

from the most hostile environment in the world.

When you get to the ice, it's terrible.

The cracking, the screeching, it sounds like you are in an insane asylum sometimes.

The details of this tense Cold War stand-off have been a closely guarded secret for over 40 years.

President Reagan wanted me to poke the Soviets right in the eye

and tell them, "We're up here to show you that we're going to be able to kick your ass!"

Now, submariners are able to talk more openly than ever before

about this silent war beneath the sea.

In early 1973, an American nuclear-powered submarine, the Flying Fish,

left her home port of Norfolk, Virginia.

Equipped with the latest sonar, she sailed 4,500 miles to the Barents Sea.

Her mission, to spy on Soviet ships and submarines.

Commander JD Williams had orders to track down one very special target.

What I knew was that they had built a new Soviet class submarine

called the Delta,

which no-one had ever seen, and that was about it.

No-one knew where it was, where it operated,

so based on my experience in the Barents, I would go and monitor traffic going in and out.

The US Navy had intelligence

suggesting that the Delta was armed with new long-range nuclear missiles,

capable of targeting American cities from the safety of Soviet waters.

If true, this could tip the nuclear balance in favour of the Soviet Union.

Frank Turban was a senior communications technician on the Flying Fish.

The captain was on there, "We've got to find the Delta.

"We've got to find the Delta!"

And he was one of the best skippers I've ever been under,

because, as far as we were concerned, we wanted to be in where the action was,

and Captain Williams was a hard charger, as we called them.

Within days the Flying Fish detected unusual submarine signals.

We were picking up sound characteristics

different than any submarine I had ever trailed before.

So right away I said, "Oh, this could very well be the Delta!"

We trailed the submarine for a number of hours, maybe even days, before he surfaced.

And this enabled the captain to get pictures from an exterior point of view,

and he wanted to get really close.

I mean, really close.

So, I remember explicitly when he, in the periscope, went,

"Oh, this is the Delta! This is... we've got him, we've got him.

"This is it!"

Until now the most powerful Soviet submarine had been the Yankee class,

capable of firing missiles over a range of about 1,000 miles.

But this submarine was different.

I could see that the missile tubes were longer and bigger than the Yankee,

which would indicate to me that the missiles had a longer range, which they did, of course.

Everybody was pretty excited because we knew it was a...

as soon as I looked at it, I knew it was the Delta.

This discovery of a new Soviet submarine came at a critical time.

In 1973, America was in crisis.

The Vietnam War was going badly.

What I have stated has been the truth...

Back home, Richard Nixon was embroiled in Watergate,

a political scandal that would end his Presidency.

MUSIC: "No More Mr. Nice Guy" by Alice Cooper

But the Soviet Union, under the leadership of Leonid Brezhnev,

was enjoying an era of powerful economic growth.

They were pouring vast amounts of money into the military.

The submarine service was a priority.

In the Barents Sea, JD Williams was about to come face to face

with the Soviet Navy's latest top-secret development.

My guess is we were within 1,000 yards.

Captain Williams was at the periscope,

and periscopes stick up about six feet,

and he could see the officer on the bridge, on the conn,

pointing right at us and then yelling down below,

and then again somebody else came up and he pointed right at us.

When I saw the watch on the bridge pointing right at me in the scope,

I said, "Uh-oh, I've been had!"

And so then I lowered the scope...

..And he slowly submerged.

And in that slowly submerged,

he didn't want to make a ripple to tell this submarine which way we were going to go.

Oh, my God!

All hell broke loose.

They had helicopters in the air, they had TU95 surveillance bombers in the air,

they had brought out more ships to look for us,

they were having a major antisubmarine warfare exercise, and we were the target!

So the captain decides, "They're not going to look for me to go closer to them,

"they're going to look for me to escape and get out of here!

"So what I'm going to do is I'm going...I'm going to get closer."

So we just stayed there and we watched the entire whole exercise.

We got exactly how they would prosecute an enemy submarine completely.

The analysts said the information we brought back was one of the best they had ever seen.

I went to Washington to brief the head of the Submarine Force, the Chief of the Naval Operations,

the Secretary of the Navy, the CIA Director...it was fairly a big deal.

The Secretary of the Navy happened to say,

"Commander, you're the most important person in the Navy right now," like this,

and here's the Admirals sitting all around. So...it was well received.

It was the Soviets' newest class missile-carrying submarine,

and it was going to carry the latest version of their intercontinental ballistic missiles,

the latest and greatest of what they had.

And it wasn't even operational yet, and we knew everything about it!

I don't have the superlative words in my vocabulary to be able to describe how big that is.

Before the launch of the Delta, Soviet submarines with shorter-range missiles

had to sail through the Barents Sea, curve around Norway and drop down between Greenland and the UK

to get within striking distance of the United States.

British and American hunter-killer submarines secretly trailed them,

primed to destroy them immediately in the event of war.

The Delta threatened to change the game.

The Barents Sea became a fortress for a growing fleet of Deltas

armed with enough ballistic missiles to destroy every city in North America.

It was teeming with hundreds of Soviet attack submarines, surface ships and aircraft.

To maintain the nuclear balance, British and American submarines would now have to enter the Barents,

to hunt down and shadow every Russian missile submarine while remaining undetected themselves.

Submarines could detect each other in two main ways...

..active sonar, pinging and analysing the sound reflected back.

But by making noise, you also reveal your own presence.

Or passive sonar...

silently listening for sounds made by the engines, pumps or propellers of enemy submarines.

But the newest Soviet submarines, like the Delta, were getting much harder to detect.

We were having a more difficult time of detecting Soviet submarines because they had become quieter.

That means we had to change our strategy and tactics in order to detect the Soviet submarines.

JD Williams was the first to use revolutionary new listening technology

that enabled him to hunt down the Delta.

Behind his submarine he towed a mile-long array of ultra-sensitive hydrophones.

It was called the passive towed array sonar.

These hydrophones were so sensitive they could detect low-frequency sounds, inaudible to the human ear.

And towing them up to a mile behind

meant there was less interference from the noise generated by their own submarine.

Paul Williamson was one of the first sonar operators to use it in the Royal Navy.

The towed array advantage was huge.

It gave us a long-range detection for miles and miles and miles.

Then you'd go out and there were contacts all over the place,

you would just...you know, you'd want to switch it off,

because the level of work in the sound room went up two-, three-fold.

Towed array came in

and it was really as though you are walking down a dark street...

..in some town somewhere,

wondering what's actually happening and then somebody turns the lights on.

It was like that.

When I joined the Navy, I would talk to sonar operators that had been in the Navy for 17 years,

"What's it like detecting a Soviet submarine at sea?"

and they'd say "I've never done it, I've never detected one."

Yep.

So now when you put the towed array on, that's a totally different ball game.

The game had changed big time.

MUSIC: "Speed Of Life" by David Bowie

The 1970s was the era of detente, when relations between the superpowers seemed to thaw.

American Presidents Nixon, Ford and Carter negotiated with Russian leader Leonid Brezhnev

to agree limits to the number of nuclear missiles.

But at the same time, the Soviets were pouring vast sums of money into their submarine fleet.

By 1977, the American Navy had been halved,

and the Soviets now had more ballistic-missile submarines than Britain and America combined.

The Soviet Union was developing cruise missiles to attack American aircraft carriers.

Skimming feet above the ocean, they were guided to their targets with extraordinary pinpoint accuracy.

Spying on Soviet Navy weapons-testing was now more important than ever.

You could see the missile...

did it have radars?

If it did, you wanted to track those so that counter-measures

could be developed.

Did it hit?

Did it miss?

So it was... it was up close and personal.

This information on cruise missile shooting was very important in developing countermeasures

for our surface ships primarily so that they could block the radars.

So it was very important in that regard.

In 1982, Al Konetzni was sent on his first mission

as commander of the USS Grayling, a hunter-killer submarine.

The Grayling would be submerged for up to eight weeks.

There's no psychological and no physical privacy on a submarine.

Everyone knows one another.

I mean, I will tell you,

in a submarine if you have a problem at home,

whether it be, you know, your financials are bad or your wife, whatever it might be,

the children are acting up, there is not a soul in that sewer pipe who doesn't know that.

I don't care if you are the commanding officer or the most junior seamen or fireman on board,

and that appealed to me because it was real.

After a month and a half spying on Soviet military exercises,

Al Konetzni reported a dramatic change in Soviet tactics.

A Delta submarine was leaving the Barents Sea and heading north.

He edged his way way into the Greenland Sea, north of Bear Island,

up outside of my area so I had to let the National Command Authority know.

We got the word back, "Straight on, go out of your area, keep trailing."

And that's when my problems really occurred.

But here we are, we're trudging up the coast of Greenland.

This guy's going north and I didn't have any charts, I didn't have those charts.

Honestly, we were using an atlas up there.

And we followed this guy, and our guy, our contact, would go up and we'd go up.

The Delta led the USS Grayling further and further north.

Then it did something even more unexpected.

It disappeared beneath the polar ice.

Soviet submarines had far more experience of these Arctic conditions.

When you get to the ice, it's really difficult.

It almost sounds like you are driving an automobile through a couple of concrete walls

with all of the noise that you're making. It's very loud.

There's bubbling and fizzing as ice breaks. It's terrible.

The cracking, the screeching, it sounds like you're in an insane asylum sometimes.

Beyond the reach of surface ships and aircraft,

this was the perfect environment for Soviet submarines to hide with their arsenal of nuclear missiles.

They could loiter under the ice in a static way

by just anchoring themselves happily to a bit under the ice...

And I would liken that to rustlers who'd rustled some cattle

and they've put them in the canyon in the cowboy film,

and before John Wayne can come and rescue them they've got to reveal their presence.

So to find this needle in the haystack,

really difficult, because how do you get your weapon to find him if he is hidden in this canyon,

upside-down canyon, if you like, where there are peaks coming down deep into the sea?

A really difficult problem.

Undetected, Konetzni observed the Delta's every move and discovered that it had new capabilities.

We'd been under the ice for a couple of weeks with this guy,

and we didn't realise until then that this Delta had a hovering system

that allows you to go completely still in the water and neutrally buoyant

and hover up under the ice.

You need that kind of a system if you are going to break through ice.

So that's when I started putting together that this is important stuff.

Soviet deployment beneath the Arctic ice was a terrifying new challenge to NATO.

Missiles fired over the North Pole could reach their targets within 20 minutes,

giving the West little time to retaliate.

Very scary to the Americans,

because with a submarine sitting still within the ice

and she's on the surface

and she could launch her missiles...

Ooh! That really kind of changes the balance.

After 33 days, the Delta finally turned back towards base.

Al Konetzni's orders were to follow it all the way.

But as they approached the Barents Sea,

they were counter-detected by a Soviet submarine, a hunter-killer.

We didn't even know he was in the area.

He went active to make sure nobody was behind the Delta, his friend.

The Delta went by and he started ringing out with what the NATO would call blocks-of-wood sonar,

and it's a very strong sonar.

It sounds like the rhyme, Three Blind Mice, that's what it sounds like.

# Three blind mice, three blind mice, doh doh doh, doh doh doh. #

And I heard it through the hull.

When they are using blocks of wood, their submarine is in an aggressive mode.

You switch to blocks of wood for a specific reason, i.e. "My weapon's coming next!"

So if you heard blocks of wood, they are accurately locating your bearing and they're there to sink you.

I was very concerned. I said "This is not good."

So we basically did what I'm trained to do, we went down to test depth and ran away.

The Grayling successfully evaded the Soviet hunter-killer, but supplies onboard were now critically low.

So this baby had gone on a long time. I mean, we were 85 days.

It was the longest time I've ever been submerged.

We ran out of one of the critical chemicals that you use to make pure water, we were out of butter,

we were out of anything, and when you're out of coffee...

And in those days many more of the guys smoked,

and when you're out of smokes, you're close to having a mutiny.

The boys were getting ready to go home.

So that's how it worked out.

These intense surveillance missions placed an emotional strain on both the sailors and their families.

You love to be home, you hate to leave the kids, you hate to leave the wife,

but it's also part of the job.

You can't make a special op unless you leave the family.

There was no communications with Dorrie as long as I was at sea,

I'd be at sea, like, 60 days at a time submerged.

There were times, especially just before they went to sea,

and the wives would get together at something,

and it was obvious that all the guys were excited

about what they were about to do, and that provoked a feeling of jealousy, really,

because they were off, you know, doing their thing and it was exciting and rewarding,

and we were left, you know, to clean the toilets.

I'm on my third marriage.

And wives 1 and 2

was during my career in the Navy.

Because when I got back, instead of wanting to be with the family,

all the time I wanted to be out with the guys raising hell.

And I was an adrenaline junkie, where if you're working on the edge

and living in something that is a life-and-death situation at times,

it took a toll.

60% of all submariners are divorced at least once...

..and officers, it's even higher.

The Soviet Navy confirmed its mastery of the Arctic seas when it unveiled a new submarine

specially designed to smash its way through the thickest of Arctic ice.

This was the biggest submarine ever built, the Typhoon.

The Typhoon could stay submerged for up to six months.

And it afforded its crew a level of luxury never seen in a submarine before.

The Typhoon was armed with 20 nuclear missiles, each with 10 self-guided warheads.

It was able to hit twice as many targets as the Delta.

In the event of nuclear war, the Typhoon could destroy every major US city within 20 minutes.

TRADITIONAL RUSSIAN MUSIC

There seemed to be no end to Soviet investment and technological innovation.

In the early '80s, a new generation of Soviet hunter-killer submarines was launched,

the Victor Three.

In the event of war, these new attack submarines

were primed to destroy all British and American submarines armed with nuclear missiles.

The Victor Three was the big thing,

the Victor Three was a very capable unit.

You really had to be on the top of your game to get the upper hand.

We saw a real step change in performance with the Victor Threes,

and they were extremely quiet,

approaching parity with ourselves and the Americans.

This was costing them huge amounts of money, but their declared aim was they were going to get as good as us.

NATO was struggling to maintain the nuclear balance.

And the speed of the Soviet technological advances in the underwater war

was both alarming and puzzling to the West.

We want Reagan!

We want Reagan!

This is Chris Wallace at the Century Plaza Hotel.

There you see the new First Family of the United States.

Into this climate of fear came President Ronald Reagan.

Taking office in January 1981, he reversed his predecessors' military budget cuts.

In his first press conference, he dismissed the policy of arms control.

Detente's been a one-way street

that the Soviet Union has used to pursue its own aims...

the promotion of world revolution and a one-world socialist or communist state...

Reagan's intent was to be in their face.

Immediately after his inauguration,

he approved the most aggressive naval exercises really since World War II.

And what we did was to go all the way up to the North Cape

and practise running attacks into the Soviet Union.

I held a press conference and poked the Soviets right in the eye

and told them exactly what it was all about.

We're up here to show you that we're going to be able to kick your ass.

And the purpose was to scare the... scare the bullpucky out of the Soviets

by showing them that they couldn't stop us.

In the event of war,

the US Navy now planned to storm the Soviet Navy in the Barents Sea.

This new strategy was designed to force the Soviet Navy to keep its attack submarines close to home

to defend its nuclear-missile carrying Deltas and Typhoons.

In 1983, Ronald Reagan unveiled America's own massive new investment in Cold War technology.

Let me share with you a vision of the future which offers hope...

The Pentagon is looking hard at something called the X-ray laser.

Tensions between East and West were close to breaking point.

Not since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962

had the world come so close to the brink of nuclear Armageddon.

When you hear the attack warning, you and your family must take cover at once.

Do not stay out of doors.

If you are caught in the open, lie down.

I urge you to beware the temptation to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses

of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding,

and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong, and good and evil.

In 1985, a new Soviet leader came to power with a radical modernising agenda.

Mikhail Gorbachev introduced "perestroika",

a complete restructuring of the Soviet political and economic system.

He also reopened negotiations on arms control with America.

In the same year, it suddenly became clear that the Soviet Union's huge investment

was not the only reason behind their rapid advances in submarine technology.

One of the most devastating military spy rings since the war has just been smashed in the United States.

The damage is enormous.

On the 19th of May, John Walker, a retired submariner and naval communications specialist,

was revealed by his estranged wife to be at the centre of a spy ring.

He'd recruited members of his family,

including his son, a sailor serving onboard a US aircraft carrier.

For 20 years, John Walker had been selling the US Navy's secrets to the Soviet Union.

It was the biggest intelligence leak in the history of the US Navy.

The Walker spy ring compromised so much of our operational intelligence,

it's hard to overstate how damaging it was.

They provided some of the critical technical secrets for silencing submarines,

and so we saw very rapidly the Soviets incorporate this in their new classes of submarines

and it just got much harder to deal with.

I blame that spy team

for giving the former Soviet Union a great jump up on us

because those sorts of leaks back in those days really, really hurt us.

The Victor Three had incorporated so much Western technology,

including towed array sonar,

that US sailors dubbed it The Walker Class after the American spy.

And in March 1987, while Reagan and Gorbachev prepared for arms talks in Iceland,

the Victor Threes and their stolen technology

were turned against the NATO forces in a Soviet operation called Atrina.

Vladimir Chernavin was Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Navy.

In the spring of 1987,

we saw an unexpected deployment of Soviet frontline Victor Threes,

in the North Norwegian Sea.

The Victor Three was the most capable anti-submarine operator in the Soviet order of battle

and had most chance of upsetting our submarine operations and in particular the national deterrent.

The Victor Threes had been detected by NATO's underwater Sound Surveillance System, SOSUS,

as they moved into the Atlantic.

I was in the Ministry of Defence at the time,

and it was the political and strategic concern

as to why the Soviets had decided

to send what was their A-Team

of nuclear-powered submarines out,

in strength. Why would you do that?

It rapidly became clear that they intended to continue south.

Within a couple of days, we had a good handle on four of the five submarines.

008.

Good firm contact.

The fifth one, although of the same class, was obviously very much quieter than the others.

Now it maybe that he was a particularly well-maintained, well-managed submarine.

He was always known in the trade as the Prince of Darkness because he was so difficult to detect.

One of the commanders of the Victor Threes was Vladimir Alikov.

They swept through the water just off the continental shelf west of the United Kingdom, slowly,

in a well-organised, well-structured, previously thought-out plan.

The Soviets were turning the tables on the West,

hunting down and monitoring American missile submarines.

I knew what was going on, and the fact that they wanted to show,

"We can cruise into your waters any time we want..." Fine!

And so to have real, the latest, quietest things to exercise against

was, well, I'm sure the Navy... I wasn't in charge at the time,

but had I been I would have sent 100% of available assets out

to get the experience of operating against these real targets.

I think it had two objectives.

Firstly it was to prove to their own senior management and their own political management

that the Soviet Navy's new submarines were capable of doing a job.

Also, of course, it sent a message to the West that despite all the talks that were then going on

about arms reductions and so on, that they weren't going to be pushed around.

The Soviet Union was developing some of the most sophisticated submarines in the world.

But they weren't typical of the Soviet Navy, which still relied on a fleet of much older submarines.

The K219 was one of them,

and it was armed with 16 nuclear missiles.

Gennady Kapitulsky led the engineering team responsible for the submarine's nuclear reactor.

ALARMS SOUND

BOOM!

Two sailors were killed during the explosion.

Seawater had leaked into the missile tube and mixed with the liquid fuel,

producing a highly toxic and very flammable gas.

A third sailor died when the toxic gas seeped through the stricken submarine.

The K219 was now rapidly filling up with tons of seawater.

Within minutes of the accident, every compartment in the submarine had been sealed.

This prevented the whole ship from flooding.

But 25 submariners were trapped in the damaged section.

For nearly 14 hours, the crew fought to save the submarine.

They knew it was vital to shut down its nuclear reactor to prevent a catastrophic meltdown.

But the automatic system designed to do so had been disabled.

Conscripted sailor Sergei Preminin volunteered to go into the reactor chamber.

Wearing an oxygen mask, he remained in constant radio contact with Kapitulsky

as he attempted to shut the reactor down.

Preminin had prevented a nuclear disaster and saved his fellow submariners,

and now the survivors were rescued by another ship.

Three minutes after the last man had left, the K219 submerged for the last time.

16 missiles, 48 nuclear warheads and the body of Sergei Preminin

went down with her 2½ miles to the bottom of the sea.

The sinking of the K219 was a human tragedy.

It was also a symbol of the unreliable condition of the Soviet Navy and the whole Soviet economy

in the last days of the Cold War.

In 1991, the Soviet Union and its empire in Eastern Europe disintegrated.

The Soviet Union's extraordinary investment in the arms race finally broke them.

I always say, though I am a little biased as a submariner,

that the submarine force helped drive the Soviet Union to the poorhouse,

because they tried to gain undersea superiority from us.

And they tried every which way, and so they spent a lot of money and they ended up in the poorhouse,

and I think the submariners can take credit for some of that.

They spent all this money, they sacrificed so much of their standard of living and everything

to deploy this huge navy, air force and army,

because here they had been spending 48% of their GDP,

and here's the United States and NATO spending 6½% of GDP,

not even huffing or puffing,

and that was a huge factor in bringing about the end of the Cold War.

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