When the SEALs have completed this mission it's time to return to the sub. Despite what the movies would have you believe, usually the egress phase is quite calm and goes according to plan. If they have committed violence, there will be confusion. If all they have done is to look around and take pictures, then the victims will probably never know they have been had. Once the SEALs are on board, the submarine's skipper quietly leaves the area. Another special operation has been completed, and the joint SEAL/submarine team within the Navy has grown just a little bit closer. And each group of men feels both kinship and distant admiration for the other: the submariners because they have no desire whatsoever to go onto the beach-if they wanted to be Marines, they would have asked for it. The SEALs, on the other hand, shudder at the thought of being inside a steel pipe for weeks at a stretch. It takes all kinds to do the job.
Tactical Example — Special Information Gathering
It was called Ivy Bells. Once upon a time the U.S. Navy learned, never mind how, that there was a telephone cable on the floor of the Sea of Okhotsk that ran from Vladivostok to Petropavlovsk. Both cities were the sites of major Soviet naval bases, and someone, never mind who, wondered if it might be worthwhile to tap that telephone line. And so, an American SSN entered the area.
The Russians claim the Sea of Okhotsk as territorial waters. The United States does not recognize that claim. It's a fine legal point, over what closure rule you think is appropriate. In either case, it's relatively shallow water, a little too shallow for a submarine commander to be completely comfortable, all the more so since the Russians regard it as home waters, hold exercises there, and probably have it thoroughly wired for sound.
But at some time in the late 1960s or early 1970s, a U.S. SSN (perhaps USS Skate) made a call and located that phone line. Swimmers went out the escape trunk and made the tap. Then they attached a recording device, probably using an extremely long cassette tape. For the next several years, perhaps extending into the 1980s, a submarine periodically (every month or so) had to reenter the Sea of Okhotsk to download the data on the tape cassette for "processing."
Sure enough, the phone line was used by the Soviet Navy, and so secure did they believe the phone line to be that the data on the line was not encrypted. Everything the Russians knew and did at sea came across that telephone line, and after a brief handling delay, all of that data reached the U.S. Navy's intelligence headquarters at Suitland, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C., not far from the Smithsonian Institution's Silver Hill Annex.
Of all the intelligence operations conducted by the United States since World War II-at least, all those that have come to the light of day-this is probably one of the most productive, and certainly the most elegant. Which is not to say it was easy. On at least one occasion when a U.S. sub was trying to retrieve the data on the cassette, a Soviet live-fire exercise was underway overhead, and the American crew had no option other than to hug the bottom and hope the Soviet weapons were working properly, because to move away would have presented their counterparts with a target upon which they might have fired live weapons. It became dicier still later. A spy by the name of Ronald Pelton, an employee of the National Security Agency, revealed Ivy Bells to the KGB-for which he was paid the princely fee of perhaps $15,000; the KGB was never generous to its spies-and the tap was discovered. At this writing, Mr. Pelton lives in the basement level of the United States Penitentiary at Marion, Illinois.
What happened when the next submarine went in to download the monthly "take"? That's an untold part of the story. Suffice it to say that Mr. Pelton, in addition to denying his country a hugely valuable source of information, placed over a hundred men at the gravest risk. Was the data worth the risk? Yes. Can submarines still do things like that? What do you think?
Mission #4 — Precision Strike: Tomahawk Attacks
As was shown in Desert Storm, a submarine can do many things. Let's say there is a building you don't like. The other guy has lots of radar around it, and maybe the F-117A stealth fighters can't get there. (One needs to remember that the so-called black jet is invisible on radar, but the aerial tankers it refuels from are not.) And you want to do this job with minimum notice to the other side.
A submarine approaches the coast-not all that close, actually-probably at night, and launches a UGM-109 Tomahawk Land Attack Missile (TLAM). For the first few seconds of flight the bird rises rapidly on its rocket booster. Then the wings and tail deploy, the intake for the turbofan engine opens, and the Tomahawk settles down, easily to within a hundred feet or so of the surface. It's a small missile, difficult to detect, especially with the new stealth features added to the Block III missiles now in production. The missile, knowing exactly where it launched from because of GPS satellite fixes (another Block III innovation), then follows a path defined by its inherently accurate terrain-following navigation systems. How accurate will it be? On a good day, a Tomahawk can fly into the door of a two-car garage at a distance of several hundred miles. And that can ruin your whole day.
Tactical Example — Execution of a TLAM-C Strike on an Enemy Airfield
It is not often remembered that the majority of attack aircraft employed by the Imperial Japanese Navy in the Pearl Harbor attack were tasked to counter air missions so that the remainder could attack the U.S. Navy in relative peace. Enemy aircraft are always the most enticing of targets, especially when they are sitting still. But your aircraft also have flight crews, and their lives are precious. That makes them targets also. I will, for once, blow my own horn. I was the first, I think, to consider this possibility in the open media when I included it (as Operation Doolittle) in my second novel, Red Storm Rising. (A more professional version was run in The Submarine Review, with my permission.) I'd decided that I wanted to do something that was seemingly outrageous but well within the realm of technical capability. So, why not use submarines launching cruise missiles to take out aircraft? This was, according to reports, a mission the Navy lobbied for in Desert Storm, but which the Air Force denied. Thus a few RAF Tornado aircraft were probably lost as a result of the fact that even the USAF wasn't fully aware of what Tomahawk could do.