[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 46 (Tuesday, March 23, 1999)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3149-S3150]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
ADDITIONAL STATEMENTS
THE 1999 JAMES MADISON PRIZE
Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, this past Friday, the Society for
History in the Federal Government awarded its annual James Madison
prize for the most distinguished article on an historical topic
``reflecting on the functions of the Federal Government.'' This year,
the award was presented to a member of my staff, Mark A. Bradley, for
an article he wrote on the disappearance of the U.S.S. Scorpion (SSN
589).
The Scorpion was a Skipjack class nuclear submarine. In 1968, after a
Mediterranean deployment with the 6th Fleet, the Scorpion was lost with
all hands aboard about 400 miles of the Azores. It had been on a secret
intelligence mission and the exact circumstances of the tragedy
continue to be debated. Mr. Bradley's article recounts the events that
led to the loss of the Scorpion and offers an insightful explanation of
what might have caused the accident.
Our own Senator Robert C. Byrd for his masterly work on the Senate,
historian Ira Berlin for his work on Emancipation in the American
South, and the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, for its
W. Averell Harriman project are all past Society for History in the
Federal Government award winners.
As a Rhodes scholar, Mr. Bradley is no stranger to distinguished
awards. He is an accomplished historian who, in his spare time, serves
as the Associate Editor of Periodical, the Journal of America's
Military Past, where his award winning article, ``Submiss: The
Mysterious Death of the USS Scorpion (SSN 589) appeared. We are proud
of him and thankful that he has chosen to apply his talents here in the
Senate in the service of the nation.
I ask that a portion of his award winning article be printed in the
Record and intend to have the remainder of the article printed in the
Record over the next several days.
The material follows:
Submiss: The Mysterious Death of the U.S.S. ``SCORPION'' (SSN 589)
(By Mark Bradley)
At around midnight on May 16, 1968, U.S.S. Scorpion (SSN
589) slipped quietly through the Straits of Gibraltar and
paused just long enough off the choppy breakwaters of Rota,
Spain, to rendezvous with a boat and offload two crewmen and
several messages. A high performance nuclear attack submarine
with 99 men aboard, the Scorpion was on her way home to
Norfolk, Virginia, after completing three months of
operations in the Mediterranean with vessels from the Sixth
Fleet and NATO. Capable of traveling submerged at over 30
knots, she expected to reach her home port within a week.
Upon entering the Atlantic, the Scorpion fell under the
direct operational control of Vice Admiral Arnold Schade, the
commander of the U.S. Navy's Atlantic Submarine Fleet. On May
20, he issued a still-classified operations order to the
submarine that diverted her from her homeward trek and
required her to move toward the Canary Islands and a small
formation of Soviet warships that had gathered southwest of
the islands. Under U.S. Naval air surveillance since May 19,
this flotilla consisted of one Echo-II class nuclear
submarine, a submarine rescue vessel, and two hydrographic
surveys ships. Three days later, a missile destroyer capable
of firing nuclear surface-to-surface missiles and an oiler
joined the group.
At approximately 7:54 p.m. Norfolk time on May 21, the
Scorpion rose to within a few feet of the rolling surface,
extended her antenna, and radioed the U.S. Naval
Communication Station in Greece. Her radioman reported that
she was 250 miles southwest of the Azores Islands and
estimated her time of arrival in Norfolk to be 1 p.m. on May
27. On that day, as the families of the crew gathered on Pier
22 in a driving rain and waited for their husbands and
fathers to surface off the Virginia capes, the captain of the
U.S.S. Orion, who was the acting commander of Submarine
Squadron 6, the Scorpion's unit, told Schade what the Vice
Admiral secretly knew: the Scorpion had failed to respond to
routine messages about tug services and her berthing
location. After an intensive effort to communicate with the
submarine failed, Schade declared a SUBMISS at 3:15 p.m. and
launched a massive hunt.
Numbering over fifty ships, submarines and planes, the
searchers retraced the Scorpion's projected route to Norfolk
and found nothing. What most in the Navy, including the
crew's families, did not know was that Schade already had
organized a secret search for the submarine on May 24 after
she had failed to respond to a series of classified messages
and, by May 28, he and others in the service's
command believed the Scorpion had been destroyed. Highly
classified hydrophone data indicated to them that she had
suffered a catastrophic explosion on May 22 and had been
crushed as she twisted to the ocean's floor.
On June 5, the Navy officially declared the submarine
presumed lost and her crew dead. On June 4, the service's
high command had established a formal court of inquiry
chaired by Vice Admiral Bernard Austin (Ret), who also had
headed the Navy's investigation into the 1963 loss of U.S.S.
Thresher which had cost the lives of 129 men. After
evaluating nearly 50 days of testimony, the Court concluded
that it could not determine the exact cause for the
Scorpion's loss. On October 28, 1968, the Navy found the
Scorpion's shaattered remains in over 11,000 feet of water
approximately 400 miles southwest of the Azores Islands. On
November 6 Admiral Austin reconvened his court, which studied
thousands of photographs taken of the
[[Page S3150]]
wreckage by U.S.N.S. Mizar. After two more months of
investigation, the Court again held that it could not
determine precisely how the submarine had been destroyed.
Frustrated by their lack of any clear answers, the Navy's
high command turned to the Trieste II, a specially designed
deep water submersible capable of plunging down to the
gravesite. Between 2 June and 2 August 1969, this bathyscape
made nine dives to the Scorpion, photographing and
diagramming her broken corpse. Although these efforts
provided a clearer view of where she was and in what
condition, they again failed to tell what had happened to one
of the service's most elite warships. After thirty years, the
Scorpion's fate still remains shrouded in mystery, a not so
ironic end for a member of the silent service that spent her
life on the shadowy front lines of the Cold War.
Launched on December 19, 1959, and commissioned on July 29,
1960, the Scorpion was built by General Dynamics' Electric
Boat Division in Groton, Connecticut. One of six Skipjack
class nuclear attack submarines, which combined a tear drop-
shaped hull with a S5W reactor, the 252 foot Scorpion was
capable of traveling over 20 knots while on the surface and
over 30 knots while submerged. Her top underwater speed was
more than 8 knots faster than that of U.S.S. Nautilus, the
world's first nuclear submarine, launched in 1954, and twice
that of the best World War II German U-boats. While the
Nazis' Type XXI submarine, completed in 1944 could travel at
a top speed of 16.7 knots for 72 minutes without resurfacing,
the Scorpion could easily travel submerged at top speed for
70 days. These capabilities for high underwater speed and
unlimited endurance gave the Navy new tactical abilities
undreamed of in 1941-1945.
Although World War II had witnessed two great submarine
campaigns, the first in the Atlantic where the Germans tried
to sever England's supply lines and the second in the Pacific
where the Americans assaulted the Japanese merchant fleet,
the submarines of that period were strikingly similar to
their World War I counterparts in submerged speed and
endurance. Dependent upon diesel oil while traveling on the
surface and batteries while underneath, these submarines were
forced to spend the bulk of their time above water
recharging, only submerging once they had spotted a target.
Their reliance on two propulsion systems made them easy prey
for air and surface attacks. Only near the war's end did
Hitler's U-boats experiment with snorkels and more powerful
batteries, and American submarines regularly employ sonar and
radar. Even with these innovations, the United States Navy
still lost nearly one-fifth of its submarine force while
fighting in both theaters. The dropping of the atomic bomb
changed all this and made possible not only one fuel system
but also much greater underwater speed and endurance.
The Navy quickly seized upon these new capabilities and
deployed its nuclear submarines in a variety of missions,
particularly in gathering intelligence about the Soviet
fleet. In 1959, President Dwight Eisenhower approved one of
the most closely guarded intelligence operations ever mounted
by the United States. Code named Operation HOLYSTONE, its
original purpose was to use specially equipped submarines to
penetrate Soviet waters to observe missile launches and
capture readouts of their computer calculations. Later, they
also were used to photograph and gather highly sensitive
configuration and sound data on the Russian navy,
particularly its submarines. This information was then used
by intelligence analysts to track hostile warships by
listening to their noise patterns and sound signatures.
While the Scorpion specialized in developing undersea
nuclear warfare tactics, she also was used to collect
intelligence. For instance, in the late winter and early
spring of 1966, and again that fall, she was engaged in what
the Navy has called ``special operations.'' Her then-
commanding officer received the Navy's commendation medal for
outstanding service. Although much about her last mission
remains a mystery--five out of the last nine messages sent to
her between May 21 and May 27 from Norfolk are still
classified top secret--it seems likely that the Scorpion was
engaged in or had just completed a highly sensitive
intelligence operation when she was lost.
According to the first Court of Inquiry's sanitized
declassified report, the Scorpion had been diverted to shadow
a Soviet flotilla engaged in a ``hydroacoustic'' operation.
This means the Russians were also collecting and analyzing
information derived from the acoustic waves radiated by
unfriendly ships and submarines. The Navy would have been
greatly interested in any activity of this sort,
particularly given the Soviets' location off the Canary
Islands and near the Straits of Gibraltar, the gateway to
the Mediterranean.
The Soviets also may have been trying to gather
intelligence on the Americans' highly secretive Sound
Underwater Surveillance System (SOSUS), an elaborate global
network of fixed sea bottom hydrophones that listened for
submarines. First developed in 1950 and installed in 1954,
SOSUS formed the backbone of the United States' anti-
submarine detection capability. This system became even more
crucial in the late 1960s as the Soviet Navy began shifting
its focus away from protecting Russia's coastal waters to
building a blue water fleet spearheaded by advanced hunter-
killer and ballistic missile nuclear submarines. This forced
the Pentagon to place a premium on intelligence about the
Kremlin's undersea operations.
By 1968, the Americans had deployed a SOSUS network off the
Canary Islands and were laying another off the Azores
Islands. Both were aimed at tracking Soviet submarines
nearing the Straits of Gibraltar and approaching the Cape of
Good Hope. Any Soviet attempt to disrupt or penetrate SOSUS
would have aroused a great deal of interest in Norfolk and
may explain the Navy's decision to send the Scorpion toward
the Canary Islands.
Whatever he last mission was, it appears likely that the
Scorpion had completed her operational phase by 7:54 p.m. on
May 21, when she broadcast her last position and estimated
time of arrival in Norfolk. Operating under strict orders to
maintain electronic silence ``except when necessary'', the
Scorpion sent only this message after she left Rota. At the
time of her last communication, she was approximately two
hundred miles or six hours away from the Soviet formation she
had been sent to monitor. Nearly twenty-four hours later,
SOSUS and civilian underwater listening systems ranging from
Argentina to Newfoundland picked up the shock of an
underwater explosion along the Scorpion's projected route
followed by crushing sounds not unlike those recorded during
the Thresher's destruction in 1963. According to these
readouts, the entire episode lasted slightly over three
months.
Applying sophisticated mathematics to these recordings and
tracing the Scorpion's presumed track and speed to Norfolk,
the Navy designated an area of ``special interest'' for its
search some 400 miles southwest of the Azores Islands. On May
31, the U.S.S. Compass Island, a navigational research ship,
was dispatched to conduct an underwater survey and on October
28, 1968, the U.S.N.S. Mizar, another navigational ship with
advanced photographic equipment, finally found the wreckage
only three miles away from where SOSUS computers had
estimated it to be. Broken into two pieces, the Scorpion's
remains lay in over 11,000 feet of water.
Deeply shaken and still reeling from the loss of the U.S.S.
Thresher (SSN 593) five years earlier, the Navy began its
post-morten with only the SOSUS readouts, the Scorpion's
operational history and the testimony of her former crew
members. The first Court of Inquiry deliberated from 4 June
1968 until 25 July 1968 and examined 76 witnesses as it
considered a broad array of fatal possibilities. First among
these was that the Soviets had intercepted the Scorpion and
finished her in an undersea dogfight. The Court discarded
this theory after it examined the reports the intelligence
community provided and found no evidence that the Soviet
formation which the Scorpion had been sent to shadow had
launched an attack or fired any weapons when SOSUS recorded
the explosion. The Court also noted that there were no other
Russian or Warsaw Pact vessels within 1,000 miles of the
Scorpion's last reported position.
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