[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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