Blind Man's Bluff

Rating:
Summary: More startling than any novel. Men against the Sea!
Review: "Blind Man's Bluff" is a book that in any other country but the USA would have put its author and contributors in jail. For this is the story of many classified missions undertaken during the bad old days of the Cold War by American submarines against the Soviet Union. These missions were utterly classified, and startlingly successful much of the time.

Unknown to almost all American citizens, for several decades the US Navy's submarine force engaged in an aggressive intelligence campaign against the Soviet Union--in fact it is said that many US subs spent more time in Soviet coastal waters than did most Soviet vessels. According to this book, the Glomar Explorer episode, far from being an intelligence coup, was a poorly thought-out venture into the US Navy's turf by the CIA. On the other hand, various other heretofore unknown undersea intelligence operations were hugely successful, perhaps adding to US security in ways that most of us will never understand well enough to appreciate.

Regardless of one's personal attitude about the Cold War, this book makes plain the amazing level of both competence and courage that characterized US Navy submarine crews. It may have been peacetime to most of us, but these sailors went in harm's way often, putting their lives on the line by venturing into Soviet waters where their presence, if detected, would lead to a very likely lethal response.

The book gives some interesting perspectives on the Cold War. Soviet submarines never felt secure, and the Soviet Navy had an accurate perception that any time its submarines put to sea they were being aggressively hunted by a relentless, technically advanced enemy. On the other hand, much of this American technological and industrial prowess was at least in part neutralized by the second oldest profession in the world--human spies, i.e. the Walker spy ring and perhaps others. This book explains how an American intelligence operation that undoubtedly cost billions of dollars was eventually thwarted by a few traitors who were paid, at most, tens of thousands of dollars in bribes by the KGB.

This book is more engaging than any espionage novel and is a must-read for those interested in either espionage or stories of men at sea.

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Summary: The story of the subs that helped us win the Cold War
Review: It is hard to overstate the singularity and importance of this book. Blind Man's Bluff, as the subtitle says, truly is The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage. Before the research of writers Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew (with Annette Lawrence Drew) culminated in the publishing of this book, the stories of hundreds of submariners, true heroes one and all, had been shrouded in the secrecy borne of the Cold War. Many men aged and died without ever telling their wives and children what they did during their tours of duty; many family members never knew exactly how and why their loved ones never came home; many survivors have only now learned, thanks to this book, the exact nature of the missions they took part in, having never been privy to that information during their service. According to the authors, many of these men and their families have thanked them in quite emotional terms for finally telling their stories. The submariners of the United States Navy helped win the Cold War, and they deserve the heroic recognition they dutifully earned in service to their country.

This book basically takes the reader through the secret history of submarine intelligence missions over the course of the Cold War years and beyond. Many of these tales prove once again that truth is oftentimes stranger than fiction. Triumph and tragedy abound. The book also serves as a primer of sorts for the history of the Cold War; the interplay between different American administrations, naval chiefs and admirals, larger-than-life sub captains, and brilliant civilian naval administrators immerses you in the full scope of military planning, action, reaction, and sometimes overreaction. The biggest mistakes that were made all seem to fall in the lap of admirals and high-ranking naval officers and administrators, and these mistakes put many lives in danger and caused a number of unnecessary deaths. The dangerous obstinacy of government bureaucracy is a problem we continue to deal with today.

Submarines fulfilled innumerable intelligence-gathering missions during the decades after World War II. Subs infiltrated Russian waters to glean data about Soviet hardware, missile technology, and military behavior patterns; they secretly tailed all manner of Soviet subs across the oceans in order to identify each type of craft by the slightest of sounds and to learn the practices and tendencies of Soviet sub commanders (helping to ensure that the Soviets would be hard pressed to ever launch a massive nuclear first- or second-strike via the sea); they searched for valuable military hardware (both American and Soviet) along the ocean floor; and they brought home some of the most critical intelligence findings imaginable.

Among the more remarkable stories detailed here are the Navy's successful attempts to locate a lost Soviet nuclear sub (which the CIA later attempted - embarrassingly unsuccessfully - to salvage from the bottom of the ocean), the mysterious loss of the US sub Scorpion (along with new information that would seem to finally explain the cause of the tragedy), and the collision of an American sub with one of its Soviet counterparts (just one of a surprising number of such collisions). Perhaps the most fascinating account to be found in Blind Man's Bluff is America's secret tapping of Soviet military cables underneath the sea off Okhotsk and in the Barents Strait. Submarines made a number of undetected trips to the discovered cables, hiding in relatively shallow waters literally just beneath the Soviet navy's very nose for days at a time, to collect and replace recorded tapes that gave Naval Intelligence an unprecedented look at Soviet plans and capabilities as well as crucial insight into the Soviet military psyche itself.

You will meet some incredible heroes and brilliant intellectuals in this book: men such as John Craven, Commander Whitey Mack, Admiral Bobby Inman, and Tommy Cox, a would-be country singer who immortalized the deeds of his fellow submariners (and memorialized those who didn't make it back home) in song. Then there are John A. Walker, Jr. and Ronald W. Pelton, two of the worst traitors in American history. Walker spent eighteen years building a spy ring that turned over an immense number of secrets to the Soviets for less than one million dollars, while Pelton informed the Soviets of the Okhotsk cable tap for a mere $35,000. These men put the lives of hundreds of brave submariners at risk, greatly compromising their nation's security in the process, and will stand forever among the most infamous of American traitors.

If you want to know what peril under the sea can really mean, read the amazing accounts chronicled in Blind Man's Bluff. America's submariners played a crucial role in our nation's defense for decades, but only now are their stories being told. It is a secret history more thrilling than that borne of the imaginations of the best military science fiction writers.