Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring by Pete Earley Page A

inquisitiveness. His thoughts, he said, were similar to those of a man who inherits a valuable heirloom. He has no intention of selling the family treasure, yet he still wonders how much it would fetch from a collector. Knowing the Soviets might pay thousands of dollars for a copy of the SIOP made John’s access to it that much more savory.
    John had entered the Navy’s submarine force at a pivotal time in its history. In the 1950s, the United States and the Soviet Union had both moved to enlarge and modernize their postwar submarine fleets. The first dramatic step for the U.S. Navy came with the successful launch of a submarine powered by nuclear energy. Suddenly diesel submarines were obsolete. Atomic-powered submarines were legitimate underwater vessels, capable of remaining submerged for months. Almost overnight, the importance of submarines increased. Difficult for the enemy to track, they became the silent eyes of the Navy. The next major improvement came in 1961, when ballistic missiles were added to the submarines’ armory. No longer were submarines confined to firing torpedoes at ships. Now they could attack entire cities.
    John joined the submarine fleet just as it was being converted from an aged diesel flotilla into a modern nuclear armada. His first submarine assignment had been to a diesel-powered vessel, but a year later he joined the crew of the new, nuclear-powered U.S.S. Andrew Jackson . One year after John came aboard, the Jackson moved to the East Coast, where it launched the first Polaris “A-3” missile on October 26, 1963. The two-stage, 30,000-pound Polaris “A-3” could hit a target 2,875 miles away – nearly twice the range of previous Polaris missiles. For the next two years, John roamed the Atlantic and the Mediterranean on the Jackson . Barbara and the four children lived in Navy housing in Charleston specially built for Polaris missile crews.
    The workings of nuclear submarines and Polaris missile launches were not the only bits of front-line technology John was privy to. Depending upon which Navy official was speaking, the Russians were either nipping at our heels in submarine development in the fifties and sixties or were years ahead of us. To counter the Russian threat, whatever its size, the Pentagon devised numerous anti-submarine-warfare techniques. The most impressive was SOSUS, an acronym for Sound Surveillance System. SOSUS was nothing more than a giant underwater ear in the form of several hundred specially built hydrophones installed by cable-laying ships on the continental shelf off the East and West Coasts.
    The architects of America’s nuclear submarine program had adopted a one-reactor, one-propeller design and paid extraordinary attention to making U.S. nuclear submarines as noiseless as possible. However, the Russians had focused on speed, and built nuclear subs with two reactors and twin propellers that created a much more jarring wake than our single blade. The Russians also bolted pumps, motors, and other internal machinery directly to the inner hull of each submarine, which resulted in the broadcasting of the slightest vibration or clatter into the sea. By the time that John joined the Jackson crew in 1962, the Navy had perfected SOSUS to the point that a Soviet submarine could not leave its home port on the Barents Sea or the Sea of Okhotsk and head for deep water without being detected by SOSUS ears. By the mid-sixties, the U.S. Navy had so thoroughly bugged the continental shelf that it was impossible for a foreign submarine to approach the U.S. coast without each mile of its voyage being carefully tracked by SOSUS. The hydrophones, later enhanced by computers, worked so well that SOSUS operators could tell from the sound of propeller wash not only the location of a submarine but also its type.
    The SOSUS system was another top secret that made John pause and wonder: “How much would this be worth to the Reds?”
    John didn’t consider such thoughts unique.